Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute: So Now What?

Welcome to the Enough about me, let's talk about YOU for a minute series on my blog. It's to celebrate my birthday and blogiversary week. Each day until and including 15 December I will feature a guest blogger who I admire. I hope you enjoy the series as much as I did collating it.

Bern Morley from So Now What? has a talent. She's successfully drawn me in to her blog which is part of a genre that I have little interest in. The Mummy Blog.

She writes her blog with such wit, intelligence, honesty and compassion that I can't help but love her blog. Even though I don't have children, I can relate to her so well.

Bern likes Savage Garden and is not afraid to blog about it - big tick! Bern tells funny and sometimes poo-filled stories about her kids. And heartfelt ones. She made me cry with the story of her mother's decline in health. And this blog entry about her father is one of the most moving pieces of writing I've ever read.

I've come to know her through Facebook and Twitter, and will be meeting her next March. She's beautiful inside and out. And I know she'd fight me for Callan Mulvey. Game on, Bern. But let everyone read your guest blog before we have the showdown!

Guest blog by Bern Morley:

WHY I BLOG

If you had asked me if I blog eighteen months ago, I would have thought you were enquiring as to my toileting habits. To be quite honest, you could have spoken Norwegian to me and made more sense, such was my ignorance.

Around that time though, I started using Twitter. I had tried Twitter before that, and it just hadn’t stuck. It was like I was sending little 140 character statements off into the ether and I guess I felt like a bit of dick. But this third time, more than likely because I was bored, I followed some local people and they answered me back. And then I got Retweeted for something witty I had said and BAM, I got it. Like Whitney to a crack pipe, twitter was my new addiction.

It wasn’t long before I noticed people tweeting about their blogs and I clicked their links to discover what in the hell they were talking about. I was and still am, an avid reader, so to think I may have missed out on all of this diverse information for so long kind of bummed me out. Imagine if these had been accessible to me when I couldn’t get my son to sleep all those years ago? Or when my 2 year old daughter at the time, started having night terrors? I especially wish I had been aware when our son was first diagnosed with Aspergers. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have felt so alone and ashamed of myself. Shared experiences count for so much more than any kind of information pamphlet a doctor can hand out.

I am a pretty bog standard working mother of three in the two thousand and tens. I am not crafty or incredibly talented in any one area. I have one child with Aspergers, one on the cusp of leaving her innocence and naivety behind, and one who is a natural disaster on legs. My husband, a plumber, just comes along for the ride in this theme park of a life and for the most part, does not complain.

I guess that doesn’t really explain why I blog.

To be completely l honest, I started blogging because I thought I had a book inside of me. Some years before, I had woken up one morning and seemingly out of nowhere, penned two chapters of a book. Then that was it. It was left to fester in the wasteland that is my overworked hard drive. So, probably more than likely trying to avoid an assignment one night, I signed myself up to blogger and then I posted those two chapters as my first blog post. And then I ran and hid in the toilet and held my breath.

Eventually I came back to face the music. And to my surprise and delight, not only were there comments but there were lovely comments. Encouraging. Almost instantly, I was addicted. Addicted to the positive (and sometimes negative) responses to something I, Bernadette Morley, wrote with my own hands and mind.

The funny thing is, I’ve gone back and read those two chapters and they are complete shit, but I do have them to thank for getting me started and keeping me there.

Thanks Carly. You are one of the other reasons I blog. Because you are inspirational, funny and quite possibly are one of the most unique individuals I have ever met without actually meeting. Oh, and you have the best freaking dress sense in the world. Thanks for having me. xxoo

http://bernmorley.blogspot.com/