thank you, and good night

yesterday was our second bloggiversary, which seems like as good a point as any to bring this thing into the barn. i think we've had a good run, considering the average blog lasts six days.* i do appreciate the suggestion that what is published here is sometimes helpful to other people, but (1) this blog was first an outlet for our raw and immediate grief, and we're in a different place now, and (2) judging from the feedback we've gotten over the last two years, enough help has been distributed to allow us to walk away without any guilt.

*i have no idea what the average blog life is. i made it up. it just seems like it, okay?

so, tomorrow we leave for prague, and in a couple of weeks when we get back i'm starting a milo blog under this user name, which i'll launch when we're done tearing down this one; justin will probably be a co-contributor. and i'm going to start another, solo blog under a new user name - this blog will be the one in which i air my stained and dingy laundry. i plan for it to be a collection of well-thought-out and carefully edited essays, posted once or twice a week, with an occasional shocking revelation of my darkest self; in reality, it will probably mostly be my off-the-cuff thoughts hurriedly dashed off, with an occasional post on which i spent more than ten minutes.

i'm not going to restrict access to either blog, at least for now, but i request respectful handling if you decide to visit both blogs. if you wish to be notified of the launch and address of the milo blog or the navel-gazing blog, please e-mail me and tell me:

1. your name
2. your blog address
3. whether you want the milo, the navel, or the combo

please don't be offended if i ask you a few questions to determine who you are before i redirect you. and please don't make any anonymous requests.

thank you to everyone who has read, commented, encouraged us, and shared their blog back with us. we would not be here now without you.

most of all, thank you for acknowledging johannes - hans - our beloved firstborn. he's the reason we've written these two years. he deserves much more than this blog, and i like to think that some day his story will be told to an even broader audience. my face and neck are wet with tears as i think of him, of our plans for him to be a well-traveled and multi-lingual kid, of our gut-feeling that he would be a musician, of our visions of lazy saturday mornings spent playing with him in our bed. i miss his tentative kicks, his sweet calm, and all that he will never be. if i could, i would give him a thousand kisses right this very minute. god, i hope he had some perception, some inkling, of how much he was loved.

a fork

this blog sucks.

sure, there have been some high points, and some low points, and some of the low points have even been high points, blog-wise. but this blog has become incredibly uninteresting, at least as far as being a diary of life in the wake of stillbirth. and while in the early days of milo-hood, time was a huge factor in the frequency of posting and in my ability to contruct a coherent thought, it's not the issue now. it's not like i have time to kill, but i have enough i want to post badly enough to make the time for it. i have these big hairy constructions brewing about pregnancy and about adulthood and about fear that just won't work here.

here's the problem, kids: this blog is too public to write what's really on my mind. and it's too private to make it a life-of-milo blog. my real and virtual lives have come to overlap to the point that i can't fulfill either function properly. i want to do both things, though.

the proposed, three-step solution:

1. take this thing down. i think it may be time to put it to rest, anyway, and it's not like justin is using it as a regular outlet, either. btw, i could use some pointers from those of you who are technical smarty-pants as to how to save this text for my personal use without having it published online.
2. start a new, public blog, featuring all milo, all the time, except for an occasional musing about what might have been. suitable for all audiences including moms, grandmas, aunts, friend's moms, etc.
3. start a new, private blog, featuring my deepest, darkest thoughts. all names and pictures would be expunged to protect the innocent. news would be minimal. navel gazing would abound.

my concern about a double blog life is that the two blogs could eventually bleed into each other again, via fellow bloggers who comment on the public blog attracting the attention of the great-aunts, et al, who would then visit loss blogs and link to the private blog there. i don't want that scenario to develop. if i make that kind of effort, i want to be able to be completely uncensored on the private blog - a ship that has long ago sailed in this forum.

so i'm looking for some feedback from the three of you still checking in here: would you mind being exposed to only one blog and forgoing the other? if so, to which blog would you want access? if not, what alternate solution would you suggest? feel free to be completely honest. if you are sick to death of fluffy baby pictures, you will not hurt my feelings. if you find it absurd that anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to my navel-gazing without compensatory pictures of miloliciousness, just say so; the private blog would be for my benefit first and foremost; feedback to it would be welcome but secondary.

well?