Type-A Mom Conference – When Blogging Gets Too Personal: Sharing About Grief, Loss, and Other Fierce Emotions

I switched over to the Passions track from the Practicalities track for this Type-A Mom Conference session. This is When Blogging Gets Too Personal: Sharing About Grief, Loss, and Other Fierce Emotions. Cecily Kellogg is moderating, with speakers Anissa Mayhew and Kim Borchert.

Anissa is introducing herself. She blogs about what to do when your life changes. Her life has changed so much in the last year since her stroke. Coping is a big thing. Before her stroke, she blogged about her daughter’s cancer at Hope for Peyton.

Kim lost her oldest daughter at eight months old in a freak accident. It’s been seven years, one month, and a few days since she died. She calls that day her angel day. She started writing about her about two years after she started blogging.

Cecily lost her twins at six months of pregnancy due to pre-eclampsia.

What was the one coping  tool, other than blogging, which helped you to keep the grief from overwhelming you?

For Kim, Emma was her first child. She went from having someone to take care of to doing nothing. Her house was silent. She had to move. She couldn’t be there where Emma was not. Being able to be close to her, sitting by her little spot by her headstone helped a lot. She didn’t want to see the outline of where they dug the hole. Her sister got her started on knitting, which ended up helping her because it gave her something to do. It gave her something to keep her mind and her hands active.

Anissa had her first stroke in 2005. It was barely a blip on the radar. In 2006, her daughter got cancer. Her treatment for her stroke got put on hold so she could get cancer treatment for her daughter. As soon as her daughter got better, she had the two strokes that paralyzed half of her body. It might help her to get up and cry for 15 minutes every day if it wouldn’t set a bad tone for the whole day. She has to get up every day in the wheelchair she never thought she’d need. She has to be a mother to her three kids and a wife to her husband. She can’t just stop living to wallow in self-pity even though she admits her  life sucks. In a contest of whose life sucks more, she wins. She isn’t allowing herself time to feel bad for herself. Use her as a yardstick, she says. As long as you’re not her, you’re doing fine. It helps her to cope that other people can look at her and say, “At least I’m not her.” Anissa also uses a lot of humor to cope. We’re laughing and crying at the same time.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cecily’s “ugly” out of the good, the bad, and the ugly… because she had a medical termination, a partial birth abortion, she got people attacking her for murdering her babies.

Kim’s worst story. Emma died on August 23, 2003. She was in online forums, and she wanted to help other people. When you lose a child, you have a need to make their life matter and to help other people. She started a Web site because she only knew one other person who had lost a child. She had a forum to help people. After a year and a half, someone came up to her in church to tell her about finding her Web site. The woman told her about the site, not knowing it was hers. She had to tell the woman three times that it was her site and her baby. She started shaking and went home and cried and took the Web site down. She put it back up, but now she’s removed the part about how Emma died. That’s hers, and she doesn’t share it. The most popular search on her blog is “How did Emma die?

Anissa’s worst story. On her site for Peyton, she promoted charities that meant a lot to her. She was angry when she learned that Locks of Love was not what she thought it was. She posted news articles about what they  did with their charitable donations and stuff. She posted about how angry she was that Locks of Love was using her daughter, a cancer patient, to sell their agenda. Someone posted that Locks of Love was wonderful, and she was just an evil bitch for saying these terrible things, and it started a lot of horrible drama. She was so angry that she couldn’t eat dinner that night. She deleted the offensive comments. She has no problem pressing that button, because it’s her blog. You’re not going to come to her house and talk ugly.

Cecily wants to talk about the good part now. When people come to her site who are against abortion, she ended up talking with them. She ended up developing empathy for their position. She’s still an adamant feminist and pro-choice, but she understands that emotion they have and their right to believe what they believe. She is very grateful for that empathy and sympathy. When she had her daughter, she had presents at her baby shower from her real life friends, but she had an even bigger pile of presents from her online friends.

Kim’s good stuff. When Emma died, people sent her food. They sent her money that helped to pay for her headstone and to move. A month after Emma died, Kim got pregnant with a new little person. When he was born, she got a lot of cloth diapers and clothes and phone calls and emails… the support was amazing. Being able to connect with other moms seven years later is amazing. Without the Internet, you can go your whole life without meeting someone else in your same situation. But she and @mamaspohr are kindred spirits who met because of the Internet, moms who lost a child and got pregnant a month later. They never would have met without the Internet. Having a network of women who “get it” is the best.

Anissa reminds us that she had a stroke. Two of them. Last November. She was a blogger before she got sick. She’d just gotten back from a trip where she met Cecily. After her strokes, her life was the walls of the hospital, learning how to eat, to talk, to get dressed. She had no idea there was this whole community of people out there supporting her and her family. Her parents and her family and her husband and her real life friends got introduced to her online friends. Her husband had no money at Christmas because she was in the hospital, but presents came in the mail. Things for her kids, sent by online friends. For a family who doesn’t know if their mom is coming home, that meant a lot to her kids. When she learned what everyone did while she was in a coma, she was overwhelmed. (She mentioned the calendar we did. Shannan and I suddenly feel self-conscious.) The Internet supported her family when they needed it most.

What have you decided to stop sharing about?

Cecily often decides to stop sharing about her financial situation because of all the unhelpful advice she gets.

Kim will never post anything about her marriage without her husband’s explicit consent. One of the best posts she’s ever written will never be posted. She had him read it over after a difficult conversation one night, and he was not comfortable having her put his feelings out there like that.

Anissa recently posted about her son’s dream, not realizing it would be a big deal. Dreams are very personal, like pictures of you in the bathroom. He gave her permission to post it, and she got feedback thanking her for asking him first. It never occurred to her not to ask his permission, because he’s 12 years old and it’s very personal. You have to be sensitive to what you write about and what you don’t write about. Don’t write something that makes your family feel uncomfortable. (I think my husband may have words for me about this.)

Cecily pulled some posts down she’d written about her father’s funeral because she realized she was telling someone else’s story. Her father had other kids.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.