These are things I've never said here before. For the most part, I've made this story about my children, our family, and my thoughts, and I didn't need names or locations. If you found this blog and you knew who I was, then you already knew me. If you stumbled upon the pages here and decided to read on, knowing who I was wouldn't have changed anything. So I remained relatively anonymous, mostly for me, mostly because I've never really felt comfortable having an online presence. Today, that's changed and it all started with a business card and a man at Starbucks.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far before COVID-19 had descended upon us. a man I knew from Starbucks gave me his business card. He did podcasts, he told me, and if I knew anyone interested in doing a podcast to please pass his information along.
I didn't know anyone interested in podcasts, but I thought maybe I could be a guest speaker for an episode and talk about what it was like having a blind child. I could make it funny and interesting and poignant and compelling, I had hoped. I like to tell stories, which is one reason I enjoy this blog so much because every day I get to tell a story. So I gave him a call.
He told me he didn't have a podcast, he produced podcasts for businesses and individuals. It was at this point that I realized I'd been very silly, thinking I could have just talked about my daughter on someone else's podcast. What was I thinking, that he was the Oprah of podcasts or something? But I didn't hang up just yet.
He didn't know I had a child who was blind, and as you well know, once that can of worms is opened it spawns a whole load of questions and conversation. So we talked. About both my daughter and podcasts. I remember I was waiting for my car to be cleaned and we must have talked for at least half an hour.
That night I thought about it. About having a podcast where I talked about what it was like to raise a blind child. I thought about it so much I called him the next day. I called him several more times until we had hammered out what this podcast I'd envisioned might look like. We weren't sure if it would be compelling or not, that would be on me. We didn't know if it would be interesting to people beyond my immediate family and friends, but I didn't mind that so much. By this time, we were both invested enough in the idea to give it a try, at least for a few episodes, and see what happened.
The only person I told then and have told through this entire long journey was my husband. Because I didn't know if it would ever come to fruition. That was a long time ago. I think it's close to two years now since that first phone call. We worked on things and then had to shelf it for a while. COVID-19 happened and we couldn't record in person anymore so we thought we'd wait it out, which clearly didn't work. So we picked up doing distanced recording with each of us in front of our own mics.
From the start, we thought we had an idea of what would work, only it turned out to not work at all, so we scrapped it. It took us a while to get into our groove, which we now both like. Things got easier and we recorded some more. We both thought we wanted to have several episodes to release at once, to be followed up with regular episodes once we'd done our initial release.
It's been stressful some of the time, telling the story of your life. But it's also been rewarding as well. So today, with tremendous gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald who is my partner in this podcast in so many ways, that podcast is a real thing. Scott made me sound good. He kept the good parts and left behind the bad. He spent untold hours editing and re-editing as we changed our minds until we circled around to what worked. He made this podcast what it is. Without him, this would have never happened.
So without further ado, here are the first six episodes of
Note: be sure to play them starting at episode one. The podcast makes a lot more sense in order!
Additonal:
* You can listen for free on each of the streaming services listed on the webpage. As of this writing, episodes are still propagating out to each service so if you don't see all six episodes yet on your preferred service, come back in a bit and check again.
* You can also listen to the episodes from the main page itself.
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