Featured Blogger - Mr Boos Mum
Thursday 21st of November 2013 | Category: Opinion | Written by: Mr Boos MumWhen did you start blogging, and what prompted your decision to go ahead?
I started blogging a little over 6 months ago in April 2013. I wrote my first post the night of my son, Boo's, first birthday and a week after I finished a short course of cognitive behavioural therapy in which I was trying to come to terms with his premature birth (at 29 weeks) and his emerging disabilities (cerebral palsy and epilepsy). I really needed to talk about our new life and try to make sense of it all. Blogging has proved to be the best therapy I know. The blogging community is amazingly supportive.
Does blogging ‘connect’ to your working life in anyway?
Yes and no. Writing is a big part of my professional life. But I fret about my professional writing. A lot. And I endlessly redraft. On the blog I feel I can just write, and although I care about the writing on Premmeditations and hope people like it, it is such a relief to get out words I often censor in other situations that I usually write quickly and easily. I also think that getting these thoughts out in the blog is essential to enable me to work at all. It keeps me sane, which helps in both my parenting and professional day jobs.
Tell us about your personal top three posts from your blog….
My favourite post (and the one most read) is called 'Dear Me'. It's a letter I wrote to myself in a (mostly successful) bid to give up the guilt for Boo's premature birth. I ran the blog's one and only linky so far on the back of this post and it got a fabulous response from some amazing bloggers trying to ditch their own, misplaced guilt.
The moment you finally get a diagnosis for your child, or D-day as us SEN parents often call it, is huge and brings with it a whole range of emotions (distress/relief/fear/hope). Ours came belatedly and rather recently and I tried to work through some of my mixed feelings here in ‘Diagnoses and Other Dilemmas’.
Finally, although much of the blog is about Mr Boo's progress, his amazing big sister, Sissyboo, is a huge part of our story and her relationship with her little brother is one of the great joys in our lives. She has every reason to resent Boo and the time and attention he needs. Quite the reverse is true. I have learned so much about love and acceptance from Sissyboo and wrote about this is a post called Truths my Daughter Taught Me.
What do you look for when reading other blogs?
I read lots of different blogs now (although not as regularly as I’d like) and for all sorts of reasons. Many are blogs by the parents of premature or kids with additional needs and I read them for information and inspiration (I invariably find both and much more besides). But I also read blogs about politics, history, running and, well, all sorts really. For me the most important thing is that any blog is from the heart and written with passion. I like to feel I know a little of the blogger from the words.
How do your family and friends feel about your blogging habit?
Well, with a couple of exceptions, they don't know. Not even my partner knows. Anonymity is very important to me, even though being a secret blogger is a bit of an albatross sometimes and I feel guilty about it from time to time. That said, my partner thinks I spend a bit too much time attached to my phone late at night (I write all my posts on it) so I think he already has views on my blogging habit without knowing it.
What do you hope your kids will make of the blog one day?
Do you know, I have never really thought about that. How odd. When I started blogging, I didn't know if I'd manage to keep it up for a month or if after three so few people would look at it that I'd stop. I can't ever imagine drawing my kids' attention to the blog (because of the whole secret blogger thing) but if they did see it, I'd hope they'd see that I tried my best and I am more proud of both of them than I ever imagined it was possible to be.
What do you enjoy about being a Trusted Blogger Club member?
What's so great about the Club is what's so great about blogging more widely: the sense of community. The Club is full of fantastic bloggers, all of whom wrote brilliantly on a range of subjects and support each other.
You can only write one more post on your own blog; what would the topic be?
I would write a letter to my kids explaining what I have learned from them about life, determination, love and laughter in the last few years. It would be a long post because they are both rather remarkable.
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