Before moving back to the Sunshine State, I worked full-time while my husband served in the US Navy. I had dropped out of college to marry my husband and raise a family. Once my kids started school, I went back to work. It was a good job and I tried to advance, but was repeatedly denied a promotion because I didn’t have a little piece of paper that said I graduated.

It was frustrating because I knew I could do the job, considering I had filled in for the job on a few occasions when illness or emergencies struck.

It was a blow to my ego. And it angered me on several levels.

About a month before we moved back here, my husband generously transferred his Post 9/11 GI Bill to me, so that I could finish something I started 15 years ago. I tried to talk him out of it so he could better himself, but that was like talking to a brick wall. He wanted me to go and finish because he knew I wanted it so badly.

And so, as an adult, I returned to college.

The school I attend is a popular university with military and former military, and I attend a satellite campus in Orlando. I love it. I take one on-line and one on-campus class a week for 8 weeks, and because we have short terms, the classes are long and intense. Seems just about perfect.

And it is, when I am not busy being a full-time mother.

I wonder often if I am the only mother in the world who puts aside work so that I can better myself. There are times I deal with a large amount of guilt when I tell the kids I can’t give them attention because I am busy on a paper, reading, or homework. I know the goal is to get my degree so that I can get a better job and provide more for my family, but I wonder if I am not doing damage to my kids at times. I think many mothers who go back to school experience this, and suffer as much as I do, possibly worse.

I remember my own mother graduating from college when I was a kid. She wasn’t around much. One thing I want to do differently is to actually use my degree after graduation. My mother didn’t and I wonder why she wasted her time, ignoring my brother and I for those years (at least it seemed like it), if she wasn’t going to use the degree to justify the expense and time away from her children. Nothing changed after she graduated; we were still poor and she still worked a low-paying job. I can list, several times over, the things that her money could have been spent on. Food for us for school lunch is just one item on that list.

I don’t want my college completion making an impact on my children in a negative way. I try to counter my times of isolation for study with times spent at a theme park, walking 5K’s with them, or even at the community pool. My children need to know that the hard work I put in and that sacrificing some time with them is going to be worth it in the end. I don’t want them to resent me for my one selfish act, because I will better all of our lives when I’m done.

I believe I will be making Dean’s List after this term, and my goal is to maintain that throughout my college career. I want to inspire them to greatness now, before it’s too late, and they become the procrastinating sloth I was for many years. Part of doing this is proving to my family that you can do things for yourself, for the sake of your family, and still be there for them. I’m hell-bent on not letting them down. As their greatest teacher, I can only teach by example, so it has to be a good example. They will be better off for all the sacrifice on their parts. And that motivates me to do well far beyond anything else.

I want to be the “modern mami” who can do it all and have a thriving family. I just have to keep up the hard work. I hope to be an example to other mothers in the world who feel like they aren’t worth bettering themselves with education. I’m going to come out on the other side of this experience and show the women who have doubts that it can be done, and they will know it’s worth it in the end.

Is inspiration the word? Maybe. I prefer the term “setting a good example,” because sometimes, showing how it can be done is better than simple inspiration.

Blogging without readers is about as much fun as throwing a party and having no one show up. Whether you’re blogging professionally or casually, it’s nice to get a comment and know that you’ve connected with others.

When building a loyal readership, it’s important to keep in mind that not all your readers are bloggers. In fact, readers who aren’t bloggers themselves are very valuable. Non-blogging readers aren’t busy tending to their own blogs and thus will have more time to visit and comment on yours. But how do you attract non-blogging readers? Where do you find them and how do you keep them? Here are 15 tips for building your non-blogging readership.

