Group Hug, People. My Therapist Says it Helps

When I started this blogging business, I simply expected to whittle away my hours and pass my days in a computer-humming haze. I was game for almost anything to make the hours tick by faster and I was grateful for any minute I did not have to spend dwelling on my shattered life and my throbbing heart.

Little did I know that this blogging business was addictive and time consuming. My husband calls it my computer crack. He may have a point.

But beyond the self-obsessed, egotistical and sometimes conceited aspect of blogging, surfing the blogosphere gave me something more than just the ability to self-actualize and poke fun at myself. It helped me reach out and communicate with other real, live people.

It helped me heal. It helped remind me I wasn't alone. There were people whose lives were just as screwed up as my own. Children who couldn't remember to flush the toilet and husbands who didn't know the sock fairy didn't exist and that those socks didn't actually walk themselves into the hamper.

Blogging gave me a means to be normal again.

And yes, I use that term loosely.

For that, my family and my therapist are enormously grateful. And so am I.

So when the incomparable (albeit, slightly hairy) Mrs. Chicky asks for a bloggy love in, I jumped all over it, like my two kids on a trampoline.

But sitting here, I am in a quandary. Do I blog about my sweet Australian doctor friend Jelly, who never fails to cheer me up with her kind words and incomparable mother?

Or do I post about the hysterically funny Kristen who not only made me clutch my sides from laughter, but was also one of the first to figure out that my now defunct blog and this blog belonged to one mommy?

But then I thought of composing an entire post about J and KimmyK and how, if the three of us ever got together, you just know that one of us would end up in the clink for drunk and disorderly, while the other two took pics to post on their blog.

Of course, there is always my love of a bald baby and her ability to rock the hat, so I began composing an ode to the inimitable Wonderbaby.

But I found I could not do justice to her bald head. And her mother knows too many big words for any of my ditties to be worthy of the Wonderbaby, so I scrapped that idea.

In the end, like a two-year old who hasn't had lunch and missed her morning nap, I was overwhelmed and daunted by my choices. My bloglines rocks. I just simply couldn't choose from all the bloggity goodness that I have collected there.

Just know that I read you, I love you and I need you.

Yes, I'm that annoying, clingy, little girl, who just wants to be part of the crowd and will sell her soul to do it.

I'll even do your homework for you, and give you my allowance.

I'm just so grateful you shone your beacon of hope for me, and then plucked me from my fog of grief.

Thank you.