Heather Christena Schmidt

Well, it isn’t really time to say good-bye. Not completely at least. Sorry, this isn’t actually as dramatic as I made that sound.

You guys don’t trust me anymore, do you?

We have a piece of business long overdue to take care of, here on the blog. I apologize for the seriousness of this post; but I promise I will can it with all these dramatics as soon as I’m done, and get back to my foul-mouthed diatribes first thing in the morning.

For about a year, now, I’ve been hemming and hawing over something pretty big. That thing has been so big that I have stumbled along the year, making minor adjustments here and there in hopes that I wouldn’t actually feel like – in the end – I needed to do the thing I had been hemming and hawing about.

In the end, I do.

And I’m beating around the bush, hoping that by the time I finish typing out this post I will have changed my mind.

Years ago – we’re talking years – friends started calling me Bitch as a term of endearment. I know that sounds crazy, but it really was. I say that from my own perspective, though – so what do I know? It could have just been a way to tell me off nicely over and over again. I can be a little bit of a curmudgeon for my age; and I always – always – say exactly what I mean and what is on my mind. That isn’t always socially acceptable to some people, though, and those people (the ones who don’t like who I am) had a habit of referring to me as a bitch (either behind my back or in a mean way, to my face). So after a while, both friends and I figured: if we can’t stop them, join them right?

I’m getting to the point, I promise.

So when I decided to start writing an all-inclusive mom blog (I say all-inclusive because I write about a lot of things, not just being a mom), it seemed natural that I would refer to myself as Bitch. Or The Bitch. And I thought I was being clever by turning Blog into B(itch)Log… It made total sense at the time, until people started having problems getting my emails because of the parentheticals; and others didn’t really get it.

By others, I mean a lot of people didn’t get it. And a lot of people also – sadly, for their limited understanding and appreciation of the nuances of the human language – assumed my blog was not to be taken seriously because of it.

In the beginning of the Summer of 2013, I published my third book – My Wife’s a Bitch – and went to do a book signing, only to see that they had replaced the title of my book with nothing more than a description. I was insulted, hurt. What was the big deal – they say that word on TV all the time, don’t they? It was then, though, that I started to get the point: sometimes – no matter how cool it sounds, no matter how transcendent my understanding of words and language may be – there are just some things people won’t touch.

That was when I started to face the reality of the possibility of retiring The Bitch, which began with renaming The B(itch)Log.

If I was not going to call my blog The B(itch)Log anymore, what would I call it? Would I still keep my moniker of The Bitch in it? And if so, how could I incorporate it? I knew I needed to rebrand to remedy these problems and be taken more seriously as a writer in the world of creativity, which has become fiercely competitive over the years. But I just wasn’t ready to give up that bitchy, bitching, whining way of making a damn good point.

So I experimented a little. My blog was already on my writer’s website – heatherchristenaschmidt.com – anyway, so it was pretty easy. I experimented with a  new logo or theme of sorts a couple of times. By that I mean I completely overhauled my website at least eight times in the past six months.

And around the eighth redesign is when it hit me: that was a hell of a lot of time spent avoiding the inevitable when I could have been writing.

In the end, it all started to get a little lost in the fray. I realized that people stopped even knowing what to call my blog. Some still called it B(itch)log. Some called it by the new logo. And while my readership and social media following has continued to grow at a rapid pace, the amount of people completely unaware of what they were getting was growing as well.

So as I rang in 2014 (in my pajamas and asleep well before midnight), I decided it was time to accept the future and embrace a new chapter as a mom blogger and a writer. I made the commitment to finally give in and say goodbye to an old friend, a moniker who will always be near and dear to my heart – The Bitch.

I feel as though I’m in the middle of a breakup that was both long overdue, and at the same time bittersweet. In some ways, the grief over the end of the relationship and the identity that comes with it; truly the end of an era, is – at times – overwhelming (hence the months of procrastination). Yet at other times, and where I am now, is in the sense of relief and excitement for the next step.

It would probably be an appropriate time to thank you all again for welcoming The Bitch and all her (my) bitchiness into your hearts. I promise, the bitchiness will still be there; as will all the other wonderful, bizarre, pointed, and – sometimes – psychotic pieces of the puzzle that is my writing. Bear with me over the coming weeks as Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social engines phase out my Bitch and phase in my future.

Now it’s time to say goodbye. I’ll miss you, Bitch, even though you will always occupy a special place in my heart.