i was having merienda with my mom at a newly opened ramyeon bar¹ to catch up since she had been gone the last two weeks to attend some medical conferences. i was telling her about how i barely use social media these days; that i’ve been spending most of my time on the internet exploring a more personal web.

and then it hit me.

i don’t know why it took me so long to remember this but i had suddenly recalled that my mom used to have a blog of her own back in the early 2000s. actually, my mom and dad’s entire group of friends had blogs. she’s shown me her posts before, but i thought that meeting who my mom was back then as my twenty-something blogger self now would be a lot more meaningful than the half-hearted teenage interest i had shown her previously.

(my dad’s first blog [which i had just learned about] was about scuba diving and his second blog was mostly about his collection of tillandsias and cycads. his second blog is something i have a better memory of since he was blogging well into the mid 2010s and because his blog was rather popular amongst the plant community—he had local newspaper articles written about him and at one point was even invited to fly out to malaysia for an event! he was asked to blog about said event, so you could say my dad was an influencer before the term influencer was even coined)

i asked her if she still remembered the url. it turns out she had two. both of her blogs were named after me.

my mom often jokes about how i’m a lot more similar to my dad than i am to her, but the basis for this mostly comes from the fact that my dad and i are outdoorsy while she isn’t. ever since my dad and i picked up birdwatching, there have been many a weekend we’ve left her and my younger brother at home. i haven’t told her this as of writing, but i will let her know that we’re a lot more similar than she thinks.

i skimmed through my mom’s posts on both of her blogs. i found it difficult to stop myself from tearing up. one of my mom’s blogs was a private journal dedicated to writing about her experiences raising two children; the other one was about every other aspect of her life. she wrote life updates both serious and lighthearted, her thoughts and opinions on the world, her wins and losses as a mother and wife, and anecdotes about my brother and i that i have no recollection of whatsoever amongst plenty of other things². in total, she had written close to 700 posts.

we basically write? wrote? about the same things, sans motherhood and being a wife. she was just a girl, etc etc. it made me feel so much closer to her in a way i can't quite explain.

the last post my mom ever wrote was about how she hadn’t been able to write for a while (there was a 4 year gap between this post and the one before it) and that she was really excited to start writing again because she had just signed up for nablopomo. she never updated. god, that’s just like her.

i told my mom that i thought it was very cool she, my dad, and their friends started blogging right after livejournal’s conception. she bragged about how she had always been cool, informing me that she also started uploading youtube videos just three months after youtube was made.

i’m very grateful that i love my parents. i really am.

until next time!

1. it was nothing special. you pick a ramyeon pack from a selection of a little over one hundred and throw in various toppings of your choice. i tried the buldak carbonara and was rather disappointed that it didn’t really taste like anything other than heat.↩

2. it was the post about her reviewing sim city 2000 and being excited for the (at the time) upcoming sims 3 that really got to me, to be honest↩