Wednesday 31 October 2012

Talking about parenting is a minefield

Or rather talking about parenting is like walking through a minefield.  A really horrible minefield filled with lots and lots of different footpaths to follow, all filled with lots and lots of mines.  Whichever one you take you still trip over some, there is no safe path.  Sometimes I think it might be best not to choose any path at all, just hide under a rock or something!
This has been my experience anyway which is why I have closed this blog down for a few days.  After receiving some worrying comments on a post I did about Baby Led Weaning, I discovered that I offended some people that I know personally and I felt exposed and vulnerable.  Obviously, if you know me at all you would know that I am not the sort of person who goes out of their way to upset people.  But I am someone with opinions, strong ones, which begs the question, talk about parenting or not? Clearly if you have strong opinions about something you are bound to upset someone at some point even when you don't mean to, so does that mean it's better not to say anything at the risk of upsetting someone? Or do you say what you need to say because you have a voice, a heart, an idea, a truth and it needs telling? It is a hard a difficult road to take, the truth road, and I am not talking about right or wrong, good or bad, but personal truth, my truth.  
And yet I find it so hard to remember that what I see as truth, someone else might not.  Is it possible to hate something for myself and yet not hate it for someone else?
Is it possible to love something for myself and not want to share it with the world?



I really am truly sorry for upsetting people with my words, my truth, I used to think "Those who mind don't matter, those who matter don't mind"  but perhaps life isn't as simple as this because sometimes the truth hurts and I don't want to hurt people.

I took a risk with my Baby Led Weaning post, I exposed part of myself that I haven't exposed before, I expressed what I thought about something in an uncompromising way, no "if it's right for you" but my own thoughts on something without apology.  But I made a mistake.  Not in what I said, but in how I said it.  
And I think that is the key to this experience, (and thank goodness I have learnt something from it, or else it would have been for nothing) I have to think carefully not about what I say, but about the way I say it, because, unlike when chatting friends where intonation and emphasis can change the meaning of what is being told, the truth of a message can be lost in the facelessness of the written word.  

So here I am facing the future, I am not hiding away any more, but I am carefully selecting which bits of myself to reveal, which thoughts, which truths, and thinking carefully about how I expose them.  I am facing the future with love and kindness, sensitivity and peace, trying to remember that some truths are not universal even if they mean the world to me.

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I love reading people's comments on what I have written, but I am not in the business of debating, this blog is my space, so if you can't say something nice, the please, don't say anything at all. If you don't like what I have written then please don't read it.