Shake It Off.

2015 was a complete blogging dead zone, and for a long time I wasn’t ready to talk about why.

For anyone new who stumbles across this blog and wonders, I’ll go way back to explain. In January 2012, my mom passed away. She’d been battling ovarian cancer for about eighteen months; it had progressed into her brain and spinal fluid, and she took her last breath peacefully at home with my dad and his mother and sister around her. I was in Kentucky, wishing I could be there, feeling torn about taking care of my little family and taking care of the family I grew up in. That’s a hard place to be, and reader, if you’re there: I get you. Hang in there. Over the next few months, I blogged a bit (and drank a bit) and cried a lot and got through the days. You will get through it, too.

In the fall of 2014, my two oldest kids started attending private school for the first time after homeschooling for their whole lives and we bought a new house. It was crazy around here, but exhilarating and vibrant. I blogged about it.

And someone from our family’s past showed up here on my blog. An old friend of my mother’s, who missed her deeply, and who had spoken angrily and rudely to all of us when my father remarried, found my blog and left awful comments. There’s this thing called comment moderation – on the backside of the blog, I can see comments and then I can approve them to appear or I can delete them if they are spam or, in this case, abusive – so the things she said weren’t made public, but they hurt me terribly.

After that, every time I sat down to blog about something – to share something sweet or cute or funny my kids did or said, to talk about something hard or challenging I was thinking about, to encourage anyone reading – I just couldn’t. I would hear her voice in my head, rebuking and incriminating and insulting, and I would shut the internet down and walk away.
Normally I have words to spare, but that encounter robbed me of my words. So for almost all of 2015, I didn’t touch this blog. I renewed the domain, and I kept reading the words of others, but I only put my own words out on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. This place felt invaded. Violated.

Now it’s the end of the year, and when I made my goals for 2016, I realized I wanted to use this space again. I’m going to work on a little facelift, and probably streamline the archives, and –most importantly– I’m going to start writing here again.

Life is too big and my words are too important to let the haters get me down. I’ll be here with bells on in the new year – and I hope you’ll join me.