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.
27 April 2008 at 9:13 pm
I think you’re right that reading blogs makes it easier to be comfortable with the uglier sides of motherhood. I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading “The Mask of Motherhood”–published in 2000–whose point is that NO ONE TALKS ABOUT HOW HARD IT IS. I think it’s still true, but I can also see that a lot of what was missing eight years ago and earlier, I’m getting now from reading blogs. Pity that the type of honesty we see in the blog world isn’t easier to come by in “real life.” But I’ll take what I can get.
At the same time, I worry about what I write on the worst days. About what my daughters would think, reading it at 10 or 15. That problem’s not unique to blogging, though: I’d write the same stuff anyway, in a journal, if a blog weren’t an option.
27 April 2008 at 10:12 pm
You know, with my “real life” friends, a lot of what we DO talk about is what’s hard. But also what’s fun and funny and which park we should go to. But with blogs you just get a lot more variety of the hard and the fun.
As for what Baby would think about what I say here, well, I can only imagine her reaction would be much like mine was to my mother’s journal. It was very interesting, but it didn’t feel personal. I mean, I was just a baby. She was a young mother, a totally different person. And I WOULDn’t write this stuff if it weren’t for a blog, so I feel it’s “better out than in” as they say in Shrek.
27 April 2008 at 10:34 pm
thanks for sharing the article…food for thought :)
28 April 2008 at 2:05 am
While I am yet to be a parent, I have been of late, quite fascinated with the issue of blogging and privacy and mommy blogs are particularly interesting. I love how you wrote your article and how you made it a point to make your blog about your life and how your baby is in your blog because she is in your life. It is admirable that you exercise prudence and good judgment, not making this the only memory store and not revealing everything on here. That’s the key I suppose, to this online privacy issue, being in control. I’m the product manager of a free blogging service provider called i.ph and we are fanatical about giving extremely deep and granulated privacy controls to our bloggers. We let them set the privacy of each article and photo and what not on their blogs so they can properly choose their audience. I firmly believe that blogs are conversations gone global and that there is merit in being able to choose the people we open up certain things to. Thanks for a good read. Have a great day and blog on!
28 April 2008 at 11:57 am
I agree with everything you said in this post. My writing does focus primarily on the babies, but that is merely because they consume every second of my day. If my blog still exists when they are older, I think they’ll be amused by the stories from from their childhood.
I also agree that reading other blogs makes me more comfortable and confident in my parenting decisions.
29 April 2008 at 7:38 pm
I agree with everything you said and ditto to Christy. I feel that blogging has given me a way to not hold onto these types of secrets. It is an online journal and I feel that I am a better mom too. I think I realize that I am not alone when it comes to my feelings.