At some point in my maternity leave, Sarah Bryden-Brown reached out to me to ask whether I’d yet considered becoming a “mom blogger.”
I have been writing online since God was a boy. The most sure-fire way to get me to roll my eyes at you is to try and pigeonhole this little hobby of mine into something that can be marketed. And trust me – what I do for a living involves a great deal of this mom blogging pigeonholing – that’s right, haters! – so it’s not as though I have some self-righteous, old-school, cantankerous opinion ab0ut What Sort of Blogger Am I? or whatever. I just have never looked at this hobby as a way to make money or promote a personal agenda. Great things have come from it, sure, but I like whatever happens as a result of this site to be organic, not because of any behind-the-scene machinations I’m doing.
That’s just the sort of blogger I am. I’ll definitely promote products and run advertising, but it has to be a really good fit, and most pitches I receive just aren’t. Mainly because those that would are run by people like me who puts loads of time and effort into researching the footprint of bloggers and my numbers don’t fit always fit the bill.
So anyway, I kind of blew her off. She was very nice, and complimentary, and I knew she’d read my work, but at the time everything I was experiencing was very painful and raw and real and I wasn’t up to having a discussion about the sort of blogger I was or would be when I could barely poop without a human being attached to my person. But time went on, and I got a little stronger, and she didn’t give up on me talking with her and taking more seriously the topic I was exploring in terms of postpartum and being a new mom. She asked if I’d consider contributing to an anthology she was putting together, encompassing the many different viewpoints of all sorts of moms.
Well, hell. Of course I would. It gave me an excuse to get outside of all of that raw pain and articulate some of what I was feeling, and a sense of purpose I was struggling to find and wasn’t getting from just caring for AG.
Yesterday the book – Welcome To My World – became available for your digital reading pleasure at Amazon.com. Giggle and Citibabes have sponsored the book, and it’s chock-full of really good material from some really cool and talented women. If you’re looking for some new reading material this weekend, I hope you’ll consider buying our book.
I read the piece now and can’t believe how much has changed since then. You guys were part of that. Thank you, as always.