15 Tips for Attracting Non-blogging Readers to Your Blog

1. Make sure your blog is non-blogger friendly. Some non-bloggers are not technically inclined. Is the layout easy to follow for them? To test this, ask your grandmother or another older relative to visit your blog and give her opinion. You might be surprised by some very good suggestions for making your blog or website easier to navigate.
2. Don’t make commenting a challenge. Make sure that when people leave a comment, the only information they need to fill out is their name and possibly E-mail address. (URL should be optional not mandatory.) Also re-consider using captchas. A lot of people find them very frustrating.
3. Make it easy for them to return. Can they subscribe by E-mail and RSS? Do you have a distinct favicon so you’re easy to identify?
4. Don’t underestimate word of mouth. Do you include your blog link in the signature of your E-mails? Is it on your business card? How about in your yearly Christmas letter? Don’t forget to share your blog URL with your parents, siblings, relatives, friends, co-workers, and neighbors so that they can pass it on to their friends. Some of my most loyal readers were friends of my sister, and I didn’t even know it until I met them and they told me they loved my blog.
5. You gotta give some to get some. Leave meaningful comments on blogs that are similar in content to yours. You’ll attract the blog owner and their readers. (It isn’t stealing – it’s widening the community.) Guest blogging is another great option. Invite someone to guest post on your blog, and consider accepting the offer if someone asks you to guest post on their blog.
6. Leave a trail. Do you have a Facebook page? Twitter profile? Photos on Flickr? YouTube videos? Sell stuff on Etsy or Ebay? Review books on Amazon.com?… Make sure your URL is somewhere on all of your user pages around the internet.
7. Ride the buzz. Once in awhile, write about something that is a “hot topic” in the headlines or in the blogosphere. Of course, don’t do it unless it’s something of interest to you and your readers. If it doesn’t fit your regular content, then the readers you attract won’t stick around.
8. Write about something obscure. Is there something you’re an expert on that few people are informed about? Is there something you really love but you’ve noticed it’s hard to find information about it? When you search online for it, are there almost no results? Write about that and then when others go searching, you’ll be at the top of the results. (Again make sure it fits your content.)
9. Go find them. Non-bloggers hang out in forums, message boards, social networks and chat rooms. Join a conversation on a message board that is relevant to your blog, and make sure your URL is in your signature.
10. Study SEO and apply the knowledge. Knowing a little about search engine optimization will help you blog effectively so that you’re easy to find through internet searches. There are a lot of free tutorials online. You don’t have to get into anything complicated. Even applying a few basic SEO principles will help you.
11. Make yourself approachable. Your E-mail address should be easy to find on your blog in case someone wants to contact you privately. Also, try your best to respond to each and every comment left on your blog, whether they’ve asked you a question, shared something about themselves, given you a compliment or even disagreed with you.
12. Be compatible with social news websites. Consider adding buttons to your blog posts so they can easily be submitted to social news and sharing websites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, etc. (But make sure you don’t add so many buttons that it looks cluttered.)
13. Have a Giveaway. Honestly, most of the people that are attracted by giveaways are coming for the free stuff and they won’t be back, but you might grab a reader here and there. Besides, giveaways are fun. Everyone likes to play Santa Claus once in awhile, don’t they?
14. Watch your statistics. Some blog platforms come with built in “stats” that you can check, or you can use a third party stat counting website to track how people are finding you, where they’re coming from, and where they hang out on your blog. Keep an eye on this information so you know what’s working and what’s not. This will determine what you spend more time doing, and what you stop wasting your time on.
15. “Content is King”. It’s been said again and again, but maybe it can’t be said too often. The biggest rule to remember is that you need to make consistently good content and be dependable with how frequently you update your blog.

Happy blogging, and I wish you many comments!

For this week’s Viernes Social, instead of a contest, we’re featuring a heartfelt guest post from a local Latina blogger. I appreciate the post she wrote, as it’s nice to hear about motherhood past the preschool or teenage years.

You’re a young mom. Your days are hectic and seemingly short—not enough hours in the day to do all that demands your attention. Today, I will take you to a different land. We will go back to the future, to a day when most of your parenting duties are over.

