Why a blog?

     One day when I was visiting Kenney's office one of her associates, Melissa, had come in and started talking to me about this blog. I had shared it with Kenney when we first picked up Kaitlyn from her because I wanted her to know what an amazing impact she had on our experience and I wasn't able to tell her face to face.
      Melissa is one of the social media coordinators for Distinctive Life, and between her and Kenney my blog had been passed up to the higher-ups of the organization. They wanted me to write a quick blurb for their blog about why I had decided to start the blog in the first place. Here's what I wrote:

     If you have recently experienced a loss, you may have gone through some confusion when thinking about what is appropriate for your social media page, such as Facebook, twitter, and Google+. First, there is no "right" way to incorporate your grieving into the social media. Some people choose to make their status updates a quick homage to the people who have passed, maybe including a link to their written obituary. Others choose to remain silent on their page until they feel that they can write something upbeat or "normal" so that people will not feel obligated to send condolences. 

    For me, I lost my daughter as a stillbirth on September 18th. I am friends with people in many different circles (work, church, school, friends of friends, etc.) and I didn't know how to tell everyone at once. I really did not want to have to tell everyone individually, so Facebook became the obvious choice to get the word out quickly and succinctly. I didn't want to go over all the details of "what happened?!", but I wanted to let people know that we were accepting visitors if they felt like they wanted to stop by. My husband also changed his Facebook status to reflect the same thing. We didn't have an obituary for our daughter, but we could tell a small snippet of her story and know that the majority of people we cared about would see our announcement this way. I'm really glad that we chose to use our social media pages to let everyone know because over the next 48 hours we were surrounded with love from people through messages and posts from all across the world. These were, and are, some really comforting words from friends that were unable to come to the memorial service but still wanted us to know they were thinking of us.

     The next week, I felt like I needed to say more. We had held a memorial service for our daughter the Saturday after she passed, and after that people were very respectful of our privacy and didn't ask questions about what happened. I felt like I needed to document what all had happened, and I was really scared that I would start to forget all the details of our hospital stay and Kaitlyn's short life. I decided to start writing a blog about what all we had gone through, and I wanted to be able to voice emotions that I didn't think would be appropriate for a true social media outlet like Facebook. For example, I went through a really rough day where I was incredibly jealous of a girl I knew who had just posted pictures of her perfect newborn daughter, and I needed to vent. I didn't want to be completely crazy and write all over her page about how much I envied her and how unfair it was that her baby was fine, but I needed to write it somewhere. This is where the blog came into place. I was able to write, unedited, about how much it hurt me to see someone else have a happy life when we were still so devastated. I loved the ability to sit and cry and write without having anyone interrupt me with advice, as helpful as it was, or be inhibited by the sobs that would sometimes come as I recalled certain events. It has proved to be one of the most therapeutic things for me to do, because once I write about an incident or a memory, I rarely relive it. The first few days after Kaitlyn's death, anytime I was alone I would get overwhelmed with the memories from that day. Once I started writing, I was able to get all of those details down on paper and leave them there. I was able to start functioning somewhat normally, and my husband and my mom both commented on how much writing helped me. I never go back an edit, either, and I am somewhat of a perfectionist so the thought of seeing all my grammatical errors and run-on sentences still makes me cringe a little. Regardless, I wanted my blog to be true to what I was going through at the time, and I didn't want to be edited. 

     The final piece of the social media confusion is what to do with your pictures. My Facebook profile picture and banner are still my maternity pictures, and I am not ready to take those down just yet. I don't know what I would put there instead, and I'm not done looking at how happy I was when I was still with my healthy daughter. This is truly unique to every situation, but I would just warn you not to do anything you're not ready to do. We were also blessed to have a photographer volunteer her time and skills to come in the day we had Kaitlyn and take pictures of us with her. They are the most precious things I have from that day. Again, I faced a real dilemma with how I wanted to (if I wanted to) share these with people. I worried about what people would think when they saw them. I worried that they would say, "Oh my gosh its a picture of a dead baby girl." But I wanted to share them with people who wanted to see them. So again, I put them on the blog and wrote about how much they meant to me. I warned people at the beginning of the post that the pictures would be included, and if they did not want to see them that they shouldn't scroll down and just bypass that particular post. 

      One of the beautiful things about social media is that it can be shared with people from all around the world in the blink of an eye. I have had several small businesses (such as Distinctive Life and the photographer who took our pictures that day) ask to share our blog, and I have no reason to say no. I'm telling our story, but I'm not reliving it every moment. I'm able to help others who are going through similar situations know that they are never alone.