Time to Buy the Folks at BlogHer a BIG Muffin Basket.

So I got some interesting news yesterday.

A few months ago, I wrote this.  Hereafter referred to as the Hamburger post.

Then yesterday, the movers and shakers at BlogHer announced their 2012 Voices of the Year honorees.  And this happened.  Scroll down to the Parenting list.

Look.  See it?

I know, right?  Gosh.

I'm not able to go to BlogHer this Summer -- which is a bummer, because I'm thinking I'd be getting a lot of free drink coupons this year (Right?  Come on...), but I do want to thank the good folks who nominated me and got me included on a list with such fine writers.

What?  You haven't read the other posts they selected?  Seriously?  Stop what you're doing and go there RIGHT NOW.  Those are some galactically talented folks on that list, including my fellow DadCentricians Whit and Two Busy, and my Culture Brats pal Jett Superior.

And Anissa Mayhew, Maven of Aiming Low.

And Adam Avitable, with whom I hope to someday be cool enough to hang.

 Plus Kristine Cook, who's in a class all her own.  (This particular post made me laugh so hard last night my daughter woke up and thought I was having some sort of seizure.)

And many others.  I killed several good hours reading the other writers on the list. I encourage you to do the same.  Right now.  I'll wait here.

***

A few days after the Hamburger post ran on DadCentric in April, it got picked up by Huffington Post, which was exciting and scary.  A lot of the HuffPo commenters were kind.  Some were not.  Some were pretty mean.

One particularly sarcastic respondent said something like, "Gee, it's amazing how you can remember that conversation with your daughter so clearly, word for word.  You must have such a good memory."  Implying that I made the whole thing up, I guess.  Or that I put a nice gloss on the story to make it sound like a Movie of the Week on Logo.

It's true that writing a personal blog can be a very convenient way to take your life and package it up into a narrative.  You can make it gripping.  You can make it hi-lar-ious.  You can turn yourself and the people in your life into characters.  Caricatures, even.

You can make complicated events seem simple, straightforward, cut-and-dried.  

I want to make it clear that the coming out process certainly wasn't simple, or straightforward, or easy. Not for me, or the people in my life.  And if I ever make it sound like that on this blog, someone should come over here and smack me in the head.

To that commenter (who surely stopped giving a shit the second after he hit Submit), I'll say this: You know what?  I DO remember that conversation word for word.  Because I was nervous about having it, and I was hyper-aware of my daughter's reactions when it happened. One thing I can say about that post is that the conversation I described is accurate.  And Mini-Pirate's awesomeness?  All real, all true.  All I did was describe her.

Which is why the recognition from BlogHer is really, really nice to receive.