History of a decision

If you know anything at all about enneagram nines, it’s that we struggle with decisions. We what-if them to absolute death and live in great fear of making the wrong one.

So it may surprise you to notice that I have, indeed, made a decision. I will be glad to tell you all about it, but it comes with a history. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Many moons ago when I was a full-time, homeschooling mom of five sweet babes, I started a blog on a pretty unknown platform called VegSource. See? I told you it was unknown. It was a website by and for vegetarians, or maybe vegans, and they had a little branch for homeschoolers. There were discussion boards where we could compare curriculums and issues we were having with our various kids’ educations and one of them was actually the very place where I figured out my daughter’s learning differences. Once I had a clue and we found the right specialist, she was off and running. So even though the site was small and today it no longer exists, it will always have a place in my heart. Thank you, VegSource. You never know where your help will come from.

Anyway, (sorry, I am not good at making anything brief, #allthewords) that was in my phase of being “bensrib” everywhere. It was my license plate on my requisite big homeschooler van, my email address, and the user name for every website I ever used. So it made sense that it would be the name of my blog too. When I eventually migrated to Blogger, I took the name with me. I was bensrib for literal decades. Then my kids all grew up and left home and I got a full-time job and quit blogging.

After five or six years of my public—all three of you—begging for more words from bensrib, I started a brand-new website. I went all professional and hired a guy to be my web host, and I set up a Wordpress site. By that time I was in my late fifties and decided I should be something in my own right, more than an extension of my husband (who I dearly love to this day), so my daughter suggested Beyond Momlife, which became the new blog. It perfectly fit my stage of life and I happily wrote my words and all was well.

Somewhere in there was when I became an idiot magnet on the highway and was hit several times, the final time head-on, and whoosh went the floodgates of all the trauma that I had, until then, successfully kept shoved down where it couldn’t affect me. Or so I thought. Some of my blogging on Beyond Momlife included writing my way through the first two years of what I didn’t know was PTSD, and the blog became a necessary part of working through a lot of stuff.

Then one day I went to log on, and Beyond Momlife was gone. Poof. Into the ether, never to be found again. Apparently there were “miscommunications” between my web host and me. I’ll leave it at that.

If you are a writer, you can imagine my anguish. I grieved the loss of all those needed words like I would a dear friend. Let me tell you, it was hard.

But not writing was harder, so after four months, I started yet another blog on Wordpress. At the time, I was going to weekly therapy and there was so much in my past thinking about mental health that needed to be unpacked. I found that the more I told my story, the more people came out of the proverbial woodwork thanking me for sharing it and for saying—out loud, even—that it’s okay to be a Christian and go to therapy. Christians can be some of the most judgmental people on earth, and I had been one of them, scoffing at anyone’s need for professional counseling. Only now I was the one who needed it.

That was the birth of “A lot of Grace and a little Therapy,” Grace and Therapy for short.

(Are you still with me? I truly do apologize for the length of this extensive history.)

After a year of writing at Grace and Therapy, I decided I was done with Wordpress. I know it’s intuitive for a lot of people but I am not a lot of people. I struggled with every little change. Every idea required a new extension and needed another update and maybe didn’t work with the other things I’d chosen and I was just so over it. All I wanted to do was write, not be a web designer.

Enter Substack. Hallelujah and Amen. I write. You subscribe. It comes straight to your inbox. Two fonts to choose from. Inserting photos is easy. It’s exactly what I wanted.

But I had to choose a name for the newsletter (they don’t call it a blog even though I still do). I wondered if the Grace and Therapy name was too limiting. After all, I write about more than faith and mental health. I write about grandbabies and the farm and food and grammar and the saga of the kitchen sink. So on a not-well-thought-out whim, I chose Cowmom Notes. Talk about limiting. While I am (mostly) happy to be a cowmom, that’s only a small part of who I am. I was never really happy with the name.

So here I am, going back to Grace and Therapy because therapy covers the mental health part of my story and grace covers everything else, and don’t I just need that so much?

I appreciate your patience while I be all enneagram nine and struggle with decision making. The content won’t change, only the name and banner. I hope you stick around. This wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without you.