I’m not dead, I’m just irritated.

Okay, so I’ve been pretty quiet lately. (Except on Twitter, which I openly hated and now secretly love.) And, while there are multiple reasons for this silence, something happened that made it particularly hard for me to sit down and joke about my life and my kids and my parenting failures and all the other things that have made this forum so cathartic to me for the past year (yup, one year. Happy birthday to me.)

I don’t really know how to say this in the vague way I’d like to say it, so I will just say it without lots of explanation and details: a fourth-grade class at Caroline’s school was given access to my blog.

Not by me.

Not by any of their parents.

It appeared when they logged on to their home computers to do their homework.

I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I do know that my kids can sit on this very computer, where I write my blog, for an indefinite amount of time and they will never stumble on my blog. But that’s not the case for the kids who did stumble on it.

Now, I am certain none of those kids clicked and read this writing. “Mama Drama” is hardly a salacious title for a fourth grader. And I am certain that however it happened, it was inadvertent and a mistake and blah blah blah. But I don’t need my daughter’s peers reading about what it’s like to be her mom.

At the end of the day, I can’t do a darn thing about it. It was pointed out to me that my blog is public (true) and can be found by googling my name (true). It was suggested I block the user name these kids use for their homework, but despite hours of online searching, I can’t find a way to block any users, I can only allow users. And (thank you God) there are plenty of people who read this blog who I don’t know, and I can’t allow the entire universe without allowing that one username (and you, the friend who said, “Oh, I make fun of bloggers!” when I told you I had started one. You’re banned, too).

But it’s one thing for me to write a parenting blog that, by necessity, mentions my children. It’s quite another to write a parenting blog that mentions my children that is also totally appropriate for any of their peers to read.

So I’ve been stuck. I’ve had a bunch of things I’ve wanted to sit down and write (it was St. Patrick’s Day, after all, and I was itching to publish a follow up to this or this) but I’ve gotten stuck because I just don’t know who will be reading what I write. And the fact that anyone can read what I write becomes both a blessing and a curse, because I never, ever want my writing to make my children uncomfortable. (Until they’re adults and have several years of good therapy under their belts.)

I will come back to this. I like it too much. And I LOVE those of you who have asked me where it’s been. But I have to let the yucky feeling pass before I can get back to it.