WineZag was conceived three years ago this week. Happy Birthday to it! In a related side fact, my two amazing sons are now 21 and 18 years respectively. With identical veracity, I anticipate the blog’s birthdays as keenly as the boys’ red letter days. Plowing into WineZag’s fourth year of wine content creation, the connections between parenting and wine blogging unfurled themselves in an endless stream of affinities.
How can something as virtual as a blog offer any similarities to the iron clad parent/child relationship? If you consider 76 million Tamagotchis (that three buttoned, key-chained, screen of a virtual pet that took Japan by storm in 1996) were sold in less than four years, then dancing between virtual and real worlds is anything but unprecedented. Still, it took three years to make this uncanny connection between parenting and blogging.
There are definitely a few important differences between raising children and authoring WineZag. For one, the blog doesn’t require $500K in college tuitions. Blogs don’t graduate from diapers to cars either. Also, no health insurance…just the occasional back-up. Finally, at some point in their teens or early twenties, children move on to take care of their own needs independently. The distinctions between parenting and blogging end here though, replaced by the unavoidable and requisite devotion required to do either one well.
25 Points of Comparability in Wine Blogging and Parenting
- You think and worry about them every day, multiple times
- Progress is keenly monitored for each. Web analytics, height, weight, report cards, peer group influence, etc.
- You care about who they associate with- links, follows, friends
- Each is injected with your values and vision as they develop their own personalities; they become a vivid reflection of you
- Both require your feeding; words, wisdom, or food.
- You translate your personal learning and experiences for both
- You share travel with them, always taking them with you and seeing things anew through their eyes
- Their schedules, no matter how much they conflict with your own, take precedence
- No matter how tired you are, there is a reserve of energy and focus you can draw on at any time for either
- You make mistakes with both that you don’t realize until later in life. I wish I could be the perfect parent or blogger, but I am not.
- They talk back to you and you might not like hearing what they have to say; blogs through comments and children, well, they just speak their minds.
- Both provide intense pleasure and are sources of personal accomplishment
- They will or won’t develop authority over time based on how well you did your job
- Both will eventually have Facebook and Twitter identities; another level of worry about who they hang out with
- They require curfews-if you are staying up too late at night with either of them, it will eventually get in the way of your day job
- You are embarrassingly proud of any recognition or awards given by peers or authoritative bodies in their worlds
- Just when you think you’ve got them on the right track, new challenges and hurdles arise
- Both are marathons, not sprints
- Eventually you realize both are thankless jobs, yet you never question either
- It takes a good nine months from the time you start thinking and planning the process until they are live and require your care
- Once you take the plunge, there is no turning back
- The bond that connects you with each is unexplainable to anyone that has not experienced it for themselves
- You can dress them up to look handsome and presentable, but unless they are educated and rich in personal values they won’t get very far in life
- You feel intense guilt and failure when you ignore them for unnatural periods of time
- Eventually you reach the point where you could not imagine life without them
Thanks for everything WineZag, Alex, and Matt. You have given back so much. Love you all!