pretty and witty and Mae.

Posted on | January 4, 2010 | 16 Comments

ow better to start my new blogging endeavor but with a guest blogger? i picked a good one, too. my lovely friend Mae. you’ve probably seen her around here before on comments and you may even know her. i for one adore the lady and am very proud to have her as my first guest.

if after you read her post you want to fully internet stalk her (and trust me, you will), her blog is Parenting in Progress and her twitter is tophersgirl1. her blog is new (well this one anyways) and i am super stoked she has started writing again. so before i take over this post that isn’t even supposed to be mine…

Hi!  I am not Mandy.  I know, it looks like I am, but I’m not, promise.

It’s ok , I am not a perfect stranger who has hijacked her blog.  My name is Mae, and Mandy asked me to guest blog for her which is why you’re reading this.  Or at least it’s why you were reading this.  Most of you have probably stopped reading now that you’ve realized I am not in fact the person that you came here to read about.  And that’s totally cool, but I’m gonna keep writing cuz that’s what Mandy asked me to do and for some reason I have a really hard time saying no to her.  She even got me to blog again.  And join Twitter.  And actually tweet.

I’ve known Mandy for a couple of years now, although we’ve never met in person.  We “met” on a message board back before either of us got pregnant with our daughters, a board that was created for women who were trying to get pregnant or who were pregnant.  A board that, much like Fight Club and for eerily similar reasons, we never talk about.  Ever.

And yet, as a concept that board is a not insignificant part of what leads me to my little spotlight here.  Mandy and I kicked around a couple of different ideas for my post and finally settled on the topic of how internet friendships have been an important part of my pregnancy and motherhood experience.  And they definitely have been since before I got pregnant, let alone had my daughter.

Truthfully many of us struggle with the whole internet friendship thing at one time or another: How can you consider yourself close friends with someone that you have never met and frankly may never meet?  How do you come to trust someone that in a most basic way, you don’t actually know?  Because we do trust each other with all sorts of things, some pretty personal information gets exchanged out here on the interwebs to be sure.  I’ve met all sorts of people, plenty of whom I frankly do not like very much.  But I have found many true jewels as well and I treasure them for a wide variety of reasons.

I am one of the first of my group of friends to have a child, and THE first of my close friends.  And while I do work outside of the home my specific professional environment does not always lend itself to female fertility bonding stuff.  The people I spent the most time comparing notes with while pregnant were women that I met and developed friendships with online.  When I have a question about whether or not my kid is normal or that her seemingly freaky behavior may indicate some kind of demonic possession I call my Mom, sometimes.  But I also ask people with kids and frankly most of them are online.  I tend to mentally break them down into two general categories of internet friendship;  1)The Girl You Kinda Stalked In High School Who Never Knew Your Name and 2)The Girl You Were Magically Friends With Because She Didn’t Recognize How Cool She Was.

1) Jill over at BabyRabies has blogged about many aspects of parenting but there are a couple posts that literally kept me from 1.) murdering someone on an airplane and/or border crossing and 2.) Driving my car into a ditch, balls out, on purpose.  The first was about traveling with an infant on a plane and the second was about using static on the radio to calm a hysterical screaming baby while on a long car trip.  My hand to God, she saved my life as well as the lives of several unsuspecting perfect strangers, flight attendants, border control officers and my Dad.  Jill reminds me that I am not the first, someone else has done this and lived to tell the tale, it is not only possible but an almost certainty that I will make it through.  I have yelled to my husband over the sound of my screaming child, “I’m going to try something BabyRabies blogged about” and it has worked and he has said a fervent prayer for her.  I am very grateful for these moments and could give a crap if she knows who I am.

2) Mandy here actually gave me the name for my daughter.  She came on to The Board That Shall Not Be Named one night and announced that she and Scot had chosen the name Harper for their baby girl (and might I just add, how on earth could that precious pumpkin be named anything else?  Her name is so perfectly perfect for her!) and we were discussing some of the runners up.  Piper was on that list and it just spoke to me.  Eventually, after I had run out to the garage and screamed it several times in the general direction of my husband who was making crown molding for the nursery, and subsequently checking that he hadn’t accidentally cut his finger off with the table saw, it spoke to both of us.  We kept Piper’s name private between the two of us as a symbol of the romance that created her until she was born.  I can’t tell you the number of times since then that we’ve been asked “Where did you come up with that?” but I can assure you that it’s about 1/3 the number of times we said “From the internet”.

Mandy and I are what I consider to be close.  She was the first person to warn me about certain, uh… physical side effects of pregnancy that my Mom maybe didn’t so much mention.  You can only talk about those things with someone for so long before you forge a true connection.  We email frequently and chat on Blackberry Messenger now that she has her sweet berry (Thanks Scot!!).  I subscribe to her blog and follow her on Twitter, Facebook and pretty much anywhere else she tells me to go.  Jill at BabyRabies probably doesn’t know that I exist.  Yet I subscribe to her blog (which I’ve read since before her son was born, perhaps before I got knocked up even?  I’d have to do math to confirm, so we’ll never really know) and I follow her on Twitter and Facebook as well.

I have internet friends with public blogs and private blogs and no blogs.  Friends who know every part of my story and the circuitous path that led to my pregnancy, and friends who have no idea that I had a scheduled C-Section or why.

I hope that I have given back to my internet friendships, and if that’s all that this post turns out to be then I’m glad I did it.  Because Mandy asked me to and she’s awful sweet and pretty and I love her, everyday.  Bra or no bra, shower or no shower.  Although someday, when we finally do get to graduate from internet friends to IRL friends and we meet face to face and squeal and hug and scream and drink wine and eat Thai food and craft random stuff, I confess I hope she wears/takes one.

Someday.

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