Coming Out

I've been blogging for a long time. Maybe it's only been ten months or so here at It's Not a Habit, but I started my first "blog" back in 1998, before Blogger even got started. My blog at the time was nothing more than a huge table in an html file that I added to every few days on my personal website. Once I discovered Blogger a couple of years later, I switched my personal blog over to that service and I've been there for the last seven years or so. It's the record of the last several years of my life, including my first corporate job, our adventures restoring a historic New England home, our two years spent in Germany, and many trips, meals, and mundane daily activities along the way. With pictures.

Since starting that blog, I've also kept a bunch of other blogs, more specialized ones for my different interests. Some I kept private, for tracking health or weight loss. One was a pregnancy blog for my first pregnancy (in 2000) that became my first miscarriage blog. I've kept public blogs for my involvement in fandom, for my cross-stitching, for music reviews, and even password-protected blogs just for bitching with my friends. But I always kept these blogs in tandem with my personal blog, which is on my main site, and which my family, in-laws, and friends read with some regularity.

The readership of that blog is most likely why I've felt the need to have other, more specialized blogs over the years. I mean, back when I wanted to talk about the latest X-Files fanfiction I'd read (or written), I sure didn't want my mom following that link. And when I wanted to talk about my latest miscarriage, I couldn't deal with the thought of a random co-worker knowing about it from the Internet. (Not that a lot of co-workers read my site, but hey, it's the Internet. Word gets out.)

So that's why I started It's Not a Habit. After five miscarriages, most of which I never went into much detail about on my personal site (except for the first one, which I wrote extensively about at the time), I knew we were going to have to buckle down with the treatments and I was going to need to talk about them somewhere. I didn't know much about IF blogs, I wasn't one of those people who went looking for kindred spirits and found Julie and Tertia and the rest, but I had been blogging long enough to know that for any special interest there would be a community of bloggers, and I wasn't wrong.

I'm so glad I found you all. It was such a relief to discover other recurrent miscarriers talking about their experiences, their fears, their treatments. It was also great to gain a better understanding of other aspects of infertility, things that I hadn't thought much about at the time -- SIF, IVF, adoption. For many months, this blog and my Bloglines list of IF blogs have pretty much been the center of my blogging activity. But I can feel things starting to shift.

And I don't mean I'm leaving this blog behind. Only that there are places where things are starting to converge, and I know it's only going to continue as things go forward. I'm not expressing this well, but basically, it's like this: sometimes I need to keep things separated, and other times I need to bring things together. Now seems to be a time for bringing things together.

As this pregnancy has progressed, I've started to talk more about it on my personal site, and I know that once the baby arrives, I'll continue to do that. My husband and I live far away from our families, and one big reason why I keep my site in the first place is so that people can keep up with what we're doing. The baby's going to get a lot of coverage over there -- the grandparents are going to demand it, if nobody else.

So what I'd like to do right now is invite any of you who may be interested to visit my personal website. It's not that exciting, but it's the rest of my life (or much of it) and you're welcome to read about it, join in, comment, whatever: www.raspberryworld.com (copy/paste in browser address window).

You'll also notice I have a baby blog over there. It's mostly made up of the weekly e-mail updates I've been sending out to our faraway families since week 16 or so. It was hard to make myself do it, especially the early ones, but I think writing them helped me believe that the pregnancy was real. So they're archived on the baby blog over there, and you're welcome to see the normal face I put on my pregnancy for the people who don't understand the trauma and fear of pregnancy after recurrent losses. It's not really a mask, it's more like... what I might have been like if it hadn't taken me six years to get here. Or at least, I like to think of it that way. Last night my mom told me on the phone that she's felt so involved in this pregnancy -- despite not having seen me since July -- because of those updates. And that made me feel like it was the right thing to do, even though it wasn't always easy to put the fears aside and write those weekly emails.

I still don't want all the people who read my personal site finding their way over here. The things I've expressed here are only for the eyes of all of you dear "strangers" on the Internet. Is that weird? I'm so grateful for the support and love I've felt from all of you, and the good thoughts and prayers I know you've spared me over these months. I'm not going away, just giving you the chance to see more, if you want. And it's not even National Coming Out Day yet.