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Hi there. This is not, actually, my first post. This is where my first post would have been if I hadn’t deleted it a while back.
When I started this blog, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. A friend had convinced me to write for a local “Mommy blog” site (I detest that term), and after doing that for a little while I decided that I needed a site of my own. I already had another website, one that chronicled what was filming in Brooklyn on any given day, and at that point was finding some success. But I wanted someplace to put more personal posts.
Plus, because I was writing on that other parenting blog site, brands kept contacting me, but I wasn’t allowed to team up with companies on that other site. So, Selfish Mom was born. Years later, it became Amy Ever After.
Selfish Mom/Amy Ever After was a big mix of random things. Blog posts about parenting that I thought were profound. Reviews of random things that companies would send me. Chronicles of my family’s trips (I can’t even tell you how much that annoyed them). Sponsored posts about products that I initially loved doing (I’m getting paid? To write about stuff I like??). What I was doing (usually SUPER boring, but for some reason those posts were getting traffic).
There was no theme, and very little follow-through. I would start a post series and abandon it after two posts, or I would promise to write about things and never do it; this reflected how things were going in my life, before I was diagnosed with ADHD and got some very helpful medication.
As time went on, and I was doing more freelance writing for other sites, I started to be embarrassed by a lot of the content here. The writing was often bad, there were broken links everywhere, and I had eventually grown very wary of writing about my kids.
For a while, my kids LOVED that I had a blog. Toys and video games arrived in the mail almost every day. They got to go with me to very cool events (skateboarding with Tony Hawk, meeting The Jonas Brothers, that kind of thing), trips to amusement parks (I’ve lost track of how many times we all got to go to Disney World, with insane insider perks and parties), exclusive shows, and other things that we never would have had access to.
But as time went on, I found that I really didn’t like working with my kids in that way, and they got tired of it pretty quickly as well. This was back when social media was new, and things weren’t quite as exploitative as they are now. But still, it started to feel icky. And eventually my kids asked me to remove almost all of the posts about them from this site and YouTube.
At first, I just removed those posts. But eventually I culled everything that wasn’t evergreen or getting traffic. At this point, there are around one hundred posts (there used to be over 2,000). If you want to see some examples of really bad writing and really stupid topics, I’m sure you can find a lot of them on the Wayback Machine, have fun!
So why this post? Because if anyone was ever bored enough to go through my archives, I didn’t want them to wonder how this blog had sprung up from nowhere, with a post about a blogging convention and Muppets. It was actually the result of a lot of work, a ton of figuring things out, and the luck of getting into the game early.
At this point, I don’t post much. While being a writer and content creator used to be my full-time job, I’ve moved on to another career. But when I find myself with downtime, I will add a food post or something else, because after almost 20 years of doing this, I often find myself thinking, I really need to put this on my blog.