Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

BlogHer retrospective

BlogHer and Me

Blogging & Writing

BlogHer Logo 2010
The BlogHer logo that went live in 2010

Over the next two weeks, I mainly will be posting about All Things BLOGHER.  I may post about a couple other events and or topics, but… throughout the rest of July, I will be posting about my experience at the BlogHer events and how interaction with this network and through this network have influenced me over the years.  

I did not know about the 2005 conferencealthoughIhad been blogging for several years at that time.  I tried to attend in 2006, but my husband and I were not getting along well at all at that time, and we had a huge fight about spending the money for me to go.  I ended up bowing out of the podcasting that I had volunteered to do at the conference, and did not attend.The firstBlogHer conference I attended was at the end of July 2007.  Things looked a bit different back then.

468x60_BH07_banner
The conference banner from 2007 showing the colorful logo as it was way back when.

My very first BlogHer conference post went upon JULY 27, 2007

I’M HERE!

I’m atBlogHer 07. Arrived last night quite late and have been busy every moment since then. Amazing women per media, politics, technology, business…. The over-layer of corporate gloss conceals a significant network of progressive women.

originally posted on:  buildpeace.blogspot.com

What is not said in these first posts about BlogHer is at least as important as what was said. The conference was in Chicago.  My mother had passed away, at age 92, a month before the conference.

I had taken care of her in her home in Northern Indiana for four months prior to her passing.  Though I missed my husband and daughter in Tucson terribly, I was still based in Northern Indiana while closing up Mom’s house and going through my Mother’s decades upon decades of collected stuff as my brother executed the estate in the most bass-ackwards estate settling process ever known to humanity.
I needed BlogHer ’07 more than I knew at the time.  I needed to get away from the total dysfunction that was anything and everything related to my family of origin.  Blogging gave me a way to direct my writings, which up until that point had been scattershot and outside myself, on politics and peace activism.
I have always been a writer; I sold my first story 17 years before attending this blogging  conference, and I was first been published over thirty years prior to the conference, but up until I attended this fortuitously located conference, I had not connected the ubiquitous overlap of world of women and the world of writing.
To me, though I did not realize it at the time, I was able to merge myself with my writing and comfortably envelop this writing identity within a women’s culture network, within a nebulous concept called “BlogHer.”
BlogHer had given me a frame. Dame Fortuna presented one of her rare gifts in sardonic disguise.  In February of 2007 I was called to Indiana to care for my mother as a daughter, a woman in her 40s, and the mother of a daughter in High School.  I left Indiana in the Summer of ’07 and found myself to be 50, orphaned, and an empty nester.
Three major life events snuck up on me, announced themselves, somewhat out of sequence, and shifted every frame of reference in my life.  Suddenly I needed progressive lenses to see anything clearly.  Nothing was the same.  Everything looked different.  I was stumbling into a new world for which I had not prepared, but I clutched my laptop to my breast and headed off into the next phase of my life.