Samantha is a 27 year old married mother-of-two that works in the construction industry. During the day she (sometimes) wears a hard hat, coveralls and steel toed boots on downtown Toronto construction sites. But at home, in the evenings, she gently constructs beautiful social nets – she blogs and builds pretty web buttons that bind together a potent roster of rookie moms.

Temporarily Me is the blog portal associated with a design shop called Designing Temptation. This is a textbook design firm / blog model and the synergy is obvious and powerful. But look closer, there’s more going on here. Go back to Temporarily Me and check the links page and see buttons for Mom Pack, Blogamama, Mom Blog Network, etc and of course Blogher. Suddenly I understand; this author is a participator, and she is so positively charged by the ‘mom genre’ networks that she has hit on an innovation and started her own club! Her husband is a commercial roofer, and now she uses her design skills to weave her own network called Being a Rookie Mom Ain’t So Bad. This is styled as a photo challenge, but Samantha will be the first to tell you its really just another great way for young moms to share pictures and socialize.

Sam is ahead of the curve in social networking, and her techniques are worth studying - her Tempting Mama Twitter account now has 380 followers, due in part to the brilliant avatar. One thing I noticed right away is how her blog incorporates lots of popular social networking buttons. Her Stumble Page is focused on motherhood, but assembled from lots of diverse source material.

When it comes to actually writing her own signature brand of Temporarily Me daily content, Samantha is very prolific and demonstrates good time management skills. Common themes include sleep deprivation and coffee appreciation, and experiences surrounding a summer of motherhood. I chuckled when I read in July about her taking a week off to have a 2nd baby, and promising an immediate return to readers one week later… this doesn’t sound like a rookie mom to me!

Okay now the real reason why I love Samantha – she puts it on the line. She is genuine and open and writes from the heart. I remember reading the post she wrote back in January under her blog’s Marriage tag where she opened up about her own marital problems. I marveled at the honesty and the bravery of her self documentation – she had the courage to step out from behind the façade and face reality in confessional writing that becomes the ultimate public self exploration. The next day she started dismantling the facade and her readership helped.

Coming from broken homes, we have both witnessed parental fights, resentment and divorce. Over the past eight years, we’ve unintentionally fallen into the same pattern. Recently, our marriage has consisted of a constant barrage of verbal assaults, emotional abuse and constant reminders of the others faults.

This post caught my heart. It impacted me and now I will never forget this author, and her story. It compels me to follow her on Twitter and bookmark her prodigiously – she has opened up a new genre to me. Sam begins that landmark March 11th, 2008 post by saying that although the subject is taboo, she found the courage to write this by reading Mama Loves ‘the post I might delete later’ which encourages people who are suffering social discomfort to write about their plight. Mama Loves and Samantha both believe that taboo topics are finally seeing the light of day because of blogs. And so Temporarily Me is evolving into a wonderful animal. Because of her own hardships, Sam is the perfect host for a blog based social network that provides information and emotional support.