She’s the antiblog. She doesn’t read them, snickers at the mention of them, rolls her eyes, and shakes her head. Blogs have created a relational disconnect; women blog rather than pick up a phone or gather to exchange stories. Blogs are either ways women brag about their Pintastic motherhood, try to make themselves look like women they are not in a online-dating-service kind of way, or pitifully share about absolutely nothing of any interest. Never before have so many people with so little significant things to say said so much to so few people. Told you she’s the antiblog.
But, I blog. I really like to blog. In fact, I’m doing it right now. blog, blog, blog.
I was introduced to it all in 2007. We had just started the adventure of adoption, and I very likely wore down the keys on my keyboard that formed the words “china adoption blog.” I read every word of every blog I could find. I couldn’t get enough of referral pictures and current pictures, agency reviews, the how tos and how not tos, attachment woes and success. Blogs became my personal library with unlimited volumes of reference material all contained on the 13″ screen sitting in front of me.
While nail biting the initial steps forward in adopting, I wrote my first blog post seven years ago on an old blogger site with a cluttered and distracting design that I loved at the time. I wrote a little and someone other than my mom and husband may have read it every so often. My voice was guarded and the lack of any readership reflected that. A few years into it, our family grew as did my need to have a voice and my “stats” as they are called grew as well.
Hi, how are you? How is your family? How is your daughter doing? Oh good. That’s great.
With a child on my hip, one clinging to my leg, and two more either arguing, needing a wipe, or dying of thirst, that was pretty much the depth of my in-person conversations for years. Some days, that was generous; I was lucky if I was able to say hello and smile.
But, in the afternoons when there were some moments of quiet sandwiched between chaos or in the evenings when all were tucked snug in their beds, I had my overthinking and this blog. In a season that could have been isolating, I found companionship, not in Times New Roman and words in front of me but in the women who started to read those words and who responded in kind. Far from creating a relational disconnect, blogging has connected me. The clicking of the keys and the final click on “Publish” have been nothing short of keys to connection.
And, even when they are not and the words I put out there seem to be tossed out into an Internet abyss and come back void, I keep clicking because (a) intentionally taking the time to put my overthinking into semi-intelligible words forces me to overthink even my overthinking and process things I would have left swirling around my head and heart AND (b) my kids will thank me one day. Alright, maybe they won’t. But, I would be thanking my mom right now if she had blogged and I had an ongoing record of her overthinking and how she made sense of life and responded to our everyday.
It’s not about showing off. It’s not about making myself look like I’m someone I’m not. It’s not about stats. Blogging is becoming a volume in that reference library that is pulled out every once in a while and cracked open wide. Maybe I’ll never meet the person who reads the words on my these virtual pages or maybe the one reading will end up joining me on a service trip to China and become a dear friend. Better yet, maybe the reader will be my son or my daughter tracing the heart and thoughts of their mother. If no one else, the one blowing off the dust and clicking open the pages will be me so that I can remember where I’ve been and how I got to today.
Antiblog, go ahead and roll your eyes. I’ll just smile and shrug my shoulders and then go blog about it.
