I have been thinking lately about why I blog.
Which is probably quite a dangerous thing for someone like me to start thinking about, because one thought inevitably wanders into another, which wanders down a completely different path, stops to admire a metaphorical flower, remembers something from twenty-seven years ago, writes half a poem about it and somehow ends up researching a dead relative at two o’clock in the morning.
Such is the inner workings of my brain.
But somewhere amongst all those wandering thoughts, I realised something.
I don't blog because I think my life is particularly extraordinary.
I blog because I have spent so much of my life searching for people who are no longer here.
And I know how frustrating it is to find their names...
but not them.

The Spaces Between the Dates.
When you research your family history, you become rather accustomed to dates.
Born.
Baptised.
Married.
Children.
Census.
Died.
Buried.
A whole human life reduced to a handful of carefully recorded events.
Sometimes, if you are very lucky, there might be a photograph.
A newspaper clipping.
A military record.
A signature at the bottom of a marriage certificate.
And suddenly you find yourself staring at that tiny piece of handwriting and thinking...
You touched this.
For one little moment, the distance between their world and yours seems to disappear.
But there is always so much missing.
I want to know what made them laugh.
I want to know whether they worried too much.
Whether they were romantic.
Whether they were stubborn.
Whether they sang terribly while doing the housework.
Whether they loved the rain or grumbled about it.
Whether they had dreams they never told anybody about.
Whether they ever sat awake at night wondering if they were getting life completely wrong.
I want the ordinary things.
Because somewhere along the way, I have realised that the ordinary things are actually the extraordinary things.
They are the pieces that make us human.
And perhaps that is one of the biggest reasons I write.

I Am Writing My Own History While I Am Living It.
One day, I will become somebody's ancestor.
That is a rather strange sentence to write.
Right now, I am simply me.
Living my life.
Making dinner.
Worrying about people I love.
Laughing at ridiculous things.
Writing blogs.
Writing poems.
Writing song lyrics.
Taking far too many photographs.
Researching people who lived hundreds of years ago.
And sharing my home with two enormous snow dogs who seem to believe that personal space is merely a suggestion.
But one day, all of this will be history.
My history.
And that fascinates me.
Because history isn't only kings and queens, wars and revolutions, castles and ancient ruins.
History is happening in kitchens.
In gardens.
On ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
It is happening while families sit around dinner tables.
It is happening when somebody falls in love.
When somebody loses someone.
When somebody brings home a puppy.
When somebody changes direction.
When somebody makes a terrible mistake.
When somebody begins again.
We are all living history without really noticing it.
And I suppose my blog is my way of noticing.

My Rambles Belong Here Too.
Sometimes I wonder whether I should keep my blog purely about genealogy.
Nice and tidy.
Organised.
Sensible.
Then I remember who is writing it.
There was never much hope of that.
Because I don't want Intwined to become simply a collection of names and documents.
I want it to breathe.
So I include my rambles.
My thoughts.
The things that wander into my head when I probably should be doing something considerably more productive.
Sometimes they are philosophical.
Sometimes sentimental.
Sometimes sad.
Sometimes hopeful.
And sometimes they are complete nonsense.
But they are my nonsense.
And perhaps one day, that will matter.
Imagine being able to find the blog of your great-great-grandmother.
Not simply her family tree.
Not just a photograph of her standing rather stiffly in her Sunday best.
But her actual thoughts.
Imagine reading what she thought about love.
About ageing.
About motherhood.
About grief.
About the world around her.
Imagine discovering the things that kept her awake at night and the tiny things that made her ridiculously happy.
I would give almost anything to have something like that from some of my ancestors.
So perhaps, without really intending to at first, I started creating it for mine.

Writing Is Also My Therapy.
There is another reason I write.
Perhaps one of the most personal reasons of all.
Writing is my therapy.
It is how I get the noise out of my head and put it somewhere else.
Sometimes my thoughts arrive neatly enough to understand.
Other times they are tangled together like a ball of wool that has been enthusiastically investigated by a cat.
And sometimes I don't actually know what I am feeling until I begin to write.
So I sit at the keyboard.
And I let it come.
A sentence.
Then another.
A memory.
A feeling.
Something I have been carrying without even realising quite how heavy it had become.
Writing gives those thoughts somewhere to go.
It allows me to take something that has been spinning around inside my head and place it in front of me where I can look at it.
Understand it.
Question it.
Sometimes cry over it.
Sometimes laugh at it.
And, occasionally, finally let a little bit of it go.
Not everything I write comes from a happy place.
Some of it comes from grief.
Some from fear.
Some from anger.
Some from guilt.
Some from confusion.
Some from those moments in life when you are trying desperately to make sense of something that simply doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
And yes...
there will probably be people who believe some of those thoughts should remain private.
Perhaps there are things we are supposed to lock away.
The uncomfortable things.
The messy things.
The thoughts that don't fit nicely into the carefully edited version of ourselves we tend to show the world.
But I have never wanted Intwined to be a perfectly polished version of a life.
Because that isn't life.
Life is beautiful and ridiculous and painful and magnificent and unfair and funny and heartbreaking.
Sometimes all before lunchtime.
And if I am going to leave pieces of myself behind in this little corner of the internet, then I want them to be real pieces.
Not just the pretty ones.

