Blogging from Widowhood Lane

Last week my view counter ticked up to and over 150,000. Not bad for three years and I really wanted to do some sort of commemorative post thanking people who return to read from time to time. I guess I didn’t put it high enough on my priority list to follow through. Or maybe I held back from doing so because of something I wrote at the 100,000 mark. Along with thanking frequent readers, I bemoaning the fact that I get so few comments and I was rewarded with a snippy comment suggesting that I must be a comment whore. I replied back was that if I was writing just for the comments I would have quit a long time ago. To date, I’ve chalked up 1,494 comments. Does that really sound like I’m writing just for the feedback? I rest my case. I am not a comment whore even though I treasure each and every one I get. Thanks for asking, Snippy Lady. 

Why do bloggers blog? I read somewhere the blogging is dying out in favor of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. I get that. I get that not everyone loves to write and at all those social media sources, short throw-away posts and comments are the accepted norm. I have accounts at all those places but I read far more than I post. Saying things in 120 characters is too darn hard for me at Twitter. Facebook I use mostly to keep up on what is going in Don’s and my family. Pinterest feeds right into the bulletin boards I was crazy about creating in my younger days but it bothers me that we’re telling cyberspace advertisers exactly what kinds of things we like. (As if Google doesn’t already know that.) And Instagram. Dear Instagram where I love the photos family posts and the concept that others can’t nab or share them, but I can’t seem to manage a cell phone picture without my thumb included so that leaves me out of the sharing process. No, I’ll stick to blogging where I hope/can pretend I have a connection with people who don’t care if the format is on its way to Horse-and-Buggy Land. If you are still reading this, thank you.

A far more interesting question, though, is why do people read personal blogs written by ordinary people, living ordinary lives? I can only speak for myself but I enjoy getting a window into how others feel about their day to day existence---the frustrations that get them down and things that make them feel joyful inside. I learn about myself from reading what others write, too. One of my favorite bloggers, for example, couldn’t be more different than I am when it comes to core values and life experiences but we are so spooky, scary alike in every other way that I just know we’d be great friends if we lived next door to one another. Without reading her blog, I never would have gotten beyond the labels we put on others to discover that, and that helps me when meeting new people in person. Reading personal blogs also makes me feel connected to a community when the isolation of going through life-crisis’s such Don’s disabilities and eventual death, then the whole widowhood “thing” could otherwise make me bat-poop crazy. We care about each other in cyberspace just as much as if we were talking over the back yard fence. At least that’s my view from here. Oops! My View From Here is the name of another one of my favorite blogs to read and I just plagiarized Donna’s catch phrase.

(Note: I wanted to say above, "...could make me bat-shit crazy..." but when I used the word 'sexual' in the title of a recent blog entry Bloggers sent me a notice that blogs with x-rated content will be turned private in the near-future. Oh, my, I thought, swearing content can’t be far behind on the no-no list if THAT post got tagged!)

A few people may already know this but I’m going to repeat it in this post because I’m old and that’s what old people do. Anyway, I started blogging a year after my husband’s stroke as sort of a gratitude journal and speech class diary. It was so hard back then to pull myself out of the darkness that goes with a life changing event like the massive stroke of someone you love. So I consciously made the decision that I couldn’t go to bed each night without first finding five good things to write down about my day. Before I knew it, I’d find myself saying during the day, “This should go in my journal” and that turned into seeing the funnier things that were happening in my world where I was a caregiver/wife to a wheelchair bound guy who worked very hard at building up his vocabulary. A vocabulary that turned out to be at its highest point only 25 unprompted words on a good day. When he died the bottom fell out of my world again and my blogs had to go with him.

Eleven days later, in January of 2012, this widowhood blog was born. Fast forward to now and here I am, knowing that the blog world has helped, does help and will help me again with whatever challenges life throws my way. It’s given me a place to spill my guts---my secrets, my desires, my fears, my disappointments and joys and my plans A, B and Cs. If you’ve been here often enough to see me put Band-Aids on my broken heart and rip them back off, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to see me rub salt in my own wounds then wash it back out, thank you. If you’ve been here often enough to care if I ever put some real adventure into my widowhood days, as the blog title implies I should, a double thank you. ©