Why?

It seems like it's all my kids ask me. Why why why why why WHY? I answer the endless sea of questions from "why does a red ICEE make my teeth red?" to "will I die someday?" Sometimes the very trivial question of "why does Barbie have yellow hair" precedes or follows the very type of question that stops me in my tracks like "can I have a lemonade stand next summer and give all the money I make at it to kids that are sick and in the hospital or to kids that don't have mommies or daddies and why don't they have them and why do kids get sick anyways????" I make up the answers as I go. I find myself saying "just because" or "because God made it that way" a lot. The point that I am doing a very poor job at making is that I am sick of questions. I sometimes sit with Mike late at night and beg him to please not ask me anything or make me decide anything for 20 minutes. Questions are the bane of my existence.

So when I got several messages in my inbox these past few weeks from strangers who have somehow stumbled upon this silly little corner of the Internet, I thought how NEAT! A lot of these questions ask the same thing..."why did you start a blog?" or "what inspired you to start a blog". Well. Um. Let's see.

My sister in law Amber told me what a blog was. I didn't even know. So she said, go to blogspot and sign on and we can post pictures of the kids so you don't have to mail them to me. Good idea, I thought. And then I wrote a post. And I hit the button "publish post". And later that night I showed Mike. And he liked what I wrote. And then a few days later I wrote a little essay about something that happened in our lives. I forget what. And when I hit the button "publish post" I felt this little thrill of exhilaration. I thought, wow, I just wrote something and ANYONE could read it if they wanted. It was a rush even though I knew Amber was the only one that knew I had a blog. So then I added my blog address to my email signature. And I started to write about personal stuff that was embarrassing. Ha!!! I felt free and liberated. Here I was being honest about my thoughts or bad habits and anyone in the world could be reading this and I wouldn't know it. It was so freeing to my soul. I found that I still loved writing. When I was younger I wrote all the time. I took writing classes and was Editor of my HS newspaper. I had a regular column where I could write on any topic I wanted. An early version of this blog? Maybe. And I discovered I still LOVED the idea of strangers reading what I wrote. I love to write. Sometimes I think a post is really well written. I don't go back and edit. Most of the time I don't even read the post before I publish it. I just write in a free-style format where I just put my ideas from my brain to my fingers to the screen. Sometimes I will go back and read what I wrote weeks later and think...OH MY GOSH, I can't believe I admitted that! Or I will blush with embarrassment and poor sentence structure, dangling participles, poor spelling and the switching of tense. But I don't let these things bug me. It's MY blog after all and if I want to dangle my participles all over the place I can. I love it and the fact that even one stranger would send me an email telling me that they liked this little bloggy thing makes me happier than the squirrel with the mouth full of nuts that I saw today in my parents tree. (How's that for poor sentence structure)

So anyway, that is why I write. It's why this blog isn't private. It would be stupid for me to say "this is my journal" or I write this for my kids. In part, I do. In part, I write it for Mike and for myself. I write it to embarrass my Mom who thinks I over share waaaay too much info. But it would be a lie to say that I don't hope that somewhere someone will read my words. I think words and stories are so powerful. I write because I have found that writing is part of who I need to be. I love it.