Today I went there. To the internet archives. I Googled wayback machine, looking for my original blog. And I found it. I found it there, on it’s original Blogger platform, and I read some of the words. A few posts, a bit cringey and also so raw and real I can’t believe I was so brave and open. I looked at the list of the links of other blogs I read at the time, and went into another whole place of remembering how one post would lead to a morning of reading and commenting and feeling like me, in my house, with my small needy children was not really just me, in my house, outnumbered. That literally a click away there were others telling their stories. And they were familiar tales of exhaustion and developmental milestones. Or they weren’t, but somewhere there was enough familiarity to feel like I had a place, a community, and, I realize now, a kind of responsibility to show up.
I clicked on that first day in the wayback machine timeline knowing that I’d see my own words. What first caught my attention was a photo of my oldest child’s lovey, who accompanied us everywhere and almost got lost in a Whole Foods one time, and who now is in one of those plastic bags that sheets come in, in my closet, mostly dismembered and probably smelling foul.
Why is getting rid of things so hard?
Why did I get rid of this blog that held my identity for so long?
Why am I realizing now how quickly I could go down the proverbial or maybe literal rabbit hole of revisiting my past, getting lost again as I chase links around the web looking for connection or support or understanding.
When Sarah and I shut down Momalom, we archived the posts. I have all of the words I wrote for our shared blog saved chronologically on Google drive. l don’t have the guest posts I wrote or the guest posts other bloggers contributed to Momalom. And, I realized today, I also don’t have the comments. THE COMMENTS. The comments from our readers, who somehow found us only a few days into our crazy idea of writing it all down in between nap times and mealtimes and doing the dishes. And today, when I saw a comment from momalomsmom I almost couldn’t read it. Why? Why. Because, I think, because I didn’t realize these comments had been left behind. I didn’t realize that in letting the blog go I was letting go of all of the support and community that came with it. Some of that support from my own mother. Momalomsmom.
It’s been years now since we shut it down. The kids were getting older. I was spending more time working outside the home. My role as a mother changed and with it my material — or the material I was comfortable sharing — shifted enough so that the blog seemed too different. It had become more like work and less like fun, and we let it go.
But, then there is the internet archive. And at least some of those years are preserved. And when I saw the photo of Theo the stuffed dog today and skimmed a few posts about welcoming kid number three into the family, I got a hollow feeling in my gut. It’s still there, 90 minutes later.
Maybe this is because life is shifting again. The kids, who had grown up enough to be able to take a point of view about how they might be portrayed online back when we wrote our last Momalom posts more than 10 years ago, are now entering young adulthood. And as they shift, I shift. What does it mean to be a mother? Does the answer to that question change with the ages of the children? Mine are 19, 18 and 15 now. They don’t nap. They can feed themselves. Two of them can drive where they need to go or get their younger sibling to her destination. One doesn’t even live with us anymore. And yet, there are still things to say. There is still thinking to do about what it means to have brought them into the world and to watch them navigate it.
I don’t know if I have it in me to truly revisit the origins of my writing about motherhood. But I do know that I have more to say and likely always will, even as we all grow and change and our relationships change, too. And just as it was an unplanned instinct to type “Momalom” into that Wayback Machine, it was a similar reaction to see if I remembered the password to this site, born of early pandemic days.
I tend to overthink, but I’m trying to do so less often. I’m also remembering that true blogging meant not too much editing, writing in the quiet moments and then just hitting publish without worrying too much about typos or finding the best way to say something. As I sit here and wonder if I can do that again, I try to remember and, honestly, admit how happy those days of daily blogging were. How much I miss it, at least right now. And how knowing that those words, that experience is still archived, at least in part, makes me feel equal parts happy and sad. Maybe just being here, in the now, is where I’m meant to be. For now.
Maybe it’s OK that letting go is sometimes just temporary. Or maybe, if I write down the detail about the stuffed dog carcass in my closet, then I can properly dispose of it in the trash bin and know that proof of former existence will help to get me to wherever it is I need to show up next.