Blogging failure

I'm not going to post this week's menu because it is not terribly inspiring. I wasn't feeling very excited about cooking this week, so we are having meals I don't need a recipe to cook. Spaghetti... taco salad... a couple of curries... you get the idea. It's not scintillating reading under the best of circumstances, this week felt as though it would be too boring to even write, much less read. 

Instead, I'm going to talk about how I'm [not] a blogging failure. Recently, I've had some targeted ads pop up which have to do with blogging. Many of them are advertising ways to start a blog, or make your blog better, or how to make money from your blog, etc., etc. I've been blogging for fifteen years, it seems a bit odd that they are just popping up now. I wonder what I clicked on to make me a target. Whatever. 

One of the ads was titled, "How to not be a blogging failure," or something like that. I was curious (or bored at the moment), and since it didn't want my money, I clicked on it. (Now I know I'll be inundated with similar ads. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.) Since I am doing all the wrong things, it is evident I'm a failure at this blogging thing. 

Well, I'm a failure if one sees the whole goal of blogging as making money. Obviously, making money is not my main reason for blogging. Actually, making money from blogging has never really crossed my mind. J. and I first started the blog to keep family and friends updated on how our adoption of TM was going. Then there were the updates after he came home and K,'s adoption. Then somewhere along the line, realizing it was a great way to keep my parents up to date on what we were doing, I gave myself the challenge of writing every day. I thought I year would be a good amount of time to give it a shot. Thirteen or so years later, here we are. 

We are not adopting, our children are growing up (and teens are, for various reasons, not particularly good blog fodder), and we are beginning to think about what life will look like in the coming years, so why do I keep writing? 

1. Because the blog has kind of become the de facto family record. I have lost count of the number of times we have had a family disagreement about when something happened or where we went, when a child will do a quick search of the blog and find the required information. 

2. It is therapeutic for me. I have learned over the years that I process information, emotions, events by writing. There has often been instances where I have to start writing about something before I can be entirely sure what I think about it. I use it as a journal; a journal that is open to the world, but still a journal. I tried to keep a journal when I was younger of the private, hand written sort, but gave it up because it seemed pointless if no one was ever going to read it. 

3. I've gained a lot of hard earned wisdom over the years. Much of it involved some very painful lessons that I evidently needed to learn the hard way. If I had a chance, there is so much I would change about how we parented our adopted children in those early years. My stubbornness and ignorance caused more pain than I care to think about. If I can save other parents that kind of pain and give them tools and information to reframe how they see their children and rethink how they interact with them, then the pain we went through is redeemed. In so many ways, this has become my purpose in this time of life. It is why I write; it is why I am certified in EFL; it is why I still belong to more than a couple of adoption groups. 

So to everyone who comes here faithfully and reads, thank you. Thank you for sharing our lives with us. To everyone who passes a post on to a hurting friend, thank you. To all of you who have written to me over the years either sharing your worries or sharing how I have helped make your family a little bit stronger, you have made my day with each message and email. Writing can sometimes feel lonely and you wonder if you do make a difference. It's nice to hear that you have. 

I'll just keep on failing at blogging... not worrying about money, but sharing information which can help people. (I hope.) I'll keep on writing posts that are too long, sharing pictures that don't look perfect, and throwing in the occasional rant, and not monetizing the blog. It may be considered failure to some, but it seems to be working in the ways that really matter.