Meeting Me Again

It’s been a while since I have known what to write.

It’s not that I don’t have things to say.

It’s that my life has gotten so big, so full and so rich, that quite honestly, I don’t know where to start.

I am a food blogger.

I miss being the blogger I was 8 years ago, when there were only a handful of us, we knew each other by our real names, we visited each other’s sites and we were true friends. We didn’t just have friends to share our chocolate cheesecake on Pinterest. We didn’t just comment because our secret Facebook group said it was our turn to comment.

We knew the names of our blogger friends children. We watched them grow. We delighted when our infertile friends finally got pregnant with twins, when the swimmer son of a blogger went to State. We cried when a spouse died and we made pie to honor him. We were a unit, we were real. We shared our lives as well as our recipes.

I miss ALL of that.

Somewhere along the way, many of us became lucky enough to walk away from the 9 to 5 and become full time bloggers, a dream we didn’t know would change us. We work for money, actual, real bill paying money, not just boxes of crackers and bottle of vanilla. We say yes to projects we may not have, because we are businesswomen now, and businesses know they need income to survive. We don’t know how long the luck will last, we only hope it does. So we work.

Sometimes, many times, we don’t love it.

I want to love it again.

I want to share my real life, because it is wonderful. I want to share not only the great things, but the trials I face. And I DO have them. We all do. I guarantee you, behind the sunny façade of some of your favorite bloggers is a struggle you may not know. But now that we are a business, we fear we can’t share the less than pretty parts of our lives.

I don’t care anymore. I am going to share.

The good. The bad. The ups and the downs.

I miss my voice here. I miss the friends. I miss all of you, commenting, sharing your own stories with me. We all have them, and I want to know them. Will I still do sponsored posts? Of course, yes. I still have bills to pay and I do only take posts that I feel work with my life. But I will bring back my blog. And I will be my old self, the self I was when I said whatever it was that was on my mind.

I have SO much to share.

I hope you won’t mind.

Take, for example, I want you to meet Mr. Texas. He has a name. It’s Rust. And he’s everything I never knew I needed.

Younger than me, by quite a bit, but with a heart bigger than anyone I have ever met. He’s a very responsible provider, a lover of things he thinks I love, he’s got intelligence you can’t imagine. And he loves me. Every day, he tells me. Everyday, he tells me I am beautiful, that I am his favorite thing. His parents have welcomed me like you can’t imagine, and I adore them. All of them – Rust and his parents – have welcomed and loved Seven as well. Seven spends a lot of time with us, as much as possible, and they’ve been better than you know.

I am beyond lucky.

We bought a house in April, and have spent all summer with Sev making it our home. We love it, and we love what we have created. It’s warm and inviting, and we are filling it with wonderful art and collections of things we get on our travels. It’s everything, and I appreciate it in every way.

So this is Rust. He is mine. And even better? I am his. He’s asked me to marry him, and I want to tell you all about it. But that post will have to wait, because it deserves a post of its own.

Until then, I hope you’ll forgive the blubbering, and maybe even welcome it.

I’ve missed you guys.