The End of an Era

This Thursday the MOPS online forums will be shut down in preparation for a new and improved forum that is slated to open this September. Unfortunately in the process of creating this new forum, everything currently on the forums will be deleted. For some reason this news really bothered me. I guess I thought that those forums and everything that we posted there would be available to reference indefinitely. Obviously this is not the case.

I have been a member of the MOPS forums since March 2006. I had joined my local MOPS group after Mike got deployed and emailed MOPS International asking for resources for women in my situation. The person who responded to my email directed me to the forums.  The fact that there were no tangible resources for women with deployed spouses really bothered me at first, but I decided to give the forums a try since that seemed to be my only option.  That was one of the best decisions I ever made.

What I found waiting for me was a group of women from all over the world sharing their lives with each other.  They encouraged, laughed, cried, prayed, shared, mentored, and essentially mothered each other in a way I had never experienced before. I was very blessed to be a part of it.

During Mike's deployment I knew that if I logged on at 1:00am needing a friend to talk to I was certain to find Cheryl in Japan, Megan in Australia, Ilse in South Africa or any number of other international moms. During the day I connected with many moms here in the states and in Canada. It amazed me that no matter the time of day and no matter the issue I was concerned about, if I posted a thread asking for prayer I was guaranteed to have someone praying for me within minutes.

When I discovered everything from the last five years would be deleted, I spent some time sifting through the 81 pages of posts I found when I did a search for myself. I copied and pasted anything I wanted to save into a word document. I have to admit reading some of those posts was a bit more difficult than I had anticipated. To have the knowledge of how things worked out for the deployment and still read the hopefulness of an early return brought tears to my eyes.

I guess you could say that the MOPS forums were like my blog during the deployment. Anything worth sharing was recorded there for my online family. Now the question is what to do with all those posts. I am considering taking some time to organize them and post them here to share what life was like for our family during that time in our history. The kids were too little to remember much about when daddy was away at "army man camp driving a hummer."

Since Daisy was born I haven't been on the forums as much as I was while Mike was gone and I am thankful I decided to check in earlier this week as opposed to later. It would have been difficult to discover that all that history had been lost.