I have a nightmare about the future. I imagine my 4-year-old as a middle-schooler at her locker. Taped to the door is an embarrassing childhood photo, in which she is naked save a tutu and a pair of big headphones.
Where would the mean kids get a photo like that? From me. From my blog.
I am a mommyblogger, a shameless and prolific one. But lately, I've been worrying about the future impact of the hundreds of pages I've published about my two daughters. Will the stories I once found so cute—like the time my then 2-year-old confessed to "destroying" her Tinkerbell underpants in a potty-training lapse—someday prove humiliating?
Will Our Kids Hate Us?
I set off for San Francisco and the BlogHer conference, a gathering of more than 1,000 women bloggers, to find out what other mothers think about this.
Some shrug and point out that, as mothers, embarrassing our offspring is our job. But I was teased as a kid, and not the "happens to everyone" teasing, but extreme social ostracization. I've vowed to do anything in my power to prevent my daughters from experiencing that—so how can I justify providing their potential tormentors with so much juice?
Heather Armstrong has chronicled nearly every day of her 4-year-old's life on Dooce.com, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. She gets e-mails all the time warning her that she is destroying her daughter Leta's future social life, but she thinks the benefits will outweigh the risks.
"She will know that she is the most important person in the world to me," Armstrong told me.
With 4-year-olds, it's easy to say it will be okay and hope it really will. But what about when they're teenagers? I found one mom at the conference who is already blogging adolescents.
"Far from hating me for writing about our lives, they seem to think it's pretty cool," said Lindsay Ferrier, who has two little ones as well as two teenage stepchildren. Ferrier, who writes at Suburban Turmoil, reminded me that kids growing up with Facebook and Twitter have different ideas of public and private than we do.
Looking at it this way, I can't imagine that my daughters' future classmates or bosses will waste time on my blog once the girls have had time to create their own Web personae. Of course, asking women who blog about their children if it's wrong to blog about your children is kind of like taking a survey at Morton's on whether meat is murder. We find reasons to keep doing the things we love.
Outside the conference, I found a mother who pulled the plug on her blog because she realized the Internet made it too easy for her to overshare. Writer Ayelet Waldman still publishes essays about parenting her four children, but she gave up blogging after just nine weeks.
"Blogging is a much more dangerous activity. When I write for publication ... I have a lot of time for second thoughts," Waldman said.
She's learned that we can't always predict what will cause problems for kids. And when she blogged, the one she ended up overexposing was herself. Waldman, who is mildly bipolar, posted what she now calls "a suicide note," alarming her family and readers.
"Bad call!" she says in retrospect.
This brings me to a realization: Although the word family is in the title, my blog is about no one more than myself. The one person that future readers will judge is me. And the readers I care about—and fear—the most are my daughters.
Why We Blog
For many moms who blog, the future audience is the incentive to keep writing. These blogs are the letters of the Victorian age, full of everything from mundane advice on how to get a baby to sleep to true confessions—all valuable in an age when many mothers work alone.
I feel the value of the long document I'm writing, but I also feel my knees knocking together when I imagine my grown girls reading my blog. Will they hate me for the confessions, like the choking hazards that I admit leaving on the floor because I was too busy blogging? Will they wilt knowing that "sometimes I dislike my own child"?
At the most, I hope the blog can create a sense of sisterhood. I hope that they will not be too hard on themselves if their babies' car seats are so food-caked that they become squirrel bait, because the same exact same thing once happened to Mom.
At the least, I hope for indulgence. I hope they can laugh, and shake their heads, because once again, Mom found a way to make it all about her.
