Wow, the blog has been…well…. (crickets chirping) …dead.
Why? It’s a combination of things really.
Yes, I’ve been back to working full time and when your job incorporates a lot of writing, editing and marketing conversations, it’s hard to think about that in your spare time too. I’m often creatively drained when I get home.
But even more complicated is figuring out what to blog about. Because we have turned this weird corner were I no longer feel the freedom to blog about our life as openly as I generally was. I tend to be an all or nothing conversationalist and for a long time that applied to my blog.
I think the shift started with our move three years ago. It was a new chapter for all of us. A new job for me that had NOTHING to do with orphans or adoption or social justice. The kids transitioned from a tiny Christian school to large public schools.
And the kids are teenagers now. Their friends Google things. We live in a small town (about 15,000 people) and one that is not extremely diverse unfortunately. So L & B were already going to stand out. They didn’t need me adding to that. I even went through and unpublished quite a few blog posts.
In the same way, so much of my time was spent in the adoption/orphan advocacy world. Both Mark and I were working in orphan care full time, I was writing the book, speaking, attending conferences.
But then suddenly my work was about something else – sure there was still the book launch and marketing, but it wasn’t all consuming.
And then we took the trip to Ethiopia in the spring of 2015. And it was HARD. In ways I hadn’t imagined. I thought I was prepared — in some ways I was … in other ways I was not. I needed time for God to work and deal with me in some dark, ugly places. I needed to go back on my anti-depressants. I needed (and got) therapy.
And somewhere in there I realized that way too much of my identity, and even self-worth, was caught up in being an “adoptive mom.” And I needed to just be “Mom.”
And that meant stepping away from the blog for awhile. Even still as I think about it, I’m trying to figure out the balance. Do I jump back in? How do I write about our life without oversharing – and yet still be interesting?
So the posts may be way less frequent, but I hope I’ll be back from time to time. Talking about parenting, personal growth, financial freedom…wherever the writer’s heart wanders.
