Month: March 2019

2018 Year in Review

I know, I know. It's the end of March and it feels a little late to be reflecting on a calendar year that has been retired for three months now. But I've gotten in the habit of doing this - see 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011 - and there is part of me that needs any small bit of closure that writing this post might bring.

Personal

If you had told me a few years ago that 2018 would be the year I lost my mom, I wouldn't have believed it. But the year was indeed consumed by continuing to accompany her through cancer treatment, worrying about her health a lot when I wasn't with her, and then finally saying goodbye to her in December.

I've written some about what that loss and grief has been like and so I won't repeat that all here. But there was little I did, planned, thought about or worked on that wasn't somehow affected by the constant low-level stress and anxiety of knowing a loved one was facing tougher and tougher odds for survival. I wrestled with finding the right balance of dropping everything to have meaningful and special experiences with mom while I could, and living my own life as fully as I could knowing that she found comfort and pride in hearing about our adventures and accomplishments as a family.

Those struggles and that grief brought out some of the best moments, too, when it comes to the love and support shown by friends, family and community. I still can't fully believe or begin to recount the incredible ways that people have reached out and, through gestures big and small, helped make life easier for us during the hardest times. I am so grateful for this and yet I've felt woefully incapable of expressing that gratitude while the fog of grief still swirls around me.

Parenting a preschooler continued to be an almost all-consuming experience. The year started with me entertaining her with puppet shows and craft activities and now she entertains us by breaking into song, dancing on her homemade stage, telling us the latest scuttlebutt from school and amusing us with endless creative scenarios and ideas for play. Helping a human develop, figure out the world, absorb language and deepen her emotions has been incredibly moving and wonderful. Exhausting! But wonderful.

I was thrilled to have a couple pieces of my writing included in publications beyond my own websites, and I still want to get back to doing more of that.

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Better WordPress multisite image URLs

I've been running a personal WordPress multisite instance for several years now, and I use it to host a variety of personal and organizational sites, including this one. I really like the ways it allows me to standardize and consolidate my management of WordPress as a tool, while still allowing a lot of flexibility for customizing my sites just as though they were individual self-hosted sites.

For the most part, my use of WordPress in multisite/network mode doesn't have any user-facing implications, especially since I use the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to map custom domain names to every site I launch. As far as anyone visiting my sites knows, it's a standalone WordPress site that looks and works like any other.

The one exception to this has been the URL structure for images and other attachments that I upload to any site hosted on this multisite instance. Whereas the typical WordPress image URL might look like this:

https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/my_image.jpg

on a multisite instance, there is an directory structure added in to separate each site's uploads into its own subdirectory:

https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2019/03/my_image.jpg

where 25 might be the site's unique site ID within that multisite setup.

There's nothing wrong with this approach and it certainly makes technical sense if you have lots of sites on your multisite instance that are either subdirectories or subdomains of the main multisite domain.

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Losing my parents

One morning recently as my preschooler daughter climbed in to her customary spot for breakfast, she remarked out of nowhere, "now you don't have any family left!"

It only took a moment to clarify that she was putting together my mom's recent death with knowing my dad had died when I was 10 years old, and realizing both of my parents were gone. She said it in the same way as when she notices that furniture is unexpectedly repositioned or that some part of her bedtime routine is missed, seemingly unaware of the emotional content of her observation.

Dad and Mom, being silly, before.

In that moment I mostly parented through (around?) the emotion by further clarifying with her that of course I still have family, between her and my wife, my sister and her family, my wife's family, my various aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, the many friends who have become chosen family to us, and on and on.

Part of me wanted to show my daughter just how long the list was, so that I could simply reaffirm to myself that I am not without family.

But the awareness of being without both parents haunted me through the rest of the day and into that night's dreams. I guess it's been haunting me on and off for the last three months after saying goodbye to my mom. Maybe in some ways the prospect of it has been haunting me for more than 30 years after my dad's death.

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