Recently, when I was visiting my mother, I happened upon the journal she wrote when I was a small child and we were living in China. One entry written when I was about the same age Baby is now mentioned that I was out visiting with my nanny and her husband, and that my mother was grateful for their help, that she needed a break from me.
I smiled at reading it. Of course she needed some time away from her one-year-old, especially given that she had recently moved to the other side of the globe with my alternately neglectful and enraged father. Any parent–any person–sometimes needs some time alone. But even in the privacy of some journal, it was obvious my mother felt uncomfortable admitting this.
But I wouldn’t, not at all. And I got to wondering if my experience of motherhood is different because of all the journals of mothers I read–all the blogs. Maybe I have a broader sense of the gamut of experiences and emotions that can attend mothering, and that’s only made me more comfortable with my own, and with sharing them. Certainly I get that from my “real life” friends, but without the barriers of geography, acquaintance, or socially-accepted practices of privacy, it’s a lot more frequent and possible from blogs.
I read an article recently about how blogging can affect bloggers’ children. The consensus was that the effect is bad. In my case, I only see how blogging has made me a more educated and relaxed parent, which I feel certain has benefited my darling child. I certainly don’t think I am exploiting her, or creating embarrassments for her in the future. She’s not the theme of my blog, though she’s a focus, and I do make some efforts at anonymity. I am not nasty about her. And I don’t depend on my blog as my only or even primary source of memory-making about her childhood–I don’t share everything here. Plus, I am not at all sure that my blog will even be around when she’s old enough to care about it. Technology changes, and our lives do. I would delete the blog if it affected her negatively without a second thought, but that’s hardly the case at this point. And I don’t depend on my blog, on my accounts of Baby, for money.
I enjoy blogging, and I enjoy writing about Baby, but the focus is my life, not hers. And my life has been enriched by blogging (by which I mean writing mine, and reading others’), and in turn, I think, so has Baby’s.
