Taking Back My Blog

I’ve Just Been Here-Living My Life.

Oh, hey. You guys are still here? Cool. Thanks for sticking around.

I had a bit of an unplanned vacation from this here blog. See, like a good girl, three weeks ago I did all my pre-vacation work and posted some oldie but goodie posts for the week that I was away with my family. Then, but for a few quick seconds to share said posts on social media, I barely touched my iPad and didn’t even crack open my laptop all week.

You know what? It was glorious. I mean, really, truly glorious. Dare I say, I relaxed for the first time in six years, since this blog began and I enjoyed every second of the nothing that I had to do every day. Then, I came home and turns out I enjoyed it so much, I just kept right on enjoying it through another week and a day.

A couple of times last week I thought of writing and felt bad for not doing it. But not a lot. So of course, I had to analyze these feelings (It’s what I do.) and try to understand why I wasn’t missing my blog.

I couldn’t really put a reason to it, but I could stress out and OVER-analyze (It’s what I do.) and get myself all wrapped up in trying to understand the wwwwhhhhhyyyy of my actions. (Exhausting.)

Mid-Self-Induced Episode of Cray, my friend Cadi wrote this post about the  business of mom-blogging and I read it and I nearly screamed out loud, “holy crap that’s it!”. But I didn’t. I stayed quiet (mostly, I might have screamed in Cadi’s comment section.) with my thoughts for a few days (it’s also what I do) and came to some conclusions.

One is that I actually don’t hate blogging. I hate the way blogging currently occupies my life. And, two, I won’t quit blogging but I will majorly revamp the way I do things.

When I first started The Traveling Circus a million years ago, it was just to write about the crazy crap I’d gotten myself into as a wife, mom, looney-tunes lady who moved out-of-state. Then, some wonderful opportunities came my way as a result of both my writing and some plain dumb-luck.

These opportunities had me begin to view my blog in a different way. It was a vehicle to other things-or so I was told I should think. So, The Right Hand Mom was born and it was supposed to be a place to Showcase My Writing and Build My Brand. (I put those in fancy font so you could see how serious I was about these two things. I thought I was really moving into something big and way cooler than the average Joe.)

So, I spent years figuring out what the hell my Personal Brand was. I wrote about being a doula.  I wrote about healthy eating. I wrote parenting articles and how to dig your way out of debt. It was fun at first because I had somethings to say about all of this. But then it turned into writing specific pieces for specific brands and including all the right keywords and using different fonts to drive SEO and checking back-links and reporting traffic and every other nightmare that comes with blogging for eyeballs and not people or numbers and not friends. I did it all and I thought I was doing the right thing, following a new path.

But all the while, what I wanted to do was write how I always have which is from my heart and often includes crazy-crap I get myself into or think in the middle of the night when I’m awake over-analzying the world. (Oh, the analyzing? It’s not just for me.)

Blurry-Just Like My Ideas.

So the slicked up and shiny Right Hand Mom Blog had a bit of an identity crisis, and in turn, so did I.

Three weeks ago when I went digging into the last five years of this blog, I realized how much better those early posts were. Oh, they were sometimes horrible to look at because I was still figuring out how to write on a blog, but the content was so much more rich than some of what I’ve put out there in a while. Then, in the last two weeks, as I have just lived my life, I noticed that I did still want to write every day but not about some of the things on my Editorial Calendar of What to Write (See, important italics again). I always promised myself when this thing go to a point that I felt like I HAD to write instead of want to write, then I’d stop. But I don’t want to stop. I just want to go back to doing it the way I was before-when it felt like me and mine.

As of today, I’m taking back my blog. I’m not sure what that means except that I know whatever I write here will be only for two: for me and for you. I’ve never like dispensing advice, but I’ve always loved sharing what I know and see in the hopes of helping someone out there feel less alone, especially moms, because they so often can feel alone.

Sometimes this looks like me writing stories. Sometimes it means me gushing about people or products I’m loving at the moment. Sometimes it means videos while I’m still in my workout clothes because I just can’t wait to tell you something. Sometimes it means a picture-or ten. Whatever shape it takes, this blog will no longer be a vehicle to build a brand (whatever the hell that means) it will just be what The Traveling Circus meant to be all those years ago-a place to write about life, that maybe some people want to come and read once in a while. I’ll just be writing, not stressing about who and how many, read.

Going forward this is exactly what The Right Hand Mom will be: a place for me to share my stories and maybe even make you feel something when you read them.

Thanks for coming back. Hope to see you around again, soon.