FUN MONDAY is being brought to you a day early here at Irreverent Mama, as IM (aka Laura) will be out of town and possibly unable to blog for most of next week.




Lisa wants to know why we blog.

I’d like to know more about you, what makes you tick. I’d like to know how you started blogging. Did you keep a diary under lock and key safely hidden as a child? Do you still? Do you share the same things on your blog that you would have, or do, in your diary? Why did you start blogging and why do you continue? May as well throw in any roadblocks you have run into while blogging. If you still have your old diaries we’d love to see them.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I had another blog. It was a great little blog, a fun little read; I had a decent readership and a steady email correspondence with enough of them to keep me busy.

But it wasn't about me, not really. My readers tended to think that was me, and projected all sorts of (generally very flattering) things upon me. Flattering, but limiting, too. It was a work blog, and, as such, showed only a small part of my character, and essentially none of my 'real' life. The person speaking on the blog was a persona.

I wanted to have a place where my real voice could be spoke. One night, when I should have been sleeping, the perfect-for-me blog name popped into my head - and I leaped out of bed to claim it before someone else did. (Geeky, I know. But hell, I don't need to feel foolish for this; you're all bloggers.)

And thus IrreverentMama was born. Here, I do what I want. I don't feel compelled to post daily. I don't feel compelled to interact with my readers. (Though, obviously, I do so - because I feel like it.)

And I say what I want. Oh, there are still things I don't say here - those things go in the password-protected hidden file on my computer. But everything you see here is genuine.

Lisa asks about journalling, which I have done since I could write a sentence (and long before I could spell). For various reasons, I don't have any of my old paper-and-pen journals, but for me, journalling is qualitatively different than blogging, anyway.

So why do I blog? It's a forum for expressing more - but by no means all! - of the genuine me. I enjoy the fact that it's public; I appreciate the possibility of interaction. Blogging is like bumping into congenial strangers at a bus stop or your local pub or in the park - only with blogging, you can come back again and again - or not at all - and maybe some of those congenial strangers evolve into something like friends.

It's a fascinating world, out there in the internets.

:-)