I’ve been blogging since 2005 as Stuntmother over at Blogger. It was a wonderful time, all that writing and bonding and anecdotal parenting stuff — and then it seemed to fizzle out. I started I Do All My Own Stunts when Ed was away traveling for his PhD for weeks on end, and when barely a day went by when I didn’t feel as if I’d averted some spectacular parenting disaster by the skin of my stuntmothering teeth — and when disasters struck on the rest of the days. In those days, I was mothering two young children pretty much full time, and what emerged was a blog primarily about identity, motherhood, parenting and children. With some knitting thrown in.

Then the children grew a little older, Ed stopped being a student, we moved and I realized that I needed to identify as ‘mother’ like I needed a hole in the head. What I needed was to find out where the non-mother, non-wife I had got to in what had become my life.

I needed a fresh start (a fresh hell, as Dorothy Parker once said). This is it.