Commence Segregation...

This will be one of the last posts focusing (partially at least) on Share Southern Vermont on THIS blog.

Why? Because SSV has it's very own, brand-new, shiny blog!! Click over to oooo-aaahhhh and answer the burning question in the first post!

Slowly, as time allows and as I figure out this eleged new blogging feature that allows me to transfer posts from blog to blog, I will be moving the backstory over. For the month of January the SSV Memory Making Giveaway info will remain on BOTH sites, but in February all you will see is a tiny little reminder on the sidebar to click over and feast your eyes on the NEW prize pack.

This is simultaneously exciting and sad for me. This blog feels (and pardon the ridiculous metaphor) rather like a uterus to me. It grows and expands to hold all I fill it with. It is a safe place for new idea to grow and develop, but expels it when the idea is too big, needing a new home. SSV's new home is ready, both in blogland and in a meeting room in Southern Vermont. It is time for BHB to return to it's roots for a spell.

(if you are of the praying variety please send one up that the NEXT big idea doesn't hit me over the head for a good long while! Is this is a bad time to tell you that the title of yet another book swirling around in my head popped out while driving yesterday?)

Damn tangents.

As I was saying, it is time for these posts to return to the rhumeratory nature of grief and loss throughout the years.

Recently, I have received a fair amount of comments and posts about my "upbeat nature" and "positive attitude". Yes, I certainly am taking the largest shipment of nearly rotten lemons and turning them into a bearable beverage - but, and this might sound crazy so bear with me - this blog isn't feeling like the place to be positive right now.

I don't mean that I am going to morph into a scary version of a movie character. But I do mean that I have hard some dark times. I have nearly dove headfirst into the hole many times during this grief journey. And many of you are teetering on the edge, as I type.

It is for you, the newly - and not so newly bereaved parents, that I started this blog. I owe it to you, and to myself, to write about the experience from the early years and throughout. It is eerie how easily I can put myself right back there and draw from the emotion to find words. I recently received an email in reference to my Exhale column, "Did you write that after emma died, like at that 2 month mark?"

I was stunned into a computer haze for a moment as I digested her question. The answer is no. I wrote that in December as my submission to become a comlumnist for the new magazine. But her comment made me go back and read it through her eyes, through my eyes 8 years ago.

THAT is what I want to be producing here. I'm sure occassionally I'll post something surface and fun...heck- I'm addicted to Show and Tell, aren't you?

I'll make you a deal. I'll go back if you go forward...one step, one day at a time.

xoxo to ALL of you