In 2007, I began a blog called Our Journey to 5 on the Blogger platform as a way to share my thoughts on expanding our family through adoption.  I had hoped to connect with like-minded people during our decision making and beyond. In the beginning, I posted about my adoption thoughts and concerns in blog entries that got zero views.  As time went on, thanks to a very active adoption community, people began to find my blog.  I met and became friends with people all over the world as I shared what it was like to finally bring my husband on board with my adoption dreams.  I ultimately shared what it was like to fall in love with a toddler who, for a long while, was reluctant to connect.  

When my father got sick during my first year home with my son, my blog posts increasingly focused on how I felt as a daughter losing her dad.  My thoughts, and therefore my posts during this time, didn’t solely focus on what brought me to blogging in the first place.  I had it in my head that my “journey to 5” blog was intended to focus only on adoption and our new family, so by writing about other things I was going through, I felt I was veering too much away from what I was “supposed” to be writing about. The question that plagued me was — Who wants to turn to an adoption blog only to read about someone’s ailing father?

My Last Blog Post

Three months before my father passed away, in December 2010, I wrote my last blog post.  At the time, I didn’t know it was going to be the last thing I ever posted.  Perhaps if I would have known, I would have reached out to my community and supportive friends.  I could have simply said good-bye properly and not had my last blog be a photo of my son eating his first potato latke.  Had I reached out and told people that I was struggling — emotionally and also literally with the content of my blog and where it was heading — I would have found out that this was okay.  That a blog morphs and changes with the person who blogs.  I would have realized that people liked me and trusted me as a person, not just because of the adoption I first began writing about. I was a person who adopted a child, and I was also a person who was going through something else in her life — something quite traumatic for me.  Had I stopped to think about this further, I might have found comfort in continuing to write about what it was like to learn to love my son while simultaneously learning how to be a daughter who was losing my father. 

This Blogging Life

A blog is never about one thing, but it is about the person who blogs.  And so, back for Round Two in this blogging life, I promise to not worry about perfection, not to concern myself with just including the good parts, and not curate my life any differently than how it’s unfolding.  There may be a typo (though I hope not), there may be imperfect writing and sometimes parts that need editing.  What I hope mostly is that there is truth.  And in truth, I hope we connect.  

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