Marking Time

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way first. I am celebrating three anniversaries of sorts this week:

+ today, March 1st, I joined the proverbial Century Club…that means I’m officially on Day 100 of my wait for LOA/TA. *Sigh.*

+ today, March 1st, The Bee turned 19-months-old. *SIGH.*

+ Monday, February 26th, marked my one-year anniversary of blogging.

In honor of that last anniversary (and because I was tagged by OmegaMom), I am doing the latest meme, the five reasons why I blog.

I started to blog last year on the night we arrived in Las Vegas for our second IVF (clinic was out-of-state). I was anxious and looking for something to do in the hotel room. Er…that doesn’t really count as a reason, though, does it? ‘Cause it sounds mighty lame.

When I left teaching in December of 2003, I spent a good solid two years writing poetry. And I mean every day. I had a routine of getting out to the office early, writing for five or so hours, and then getting packets of poems ready to send out to contests and journals. The post office closes at 3:30 here, so it was a natural end-stop to my day, and a reason to turn the computer off and go back up to the house for the evening. I never had to push myself to write during those two years. It was just “there” in the way that is hard for a writer to explain. Sort of like a faucet.

Then the faucet turned off. I’m not entirely sure why. It vaguely corresponded time-wise to my first miscarriage, but that certainly wasn’t a connection I was making at the time. I still felt the same, but the words wouldn’t come. I would try to force myself to finish a poem, and the poem resisted.

So, I decided not to worry about it. Time off was probably a good thing. I needed a chance to renew the creative energy, right? But after a couple of months, I worried that no writing at all might make me rusty…so I thought that maybe the blog was a good place to turn as an alternative.

So, to answer the meme question, the first reason I started blogging was to fill a gap between theory and practice–I was a writer in theory only. Meaning I was a writer not writing. So perhaps the blog was initially intended to legitimize me again.

I wrote for about five months without readers, without comments. The way you find readers is to become one. When you leave comments for other bloggers, they come calling. They read. They begin to comment back. But for a long time I was scared of the possibility of an audience. I liked writing in my little vacuum. It’s a safe space before you get your blog legs under you.

When I first started, I wrote about The Issues. Infertility Issues. Adoption Issues. Family-formation Issues…RAD. Racism. Ideologies. Idiocies. I felt the need to get stuff out on the table. So, definitely, another reason I began to blog was to record my thought-process. To figure out where my carved-out space in this community was going to be, what it was going to look like. Because one sure thing I have discovered about blogging is that you must choose your community. There are literally millions of blogs out there, but my corner of that bloggoverse is fairly small–meaning, the same names keep popping up over and over, even in the comments of blogs I rarely read or merely stumble across. I started out reading The Naked Ovary, and I connected through her web to the RQ, and just started to read the people who were reading the people. My most popular post ever was this one in which I spoke about how I couldn’t be a part of traditional DTC culture. And that opened other doors in the community.

I haven’t written about Issues in so long I can barely remember what it feels like. Fluff has become a safety measure, until The Bee is completely, bodily, here. So, I’ll give my more fluffy reason for why I blog: it does serve the purpose of journal. I might choose to share some of it with my daughter some day, but, in any case, it’s a record of SBird in the days leading up to motherhood.

Another feel-good reason why I blog: it does create community for someone like me, who spends whole entire days (as I have for the past two) speaking to absolutely no one (not even on the phone) but the dogs. R. is in California at a palm-tree tradeshow, so I have the satellite on my roof to keep me company. It’s smarter than the TV. The great thing about the self-selecting communities of blogs is that you don’t have to worry about finding people who can identify with where you are in life or what you’re doing. Y’all know an LID when you see one.

The last reason why I blog is the formal reason: I can only write on the computer now (this is true for anything other than a thank you note…I can’t even write poetry except on a blank screen.) And I like the high-tech collage that you can create with a blog–the words, the pictures, the hyperlinks, the music, the video–that you can feed into a single discussion of something. It allows for a sort of radically individualized reading experience. It basically allows you to click on links until you’re miles of bytes away from where you began–both virtually and cognitively. As a writer, it allows me to gather scraps and patches together in a sort of digital quilt. There’s more for the mind to do than with a conventional paper and pen.

Those are my five reasons for blogging.

Anyone who wants to think about their motivations and complete this meme, I would be really interested in reading!