If My Words Help Just One Person...
Being open isn't always easy.
There is vulnerability in pressing publish on something that came from somewhere private inside you.
Because once those words leave the safety of my own computer, they no longer belong entirely to me.
People can read them.
Interpret them.
Disagree with them.
Judge them.
And, of course, this is the internet.
Somewhere out there is always a keyboard warrior polishing their armour and preparing for battle over something that probably didn't require a battle in the first place.
Opening up a private part of your soul to strangers is frightening.
But I keep coming back to one thought.
What if it helps somebody?
What if somebody finds one of my rambles at two o'clock in the morning because they typed their feelings into a search bar, desperately hoping to discover that somebody else has felt the same?
What if they read something I wrote about grief, heartbreak, guilt, fear, love, family or simply trying to navigate this strange business of being human...
and think,
Oh.
It's not just me.
Perhaps my words won't solve anything.
I don't expect them to.
But maybe they could make somebody feel understood for five minutes.
Maybe they could help somebody put a name to something they couldn't explain.
Maybe they could help someone process their own thoughts because they recognised a little of themselves in mine.
Maybe they could simply make another person feel less alone.
And if my struggles can help somebody else process theirs...
if being open and honest about how I feel helps another person in even the smallest possible way...
then perhaps putting myself at the mercy of the keyboard warriors is worth it.
Because behind every screen is another human being.
And sometimes we don't need someone to have the answers.
Sometimes we simply need somebody else to whisper across the darkness,
"I've felt that too."
Perhaps that is another thing I am leaving behind here.
Not wisdom.
Not answers.
Certainly not instructions on how anybody else should live their life.
Just honesty.
One imperfect human being trying to understand herself through words and, in doing so, perhaps helping another imperfect human being understand themselves too.
And if that happens even once...
then opening up that private little piece of my soul was worth it.
Here, in this tiny corner of the enormous internet that I call Intwined.

The Poems and the Songs.
Then there are my poems.
And my song lyrics.
Those probably reveal parts of me that ordinary writing sometimes cannot.
There are feelings that refuse to behave themselves in sentences.
They need rhythm.
They need imagery.
They need music.
Sometimes a thought arrives as a line and, before I know it, I am following it somewhere.
Some songs have come from happiness.
Others from grief.
Some from anger.
Some from memories.
Some from family history.
Some from those strange corners of the heart where love, loss, hope and regret seem to sit together quite comfortably.
I write the lyrics, and technology gives them voices and music that I could never give them myself.
Which is probably for the best because nobody needs my singing voice preserved for future generations.
There are some things my descendants deserve to be protected from.
But the words are mine.
The feelings are mine.
And tucked inside those songs are little pieces of who I was when I wrote them.
Perhaps somebody a hundred years from now will listen to one and think,
So that's how she felt.
And somehow, I rather love that thought.

Then There Are the Snow Dogs.
Of course, no honest account of my life could possibly exist without Athena and Obito.
Or, to give them their equally important official titles...
Athena, aka Miss Pants.
And Obito, aka Mr Toe Beans.
My two beautiful snow dogs.
My Princess and my Baby Bear.
The elegant Siberian Husky with very definite opinions about absolutely everything, and the enormous, affectionate Malamute who approaches life with all the subtlety of a small landslide.
I write stories about them too.
Now, I should probably point out that the adventures of Miss Pants and Mr Toe Beans are fictional.
Athena and Obito haven't actually travelled to magical lands, helped Santa Paws, encountered the Grinch, wandered into Dickensian adventures or found themselves caught up in all the other ridiculous situations my imagination has placed them in.
At least...
I don't think they have.
There are occasionally moments when I look at the pair of them and wouldn't put anything past them.
But although their stories are fictional, their personalities are absolutely, completely, one hundred percent real.
Every stubborn look.
Every dramatic expression.
Every moment of chaos.
Every bit of clumsiness.
Every ounce of attitude.
Every ridiculous little habit that somehow finds its way into their fictional adventures comes from the two enormous characters who actually live in my house.
The stories may come from my imagination.
But Miss Pants and Mr Toe Beans are very definitely themselves.
And perhaps that is why I love writing their adventures so much.
Because I hope they make people smile.
I hope someone somewhere reads one of their stories after a rotten day and laughs.
I hope people who have never met Athena and Obito feel as though, somehow, they know them.
And most of all, I hope people fall a little bit in love with the two snow dogs who drive me absolutely crazy on an almost daily basis.
Because they also give me the most humongous tummy laughs.
The sort where you are laughing so much that your stomach hurts and you can barely get the words out to explain what they have just done.
They give me sloppy kisses.
Nose nibbles.
Fur-covered clothes.
And tumbleweeds of snow-dog hair that float majestically through the house no matter how recently I have cleaned it.
Seriously.
I sometimes think Athena and Obito are slowly reproducing themselves entirely out of discarded fur.
There is enough of it.
But amongst all the chaos, the madness, the stubbornness, the enormous paws and the never-ending snowstorm of hair...
they give us an enormous amount of love.
The uncomplicated sort.
The sort that doesn't need words.
The sort that simply appears beside you, rests its head against you and somehow knows.
And I know that our animals are only with us for one chapter of our lives, while somehow managing to occupy enormous parts of our hearts.
So I write Athena and Obito into our history too.
Not just the things that really happened.
But the imaginary adventures they inspired.
Because those fictional stories preserve something that a photograph never quite could.
Their personalities.
Their silliness.
Their quirks.
The way they make me laugh.
The way they make our house feel alive.
And perhaps one day, long after the tumbleweeds of fur have stopped rolling across my floors, somebody will discover the adventures of Miss Pants and Mr Toe Beans and smile.
Perhaps, through those stories, they will get to know them too.
And that means rather a lot to me.
Because life would be considerably tidier without Athena and Obito.
There would be less fur.
Fewer stolen things.
Far fewer moments of me standing in the middle of the house saying,
"What on earth are you doing?"
But goodness...
life would be very boring without them.

