Once upon a time there was a woman who blogged.  She blogged for years and years and made many virtual friends, some of whom turned into IRL friends.  She also had a loyal core readership, some of whom would introduce themselves shyly at homeschool conferences.

She would also meet many women who, upon hearing the name of her blog, would say, “Oh, I’ve heard of you, but I don’t read you.”  This convinced her that she was the most widely unread blog out there, which she found very funny and not at all insulting.  She was happy regardless.  She didn’t blog for the world; she blogged for herself.  She loved to write, and she loved to record her family memories so they wouldn’t be forgotten.  She loved to post pictures of her kids and things they had done, because she knew she would never ever make lovely scrapbooks or even lousy photo albums.  She also blogged for her family and for the many friends she left behind every time the army moved her family to another state.  Making new friends through blogging was a bonus.  Entertaining an audience was a pleasure.  Mentoring or inspiring other women was both frightening and humbling.  But, she reminded herself often, this is a hobby, not a career.

One day, this blogger had a baby, which was nothing particularly remarkable, since she had done so six times before.  She had even blogged through two pregnancies and births and infancies.  But back then, the other children were also fairly young, and life was much simpler.  This time, only a few weeks after that baby was born, the oldest brother started high school in their homeschool.  Two other older siblings were in middle school.  And they all lived in a new town where they didn’t know anybody yet, and frequently got lost on the way home from the grocery store.  Although eventually they made many new friends and learned lots of shortcuts around traffic without getting too lost, school and keeping up with life in general forced blogging far down on the priority list.

Nearly two years went by, and then, like the first warm day of spring after a bitter winter, the school year started to wind down.  The younger children finished, and the older children had only a few assignments left.  Music lessons and sport activities ceased for the summer.  The family actually had several days in a row with nothing on the calendar.  And the woman took a deep breath and asked herself, “Do you think you’d like to get back into blogging?”  Not wanting to be too hasty, she decided to enjoy this new-found leisure time instead.  And in that break, her creative thoughts started flowing once again.  She went back through her own blog archives, looking up a few memories, and re-reading posts from three, four, eight years ago.  And they made her laugh.  Really laugh.  And then she knew the answer.  Not for the world, not for friends or family, but for her own joy:

“Yes, I do want to blog again.”