This blog came into existence to allow me an outlet for some of the conversations I felt a great need to have that were not and are not appropriate in the context of a breastfeeding support group helping breastfeeding moms. *sounds of record player needle scratching along the top of an old 45* Conversation smonversation! I wanted to say what I wanted to say and conversation was not even on my mind when I plunked down my money for the domain name. I bought the domain name in the throws of a grand and glorious need to scream “Are you KIDDING me?!” about something or the other. I was incensed! I was finally going to let loose all the roiling boiling thoughts that I had kept on a short leash because they were not appropriate to screech out while I was trying to support someone.
I was going to become one of THOSE lactivist! You know who I’m talking about. The lactivists that almost universally face the common sentiment that they are too vocal, too in-your-face, too strident, too militant, too much, too _____. I decided a blog would allow me a pressure valve when the hard parts of breastfeeding advocacy got to be too much for my cerebrum to handle. ONWARD!
Then I rethought things a bit.
Throwing public temper tantrums loses it’s appeal after a period of time. Imagine that! I waited long enough for an expiration date on the red haze before my eyes and then began to organize the blog space I had given myself. I didn’t want to go off half-cocked from the beginning so I started reading other breastfeeding blogs and learning about the back-end parts of having a blog. Apparently Google is now my friend and I want to pay attention to how Google views and parses my pages. After years of moving about in areas of the internet protected by robots.txt files that consisted of
User-agent: * disallow
I was now going a courtin’ some of those very same robots and spiders and indexers. It’s been interesting trying to sort how to manage tags and header info to actually garner their attention. *gently laughing* I’m sure I will be coming back to these early pages and redoing a lot of the “not seen but heard by the search engines” parts of the pages.
Since the original burst of red-hot primal need to scream I’ve reworked what I want to do here. Don’t get me wrong. The idea of creating a space for myself where I could scream my guts out still holds a lot of appeal. So much appeal it’s scary some days. Who knows – one day someone may come here and go “Whoa! She’s really letting rip!” My hope though, is that I will not show my hiney that way in public. I have friends who are setting awesome examples of how to advocate and conversate *yes, I just totally made up that word* in the public sphere and I’m taking notes as best I can.
SO – now as I head forward I’m hoping to have some of those harder conversations (really – conversations), and maaaaaaybe some little debates within the arena of breastfeeding and breastfeeding support. Gentle, desultory debate would be my goal. If I start getting knots in my stomach and visceral reactions to conversation here then the blog isn’t doing it’s job for me.
I’m also looking to this blog to help me get back to the basics and work on my breastfeeding info. chops. I homeschool my kids so time during my day is limited. In addition, I tend to take on more of the “technological” issues at the community where I moderate leaving more of the hands-on helping of the members to other moderators. I know a lot about breastfeeding but it also feels like I’ve forgotten a lot too. I like the idea of having the chance to look at resources and research related topics I want to look at, rather than focusing on whatever the current wave of concern happens to be within the community I interact in.
So, there you have it. My mostly thought out raison d’etre for the blog. *grin*