That is where I stand today: In the middle of a quieter nest that once was filled with carpooling, after-school activities, sleepovers, Girl Scouts and much more. Just like your days are today.

My daughter, an only child, flew off to college three years ago, and that is the day when things went quiet in our home. I won’t call it an empty nest; after all, there are still two people in it. But it is a different nest.

It’s true that you don’t know how much time and attention you devote to your children until they are gone. There is no free time to calculate it beforehand! Not only do your children occupy your physical time, but also mental space. You are always thinking about them. What are they doing? Do you need to take them somewhere? How about pick them up? And so it goes.

Assuming your child is safely tucked in a dorm somewhere and there are no problems on the horizon, your child will need you a whole lot less. You slowly begin to return to the time—a long, long time ago!—when you could think of yourself without feeling, well, selfish.

You can ponder what you like or what you’re going to do, and it’s totally OK. Go ahead, take a long bubble bath. Nobody will interrupt you. Spend Saturday at the movies either alone or with friends. There is no competing event on your calendar. Take up a new sport or hobby. You have the extra time.

Among the biggest pluses of paying your mommy dues is getting to know your hubby all over again, without the pressure of juggling childrearing, working and household duties. Now, you can look at each other and smile. Hold hands. Have a romantic dinner—or two, or three—during which you’ll spend time remembering when.

Remember the wonderful Christmas we spent in Puerto Rico? Remember when (fill your child’s name) “graduated” from kinder? Remember when she sold the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop? Ahh, I remember it well. It was a very important phase of our lives.

To all the young moms still in the important phase of their lives I say, this shall be your future. It is your reward for caring and loving your family, and putting yourself last all these years.

When you’re in the middle of a bad day, feeling tired and at your wit’s end, take out this post. Read it and smile. Your moment for going back to the future will arrive a lot sooner than you think.

Because work is ridiculously busy and I lost a week’s worth of work last week due to a family situation, I will have to work late and extra hours at night from home. At least for a few more weeks until a big deadline is met.

Sooooo…..

Suffice it to say that I won’t be able to post very much if I’m working at nights in addition to my normal day hours.

Rather than take a complete break from this blog, I’m looking for some guest posts to fill the gap.

Topics can be pretty varied:

• parenting
• women issues
• home business
• hispanic/latino
• blogging
• social networking
• something new and exciting you have to offer

If you’re interested, please email me at melanie (at) modernmami (dot) com with your post idea.

Looking forward to hearing from you and reading your ideas.

Guest post by Melody Feist of Feist Family Fun.

I have an issue that’s been weighing on my mind for years but that really came to a climax last weekend. Not being a very confrontational person, I thought I’d throw it out there as a rant to the general public. Here’s what happened:

Trent, Camden and I decided to go out to dinner, only to find upon arriving at the restaurant that the restaurant no longer exists. Right. So, we drove around trying to find a place that we all liked. We usually go out quite early so that we avoid the dinner rush (and wait) and so that we can make it home before Cam’s bed time. However, by the time we settled on a place, it was prime time for the crowds, and we ended up sitting in a cramped lobby with a surprise hour-long wait … with a two-year old. After exhausting the toy stash in my purse and trying to talk to and sing songs with an unresponsive, wiggly, unwilling participant, I broke down and watched a movie with him on my iPhone. Now, anyone who knows me very well knows that this was a huge sacrifice on my part. I don’t like TV, and I don’t watch very much and rarely allow Camden to do so either. It’s just a personal preference; I feel that there are so many more constructive, stimulating things to do in this world. So, I sat there, watching with him and talking to him about what was going on. Before I knew it, we were under the watchful eye of an elderly couple sitting across from us, and the lady was giving her husband a running commentary about what a bad mother I am. “At least she’s talking to him,” she said, loud enough for me to hear. “She’s telling him about pots.” Yes, honey pots, to be exact. We were watching “Winnie the Pooh.” I had the mind to go over and tell her so, but then would she have just chalked it up to my disrespectful generation? I was also left to wonder if she would have had any less criticism for me if I’d let my child fuss and whine and make a scene rather than doing my best to entertain him… which brings me to my point:

Can’t I, as a member of “the younger generation,” do anything right?

