Image

So I’m making it official… finally. This will be my last post here. “Still Thinking” has been around for 5 years now, which is fairly long in the world of blogging. Did I ever write about how “still thinking” became the name? I decided to start a blog. And I couldn’t think of a smart, catchy, meaningful, all-encompassing, fabulous gem of a name. And so I typed in “still thinking” because I was, literally, still thinking of the perfect name. And, well, it stuck.

In 2007, I thought about breast cancer & breast cancer treatments & beating breast cancer & my job & breast cancer & my mother having breast cancer & my marriage & breast cancer. And then my mother died & I dropped into a hole so deep that I wasn’t sure I would ever breathe again.

In 2008, I thought about anger & therapy & two miscarriages & fertility & anger & quitting my job & just the outright suckage of life & therapy. Lots of therapy. They say there are 5 stages of grief — I got stuck in anger for, oh, a few years. So, so, angry.

In 2009, I thought about miscarriage #3 & living without my mother & infertility & anger & fertility testing & exorcising long-buried religion-related demons & infertility.

In 2010, I thought about mothering my 20-something-year-old sister & being motherless & not being a mother & infertility & religion & bitterness & infertility.

In 2011, I thought about pregnancy. Being pregnant, staying pregnant, obsessively looking for blood & any other sign that this one isn’t going to end well pregnant. And then I became a mother.

And I’m still thinking, obviously… but this no longer feels like the right place to think aloud.

So I want to say thank you. Thank you to whoever is reading & was reading & may read in the future. Thank you for your comments, your emails & your thoughts throughout the last 5 years. There were days, months, maybe even a year or so, that I felt closer to ladies I had never met in real life than I did to the ones I saw daily. My “bloggy friends” were a flotation device that held my nose precariously perched above the waters of anger, grief, loss, bitterness & hopelessness. And then in the next post, we would talk about paint colors & that was ok too.

I’m going to leave this blog up because mothers are dying every day & somewhere, there might be a daughter who needs to know that she’s not going crazy & that, with time, you actually will function again.

Or someone who just had their 3rd miscarriage & got online, only to read that the odds are most definitely not in their favor & who just needs evidence that it IS possible for pregnancy to actually result in a baby.

If you’re reading, will you please email me & say hi? Or friend me on Facebook? If you already don’t know, hi, my name is Sarah Weathers Rettew. Thank you so much for reading.