The Writer's Workshop

Tell us about your blogline...how long have you been blogging, when did you start, what were/are your goals for your blog, etc.

I'm a single mom and I started blogging in March of 2005. My daughter was 9 months old. I was working for Weil, Gotshal & Manges in NYC - a VERY large law firm. Little did I know what the next few months and subsequently the next few years would bring us....enough turbulence to bring down a jumbo jet.

I was fascinated by the idea of being able to write on a free space with no limits really. I wanted to write about being a single mom and what that experience is like in the real world. Of course, I'm an older single mom to boot. I had my first and only child - Madeleine Rose - when I was 42. I really thought my chances of finding a committed partner and thus a child were over and I had pretty much come to terms with that. It was a total miracle really. The world was just set up in a way that I said YES!! to this little angel when the rest of the world was telling me NO!!

I fell upon blogging. At that time it wasn't really that big yet. There were certainly a lot of people blogging, but it hadn't exploded yet. I came across Dooce one night in the middle of the night ... I don't even know how! There this site was and she was funny. Really funny. She was writing about her daughter who was just a few short months older than Madeleine. I could so identify and just felt a mommy connection to this woman who lived in Salt Lake City a world away from New York City..but I was connected.

I then just started experimenting with writing. I went through a lot of different feelings. I wanted to share myself on line...but it was also really frightening because I had no idea who or what would come back at me.

As life would have it things got pretty topsy turvy pretty quickly. I was fired from my job in June of 2005 (they kept me on until September). My daughters father called me in August of 2005 and before I knew it we were packing up, selling things and getting rid of anything and everything I owned and accumulated for most of my adult life. I was convinced all would work out with Madeleine's Dad and I didn't need to look back. Oh was I wrong! So my writing while it continued was hiccuping. I would write and stop, write and stop, write and stop. Not a good way to maintain a base of readers I found out or maintain continuity with my inner life.

All of this time I was taking care of my growing girl as well. And, I was a lone for a large portion of the time...I could call it the "adventures of Michele and Madeleine" because we certainly were on an adventure.

Fast forward to a couple of months a go. After a few years of going back and forth with the writing I decided to just go for it and write every day. I knew I would be rusty and I knew it would take me a while to find my voice and figure out what my new goal was for writing.

For now, it is just to write, find support and grow in community with other bloggers. I continue to believe my first objective is to tell my story as a single mother and to write about my daughter with the ultimate goal of having my writing for my daughter and perhaps helping others to feel that they are not so alone in the single mother world.

I'm not a young mom and I don't consider myself a "single mother by choice" so I'm in the middle some place and haven't yet found my niche. But that's ok. While my life has been turned upside down by this mothering phase of my life and there have been a lot of struggles (see past posts) I wouldn't trade it for the world. I wouldn't trade being the mother to my daughter for anything.

I definitely can be a drama queen and the stress of my life has caused many in my life to disappear...but I know deep inside that I'm ok...that we're ok and that I have a strength that a lot of people don't have. I hope this will come across here and in my writing no matter how crazy it was, is and will be.

I hope to see you here again and trust that I will have something worth while to say.