What's in a name?

By the time my husband walked in the door last night, I'd been at it for hours. Not folding laundry (it was still in the basket, growing cold and wrinkly). Not doing dishes (which I absolutely could and should have been doing for hours). Not sleeping (which is the much treasured pastime of parents of toddlers everywhere).

Nope. I was here, on the couch, trying desperately to come up with a name for this blog. Seriously.

I'd created a short and very odd list of possible names. Mommagami. Bite Reality Back. Done Got Edumacated.

What was I thinking?

No much of value, obviously, becauce the truth of the matter was that they all sucked, and I knew it. I wanted something that came as close to being me as any short sequence of words can be. But trying to define your entire self in words that some other equally unoriginal blogger hasn't used is a nearly-impossible task. I was just about ready to give up, despite the prompting of my friends and fellow bloggers who promised me that I might have something to say that was worth reading.

I wish I could say that it was when I was mucking around in the darkness for a title that inspiration slapped me upside the head. But I can't even take full credit for the title. Okay, I can only take credit for the "red pen" part (2/5ths of the title if we really want to be mathematically accurate). I had something lame like Save the Red Pen on my list when Corey got home from his class, and it was he that found the words that finally worked. I'm not sure he knew it at the time, but OH MY GOSH does that title work. Want proof? First, the obvious reasons:

1). In my TV watching days--which I think are basically behind me with the exception of Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution and The Vampire Diaries (sad, but true)--I used to adore The Young and the Restless (a fact that is even more depressing than my ongoing obsession with the vampire smut genre). Where the Red Pen Bleeds sounds like some ridiculously trampy daytime drama set in a small Midwestern city where the major characters own competing newspapers that constantly write libelous trash. And, some days, my teenage-wrangling, union-thumping, mommy-hairpulling sounds, if not trampy, at least dramatic.

2). It references literature--depressing dog literature. Not exactly my favorite book of all time, but I read it back in junior high, so there's no accounting to taste. But at least it speaks to my love of reading. At the moment, I'd much rather cozy up with a Michael Pollan book about the garbage we ingest on a daily basis (otherwise known as food substitute), a novel of young-adult fiction, or (once again) vamp lit.

3). I'm an English teacher. I like red pens. I make papers (literally) and students (figuratively) bleed.

It's the reference to the work that English teachers do with their mortal instruments that makes the title really work, though (not bleeding papers and students dry...though that sounds like something a vampire English teacher would do). Think about it. We English teachers spend our days, and nights, and weekends marking up student papers. Our comments, our thoughts, our insights are marginalized, crammed into the one-inch MLA-issued margins or squeezed into the spaces between double-spaced lines. The white space of students’ papers is no place to really write, or think, or engage with the real stuff of our lives.

So, I am taking this blog as an invitation to move beyond the margins; to say what it is that I often do not; and write about what it means to be a vampire-loving, organically fanatical, sleep-deprived, bookishly obsessive mother/teacher/wife/me.