Saturday 20 August 2011

Ghostly patterings

About a month ago, Mel wrote a post which has haunted me ever since. She addressed the phenomenon of what she called 'ghost blogs':
I'm talking about those strange places on the Internet that haven't been closed; they remain up, abandoned, their owners disappearing into the ether. There is no final post at the top announcing the cessation of the project. On the contrary, the most recent post (which is sometimes years old) usually gives no sense that the blog is coming to an end. It's like walking into a house and finding the table fully set with a warm meal but devoid of people.
I have a number of such blogs in my reader: mostly people who, like me, have gone on to parent after infertility. In some cases, we were brought together solely through the coincidence of cycling at roughly the same time, but there were others with whom I felt I had some connection beyond our common experience of IF. I still wonder from time to time how they are, how they find the experience of motherhood.
And I'm acutely aware too that this blog has also become one of those 'ghost blogs'. I've come back to it a few times since my daughter was born, but it has lain more or less dormant for a little over two years. I'm loath to take it down: it represents a very a significant part of my life, but I've also thought very long and hard about whether I want to start posting in this particular place again. After much consideration, I've decided to move to new digs, to reflect the fact that I'm now in a very different place to the one I started this blog from.
I hope that, if there is anyone out there still following, you will come and see me over at http://ifsbutsandmaybes.wordpress.com/, where I try to work out what led me to step away from blogging, and also what's brought me back.