Turns out...I'm a blogger!

It’s been over a year since I started thinking about writing a blog, but I kept coming back to the same self-doubting thought: I’m not a blogger.

Ever the English teacher, I looked up the definition of a blogger: “ a person who regularly writes material for a blog”. Ok….I need more motivation than that. So I hunted for more definitions and came up with this definition for a blog: a website containing a writer’s own experiences, observations, opinions, etc.

And with that, here I am. A blogger – at least posing as one.

But that’s not the important part. The important part is WHY I’m going to begin writing this blog.  Scott and I found out we had a miscarriage with our first sweet baby – our Clementine – on the very day of our 12 week appointment: the day we were going to tell the world about our baby.

We had followed protocol. We waited to tell anyone other than our families until we were 12 weeks in. That’s what you’re supposed to do – says who? The reason that you’re not supposed to tell until 12 weeks is “just in case” something happens. Well, the “just in case” happened to us and I was left feeling not only an empty space for my little one in my heart, but also an empty space for my little one in the world.

I wanted the world to know our baby existed and it helped me heal to talk about my experiences. It felt like such a lonely place to be in – a place that was supposed to be kept quiet and secret. Once I began to speak about our miscarriage, I saw that so many more people than I ever imagined have experienced loss. I had no idea because so often, it is an unspoken experience in life. 

Fast forward to March 2018 when we welcomed our Sweetness, Etta, into the world. I had no idea what I was doing and felt like I must be doing this all wrong. There were so many moments that I needed someone to speak up and tell me that I wasn’t doing it all wrong and that they knew exactly how I felt. I needed those unspoken stories, about feeling like things were falling to pieces around you, spoken to me in order to help me make it through that day.  I needed to know that someone understood how I felt and that I wasn’t the only mom in the world to feel the way I felt.  

I had a student once who came to me and said “Turns out, I failed your class!” to which I replied, “Turns out, when I told you if you didn’t turn in that essay you were going to fail, it was true!”.  And this young man, a decent young man who just had more than his fair share of “duh” moments in his life, is the inspiration for the name of this blog. The truth of his “turns out” moment was really quite obvious, but his vision of the situation was clouded by the realization that he failed a class; he knew why he failed. He just needed a little help seeing through the mess.

So, that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m going to pretend I’m a blogger for at least a little while. I want to help people find their “turns out” moment: a moment where you need someone to help you see through the mess so that you can realize the truth that is staring you in the face. I’m going to write about my “turns out” moments and put my “experiences, observations, and opinions” out there (because that’s what a blogger does…at least according to Google)  so that maybe someone who needs to hear it will read my words and think “Turns out, I’m not alone!”