Welcome Back, Neighbour

The blogosphere is like a big neighbourhood.

Yes, I’m repeating myself. I said something to that effect in my very first post. And in my second. And the more alert readers among you will have noticed that the title of this blog is a play on the word neighbourhood (Mother + Neighbourhood = Mother ‘Hood. Get it? Yay!) So you won’t be too surprised if I sometimes go on and on and on, very possibly ad nauseam, about what a great community this blogosphere is, how it is so like a neighbourhood, how mom bloggers and dad bloggers are so much like citizens and fellows and how, despite occasional flare-ups of controversy, the entire mood is entirely civil and congenial and friendly.

If this sort of thing rubs you the wrong way, you’re probably at the wrong blog. And even if this isn’t your thing, but you’ve got a few minutes to spare and are maybe a little curious about why I’m so rah-rah about this community thing, you might hang in here to listen to this story…

Way back in, like, February or March, when I first started blogging, I came across this blog. She called herself Redneck Mommy and she proclaimed loudly that she lived in rural Alberta and that she was an Oilers fan and that she took no crap from nobody and I fell in girl-love with her immediately. She was smart, she was funny and she put up the funniest cartoons with every smart and funny post. I visited her almost every day.

And then she stopped posting. Just like that, suddenly, one day in June. And when the posts didn’t reappear, I got a little worried. Where was Redneck Mommy? I engaged e-mails with some other bloggers – had anybody heard from her? I deliberated about e-mailing her directly to check in on her. At BlogHer, we compared notes about when we had heard from her last and discussed whether to persist with e-mails. We worried.

None of us had ever met her – few of us knew her real name – but we felt her absence keenly. We missed her. We worried about her.

We worried, in large part, because we knew something important about her, something that she hadn’t spoken about much but that she discussed, sometimes, on another blog that she had set up separately. We knew that she had, late last year, lost her youngest child. We knew that she struggled with grief, even as she helped support others who were facing a similar grief. And so we worried that she might have become overwhelmed by grief. And we struggled with feeling helpless – how does one reach out to a virtual friend who has hidden herself away? We struggled. We missed her. We waited for her return.

And then, this weekend, Redneck Mommy came back. She had indeed become overwhelmed. She had needed some time. And when she finally found it in herself to reapproach her computer and think about writing again, she found the following…

Over a hundred messages awaited me. And only five were junk mail. I just about fainted. I absolutely did not realize any one would even miss me.

We DID miss you. You were – you are – a valued member of this community, this neighbourhood. You can’t slip away unnoticed. We notice. And we leave virtual casseroles and pies and flowers, hoping that your door will open again.

We’re so glad that it did, T. So glad.

Welcome back.

If you’ve never met Redneck Mommy – go over to her place and say hello. Introduce yourself. Listen to her story, and thank her for sharing it with you. And then go give your kids a big hug.

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Many thanks for sharing your links to Canadian blogs! I’m working my way through them as we speak write. Keep them coming – any bloggers up North? Manitoba? Chicoutimi?