Today's Working Mommy Wednesday prompt was to explain when I started blogging and why, and if I still blog the same way/for the same reasons.
I have always loved reading. I would devour books as a child, just like my mom. I would re-read my favorites over and over again, hiding under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime eagerly anticipating phrases and scenes. Words have always been fascinating to me - I love to say "Lolita Davidovich" just because it sounds cool. (And I like her as an actress, too.) Spelling and grammar came naturally to me, though I must credit my teachers and phonic reading techniques, too.
Once I was of an age to begin to write stories myself, I dove in with glee. Writing became an integral part of me. So much so that when I became eligible for the advanced honors English class, I declined to enroll in it because there was almost no creative writing element to the curriculum. I ended up minoring in creative writing in college.
After I graduated, I started working full-time and didn't really have a reason to write. I kept a journal, and occasionally jotted down ideas or paragraphs for stories for "someday", but that was it. I found creative outlets in other areas: scrapbooking, card-making, graphic design.
Then I got pregnant with S.
I wanted to chronicle my maternity for posterity, and a friend had found a website where you could upload photos and stats and make diary entries. Cool! So for the next nine months, I did just that. And after S was born, I continued to update it for the first year. At that point, I decided it wasn't really the most appropriate place for us anymore considering it was called "Babysites.com". What was I going to do - keep it running until she was out of high school?
I didn't write anything in cyberspace for a few months, just keeping handwritten notes around. As a New Year's resolution the first of the following year, I decided to open a private account on Blogger, still using it simply to post updates about our lives for ourselves and our family. Over the next few months, I began incorporating more emotion and voice to my posts instead of just updates on daily life. I became more familiar with blogs and joined Mamapedia. I saw that they were accepting submissions for articles and sent in a post. They accepted it!
I hurriedly started a new blog that was open to the public and had pseudonyms to resolve my privacy concerns. At this point I still concentrated on family stuff because I didn't have any followers which was fine with me. I just needed to have a public blog to link to for when I submitted posts. Which I started to do more often.
That fall, I found Kludgy Mom's Back to School/Back to Blogging tutorial and really got into blogging and working at developing a blog others would be interested in. I was kind of fumbling for focus at that point. I still wanted the blog to be about my family, but I wanted to do more with it than just make it a diary. And at the start of the next new year, I found The Red Dress Club. And I felt I'd come full circle. A reason to write other than just to chronicle our lives and occasionally get up on my soapbox.
So that's where I'm at now. Still blogging for the same reason, but letting it encompass all of who I am as a woman, not just a mother.
