One year ago today I began my adventures in blogging. Back then I was blogging about books over at Diary of a Book Lover. I’ve since merged that blog into this one and we’re all one big, happy family.  My very first post, my very first effort to share my writing with the world, was a post on the nature of time in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, entitled Can Time Lost be Found?  (When I came to this whole blogging thing, I came big.)

In that post, I mused about the way that time “crawls and races, squeezes out in small drops and rushes past in a flood.” I wrote about my daughter (I was already a mommy blogger, I just didn’t know it yet!). I reflected on the knowledge that my time with her would go too fast, and the sad fact that there is nothing I can do about that.

Here I am, one year later, and it’s all so true. Sometimes time crawled: on a Monday afternoon, waiting for David to get home from work, I thought I might lose my mind. By the end of the week, I couldn’t believe how long it took for the weekend to come again. I daydreamed about how things would be better “when…” and I deplored the fact that whatever “when…” was, it was going to take forever to get here. But sometimes time raced: how has it been a year already? I swear Adeline changes every. single. day. How can I keep up with that?

I look back at the picture that I included with that very first post and I hardly recognize her. She was almost five months old, still practically bald, chubby-faced, a baby. Now she’s a toddler: walking, talking, lean, fashionable and with an attitude.

There have been a million moments in the last year, and so many of them are worth remembering. But many of them are already lost and many more will be lost over the coming years. Will I, like Marcel, search for lost time, only to find it when I least expect it? What tastes or smells will trigger those memories? And when? Will I eat an orange twenty years from now and remember sitting on the floor of Addie’s room with her, as we both ate oranges, her sucking out the juice, both our hands sticky and sweet, laughing together?  I can only hope.

But here’s the thing about blogging: that moment won’t be lost anymore. When my baby girl is 16 and hating me, I can look back at these posts and remember a time when she loved me more than anything. Of course, reading over a year of posts will make me remember the hard times, too. Maybe I’ll catch her in a good mood and show her some of them: “Look at how hard we worked when you were a baby,” I’ll tell her.  “You never slept, it drove us crazy! I tried my best but sometimes I couldn’t do everything right. I struggled with depression.  I overcame it for you. I loved you so much. I still do.”

Searching for lost time and finding it in these pages is a benefit I didn’t expect when I started blogging. But now, one year later, I see that it might be the biggest benefit of all. This blog is many things (a community, a space for moms to talk about what’s real, a safe place to share my writing, a catharsis, a photojournal) but it is also a chronicle of my journey through motherhood. A diary of my relationship with my daughter. Here’s to many more years of time recorded and not lost. Here’s to blogging.