For the past several weeks, my almost 2-year-old daughter has nurtured a new obsession, “Fuffy,” a white puppy with a pink bow that fits in her palm and goes everywhere she does.

Fuffy – Orli can’t say her “L’s” yet – is so tiny that she is easily misplaced. That makes Orli very unhappy. And that, in turn, makes me very unhappy.

It is amazing the lengths a parent will go to ensure mutual mother-daughter contentment.

I contacted the manufacturer. Fuffy, “Fuff” for short, had been discontinued. The indulgent marketing manager sent me the three she had left. (A fourth, she informed me, had been “skinned” to make a prototype for another toy. “Sounds bad, huh?” she wrote in an e-mail.)

In any case, four Fuffs should be enough to nourish Orli’s love affair, at least for a while. I keep two in her crib and two in her dresser, on standby for emergencies.

I understand the need for comfort, the desire for familiarity. I had a blankie through college. And for more than 10 years now, I’ve had a job at this newspaper.

I’ve sat at half a dozen different desks in the newsroom, reported to nearly twice that number of editors, covered town governments, county commissioners, dead people, naked people, downtrodden people and blissful ones, too.

I got married while I worked at this paper and had three children, who ostensibly qualified me to undertake my latest assignment, as the staff blogger on this Web site when The News & Observer launched it a year ago.

It’s been alternately effortless and unnerving to share my family’s travails and triumphs. I hope I’ve made you laugh by revealing my 4-year-old’s occasional penchant for spurning undergarments. Perhaps I’ve made you cry by sharing the story of a mom who succumbed to breast cancer shortly after her third son was born.

I know I’ve made you angry by wishing that my husband would have just a little bit of a hard time the morning he stayed home to take care of the baby. (I was labeled “disingenuous” and “spoiled” by one disgruntled reader; keep the compliments coming.)

When I look back at more than 50 blogs, I see how my family has grown and changed. I see that change reflected in myself, too.

This has been my only staff newspaper job, and, like Orli, I have found it hard to relinquish the security it’s provided.

It took me a while to get up the nerve to throw in the daily journalism towel. I worried about losing my identity. I worried my kids – especially my daughters – would no longer see me as a role model, as someone who worked hard at raising them and at my job as well.

I worried I’d feel like a ship without sails – restless, rootless, drifting.
In the end, it was my 6-year-old son who put the situation in perspective for me.

He guessed correctly that I was feeling, as he put it, “a little sad and a little happy” about the impending change.

“You’re still a writer, Mama,” he reassured me. “You can do the thing that you learn again and again and again. It never stops.”

It’s important for our children to see us as someone with our own interests and desires in addition to seeing us as the someone who signs them up for summer camp, shuttles them back and forth to swim lessons and decorates their birthday cakes with painstaking attention to detail (ocean-blue icing and lots of sharks for one, pink-tinted frosting crowned with a tiara and an image of Fancy Nancy for the other; Orli’s first birthday merited a strawberries-and-cream Locopop).

My son’s insight, as much as anything, helped me get my mojo back.

It’s been a great run at a great paper, but I’m off following a long-held dream of writing for magazines.

I was a writer before I had kids, and I’m a writer now, Fuffy or no Fuffy.

Bonnie's been a featured blogger on TriangleMom2Mom since last April.