In honor of the 200,000 hit, 100,000 unique visitors, and 50,000 returning visitors, I want to share the real story of why I started this blog.
Let us go back in time (Oh if only I really could). It is mid April 2008. I am in a serious funk. You know those times in motherhood where you feel like your life is just one dirty diaper after another? Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I loved and appreciated my kids. Truly my cup was running over with joy in them, most especially the littlest who was too young to ever do anything naughty. I loved being a full time mother too. I just felt ... unidimensional?
I am not sure I can describe exactly how I felt now any better than I could then. I can tell you that I have always been happiest when I have been very busy with lots of deadlines to meet. I work well under pressure and I work best when my plate is very full. If I only took 12 credits (4 classes) in a college semester, I would procrastinate studying and probably do very poorly. But if I took 18 credits (6-7 classes), I would get all As and Bs and be happier being busy.
Putting that type of personality into being a full time mom has been challenging for me, especially when I wanted by principle to avoid taking any job on me that would take away from my time with my kids.
I have always known I would have a career besides motherhood at some point. I even knew what I wanted to do with my life. The planner that I am, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. (The foreign ambassador to the Bahamas.) I love politics. I want to do something political with my career ... someday.
But I have lots of unrelated interests. I like to cook and bake. I love to write. I love traveling. I have always avoided doing anything with these interests because they did not contribute to my end goal -- politics. I didn't open an ice cream store because I didn't want to be a ice cream shop owner. That wasn't what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't want to be a baker or a writer or a business person.
Still I felt like I needed something more in my life. I started adding classes to my kids schedule and signed up to start taking pilates. I was seeking things to fill my schedule that were compatible with motherhood.
Then one morning in late April I woke up at 5 am and couldn't go back to sleep. I am not a morning person. This was highly unusually for me. I got in the bathtub to help myself fall back asleep and get a little more rest before the kids woke up at 8.
As I sat there in the bath, I thought about my life. I thought about who I was in high school. I sang and danced and golfed and played the piano and was in numerous clubs. No one who knew me now would guess I did any of those things. I was a totally different person then.
Next I thought of my life in college and my 20s. I was focused on school and politics and public relations and journalism and law school and criminal law. No one who knew me then knew about my high school interests. I was a different person in my 20s than I had been in my teens.
Last, I thought about my life now. I am the mother of four girls. That is where I stopped. I didn't have all these varied facets to my life as I had in the past. I was a totally different person now than in my 20s or my teens.
Then I had what was to me a revelation.
Insert angels singing and light streaming down from heaven.
I could be more than one thing in my life. I didn't have to pick one thing to be when I grew up. I could be a different person every decade if I wanted to. I could be a lawyer in my 20s, something else in my 30s, another thing in my 40s and then go into politics in my 50s and be the ambassador to the Bahamas in my 60s. :)
Instantly I knew I needed to decide what I wanted to be in my 30s other than a mother. I had to be something that wouldn't take time away from my kids. I love writing. I needed to document my life better. That would contribute to my mothering, not take away from it. I could do it at night when the kids were in bed. It fit. My 30s would be my writing years.
Until this point I had been anti blog. I was uncomfortable having so much information about myself out on the net. I had started a private blog before but found that few people check a private blog. I needed an audience to serve as my "deadline."
In this revelatory moment, I just knew I needed to get over my fears and start a blog, an open to the public blog. I needed to practice my writing and try to do it everyday if I could. Then maybe, when my writing skills were sharpened, I would write a children's book or do some freelance journalism work.
That week, I set up and started www.adailyscoop.blogspot.com.
I had no idea then how grateful I would be for following that divine direction. Not only has this blog been a life line for me personally, but I have a few precious entries with and about Camille in the last 7 weeks of her life. I never dreamed, even after Camille's accident, that so many people would come and read what I wrote. I am still astonished at that.
I was grateful to the Lord for this revelation then. It took me out of my funk. I am even more grateful for it now. It was one of many preparatory pillars the Lord, in His mercy, put in place to hold my life up when the hurricane of heartache would hit. I cling to those pillars now as treasures. They stand as evidence of the Lord's love for me and His foreknowledge of this twist in the plot of my life.
