Mourning Momwriters

I wasn't going to blog about this, but then I started writing a comment on Kira's blog and couldn't stop. So, I thought I'd better bring it over here.

I've been a member of Momwriters for over 7 years. I joined in October, 1998, just in time to vote in the first Halloween contest. (I still have a copy of the story I voted for, a chilling little piece about a woman wondering through a house full of sleeping family, only to be chided by a voice from the air to get to bed herself. It still sends a shiver up my back when I reread it. I've never known who wrote it. I wish I did.)

I was there when it was Nicki and Jerri running things. I was there when the first listowner came back and tried to take ownership back from Nicki and Jerri. I've been through the first death and the most recent. I've seen most of our traditions start. I've seen some of those traditions fade away. (I miss Vinnie and Guido.) I've volunteered. I posted all the time in those early years. I saw us get mentioned as one of the top 100 writer's sites and I saw how our membership exploded each time that happened. I saw Jerri leave as listowner and come back some time later as a group member. I missed a year after Arielle was born, but otherwise, I've been there through it all.

And now I am watching it fall apart, which I honestly never thought would happen.

It makes me think of divorce (hope that doesn't offend anyone who's divorced. I know it's not the same, it's just ...) A family is disintegrating and there's no way to put it back together. I'm losing something that's been so important in my life and I'll never find anything like it again. At first I was mad, and then I was sad, and now I'm just really, really hurting.

I spent most of the night I found out in my room, lying on the bed and crying and thinking. Even reading MW can take a big time commitment, given the temptation to read everything and the huge, huge volume we see on there. But a financial commitment is something else again. I don't pay to join online communities. Never have. Why should I? After all, there are too many free opportunities and I need to build up more offline friendships anyway. I don't often pay for things that are just for my own enjoyment, either. Theoretically we could afford it, but you know what? There are just too many needs here for me to justify it very often.

That was what I thought about. Could I justify staying in MW? I finally decided I could, but it came down to dollars and cents. I just made a significant sale through networking through MW. Quite a bit of my writing income over the years, in fact, has been due either to leads I got through MW or through networking there. Financially it makes sense to stay, at least for a while, to see if it continues to be such a rich source of income opportunities. (Since I've noticed a number of the people who were feeding such leads to the list have already announced they won't be staying, that doesn't seem too likely now.)

And I hate that. Momwriters was never primarily about money, to me. It was about the community and the friendships with the money opportunities and really nice side benefit. Only now it has to be about the money.

Yuck.

I will miss MW so much. Even if I stay long term, it won't really be MW anymore.

And I'm just so sad about that.