Celebrating One Year of Midwest Moms

These days, it seems like everyone is starting a Mommy blog -- that strange hybrid of family scrapbook, confessional, parenting manual, and late-night comedy routine.

We're a hundred thousand Erma Bombecks.

Who knows why we do it? I can answer only for myself.

I started Midwest Moms one year ago because I was the only one in my family raising children far from home. The transition from single life to married motherhood was one of the toughest life-altering transformations I have ever experienced. Through the highs and lows, after the tremendous the changes I underwent on the outside and the inside, I became stronger and tougher and more loving and patient than I ever thought I could be. Motherhood was like a trial by fire; it transformed me, not because I wanted it to... just because that's what becoming a Mom does to a woman. And once it did, once I was a Mom, I was surprised to find I had gained entry into an amazing sisterhood of strong women who had all undergone the same metamorphosis.

But motherhood is isolating work. It makes a grown woman spend the entire day speaking in two-word sentences, just to be understood. It turns a woman with a master's degree into a trained parrot, teaching her son or daughter to speak by repeating every phrase twice. It forces former professionals to resort to discussing the consistency of their little ones' diapers, the price of bananas, and how to get our whites whiter instead of using our time together to talk about the real challenges of mothering -- balancing love and discipline, raising responsible resilient children, fostering communication in the home, battling our need for appreciation with the reality that true appreciation most often comes only from our sisters in the trenches.

We don't talk about those things in the produce aisle. Or at PTA meetings.

We blog about them instead.

We blog to give a voice to our family journey, to document the challenges and the victories, if for no one but ourselves. In the process, we find friends we never knew we had -- women who live in other places, but who understand the people we are and were and hope to be. For me, blogging is a way to reach through the isolating work I do, to move past the everyday even as I write about it.

In the process of writing Midwest Moms, I have found a voice I didn't know I had, an outlet for my weird sense of humor, a way to convey my experience of the world. I find it hard to believe I've only been at it for a year -- it has become so much a part of who I am.

So, thank you for coming by Midwest Moms and sharing this strangely, surprisingly meaningful journey with me. I never could have imagined the past year of writing would be so, well, important. But it is. It continues to be.

Many thanks for a wonderful year.

- Midwest Mom