My New Best Friends

By:By Penny, Pennsylvania

About a month ago, I was on Dmarie as usual searching for the perfect poem for the layout I was working on. I was bored and agitated because I couldn't find it so I starting "surfing" as they call it and I decided to click on Picture Talk. "Surely this is something about film or developing or something like that," I thought.

The screen revealed message boards, a few of them. I clicked on the Picture Talk one because it said it had the most posts and since that day, I've gone there every day, a few times a day. What I found there was not anything about film or developing but rather a testimonial to the lives of everyday ordinary (or in my opinion extraordinary) women. Women that are just like me...they have children, husbands, homes, mold in their refridgerators, dust on their knickknacks. Undoubtedly their children are screaming in the background or tugging at their sleeves asking for the millionth cup of milk. These women have all come together on this board because of a shared hobby and have found that we share so much more! I've talked about everything with these women...there's something wonderful about the incognito-ness of hiding behind a computer screen...Yet I yearn to meet each one of these wonderful women that I have bonded with through words.

Like an old friend, I can tell them about the mounds of laundry taunting me from my bedroom. I can tell them that I haven't scrapped a single page for 2 months. I can tell them what shampoo I use, what I wear to bed, what toilet paper I use.

I go there everyday and I find not only answers to many questions I have from scrapping to child rearing but also an affirmation that I'm a good person, a good mom and someone who is valued by someone...These women who have come to value my company as much as I value theirs, who wonder where I am after not posting for a few days, who laugh at my self-depricating humor and dry wit, who tell me their opinions even if they're not the same as mine.

Do I spend too much time on the computer? Maybe, but I couldn't be spending my time at a better site, because I'm already there...at Dmarie and the Picture Talk message board.

Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: Why I Love Scrapbooking, by Debra M.