I'm thinking I love this post.

I'll have to comment more later. I don't quite have my thoughts sorted out.

Yes, yes, yes, a hundred times yes. (I'm feeling a bit like a broken record here already.)

I think what really freaks people out is the idea of mothers inhabiting the spotlight AS MOTHERS. Aside from a few ultra-conservatives, most people have gotten used to the idea of women in the workplace, women having public lives even after they have children. But the fiction that makes that system work is that their motherhood gets left at the doorstep: while at work, a woman functions as a childless, androgynous WORKER, not as a mother.

The thing about blogging that seems to take people off guard is not just that mothers are writing, but that they can write as mothers about not just their children, but themselves, their politics, their goals: it's the refusal to compartmentalize in the socially prescribed ways that allow our culture to preserve the 1950s ideal of motherhood while simultaneously requiring those mothers to work full-time jobs (and, in the case of the U.S., returning to those jobs at only 6 weeks postpartum).

I have five minutes to post! Yay!

I changed blog platforms so that I could password protect certain posts instead of a whole blog. This has come about from a series of more and more disturbing searches for children with disabilities or casts in sexual poses showing up in my stats. I know that it is possible for these people to get off seeing her in person or whatever, but I'm not going to make it easier for them to do it with my kid. That's why most of her pictures do not show her braces or any part of her body where the disability is visible, and why I will PP posts in the future discussing her specific issues.

I'm traceable if you really wanted to find me. I live in a city that is not really that large that I have identified, and my child has easily identifiable issues. My blog reaches corners of the world that would not know about or be looking for her if I was just emailing photos to Grammy. I have had two stalkers removed from my home by police in my life, a fact that certainly colors my fears, but there you go. I am a product of my experiences.

As far as embarrassment goes, I figure she's going to hate me and be embarrassed by me regardless of whether I blog about her or not, so I might as well blog. She has a very outspoken mother, and I don't think that giving birth to her required me to shut my mouth. If anything, it has given me new reason to open it.

Very thought provoking. I agree that privacy is an illusion. Shorly before we were married, my husband had his identity stolen, and the ensuring nightmare underscored that fact all too well.

We take certain precautions, especially where our kids are concerned (you'll notice I rarely share pictures of my children and have never mentioned them or myself, by name) but beyond that, we have accepted that 1984 has pretty much come to fruition.

Since I am not engaging in criminal endeavors, I am largely, and perhaps, naievly, unconcerned about it.

As for your conclusion regarding how blogging and the internet in general has impacted our view of Motherhood, it's increasing visibility and it's growing acceptance as a real and valued vocation, rather than just a duty, I completely agree. In that respect, I think it's a largely positive construct.

It has humanized an endeavor that has long been dismissed and women that too long been marginalized. Bloggers are putting a face on parenting, one that is funny, urbane, thought provoking and poignant.

I can't see that as a bad thing.

I'm with Casey. It's too early for me to properly tell you how much I enjoyed reading this post.

With the kind of mama you are, Frances would NEVER say she hates her mama. She'd probably say something more like my mother is so annoying with her gazillion scrapbooks of me and trying to show them to all my friends that visit the house. :D

Thanks, everyone.

B&P, yes. I agree. It's a blurring of the boundaries between public (work, politics, etc.) and private (home, family, kids) and I think that's why everyone's privacy-hackles are being raised.

Yay, CArrie! I've missed you.

Laura, I'm not sure if it's possible to get from 13 to 20 without ever once hating your parents.

Andrea,
A few thoughts:

First off, when I wrestled my way through all these issues in my own attempt to "justify [my] ways to Man", I realized that by blogging I was to some degree protecting my daughter's privacy. I live in a small community. The kind of community where coffee clatch gossip is still a way of life and where what you say in public is long-remembered. I'm not really a part of this community environment and I live sooo far from family and old friends that it made more sense to blog about my daughter and myself than to offer up all those charming and not-so charming stories locally. I don't tell a whole lot of Sleepytown folks about the blog precisely b/c I want to respect my daughter's privacy. As for the rest of the world, I say, "have at 'er." This, in the end, is my greatest chance at giving my daughter a long term sense of privacy barring shutting my doors and windows and not screaming to the world of my love, pain, joy, and motherish-and-more intellectual activity. 'Cause, no, I will not let them shut me up in a private domestic space.

I don't blog about my husband and yet I do blog about my daughter. This still sometimes tickles my brain a bit. I like to kid myself that I do this to protect his anonymity. He is an easily-identified uni professor in a small city and I really don't want my blog serving as "rate my professor" fodder. But as I say, "I like to kid myself." In reality, I think I largely leave him out of the picture because I want the blog to be MY voice. He can be in the periphery of that but he cannot come closer (all of which makes him happy--both from the privacy standpoint and from the respecting my voice standpoint). Besides, his appearance in my life, though wondrous and deeply meaningful, did not crack me open up the middle and permanently change the way I think about or experience the world. Nope. The kid did that. As such, she needs to be my literary side-kick in bloggyville.

