The View From Here

Shayla, my lovely Canadian blog friend, and I have wanted to collaborate for a while now, but we couldn’t think of a topic.  Finally, it dawned on us both that we should just talk about what we know best: Blogging!  So today, we’re starting a new series called “The View From Here.”  We’ve created a list of questions about the world of blogging, and we’ll answer them honestly on our blogs.

Hopefully, this will lead to more conversations about our experiences in different parts of the same continent.  Though we’re both lifestyle bloggers, Shayla is in far Northern Ontario and I’m in Central Texas, so we’ve got different takes on pretty much everything in our lives (she has to wear snowshoes sometimes!).  I hope you’ll stay tuned each Monday as we tackle different topics.

Today’s question is: WHY DID YOU START BLOGGING?

I actually started blogging back in January of 2008, after Ryan encouraged me to do it.  Back then, I was working three part-time jobs and hoping to have a baby soon, and I really didn’t think I had much to say.  Still, I wrote from time to time, mostly on popular news stories.  I read a lot of blogs, but I never considered the idea that I could do what other writers were doing.  Later that year, I had James, and then Rhys not too long after, and my occasional posts were very Mommy Blogger, as I like to say.  I got interested in birth activism, too, and I was way too outspoken politically.  I wasn’t making the best use of my blog back then, and it was more of an online journal.

Then, I took a blogging class on a whim last summer (where I met Shayla!), and I realized that I could transform my blog and what I write about.  I have a writing background, but I never really used it (besides teaching), until I started blogging regularly.  So, I upped my game, committed to posting five times a week, and found a new calling.  Now, blogging has become a way of life for me, and though I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, it’s kind of like a third child.  I LOVE my blog and I tend to it like I care for my boys, only after they are asleep, of course.

For my birthday last July, Ryan bought my own domain, and literally forced me into self-hosting on WordPress.  I didn’t think I was ready to make the leap from Blogger, but I jumped, and I’m so glad I did!  I honestly consider myself a new blogger, since what I’m doing now is so different than what I did before, and I’m learning more about blogging each day.  When I moved, I left my old blog behind (it seemed like the right thing to do) and I started fresh, so what you’re reading now is less than a year old.  But in that time, I’ve made some great friends and connections, written guest posts for other bloggers, and now I’m a contributing writer for Blog Trends, an online resource for bloggers. I take blogging very seriously and consider it my job, alongside being a wife and mother, and it is such a rewarding experience.

As a stay-at-home-mom, I totally admit to experiencing some of what Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique, and I think it’s a very real problem, even in 2013.  It might sound cheesy, but blogging kind of saved my life in a lot of ways, and gave me something to call my own.  So many bloggers are mothers at home with their children, and I completely understand the need to reach out to a greater community of like-minded people, who share your passions and concerns.  So, that’s why I started blogging.

You can check out Shayla’s response at her blog, Northern Exposure, and be sure to check back next Monday for the next question in our new series.