TWENTY.

One breezy July day, twenty years ago today, I put the kids down for a nap and opened up a new blog at BlogSpot (right? That’s what it was called?). When the baby woke up, I snapped this picture and posted the whole thing. I sent the link out to friends and begged them to share it. And they did. And their friends did. And off it took.

And the years passed and the internet and the world and blogging changed and the blog became less and less busy. I think with the rise of social media, we had access to more spaces showing more types of bodies and one centralized space for it became less necessary.

At the same time my life became busier, and then, eventually, kind of out of control with various life circumstances. Life was coming at me from every direction, I was disabled and I had little energy to devote to a site that was increasingly less relevant. It hurt to have to triage SOAM to the bottom. After all, it was my third baby. Eventually, I made the decision to move on entirely. To close this site and open Feminist Studies 101 moving forward.

I miss this place. I wish I had done more with it in the time it had. So I wanted to mark the occasion with a post even if nobody even sees it.

This website is a mess these days. So many broken images I don’t even know if it’s a very good resource to share anymore. But the stories remain! And two decades on, I bet we find a lot more in common than different in those 2000s posts!

I hope we’ve made a little difference in the world. Happy twenty years to The Shape of a Mother.