It is with a mixture of excitement and sadness that I announce the following: this was my last post over on Bear and Bug's Mommy. The decision to do this has been a long time in coming, and the following story will explain it all.
~~~~~
I began my senior year of college a married woman. A married woman who had turned twenty-one just a month and seventeen days before moving into her dorm room. A married, twenty-one-year-young woman who found herself living alone, for the first time in her four years at this school, with all of her friends and former roommates living elsewhere on campus. A married young woman without anyone to keep her company, including her new husband, who was living on his own for the very first time in a hotel room some 350 miles and three states away.
I filled my days with classes, homework, senior projects (one each for my double major of English and creative writing), and work. In addition to resuming my part-time position as the tennis coach's assistant, I also appealed to the lone male in my creative non-fiction class, a man named Joe who was in charge of the library media centers on campus. He gave me a job as a student worker in the music library, where I usually put in another ten or so hours each week, sometimes substituting at the science or art libraries to make some more spending money, since I refused to use my new husband's paycheck to go out for dinner and a movie with my friends.
It was a full life that I was leading: class, work, friends, and the once-a-month weekend conjugal visits to see Tony. But it wasn't quite enough. I needed more to fill my days and evenings; more to keep my mind off of the heartache that was always sitting beside me in place of my new husband. And so I appealed to my creative nonfiction professor, Jennifer, who offered me the task of resurrecting the now-defunct school newspaper. She would be teaching a class on newspaper journalism that first semester and needed an editor-in-chief. Was I up to the challenge?
I accepted, and she invited me to meet with another promising student who wanted in, a sophomore from my sister class who also had a love of writing, editing, and finagling copy. Brooke and I hit it off immediately. We spent hours in the old and new newspaper offices, combing through back issues from the paper that hadn't been published in years, sorting through articles that were submitted to us from that journalism class, and trying to figure out which direction to take it.
And then September 11th happened. Brooke and I took this horrific and tragic event to turn our first issue - as yet unpublished - into a real challenge for our reporters and for ourselves; to build this newspaper back up to something that others would want to read. I don't know that we were very successful. We published perhaps five or six issues of the paper that year, none of which were spectacular or groundbreaking. But something much more important rose from those hours of huddling together over a shared computer and Microsoft Publisher. A friendship was born.
Brooke and I developed the kind of friendship that I like to think is one of the most significant; one in which the two people involved can have little to no contact for months, one where we both left that college - me, a graduate; her, to try her hand in another field at another university - and haven't seen each other in the seven years since. But one in which we continued to stay in touch, no matter how sporadically, through an email or a Christmas card every now and then.
We cheered each other on throughout the past seven years through our life changes: moves to new countries, states, and cities; changes in career and progress in schooling; marriage, pregnancies, and first-time home purchases. Weeks after we moved here to Okinawa, I received word that Brooke's world had been turned upside down. Their home had been burned to the ground in a wildfire that consumed several of the houses on their street. She and her husband found themselves a month away from giving birth to their child, a son, who would now no longer have that house to come home to. Brooke was working as a special education teacher at this time and had planned to return to work after spending those first few months at home with her newborn.
But her plans changed, just as her life had. These days she's writing regularly, on a blog that she began in the days after she lost her home where she's chronicling the journey back to "normal" that has not been easy; a road that they will be traveling for the rest of their lives. She's also writing about taking the plunge into motherhood; how the beliefs she held before she found herself holding the title of Mommy have evolved from what she thought was the right way to what she now knows to be the best way for herself and her family.
She's doing more than just writing, though. She's begun taking that critical eye she once thought would be best suited for the literary world and putting it to use in her new venture of blog design. Over the past several months, Brooke has been quick to comment about my changes here at Bear and Bug's Mommy, giving me feedback about what's working and what's not. She's offered suggestions about how to help me improve it where I had faltered, and has been using her keen eye to help me make it better.
Several weeks ago, Brooke made a general offer to her friends: a blog makeover to begin building her portfolio before she goes public. I jumped at it; I had been wanting to do something completely different here, but I don't have the skills nor the time to learn those skills in order to transform it. I had an idea - a little one - to start fresh, from scratch, with my old blog posts (and hopefully readers!), but brand-new everything else. A new look, a new name, a new domain and web address, with a theme and a posting schedule. An actual original header, rather than one with just the name of my blog or a cute picture that I shamefully "borrowed" from an online source.
A blog that I'm happy and proud to call home.
Perhaps you'll notice that critter chronicles has brought Brooke and I back to our newspaper roots. It's a bit like coming full circle for us, though that wasn't intentional. And what I asked of her was much more than I believe she originally bargained for; she helped me create and design critter chronicles from the ground up.
I could go on and on about the differences between that blog and this one, but I'd much rather you see for yourself. Please note that this post will be the last one published there; from now on I will only post from critter chronicles. If you've enjoyed reading my posts and keeping up with our family, I ask you to please Follow Me here, too. If you've subscribed through a reader, please update your feeds and resubscribe. For those of you who read my posts on Facebook, well, you've got it easiest of all. There's no change for you.
But I do ask that you go and take a look. Please leave me some feedback here; tell me what you like, what could be improved. Please applaud Brooke for all the hard work she's put into the design, and perhaps sign up for a blog makeover of your own.
And thank you for reading. I hope you make the move and continue the journey with us.
