Bigger in Real Life

My mantel clock is ticking, ten minutes too slow. 1:41 (1:51) AM. I can’t count how many times I’ve been late because of that clock. A simple fix: pop the back, take out battery, insert new AAA. Dang, no AAA’s. Does anything else in our house run on AAA’s? Must run to Target. Never remember, even when am at Target. That’s why the clock is running ten minutes too slow, five months later.

It’s a gift from my mother. She bought it after a holiday décor-seeking mother-daughter shopping trip to our local Pier1. I saw it and fell in love, because it matched the side table with the wrought iron birds in the base that I’d giddily bought months earlier to help me feel nested in our brand new (to us) townhome. The clock cost $15, and I couldn’t afford it. It was a want, not a need, and I was being good. That Christmas season – one in which we’d promised to exchange no gifts and donate to charity instead – my mother presented me with the clock she’d seen me sighing over months earlier. Not a Christmas gift, she insisted, an ‘I love you’ gift. It cost $15, but to me it may as well have been $10,000, because she’d remembered.

I grew up in a house that ran on ticking clocks. Clocks that would chime the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour. My grandma kept each one wound, and they kept the rhythm of the nights I couldn’t sleep. Nights where the shadows moved mysteriously across my bedroom (living room) wall. Nights I couldn’t figure out why I felt different than the other kids in my (borrowed) neighborhood. The nights my daddy wasn’t there, because we weren’t living with him just then. I timed my breathing carefully to match that clock’s tock-tick-tock, and Sleep – my constant, elusive playmate – would eventually find me. In the morning things were bright. The tick-tock-tick kept pace with my running feet and smiling breath. I was safe because I had my mom to hug me and tell me she loved me, my grandma to give me ‘Nilla wafers and milk and call me pumpkin, and my five aunts plus mom plus grandma to read me fairy tales, taking me to new places that I could visit in books and in dreams. In that house little girls were always special and someone was always there to listen to my thoughts and songs, and tell me I could be whatever I dreamed I could be.

The light on our computer/TV keeps a blinking time with the ten minutes too slow tick-tock clock. Odd what you notice at 1:57 (2:07) AM. When sleep is as elusive as it was when you were little and your grandmother’s cuckoo clock marked the hours of your life.

This is it! On this post I officially launch my new project: Bigger in Real Life. Ta-daaaaaaa! Yes, I used to have a blog called Knit Me Together. So what’s different? Why switch? The simple answer….sometimes a girl just needs a change.

When I started Knit Me Together, knitting was what I did, and knit blogs were where it was at. Yarn Harlot was only on her second book, Crazy Aunt Purl had just gotten divorced, you could still See Eunny Knit, and Ravelry was a place that only existed on the furthest reaches of knitters deepest REM-cycle dreams. I was a knitter, so I started a blog. The thing was, I wasn’t very good at it. Due to my abject boredom at taking photos of inanimate objects and my inability to stick to a single topic, my blog was all over the place. And one thing I’ve learned about knitters is that they like their blogs to be topical and they reeeeeeally like close-ups of yarn, so I ended up writing for a divided audience: knitters and myself. At the time knitting was what I did (recreationally and vocationally), but it wasn’t all I was. I didn’t dream in yarn, I dreamed in Technicolor – usually with a moving soundtrack included. So after letting the blog lay stagnant for a year, I decided it was time to put the pieces back together.

Bigger in Real Life (BiRL) is my little corner of cyberspace where I get to write about all the hats I proudly wear – Christian, wife, sister, daughter, feminist, activist, post-modernist, musician, fledgling runner, book lover, epic-dreamer, coffee drinker, wannabe foodie, crafter, sun worshiper, and so on and on andon andonandonandon. I don’t expect anyone to read this but friends and family – if even that – and that’s ok. Because this time I’m writing for me; whatever topics come to mind, and with as much authenticity as possible. Because that’s just how I roll, what you see is what you get. That’s just me.

And if you do decide to read along, thanks for stopping by. I’m glad to have you.

I’ve tried this blog thing once before. It’s been years; I’ve changed, the internet’s changed, the world’s changed. Tonight’s another sleepless night and the theme from a childhood favorite movie is floating through my head. Whenever I need to feel optimistic, whenever I need to remind myself that nothing is set in stone and the world is what you make of it, that I can be as big and live as loud as I want to be, I think of the words to this song and smile. 

My husband, A, says I have boy dreams because when I dream at night it’s in full color, with complete plotlines that usually involve me and a few trusty sidekicks (usually A) saving the world.

Sometimes I feel like the real life me can never live up to the bigger-than-life me that I imagine myself to be. When trying out names for this blog, I was told that I have a personality that fills a room. So I’ve carved out this little corner of the internet to bring together the Christy whose dreams are larger than life and the Christy who works daily to find a balance between the busyness of life and living with the top down and the gas pedal to the floor. I hope you enjoy the journey with me.