The site certainly deserves a better candle than this one personally drawn by the site owner. Time to celebrate at least for having been around for one whole long year.

6/22/2008 — the date seems so right to me, all can be evenly divided by 2, without any remainder — thus a lucky day. Well, one year later, today, 6/22/2009, marks one year anniversary of Mom Write site. Time for a little bit reflection. I went back to see my initial justification for the birth of the site. Now, I greatly realize that one needs to be revised or simply done away.

Reflection? Why bother? One might ask. Well, there got to be some reason for any activity. For now, all I can say is it makes me feel good if I do because I got into the habit of looking backward after a few forward steps. I know it is going to be boring and I could be worse than being boring. Still, bear with me, since it is like your birthday, only once a year. That is, no lunar year birthday.

To be sure, writing is an intellectual activity, a verbalized product of what the writer experiences externally and internally and the interactions between the two. Like all human activities, we all tend to give meaning to it, so that we will feel better when we tell ourselves, “Ah-ah, we have had a meaningful life’s experience.” But then, any meaning that we give to our experience is subjective in nature and could be light year’s away from the truth, if there is one or if truth really matters; and hence can be shrug off as excuses or apology or even shameless pretense.

This reminds me of Elie Wiesel’s book Night. In his preface to the new translation, he asked himself, “Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad … Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, … Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, … ?” After many self-questioning, Wiesel concludes “I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer–or my life, period — would not have become what it is …” What a heavy conclusion! No wonder he is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Back to reality, I think it best to leave out any statement on purposes and mission of my writing or of any activities and focus on the consequence of these activities. It is more objective to let end justify the mean. The following observations are presented in the order of their appearance in my consciousness:

(1) One of my relatives has been reading my postings nearly everyday. I have no doubt that her English reading level has been greatly advanced through this language exposure. Not that my English is exemplary but this daily exposure certainly yields positive result.

(2) Writing can be viewed as a channel of expression and an exchange of ideas or prejudice, reach out, good or bad. I am glad to see some responds to my writing and their positive comments are so encouraging.

(3) One rule that I set for myself is to stay positive simply because I do not want to ruin readers’ day or night, depending when it is read. However, staying positive can be a challenge sometimes if you experience negatively and are in negative mood, only mathematically possible when a negative times negative producing a positive result. Still, the process of writing it down does attenuate your negative feeling and then reading it afterward helps lengthen the distance between you and your experience, and enable you to put things in perspective. That’s why I find writing rather therapeutic. Even though I never produce anything of good quality when my head is boiling with anger, I still write it while memory is fresh and expect fire to be burned out eventually. I am sure we all have this moment, once in a while.

I realize one of my major weaknesses is having produced too lenghy postings to encourage active reading. I promise to cut it in half after this celebration.

To be continued tomorrow…