Captain's Log Stardate 08022015: Hello world!

Hello world!
I have had a personal blog for many years, but since I became pregnant with (and subsequently delivered) my first baby, I have had many thoughts and ideas I wanted to share with more people than just my family and close friends.  Thus, I decided it was time (at the late hour of 11:30 pm) to create a blog that would chronicle my thoughts and ideas about life, pregnancy, and childrearing.  My hope is that some of what I have to share will help others who may have/had similar thoughts or struggles and just wanted someone to understand or to share that little tip that I wish someone had told me.

I anticipate that I will write about the many thoughts I've had about pregnancy and baby care-taking, but I also expect that I will periodically write about political hot topics.  I have a Master of Divinity from a school that was quite focused on social justice topics, so I find myself having thoughts about stuff fairly frequently.  I welcome constructive and helpful comments and will delete trollish or willfully argumentative comments.  Debate, especially online with people I don't know, is not my favorite form of conversation, so I will generally prefer to avoid it.  I do enjoy "meeting" new people, though, and hope people will feel safe to introduce themselves.  However you have found your way here, I hope that you will find something makes you think, gives you comfort that you're not alone, and/or helps you avoid having to find out that little tip through the frustration of trial and error.  Welcome, world, to my little starship!

As to the name of my blog:
I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up, and it was one of my favorite shows.  I still like to watch it on Netflix (which rarely happens nowadays with the attempts to keep the baby from seeing too much television).  Thus, when I became pregnant and found myself writing again, it felt natural to call my thoughts the Captain's Log.  I felt a bit like a ship carrying a little passenger.  Now I feel that the idea of my life as a ship navigating through life is still appropriate.  For the purpose of my writings, I will refer to myself as the Captain, and my husband will be the First Mate.  I'm still tossing around ideas for what to call the baby; for now I will call her the Junior Mate (which I don't think is actually a thing, but it's my blog and my prerogative ;).

I chose the name Hecate for my starship.  During my senior year in college, I took a class about ancient Greek religion.  My final project for the class involved researching and presenting about an ancient Greek god/goddess, discovering the earliest presentations of this deity.  The goddess I pulled out of the hat was Hecate (a.k.a. Hekate).  Though she later became associated with witchcraft and some darker sides of spiritual experience, her earliest role was as the goddess of the crossroads and the threshold.  (She also helped guide people across the border from life to death, which is where the darker side came from in later incarnations.)  In more precise terms, she was the goddess of liminal spaces - those places where you are neither one place nor the other.  (At a crossroad, you are technically on both roads; at a threshold, you are both inside and outside the house.)  It was felt that these places were particularly vulnerable due to this quality of being between spaces, so Hecate played an important role in protecting the person who found him/herself there.  As I have continued on my life journey, I keep finding myself feeling like I am again living in a liminal space.  In fact, I have started to wonder if life itself isn't just a series of liminal spaces.  I feel that it was fortuitous that Hecate was the name I drew; she feels like my own personal goddess at this point.