Please excuse a bit of Virgo navel-gazing! After surgery, I joked about my frustration that I couldn’t just experience my physical pain, I had to abstract it into metapain. Then I realized my labor had been more of a metalabor, my son’s NICU stay a metahospitalization. There was no metadeath or metagrief. But now, there is metablogging.

I’m back home after a week away, and trying to get back into a routine. I want to post something, but I’m conflicted, as always, about whether to post something rawer about the fresh things I’m working through (there’s no end of things for me to work through!), or whether to dredge something up that shows where I’ve been.

If I were to put together a book, it would probably flow chronologically from June 2013 to July 2014. I’m not going to dedicate much time to a book right now, because I’d feel guilty about spending energy on that when I should be focusing on my career. Still, I want to avoid “blogging the book”, which is why my posts may seem random and scattered – that’s an intentional choice, although I’m not sure if it’s the right one!

I also have all sorts of personal (and professional) boundaries to consider. Every modern parent must decide whether or not to write about and share images of their child in public. This is a very personal choice and I don’t think there’s a right answer. If Sacha had lived, I would have been quite private about him, just as I was about my pregnancy (that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have shared stories and images, but I would’ve kept it mainly to private texts, emails and fancy mailings – I go crazy for the nice paper).

Even in Sacha’s death, I feel uncomfortable sharing his story without the benefit of his input. “I won’t write about my children,” so many authors say, and I nod agreement. And yet here I am, writing about my child who will never be able to speak for himself, because his story became part of my own narrative just as we both took a sharp left and disappeared beneath the underbrush. If he had survived, of course we would also have been tightly linked. But this is different, because he doesn’t get to go on and develop his own narrative. And also, because we were war buddies.

Basically, I’m here despite my angst about this kind of publicness, and an inner critical voice telling me that if I’m going to write, I should be working on something formal and official to be published by a third party (coupled by a complicated, guilty reluctance to pursue that option at this time).

I’m hopping over those mental and emotional hurdles because I want to connect both with former strangers who have had similar experiences and with long-time friends who hopefully never will. I’m perplexed by the lack of societal knowledge about the human reproductive experience, and excited about the current generation’s ability to change that (aided by the democratizing power of new media, hooray internet!).

But on a personal level, posting my real-time experiences makes me feel too emotionally exposed. I prefer to dig into the past a bit. Since I’m not blogging chronologically, I like to hitch myself to a theme or epigraph.

What is a blog, anyway? What should it be? How long should it last?

I don’t really know. But I like writing and people are reading, so for now I’ll keep doing some more of the same. (How many times do I use the word “I” around here?! Lots, lots, lots of times.)

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