I blogged back in the beggining of blogs. That’s not that far back in real time, but it seems like ages ago based on how quickly the internets have changed since then. I was one of the first mommy bloggers. I know, you’re thinking “Ick!” right? It fit me at the time. I have more than one degree in child development. I work with families in my real life job. I was a fairly new mom. But I sort of came to it by accident. Here’s how.
My baby (she just turned 11) was born with several internal structure things wrong with her. They called them mid-line defects. She had problems that would’ve caused death if not fixed. I had no family close and most of my friends were quite far away as well, so I started a mini blog about her health to keep everyone up to date. This was even in the days before Facebook became what it is today and long before Twitter. MySpace was about it, and I certainly didn’t have a playlist related to the struggles my baby was dealing with that I was willing to share.
As my Poppy started to heal from one of her more horrific surgeries that required 10 days in a medical coma with a tube shoved down her throat in order heal correctly, I blogged more and kept up to date with a group related to one her very rare conditions. As the months progressed, I ended up writing about more than just “On Monday, Poppy is going to have her tonsils removed in the hopes that she’ll be able to swallow without aspirating.” I started blogging about life rather than just the fear of the death of my beloved baby, and that’s when the mommy blog started.
Why do I bring this up today? I found the business card I’d printed up to hand to people we met at the hospital, in waiting rooms, in doctor’s offices who wanted to know how my beloved Poppy was doing. I wasn’t being pretentious. People craved a place to go to see how that little girl with the bright blue eyes and a perpetual smile was doing. There were so many “strangers” thinking about my babe and crossing their fingers for her or praying or whatever they did.
I put strangers in quotes for a very good reason. I still remember the face of the nurse who used to do weekly weight checks on Poppy her first 3 years when she was fed through a tube in her stomach. I smile at her whenever I see her. She asks about Poppy even when I see her at Target! I remember the face of the boy who was in his 20s who was waiting for a heart transplant. He used to come and visit Poppy in the PICU. He thought she was amazing just because of her smile and how she’d laugh at his antics. And I remember the girl waiting for a kidney. The woman who donated to this girl just so happened to be married to a man from my home church. I grew up more than 600 miles away from where I lived then. That girl needing a kidney died, yet she’d held hope in her heart for my Poppy, and we held hope for her. I won’t forget any of them. Those were in-life people, but I wouldn’t have survived without my tiny online community of 7 other parents who had dealt with the same super-rare disorder my kid had nor the larger online community I eventually discovered when I became a mommy blogger.
I’m not sure where I’d be today without discovering the M/M communities I’ve found as well. Seems like very different things, right? I think that’s why I love the internet. The M/M communities have grown so much since I first discovered them, and I’m so grateful for the connections I’ve made. This is a great time to be living in the world.
