Having neglected my previous blog and being unable to access anything previously posted or saved due to backup and hard drive failures, I finally decided it was time to start fresh.

Initially, my blog was ignored due to motherhood, as I found it especially hard to squeeze aside free time for myself. There weren't a lack of ideas, for there were plenty of drafted unpublished posts! The loss of “free" time, and time for myself, was difficult to deal with.

As things became more routine, I found myself able to juggle more activities and returned to the blog here and there. However, it was short lived. I soon lost my mother and with her, I lost all creativity and motivation for anything. Grief does funny things to a person. It changes them. I was on “survival mode" only.

After a while, a long long while, I felt ready to return. Alas, I had waited too long. My web hosting had expired. There was no backup. The external hard drive where I had stored everything - my wedding and honeymoon pictures, yearly photo shoots with my daughter, pictures and videos with and of my mom, all my blog posts and corresponding pictures, things from before the internet, years and years worth of data - was dead.

I had lost absolutely everything, and I was devastated. I felt like I had lost my mom all over again.

But really, I hadn't.

Time is relative. What I lost in “free" or “me" time, I gained with my growing family. Things are materialistic. All the pictures and data I lost are ingrained in my memories; I won't ever forget any of it. As for my mother? Well, she lives inside me, my brother, and anyone else she's touched throughout her life, and I will gladly pass on as many little pieces of her as I possibly can to my daughter. I had lost nothing important at all and instead, learned a valuable lesson.

As Margaret Mitchell would have Scarlett O'Hara say in Gone With the Wind, “fiddle-dee-dee" or "fiddlesticks” (or my combination of both, “fiddle-dee-sticks"), "After all, tomorrow is another day.”