Voices that Matter

People often ask my why I blog. I fumble through some answers - "It helps to talk", or "I just enjoy writing", or "It makes be feel connected to people". None of those are very good answers however. I just have a difficult time putting into words why I choose to blog. It's certainly not because I have a wealth of spare time on my hands. Between my full-time job, my volunteer work, my duties as a single mom, and raising four children, spare time just never seems to materialize. Yet still, I somehow find time to blog five days a week.

Yesterday, I was reading an entry from one of my favorite (an apparently one of the world's favorite) bloggers - Dooce, and I discovered she read my mind and put into words, words only a master such as she could write, why I choose to blog. In an online letter to her young daughter, Dooce wrote...

Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it's like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you're going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we're not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.

So thank you, Dooce, for helping me realize that my voice does matter and that my blog may actually help someone else the way you help me with your writing.