Their secret identities are still safe.
As anyone who’s been reading my posts for a while now knows, I am a mommy. S’matter of fact, I’ve been one for like 10,000 years now–okay, not really. It just FEELS that way. Sometimes!
I haven’t blogged overly much about the offspring for the following reasons: (1) One’s own children are of course always deeply fascinating topics of contemplation, discussion and analysis, but other people’s generally aren’t, (2) I am used to compartmentalizing my maternity into an absolutely personal and familial mode, and therefore don’t really feel the pressing need to blog about it here (or discuss it at work or at social occasions with childless acquaintances or in any other setting where children are not the primary focus) and (3) violating my kids’ privacy makes me cringe.
Oooh, what was that? Children should have privacy?
Not everybody goes for this idea. However, enough people do that I actually stumbled across this article today:
Is This Tantrum on the Record? The ground rules for writing about your kids.
By Emily Bazelon
It’s not a bad article, though all the “spouse” stuff is not only nonapplicable to me, I’m not sure it’s really that relevant in general. The points she brought up, though, that I found thought-provoking were:
What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I’ve revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they’d have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?
Some writers believe their kids are fair game only when they’re small. Steve Almond blogged about his daughter Josie for Babble until she was a year and a half and then stopped. “The blog medium has a certain kind of immediacy, and a reciprocal surrendering of privacy, that we don’t want in our lives forever—and that Josie may not want, either,” he explained. Maybe it’s better to confine yourself to events kids can’t remember themselves—their “prehistory,” as Michael Lewis, author of the hilarious Slate column “Dad Again,” puts it.
You mine your kid for material, but you tell yourself that certain categories of behavior are off-limits. That last rule I got from Neal Pollack, the author of Alternadad. His young son Elijah’s bathroom habits are fair game for Pollack’s blog, but his son’s discovery of his sexuality, Pollack says, is not.
In my paranoid moments, I worry that by writing about our kids, we’re encouraging them to loosen or lose their own boundaries. Then someday, they’ll hurtle toward the vortex that produced the awful, self-destructive oversharing of former Gawker editor Emily Gould, as she related at such length in the New York Times Magazine recently.
I think…it’s going to end up being a combination of my judgment as the initial entry into the situation, and their judgment being the final decision-maker. I will decide if I think it’s appropriate to blog about a specific situation involving them, and they always have absolute veto power over it. This is the second-most morally comfortable situation for me. The MOST comfortable situation would be if I made a firm commitment to never blog about them at ALL but I already know that I’d wanna violate that so baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad periodically that I refuse to set myself up for failure like that, dammit.
I did already ask the offspring if they minded me blogging about them. They said “No.” (Of course, they were playing “Super Smash Brothers” at the time, so it’s possible they may not really have registered a word I said.)
So, anyway, here is a quick introduction to Their Awesomenesses:
J is fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school. He is over six feet tall, wears size 13 shoes, has a full complement of secondary hair growth and a voice that is one octave deeper than his father’s. He is an honors english, history and biology student and when he took the PSAT “just for practice” this year, scored so high on the verbal section that he has been pre-enrolled in all the relevant AP classes for his junior and senior years. He has a shockingly dry and clever wit; when he is conversing with adults he is comfortable with, they are usually reduced to unwilling (because a kid shouldn’t be that damn grown-up funny!) snickers, quickly giving into outright laughter. He is a very reserved person; on those occasions that he displays real vulnerability, I always end up feeling honored that he is willing to trust me with his emotions and an inner glimpse of the real J.
B is ten years old, a fifth-grader; he’ll be starting middle school in the fall. He is over average height for his age but not so strikingly as his brother is; he is also of a much more compact build and is by far the more athletic child–he is one of the star players on his ice hockey team. He can’t understand why anybody reads books on purpose, though he can sometimes be tempted by tomes on mechanical systems, chemistry, outer space…fiction simply does not move him. He regularly gets A’s in math and B’s (when he’s not feeling lazy) and C’s (when he is feeling lazy) in everything else. There is little to no filter between his brain and his mouth; like his brother, B often has the adults around him in stitches, but for entirely different reasons. He has a bad temper but over the years has managed to figure out to an impressive degree how to control it; he is powerfully motivated by love, in both that case and in general.
On a general note, they are extraordinarily good kids. Cliched to say so, I know, but it’s really true. They get up to nothing bad whatsoever; it’s a rare day when they even behave rudely. (Towards me. They regularly insult each other and engage in at least one full-blown brawl a week.) I’m incredibly lucky.
I’ll ask the kid — she’s ten now. “What if I blog about this?” I say. If she says, in horror, “Don’t you dare!” I know it’s off limits.
Often she suggests things. “You should put this on your blo-o-og!!”
I don’t have a blog, but if I did I don’t think I’d be too uncomfortable writing things about my youngest (he’ll be 3 in a couple of weeks). However, I’d probably involve the oldest and ask permission (he’s 6) if I wanted to tell something about him (and I’m sure he’d veto just about everything–he’s very sensitive and very private). I do like Pollack’s rule, some thing should be strictly off limits, but more general kid stuff is okay.