I discussed the restaurant experience with Trent in the car on the way home, and he, with is infinitely calm and wise manner, advised me to just let it roll off. I would like to. But how many times will I have to do that? Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident.

A few months ago, I was rushing to the hospital and was in quite a hurry in the parking garage, where I was following a black SUV through the packed aisles. The truck drove right past a small, compact-sized parking space, so I turned into it. Halfway through the maneuver, I was surprised to see the truck’s reverse lights shining in my face through my driver’s-side window. He almost hit me. I pulled into the space, my heart pounding after the near collision, and got out of the car, ready to run into the hospital, as I was already late for my appointment. But not fast enough. The black truck continued backing until it blocked me in, and then the passenger proceeded to roll down the window and the driver and passenger began yelling at me and telling me that I took their spot (you know, the one they had just driven past to the end of the row). I told the man that it was a compact-sized spot and wouldn’t have fit his SUV anyway, to which the lady replied. “You are so rude! What a disrespectful generation!” I kid you not. When I finished in the hospital, I found the SUV parked around the corner, in a spot about 15 feet away. And yet, I was left to wonder, “Am I a rude, disrespectful person?”

On another occasion, I was unfortunate enough to be part of a discussion on provident living where a lady made the comment that “Members of the younger generation don’t bother cooking or sewing anymore. All they know how to do is open a can.” I informed her that actually, I both cook and sew, and that I enjoy it! And still, I was left to wonder, “Do others perceive me as being lazy and irresponsible?”

Then, of course, there is my most painful memory regarding this subject, which just happened to take place on my very first Mother’s Day. We had gone out to lunch with Trent’s extended family. Camden, who was not yet six months old at the time, decided he needed a nap as we were driving to the restaurant, so we pulled him out of the car, infant seat/carrier and all, and let him continue sleeping. Later, on our way out of the restaurant, a lady spotted us and decided to voice her disapproval loudly to the woman sitting next to her. “Why do mothers these days stick their babies in those things?!” she said. “Why doesn’t she just hold him? When our children were small, we used to hold them.” Yeah. Happy Mother’s Day. I don’t suppose she would have appreciated the alternative, though, which would have been to wake Camden up and take him, fussing and crying and protesting, into a noisy restaurant. And yet again, I was left to wonder, “Am I a bad mother?”

I realize there is an issue with the generational gap. None of us are perfect. I’ve seen young people be rude to elderly people, and I’ve seen elderly people be young people. But why?

I have tried to let these kind of things “roll off,” but it’s hard to hear a message repeated over and over and over and not pay attention to it. I’m tired of feeling emotionally abused and prejudged and hated because I am a member of “the younger generation.” And I have come to the conclusion that it is just like any other form of prejudice: It is destructive and it is unfair to people as individuals. I may not be a victim of hate crimes in a physical way, like many ancient forms of prejudice have given way to, but experiences like this are damaging nonetheless. And it has begun to affect me. I find myself acting differently. I avert my eyes from people when I usually would smile at them. I duck my head and am ashamed of bringing out my iPhone in the supermarket because I worry that the people around me think I’m texting or ignoring my child, even though I’m just pulling up my shopping list. It’s wrong. I don’t like it. It’s making a difference in my life.

So, I’m just trying to make sense of this. I’m tired of carrying it around with me and not understanding it. I’m hoping that this message will reach a few fellow members of the human race who will be able to help me piece together what is going on, or maybe just to get out the message: Please don’t hate me and prejudge me just because I am a member of the “younger generation.” I’m doing my best to be a good mother, a good person, and worthwhile member of society.