(BTW, the reason I'm using the above two images on all these pages is because I consider them symbols of Bonnie, who used the flower ball as a "bullet" on her home page, and the breastfeeding Isis as part of her web logo/sig.)

Once upon a time I got the following letter from Bonnie:

Subject: mothering and the internet
Date: Sat, 25 May 96 09:23 PDT
From: Bonnie Bedford
To: tachyon@cats.ucsc.edu

Greetings!

I'm finally getting around to writing that article that mothering mag gave me the go ahead for. The idea is that women have changed a few corners of the internet into a support group or "lifeline" for mothers where questions are answered by experienced mothers and professionals and where friendships are formed.

So naturally I want to include you.

Has your life/mothering been touched in a positive way by your participation in the internet?

You've been online longer than I have - has it changed as far as support for mothers goes? Did your BBS have any mothering groups?

Where are the best places online to get support for birth/breastfeeding/mothering.

Maybe I should write about how accepting/hold hands and sing kumbaya parent-l is now.
I'm gathering my thoughts to join the fray.

Bonnie
bedford@islandnet.com
Dive Into The Internet:
http://www.islandnet.com/~bedford/bedford.html

And I started to write a reply, but arrgh!!! like so many of the other letters I start to write, I never even finished it or sent anything of it to Bonnie other than just telling her at one point that I had started it but (duuhhh!) not finished it yet. Arrgh again!!!

Anyway, here's an excerpt from my unfinished reply. I think I'll make it in red for embarrassment at not having finished it. :-(

I'll see if I can give a short version of my story, with an emphasis on actually managing to get the message finished and mailed to you rather than trying to be particularly coherent :-): OK, I went onto the BBS scene in a big way back in 1984, and put up my BBS in 1986. There was really *nothing* about mothering on any of the BBS's I was on, because at that time the BBS community was all childless programmer types and students. When Sam was born in 1988 I would post a lot of messages about him, but they were definitely very coy (I have some of these on a web page but will be kind of embarrassed if people from parent-l, radical mamas, etc. read them because there's about one mention of breastfeeding but several appearances of "bottle of juice") because I didn't feel comfortable saying much about birth, breastfeeding, etc. for all these people who didn't have any of it in common with me. Basically, Sam was *the* baby as far as the BBS's were concerned. Now, twelve years after I first got on, all the people from the BBS's who I've kept up with are still childless.

(Except for Jon of course, who I met on a BBS. :-))

I was very much a loner in terms of being a mother (and otherwise) and didn't read "parenting" books and magazines because they all seemed too nasty and insulting. I didn't go to LLL because I thought it was supposed to be a breastfeeding class for people who couldn't figure out how. I tried to start a parenting group myself once but it went nowhere. I didn't get "Mothering" because somehow I'd gotten the idea that it was a "women's place is in the home" Christian magazine. (But later when I finally actually looked at a copy I did subscribe to it.)

I started getting into newsgroups and mailing lists shortly after Sam was born, but they were not parenting related, and the demographics were still mainly childless techie/student, so anything I wrote about Sam had basically a cute or novelty effect. I could see that misc.kids was a miserable place so I stayed out of it. The first place where I found any kindred spirits in terms of mothering/parenting online or off was when I got onto home-ed when Sam was 3 or 4, and then parent-l and so on after that. I've signed onto various other mother-type lists that sounded interesting but then unsubscribed pretty rapidly because the general "I can't stand my brats" attitudes of so many people really depressed me.

OK, to rehash some of that a little, basically I pretty much thought of myself as a culture of one until I signed onto the home-ed mailing list in early 1992 and finally started to meet other parents who actually seemed to enjoy being with their children and treat them with love and respect.

Then in 1994 Bonnie Bedford came into my life (I put it that way because it would amuse Bonnie). She started out as a buddy on home-ed, TCS list, and the now-defunct Learning List, but then in early 1995 told me about a new mailing list on the topic of "extended breastfeeding", called parent-l. Despite the fact that my second child Arthur was not that many months old I was very intrigued by this, because I had breastfed Sam until he was 3 1/3 years old but didn't really know other breastfeeding mothers.

Bonnie took me by the hand into a new world. Parent-l in those early days was like a 24-hour-a-day breastfeeding mothers' salon, a party that never ended, where women discoursed about their lives, children, politics, etc. with great wit and style and experience and knowledge and not a flame to be seen.

To a very large extent Bonnie's online world was my world. It seemed like we were on every possible home-ed and parent-l spin-off list together. We were both on the fatfree vegetarian list. We were together on the Spiderwoman web-design list and some of its spinoffs. We became great friends and sent each other a lot of mail both on and off all the lists.

Bonnie was an everyday companion in my world, to such an extent that I literally forgot that I had never met her in person -- when in the summer of 1996 a visiting parent-l subscriber asked which other parent-l subscribers I'd met, I immediately and automatically named Bonnie and a local friend, then stopped in surprise realizing my mistake.

Bonnie online was the best friend anyone could have. She was fierce and passionate in speaking up for her beliefs, family and friends, but also very caring and kind and always with an encouraging word for others who were having problems, even though her cancer was so much worse a problem than theirs. She was wickedly funny in every possible way, from sophisticated humor to wild raunch to satirical poetry, but she was also very industrious -- we both joked about making funny breastfeeding web pages, but then she was the one who went on to make a huge, comprehensive and highly acclaimed breastfeeding site that has helped women all over the world. We both talked about putting up family bed and unschooling pages, but she was the one who actually went ahead and did it. If you do any looking around through all the breastfeeding, attachment parenting and homeschooling pages on the web, in a large sense it will seem like truly all links lead to Bonnie.

Unlike the rest of us, Bonnie always knew what to say and was never at a loss for words. As her cancer got worse and worse

* to be continued *