Honesty...

Source

My friend April tweeted yesterday about blogging.  More specifically, she talked about bloggers replying to their comments especially if the comments are fewer.  This statement launched a conversation about how I agreed and how blogging can be used to cultivate rich, wonderful relationships and one comment is how it all begins.  After agreeing, I expressed my sadness over having gone private with my other blog which is a family blog I started in 2008 after Josh and I got married.

It was fun to chronicle our adventures as newly weds, my pregnancy with J and J's first few months.  Before I even announced I was pregnant with E on that blog, I went private.  My followers there had grown from my Mom and Grandma to friends, family and strangers alike and I had put out more information than I felt comfortable sharing.  After years of posting, it was too late to go back and edit and I didn't want to wipe out the past posts as the blog had also become an ongoing monologue of our family's adventures, trials, and other life happenings.

I've continued to blog on our family's blog here and there, but the creativity in posting and the desire to seek my blog as a place to express my frustrations or our triumphs became less.  This is partially due to the community I lost in going private.  A few people can still read and do.  These people are the best friends I've made in the blogging community and I love that I can still read their blogs and they can read mine and we can stay caught up in each other's lives.  I love those relationships and the snail mail exchanged, the care packages sent, the text messages shared... I love that those relationships with those women have become real and I can call them all my friends.  But I do miss being part of the community.

When you're public and you post about a stressful day as a stay at home Mom, you generally get encouragement.  When you post about how your baby just crawled for the first time, you have echoes of cheering join you in your celebrations.  When you post about how you're just not sure if you're doing this or that right and you need help, people are willing to offer their suggestions and their encouragement.  There's a lot of good things about being a public blogger.

And that's why I started this blog.  It was a fresh start; a clean slate.

And now I'm here blogging in this blog and I'm a little unsure of what to do with myself.  My original intent was to simply use the blog as a creative outlet, but I'm not creative often enough to keep up with posting.  I know there's nothing wrong with turning this blog into another family-type blog either and that thought can be appealing because it means meeting even more blog friends, especially other Moms.  But how important is that?  I love the friends I've met through blogging but should most of my time be spent on these Internet relationships or should I put this desire for these relationships aside and focus on real relationship forming with my friends here in my real life?

And clearly, by submitting this post of story and questioning and by asking for your opinions on blogging and how important these Internet relationships are vs. real life relationships, I'm making this blog (at least in this post) less creative and more personal and that's ok.  Maybe sometimes that's just what I need.

Thanks for listening. :)

P.S. My amazing friends I met through blogging are: Caroline, Melissa, Liz, Allison & Krysten.  There's also Maegan who is a great online friend, but she no longer blogs publicly either.