Why do I blog?
I decided to take a minute and reflect on this question, thanks to the prompt by Mommy Wants Vodka.
I started officially blogging as a way to keep an online journal of my life. 35 weeks pregnant with twins and had a 22 month old, I was on the verge of a monumental life change and honestly, just wanted to document every single moment of it.
I had been an active member of several online communities since I got married in 2003. The connections I made with the women in these communities (Ovusoft, fertility friend, I Dream of Baby) were profound and long lasting, in fact I am still in daily contact with several of the women I started this journey with and have traveled to meet up with them many times. The support and feedback we shared impacted my life more than the support of my friends and family. I learned early on that out there in cyberspace, networking with other women is the modern day equivalent of the coffee clatch, times 1000.
Every day, my fellow buddy group members and I exchanged “personals”, and shared every bit of minutiae of our journey. We laughed, we cried, we cheered each other on, we picked each other up when things looked bad. For someone who has had a life long passion for writing, this truly was a therapy of sorts. The road would be full of pitfalls and false starts and the writing, the shared experience, was my way of processing and coping.
Over the years, the direction of my interests & writing was in constant flux. What started out as a woman in her thirties trying to have her first child through the Fertility Awareness Method turned into a woman in her thirties trying to have her first child…after a miscarriage…and then a second miscarriage…and a woman of advanced maternal with borderline FSH and low progesterone and…then someone who looks to Clomid for address a luteal phase defect…to a woman who gets pregnant her first cycle on Clomid…to someone trying to get pregnant again with Clomid to someone who is pregnant with twins and has a 13 month old…to someone who is the mother to 3 children under the age of 2…and so on…
Once I started the blog, my interest and participation level in my buddy groups waned. Many of us had finally had children, some of us still struggled with infertility and miscarriage. It seemed we went in different directions, had less time to share every waking minute talking to each other online and sort of drifted apart. It was sad, but a natural progression. At the same time, blogging started to explode. I found this new forum, where it was – to me – all about my writing and my journey – incredibly exciting. What began as a way for my family and friends to share in that first tumultuous year with the twins kind of morphed into something else. About six months in, I decided to break off and start another, more anonymous (to anyone who knew me in real life) blog. A place where I would be able to write more freely. I was able to connect with women who had the same experience of interests or sense of humor.
In the past few years, blogging and social media have become part and parcel of each other. I post semi regularly. My blog isn’t the cutest one out there, but it’s not the worst either. I get bored easily, so am always striving to improve it. I don’t regularly do giveaways or reviews. I have mixed feelings about the more commercial aspects of blogging. To balance the commercial aspects and engaging content is an art. I think it can be done really, really well. I am constantly impressed at the top notch blogs out there. I hope to be on that level one day.
But for now, blogging is about the shared journey, collective reflection and the writing. Always the writing.
I’m not saying that I provide consistently engaging content. There are many days when I ramble on and am too exhausted to be witty and succinct and edit myself. But I try. My blog has morphed right along with my life. Today, it’s about a mother trying to balance life with 3 small children and a full time job outside the home and everything that goes along with that. What will my blog look like in 2 years? 5 years? I’m not really sure. All I do know with certainty is that I will be blogging, if it’s still called that.
Oh! OVUSOFT! I haven't been there in ages, but I always used those forums (and software) when TTC 🙂
Yes! What a great post…I talked about this a while ago too! http://lumpsonablog.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-blog.html