Happy Birthday Blog!

Today is the fifth birthday of my blog. Yes, my first entry was on 5 Oct 2005 and today my blog is 5 years old. I spent a while thinking whether I should celebrate this date as an anniversary or as a birthday. But since a birthday is the specific celebration of a birth and an anniversary is a celebration of any event at all, I settled for a 'birthday' :)

I started this blog the year J went off to the US to study. It was a milestone event for me, my first-born leaving home to live on her own, without maternal supervision, may I add, in a foreign country. It was a hard time for me, a time of a great deal of anxiety about how she would cope, if she would make friends, how would she cope with winter, would she eat properly, what if she fell ill... The list was endless. As it turned out, she coped very well. Made new friends, broke a toe, kept crazy hours, loved her classes and started dating. During those years, this blog was a way for me to keep in touch with her, to tell her what was on my mind, what was going on at home. And she began a blog as well and until she tired of it, the blog was a great way for me to keep in touch with her life in the US.

My blog was also a way for me to share myself with my daughters. R was in secondary school and in a super-secretive phase when mum was an intrusion. An 'empty nest' was becoming a reality for me with 2 daughters quite absorbed in their own activities, and for some strange reason, I began to worry whether I had done all I could before I released my daughters into the big bad world. There seemed to be so many life lessons I had not shared. So I started this blog as a way for me to open conversations, to share who I was, to give advice without my girls rolling their eyes :)

But soon, I got caught up in my own blog. I began to enjoy writing for myself, not only for my daughters. It became the place where I could muse out aloud and I found that writing helped to crystallise my thoughts, to understand how I had changed, who I had become. Writing in this blog also strengthened my faith as I sorted out what I believed and why I believed what I believed. I gave thanks on this blog and shared my faith journey. It has also become a repository of memories - of holidays, of times spent with good friends, of family times.

My blog has also been the means by which I made new connections. I met new people - Jonathan who read my blog while he was in Australia and then commented on a blog entry and 2 girls in the US whose blogs I commented on. I was also contacted by a blog writer based in the US who writes on midlife issues who asked if she could link my blog to hers. And of course, my posts on this blog became the basis for the series on dating that I am currently writing for Seasons of Life, a publication of my home church.

So here I am, reflecting on my blog and how far I have come in these last 5 years. Much has changed in my life. J is back but R is away but unlike J, she hardly reads my blog. She doesn't even read her own :) I was in my 40s when I started and now I have entered the 50s... I am in a hard place now but there have been good times too and when I re-read my blog entries I realise I have much to be thankful for. So "Happy Birthday TreeByTheStream"!

And hey, if you read my blog, will you stop to say "Happy Birthday" too? And if you enjoy reading it or have been blessed by it or you have anything at all to say about it, will you comment? And if you don't have a Google account and can only post as 'Anonymous' please leave your name so I know whom I am thanking for stopping by :)