It began with, “Mom, my knee hurts.”

That was this past April when my son came face-to-face with middle school physical education and a teacher who thought less than a 5-mile run every day made you a wuss. My husband, an aging jock, told him he needed time to get used to the running, sprints, etc.  Gamely, son soldiered on until he showed me the “trick” he could do with his knee cap.

The trick was that the knee cap was no longer in its rightful place. It had shifted to the outside of the knee joint. Actually both knee caps had migrated out of their proper positions, but only one caused him pain … and that pain increased daily. Nothing kills a mother more inside than a child whose pain cannot be adequately managed.

So, long story short, we spent the summer with pediatric orthopedic specialists deciding on the surgical game plan. We had numerous x-rays (I now insist on the lead ‘cup’ to protect my shot at future grandchildren.) We had high-tech gait studies. We had lots of learned folks giving us all sorts of learned advice. Finally in September, we had a plan. From surgery to orthopedic rehab to 3x a week PT in short order.

Until now. This is a photo of my son’s healing scar. We’re about 3 weeks away from the all-clear from his surgeon. No more brace. No more walker. And he can finally get himself on the school bus daily. Like the SS Minnow and the 3-hour tour, this should have been a shorter, less complicated exercise.

But it wasn’t.  So we deal. But I still had paying clients who were sympathetic but still wanted their work. I don’t blame them, of course, so I learned to write in the surgeon’s office waiting room … outside the x-ray rooms … and even in the dark of my son’s hospital room. I turned a lot of work down. (Trust me, that was killer.)

The work got done, though, and I even managed to squeak out a Landing Page Maven Makeover @Copyblogger. But you, my dear Maven readers, were unquestionably short-changed. I tried with the occasional video and the past week or so, rather than look at at empty “New Post” in my WP dashboard and feel guilty (or guiltier is probably more to the point), I added Maven Tweets as my daily post. Relevant tweets and spot-on links were better than the vast whiteness of not writing — or so I thought until Dean Rieck emailed me and said simply that he missed my writing.

Argh. Well, that got me thinking it was time to suck it up and get back to the blogging. So here I am with a picture of my son’s healing scar as a souvenir of orthopedic battles fought and won.

I’m still slammed with work – and I’m grateful every damn day for that – with more commitments than ever, but will make the extra effort to be writing and sharing as I love to do on all sorts of copywriting/marketing/advertising and language-related topics.

I’m still doing the videos and the daily Maven Tweets, but I’ll be blogging here, as well. The posts may be a little shorter (perhaps that’s all for the good), but they’ll be more frequent.

Thanks to all of you for hanging in and for your kind notes of concern over the past several months. You guys are great.