By Sharon Brandwein of After the Byline
I’ve been a stay at home mom since 2011. I realized that I wanted to be a stay home when my baby was just a few months old. The day I picked my girls up from daycare and she reached back for the babysitter like that was her mom was the day I decided. So here we are, 6 years later. Both girls are in school…annnnnd I’m here by myself… staring at the walls, feeling guilty while my husband drags himself across the finish line to his retirement. Sooooo, I have no babies to take care of… what now?
Copious amounts of research and 1,764 Pinterest pins later (yes, that’s an exact count), I decided I would try my hand at blogging and freelance writing.
[adsanity id=”35664″ align=”aligncenter”/]Yes! Setting up a website is a great idea for the woman who calls the cable company to tell them the internet isn’t working and the little light that looks like the world on the router is blinking. Umm, at least I know it’s a router.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, I decided to bite the bullet and just do it. I secured my domain name and I bought the web hosting. After my purchases were made I was so excited!
The moment of truth was upon me. I typed in my URL and BOOM!! ….Nothing. Wait what?
Clearly, all those people who wrote articles about starting a website in under 10 minutes haven’t met me. Mind you, I’m well into hour 1 at this point. So, of course, I hit refresh about 12 times, hoping the tech gods would have just a little mercy on me. But alas, no dice. By the 13th click on the refresh icon, I figured something was terribly wrong.
I searched for a hotline number for the web hosting company and dialed. This case called for a hotline, people; regular customer service just wouldn’t do. A guy answered… we talked, he asked me questions and he said things. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to tap out by the third question. But we came back around to easy questions that I could answer, like what’s my domain name. It was going so well. Then he said I needed to point the DNS servers to my website.
[adsanity id=”35667″ align=”aligncenter”/]All I could think was, “What fresh hell is this?” (Frasier Crane voice and all)
Let’s take a step back here. Not to set feminism back a hundred years (you can put the pitchfork down), but my husband explains my electronics to me. The day he asked me to pop the hood of my car, I literally just looked at him like that little internet meme girl with my hands in the air. A snowball had a better chance in hell.
So there’s that…
DNS servers? Pfft, this should be good. Thankfully this kind gentleman walked me through the process and what I couldn’t do, he did for me. I bet I wasn’t the first potential blogger with big dreams to be on the other end of his line.
[adsanity id=”35665″ align=”aligncenter”/]Over the course of the next 24 hours, I had to find my incoming servers and clear caches and do all sorts of techie stuff (I believe that is the correct terminology) to get my website up and running, all the while completely determined not to ask my husband. I wanted to do this by myself (with the help of tech support, of course, but shhhh).
And you know what?
I did it, me, by myself, and I felt proud of me. This was pretty huge, guys. I discovered that I was much more capable than I gave myself credit for (and with the help of Google, Pinterest and an 800 number, I can do anything).
Starting over at 42 was starting to look up.
[adsanity id=”35666″ align=”aligncenter”/]In case you were wondering, I still don’t know how to pop the hood of my car.
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About the Author
Sharon Brandwein is a writer living in Southern California. She is a blog editor for Literary Mama and an editorial fellow for Your Tango Experts. Her work has appeared on Her View From Home, ABCNews, Motherly, Moms of Tweens and Teens and Grok Nation. When she’s not busy curating a wardrobe for her puppy, you can find her writing about motherhood and documenting her life as a writer at https://afterthebyline.com/ and follow Sharon on Twitter and LinkedIn.