What brought me back to this place was the Time Magazine cover, feeding the lactivist fervor that never quite goes away.
Once I was back, I started reading my old posts about breastfeeding and feeling the gulf between who I was and who I am. My girls are both school-age now, and nursing them is a vague (but intense) memory.
Naomi, whose weaning I obsessed over, stayed up until nearly 11 tonight finishing her last (I think) project of third grade. Miriam, who nursed perfunctorily and weaned herself at the continent age of 16 months, recently wrote a hysterical story (with pictures, of course) about an event that happened when she was a toddler (when the cat ran away). They are both so grown up, so *astounding* in their own ways.
And me, I've been unable to write, in the public way I used to. The deluge of all the social media options paralyzes me. I have a thought: do I tweet it, FB it, G+ it, forget it? What? By the time I can decide where it goes and how to get it there, it's gone. To add to that, I am ambivalent about what I want to share. Putting myself "out there" feels much scarier now.
Rereading my old posts, I've remembered the fire and passion that used to spur me to think about how and why I did whatever I did. That level of public self-examinaion has been, for better or worse, absent from my life for the last few years. I find myself suddenly in my mid-thirties, no closer to what I truly want for myself than I was at 29. Further, you could say. Dreams have died. Pragmatism has won the day.
But that's the neat thing about blogging: you can always come back, and blog like it's still 2004 with all your guts splayed out for public consumption. So I'm coming back. Hello, again :)
