Just Blog It: Just Jot It January 3, 2019

So… I’ve been participating in Just Jot It January 2019, after missing it last year in the midst of Jim’s final days and their aftermath.

As the anniversary of that date rolls closer (it’s a week from Saturday, on the 12^th), today’s prompt is to write about blogging – how we began, why we do it, whatever.

It’s interesting, maybe, that my blogging life began as the outgrowth of our newborn son, Elijah, who lived only 12 days, from July 13-25, 2003. He never left the NICU where he was swept after what had seemed like a textbook pregnancy ended in a grand episiotomy and forceps – and a profoundly brain-injured baby who had been normal five minutes earlier.

It’s times like these that change people forever, and I think I started blogging to find some way to comprehend the blur of those twelve days, of a baby who had been just fine, but of whom the CAT scan revealed “minimal electrical architecture” – meaning that he wasn’t exactly brain dead, but he wasn’t missing that by much.

I don’t know if I hoped then that my words might touch someone else and help them…

I don’t know if they did. I only know that I needed to make some kind of a record of our baby boy, so he wouldn’t just disappear as though his tiny life didn’t matter, because it did.

The blog fizzled quickly. It was too hard to write the posts about dates, and the crib full of baby clothes that were never worn – and, also, I got pregnant again as soon as we were cleared to have sex, and then there was a diagnosis of placenta previa and a partial placental abruption, and I was put on modified bed rest with a two year old to tend to, and blogging just fell away as we tried to get our daughter born at an age where she would be “viable” – not something you want to hear mere months after living through the anguish of watching your newborn die.

Thankfully, Annalise (just call her Lise, these days!) was born healthy, and quickly earned nicknames like Force of Nature, the Tiny Tornado, Daredevil Diva, and the Impinator. She brought joy and sparkle, and patched up our fractured family.

It would be six years before I’d blog again… and, again, it would be a time of change that brought it about.

I was learning to parent in a new, peaceful way that was about as far from the way I myself had been raised as the North Pole is from the South. I needed a place to work through what I was learning and trying, and the changes I was seeing in the kids and in myself.

This time, it did occur to me that this journey and the record I was making could help others – but it still wasn’t the main reason I wrote. I did it to have “proof” – for myself, for my still-a-little skeptical husband, and for my family, who thought I was permanently damaging my children  – by treating them with kindness and allowing them the freedom to make choices that actually mattered in their lives.

I wrote the blog for a couple of years, until radical unschooling and the peaceful parenting at its heart became a natural part of my life. I didn’t stop blogging that time, though – I simply shifted my focus to writing, and, with only a few interruptions, I have been blogging since.

These days, learning to give value to my readers through what I share is the primary goal. So, I’m taking this opportunity to ask – what would you like to see in this space? What would delight you? Inform you? Touch your emotions? Make the time you spend with me worth your while?

Please feel free to share – I love chatting!

Join in for Just Jot It January!