The Post Formerly Known As “About MLB Update”

by Jane Gassner of ByJane

A year ago, when I started MidLifeBloggers.com, I envisioned it as a gathering place for all of us who consider ourselves to be in the middle of our lives. How old any of us actually were wasn’t really important, because midlife is not a function of years lived.   It’s more of a mindset, a sense of still being in the thick of living, still on that upward trajectory, as opposed to winding down.  I wrote about it in a post that used Erickson’s Stages of Development to define that place.  We’re not collecting IDs here, but I’d say our ages range from late 30s to late 60s.  Some of us are perimenopausal; some of us are post; some of us are smack in the middle.  Some of us work outside the home; some of us are stay-at-home-moms and, yes!, grandmothers raising grandchildren; some of us are looking at and for second or third careers.  We are the fastest growing demographic in the US and when MidLifeBloggers first started, few people are talking to us or for us. Now, if you go to Alltop, there are a range of sites that focus on midlife.  Advertisers have been less quick to follow (the ubiquitous Depends ads on Google’s Adsense don’t relate to anyone I know), but that is changing rapidly. The bottom line is: we are not living our mothers’ and fathers’ middle age, so the ‘old ways’ and ‘old rules’ just aren’t any use to us.  What MidLifeBloggers is then, is a place for us to figure out how to be in these middle years of our lives.  I wanted to give us a voice and a platform to change not only how the world saw us, but how we saw ourselves.

A year ago I wrote: What MidLifeBloggers will be is a place to hang out, to vent, to share, to laugh, to cry….And here’s what’s in the works:  A forum in which you can actually have a conversation, a debate, ask a question, offer an opinion.  It’s called, naturally, Conversations. A Flickr stream, which will have photos from all of us.  A voice at Twitter – how could we not?!  Podcasts: Talking About, one, two, or three of us on a specific subject.

Well, there is a Forum capability on the site, but I’ve never activated it.  And MidLifeBloggers does have a Flickr account, but it’s what you might call “inactive.”  We are on Twitter and Facebook, however, but not (to my chagrin and, yes, guilt) as prominently as we might be.  The fact is that we’re not a full-service site, such as those department stores-like sites, that offer a range of on-line and off- activities. Rather, MidLifeBloggers is more of a boutique, a salon of sorts, offering well-written, thoughtful, provocative posts (be they prose, poetry, or visual arts) on each and every issue–big and small, real and imagined–that any one of us is experiencing as we are wending our way through this period in our lives.

The fact is that midlife is a time of change and of evolution, and writing about it, expressing it in any genre, is one way in which we understand ourselves and our lives. On MidLifeBloggers.com, which is open to all submissions, the posts are written by our members, some of whom have strong writing backgrounds, and some don’t.  I see my role on the site not only as editor, but as writing mentor and coach (my years of experience as a writer and writing teacher support me in this).   To that end, we will soon be starting the MidLifeBloggers Writers Workshop.

We don’t (yet) have a signup to join; what we do have is an ever-growing BlogRoll.  If you want to join us—and we hope you do—send your url to jane@midlifebloggers.com