When I was maybe ten or eleven years old, my mother pointed out that we wouldn't always be this close: when I became a teenager, she warned, I would think I knew all the answers and I wouldn't want her opinion. I don't think she did this as a deliberate attempt at reverse psychology - it was more of an off-hand remark, but I was HORRIFIED. I earnestly vowed that I would never turn against her, and the more she reassured me that this phase was normal and inevitable, the more determined I became never to do it.

And I was more right than she was: our relationship did not change fundamentally during the teenage years. I confined my rebellion to matters of nutrition (a phase I still haven't outgrown), but continued to confide in her constantly and developed the absurd habit of citing her authority on matters of contention as if that settled the matter.

I attribute this to a combination of my personality (not especially rebellious) and hers: her expectations were always thoroughly reasonable, I was allowed significant amounts of autonomy (which worked fine because I was responsible, idealistic, and ambitious), and she always had a very vivid recollection of exactly what it felt like to be 14 or 15 years old, which made her an easy confidante.

All this, of course, has left me woefully unprepared to deal with my own teenagers if and when they pursue a more rebellious path from my own. Eek.

Me again.

I don't know whether it's because I am one of the older bloggers on the block or if it's because I am a librarian but I do still cling desperately to the notion that individuals should have some expectation of privacy in our society. My profession holds this value sacred. Our circulation staff are trained not to engage patrons in discussions of their borrowing habits. Sure, Patron X may be checking out Harry Potter this week and the circ desk staff member may have just finished reading it, but that patron my want to check out Lesbian erotica next week and should be afforded a degree of comfort to do so. And don't get me started on the Patriot Act and what it means for libraries.

I don't mind the public nature of my blogging but I am deeply wary of it. I have chosen to remain pseudonymous and to use a moniker for my daughter. We do live in a world of Patriot Acts, identity theft, consumer profiling and civil litigation. This new public sphere bears very little resemblance to that which existed before the industrial revolution put women behind closed doors.

I don't know what expectation of privacy my daughter will have but I do hope that if she wants to check out Lesbian erotica at 16, the public library won't inform me or anyone else. Or if she gets bullied or beaten up or raped or anything else that would compromise her sense of self, that someone isn't standing there with a camera phone and a wireless link up to You-Tube. And, and, and while I think all these things with my middle-aged, librarian, mother's brain I do stop to think "what in sam hell am I doing with this blog?"

Her safety in blog land is a veneer. It is only a pseudonym, the strength in bloggy numbers, and a stable political climate that protects her or me. I think that while we take measures to embrace this new public space and to allow ourselves the voice it affords, we still need to tread lightly and remember the rights to privacy that were fought for with very, very good reason.

Ugh, this comment sounds self-righteous and I don't mean it to. Gawd, you read my blog. You know I have precious few privacy barriers. All this comment is is thinking out loud.

OK, Andrea, please get out of my head now. Haven't you checked your site meter? You know that I am supposed to be working right now.

MH, are you kidding me? I love it when people come back to comment more than once on the same post. It means I managed to say something interesting.

I do think that if our cultural values were more progressive, no one would feel uncomfortable checking out the lesbian erotica, and that getting to that point might be better served with less privacy rather than more. I also think that, in the case our children are traumatized, the expectation of privacy especially for the perpetrators has historically been one of the tools used to prevent the achievement of meaningful justice, not to mention social change. If I were raped, I wouldn't want it on You-Tube. But, in a classic case of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, if it weren't taped your chances of prosecution are small, your chances of villification (of making it up, of changing your mind after the fact, of ruining the lives of those poor boys) are great, and your chances of reporting the crime based on those likelihoods is remote. Privacy does not seem to do us many favours there.

B&P: SURE. YOu would be the exception. :p

This deserves a longer answer, and I'll try to come back and give you one near the end of the day -- but I did want to say, in the end, password-protected blogging didn't work for me -- I'm back in the visible world at Rome-colored Glasses.

I disagree with your thesis. I think people don't want mothers to blog because they are horrified at the thought that their own mothers would write about them -- they are horrified to think what embarrassment their own mothers might have revealed about them, for one; and secondly, perhaps more importantly, they are afraid they might hear that their mothers were irritated by them, that on occasion their mothers wanted them to GO AWAY, that their mothers wanted something more for their lives than just motherhood.

The fiction is not that mothers are an invisible backdrop. The fiction is that mothers always, every second of every moment, adored their children & found them perfect.

Ah yes, but our cultural values aren't more progressive and, as a continent, we seem to be slipping increasingly to the right. After I write my next post, I will wait by my door for Regis and Kelly or whoever the hell started it, to raid my liquor cabinet and lock me up.

I will lobby until I am blue in the face for progressive cultural values but I will watch my back for fear of Stockwell Day and the like. Yes, I will play the game but I will also keep my cards close to my chest--which in addition to being a tired cliché is also a piece of crap. To wit, you read my blog; the cards are clearly on the table.

