Stories and Reasons for things

Here's a story. Leon loves trash can pedals. He plays with them for quite some time. No need to hover over him and make sure of his safety. Pedals are safe, right?! Ok, well, he is fast and I didn't see him crawl to the stairs. I was in the other room in a place where I could see him... distracted by, none other than, Facebook himself.

Several minutes go by, I still hear, what I think is, banging on the trash can. Then I hear tumble, tumble, tumble. Yeah, probably three tumbles, maybe just one, or possibly two. I don't know. I sprinted into the kitchen to see no baby by the trash can and for that split second I'm thinking all kinds of thoughts. Aliens, magic. Where is my baby. On the floor at the base of the stairs is where he was. The horror. I scoop him up, he's crying. And like a horrified, panicked mother who can hardly cry out words I cry, o'er and o'er, "I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE ON THE STAIRS! I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE ON THE STAIRS! I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE ON THE STAIRS! I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE ON THE STAIRS!" And that went on for some time, as I rocked my sad baby the way an insane woman would rock in the corner of an asylum. He was fine. Very quickly he was fine. Not a mark on him, and I said lots of thankful prayers. I nursed him back to health and he napped.

Here are some reasons for deactivating my facebook. It had, ultimately, nothing to do with anyone else besides myself. But to be so sucked into coming up with a response to someones comment that you don't see your 8 month old crawl to the stairs. Well. I don't need to continue that thought process. I had a million excuses, such as, Facebook is how I follow all the blogs/websites/see what my family is doing. That's where I communicate with my community, my church, my mom friends that I hang out with during the day (I NEED THAT), that's where I chat daily with my friend Allison. Not having Facebook would cause me to miss out on invites, on big news. People won't see Leon! This happened last time I deactivated. I made so many excuses until in one minute I just decided and did it. So that's what I did. I know people will so miss my posts about shit that's in your food, or why you should do this or that. How will they live? Will they be okay? Will they miss me? And to answer those questions, people won't know I'm gone.

Facebook starts out great. It does. I made friends there I wouldn't know otherwise. But it's not real. I wrote a post while back about this, but couldn't bring myself to post it for fear it would suggest that all facebookers are in the wrong. I'm not suggesting that. For me, I'm just bothered by how easily you can unfriend or hide and just not deal with things (that you normally wouldn't have to deal with in real life, or if you did you would deal with them differently). Or that people who don't speak to me in public will want to get into a debate about something via my wall. That's interesting. There are a lot of ways to look at it, and I'm certainly guilty of doing all the bad things on my Facebook List of Bad Things. But it occurred to me that the more social media and less true interaction with people, with nature, with Real Life, the less empathy I have. The more judgy I am. The less time I spend watching my boy do the most miraculous things, like rub his eyes and chew on a book.

So I did it, and let me tell you that it's liberating. It is. If you've thought about it, I can't choose the right moment for you, but let me encourage you to just do it. And actually, Facebook asked me why I was deactivating. I wrote, "You are ruining the world." I hope that gave an employee of Facebook a good laugh. I laughed when I typed it.

Now when I hop on the computer, I'm off in about five minutes, as opposed to perhaps an entire nap time of waste. When your husband comes home from work and asks about your day and your response is mostly Facebook news... it's time.

Alright. I'll be done now.