Hey there

Yeah, I know. It’s been a while.

I’m not sure if I will be able to explain in a way that makes sense to anyone besides me, but I’ll try.

About 12 years ago I started to blog as a way for me to chronicle my feelings and keep far flung family in the loop of my day to day life. Jimmy was deployed about half the year on a submarine, so my little blog was also a way for him to quickly catch up on things when he surfaced and joined us landlubbers again.

My blog was little and it was not fancy to look at. Sometimes my pictures loaded sideways. But that little corner of the web contained my heart.

Time moved on, and my blog started to get a little following. People liked me, they really liked me! I met bloggy friends! I even started to go to bloggy things to talk to people about how to make my blog better! I listened and started to grow my blogs audience. I still wrote about what mattered to my heart, but I also started to write about other things. Things that had keywords to bring page views. With all those new awesome page views came new words like – compensation, sponsored, PR contacts, and ads.

I started needing a dedicated calendar to keep track of what posts were due on what day. I was having to look for babysitting so I could complete the things needed for the posts. There wasn’t much headspace left for me to write what was in my heart.

Then came the Cool Whip post. That effing Cool Whip post was the start of my wake up. My blog was no longer mine. I had sold my little corner of the web that had held my heart for a post about Cool Whip that earned me couple hundred dollars.

(I’m not going to link to that post. It’s buried somewhere in here and you are welcome to find it, but eff that post.)

At that moment I started to hate my own blog. It wasn’t a respite, it was work. I dreaded the deadlines. I hated embedding keywords. There was no longer room for my heart.

Then one day my blog was hacked. Everything was messed up and a lot was deleted. There was my escape. I didn’t fix it. I left Mommy Rambles in disarray and I didn’t care.

It’s taken me several years but today I opened Word Press and didn’t feel dread. I even felt a tiny spark of inspiration to write this.

So there’s that. It’s a start, right?