Perhaps This Is My Time Capsule.
Maybe that is what Intwined has quietly become.
A time capsule.
Not a perfectly organised one, obviously.
Mine contains ancestors, gravestones, historical records, random thoughts, poems, song lyrics, dogs, family stories, holidays, heartbreak, laughter, philosophical rambles and probably the occasional swear word.
But perhaps that makes it more truthful.
Because life isn't organised into neat categories.
It overlaps.
It tangles.
It loops backwards.
The past wanders into the present, and the present is forever becoming the past.
Which, when I think about it, is rather fitting for a blog called Intwined.
Everything is entwined.
The people who came before me helped create the person sitting here writing these words.
Their choices travelled through generations until eventually they reached me.
And my choices will ripple forward too.

For Someone I Will Never Meet.
Sometimes when I am researching my family tree, I wonder whether the people I am searching for could ever have imagined me.
Could they ever have imagined that generations later, somebody would be sitting at a computer trying desperately to piece together their lives?
Did they ever wonder who might come after them?
Probably not.
They were too busy living.
Just as we are.
But perhaps somewhere in the future there will be another family historian.
Someone a little bit like me.
They might be sitting up far too late, surrounded by names and dates, following branches backwards through time.
And eventually...
they might find me.
There I will be.
Another little box on a family tree.
Born.
Married.
Children.
Lived.
Died.
Except this time, there will be more.
There will be my words.
Thousands and thousands of them.
My thoughts.
My poems.
My songs.
My family stories.
My snow dogs.
My adventures.
My heartbreaks.
My ridiculous rambles.
The things I believed.
The things I questioned.
The people I loved.
The person I was still becoming.
And perhaps they will sit there reading something I wrote a hundred years earlier and suddenly experience that same strange feeling I have felt so many times while researching my ancestors.
That little shiver of recognition.
That moment when history stops feeling like history.
And becomes a person.

So, Why Do I Blog?
I blog because I love discovering the past.
But I also blog because I am creating a past for somebody else to discover.
I blog because documents can tell you that somebody existed, but words can sometimes tell you who they were.
I blog because writing helps me make sense of the thoughts inside my own head.
I blog because sometimes the things we are frightened to say aloud are exactly the things somebody else needs to hear.
I blog because memories disappear frighteningly quickly.
I blog because ordinary lives deserve to be remembered too.
I blog because I want my children, their children, and perhaps generations I will never live to see, to know that behind the name on their family tree was a woman who thought too much, loved deeply, rambled frequently, adored her family, wrote poetry and songs, chased ancestors through dusty records and shared her world with two magnificent, hilarious, hairy snow dogs called Athena and Obito.
A woman who laughed.
A woman who cried.
A woman who struggled.
A woman who sometimes wrote those struggles down because it was the only way she knew how to untangle them.
A woman who wasn't afraid to admit that life could hurt.
A woman who hoped that by sharing some of that hurt, somebody else might feel a little less alone.
A woman who got things wrong.
A woman who kept learning.
A woman who lived.
And perhaps that is all any of us can really hope to leave behind.
Not a perfect version of ourselves.
Not a carefully polished collection of dates and achievements.
Just something that quietly says:
I was here.
This is what I saw.
This is what I loved.
This is what hurt.
This is what made me laugh until my tummy hurt.
This is what I wondered.
This is how it felt to be me.

And if, a hundred years from now, one of my descendants finds these pages while climbing through the branches of our family tree, I hope they don't simply discover another ancestor.
I hope they discover the woman behind the dates.
The polished pieces and the messy ones.
The laughter and the tears.
The strength and the struggles.
And somewhere amongst all those words, I hope they also meet a stubborn Husky called Miss Pants and an enormous Malamute called Mr Toe Beans...
and fall a little bit in love with them too.
Just as I did.
I hope, for a little while...
they discover us.
Until next time, 
Toodle pip, 
Lainey.

🪾🐾 ❤️ 🔎🎶