Jennifer, I think that has a lot to do with it--though I'm not actually sure that it's different. I think part of being "the background" is having an unvarying and uncomplicated emotional state.

Though disagreement is fine, too.

Also, I've always known that my mother didn't particularly like me, and have grown up hearing my Dad tell me how he came home from work one time to rescue me because my Mom was about to toss me from a second-floor window. So ... I don't know. It might be unpleasant for me if she had a bigger audience for some of these stories, but I can't say that the view of mothers as inherently and perfectly loving of their children has had much conscious influence on my own views on privacy.

Or maybe that's why I"m overlooking that as a potential motivation for other people.

MH: I get what you're saying, and I feel that tension a lot too (the pull between protection on a micro level and advocacy on a macro level), which tends to revolve around privacy.

I'd also add that a mother's #1 job (per society) is to protect her child. So if she's blogging -- if she's at the computer typing -- who is protecting the children? And if you're the kind of person who believes pedophiles & thieves are around every corner, then you will believe that by posting pics/names/dates on a blog, a mother is failing to protect her child, that she is in fact deliberately, obtusely exposing her child to unneccessary risk.

And finally (I think! maybe I'll think of something else in a minute!) by blogging a mother is putting her needs ahead of her child's. And a mother by definition is supposed to subsume her needs to her child's. I think that's what the momtini furor is about, too.

OOo! You were writing at the same time as me!

In my last comment I guess I'm coming around to what you said, about the invisibility of motherhood. What I would emphasize is not that mothers are invisible but that the woman inside the mother is (supposed to be) invisible.

Yes. Very true.

It's interesting, though--I'd agree that my job is to protect Frances, but I'd rather focus on what seem to me more obvious and likely threats (climate change, supports for mothers) than the media-fostered panic frenzies about pedophiles.

Wow! Lots of comments on this one.

Re publicity. When I was five my parents had a formal photographic portrait done of me. The results pleased the photographer so well that she used the shot in her window for advertising for maybe eight years. It amused my parents a lot and no one ever teased me about it, even though it was on the main shopping street of the town where I lived. Was I underprotected?

My whole family loves to tell and retell anecdotes. I can always remember my mother telling stories about things I had done (cute AND otherwise) but don't remember being bothered by it. I inherited this trait, and my daughter hated it when I told what she called 'baby stories'. She would make me promise not to do it, when she was a teenager. I suspect she would still not like it.

The woman as invisible goes back in recorded time to the golden age of Athens, where it was accounted a virtue in a woman never to be heard of for good or for ill. I think this theme was rediscovered in Britian, where all boys were educated in Latin and Greek. Certainly someone like Florence Nightingale was a shame to her own family in Victorian England.

I think blogging about your child(ren), names changed and faces blurred if it makes you feel comfortable, is at the least a record that they will enjoy as adults (most of them, anyway) and at best a shared experience that previous generations of mothers could not reach. I think it makes you stronger and wiser. And I agree with MH that the sheer number of such posts is your best protection. If it is an in-your-face assertion of your own rights as people first, good.

The whole idea that there is, in effect, less privacy now is sort of a misnomer -- just like it seems that there are more and more fatal alligator and shark attacks each year. There really aren't statistically, but because we live in such an ultra-connected world, with access to news at virtually any time of the day or night, it's much easier to get that information than it once was.

Granted, you're right -- I *do not* feel all that safe sending my child out alone to play (and she's 11!) like I used to when I was a child. I think that statistically, there probably aren't that many more child molesters out there now than when I was a young'un, but I really don't want to take the chance.

As far as blogging being sort of an outing of yourself, I agree with the idea that there are potential dangers with revealing too much of oneself online. But, chances are, most people who know me fairly well already know my "real" name, my address and telephone, and various other facts about my life. People could find that information in plenty of ways without me giving it out. It would just require work. With the digital and information age, you can find out pretty much anything about anyone if you're just willing to work hard enough.

As far as my child and my blog go, there are some things that I just don't post. I look at it as the modern version of the beauty shop. Don't talk about anything that you wouldn't care to hear come back to you. Nothing is ever really confidential. For example, I don't blog about fighting with my husband. Sure, we fight. We argue very heatedly sometimes, and sometimes we're both colossal jerks. We're completely normal, and happily married. But, I don't blog about arguments because it would be all one-sided. I would, quite naturally, put *my* thoughts and feelings on a post about an argument AT MY OWN BLOG, and I feel pretty sure that all my blog pals would side with me. And that would be unfair to my husband, because he wouldn't be afforded a like chance to tell his side. Plus, I would probably say something in anger that wouldn't be either fair or right or me to say, and even if I later removed that post, it's out there. Once you publish, it's out there, and you can't take it back.

I did give serious thought to not posting pictures of any of us, just to avoid a situation like what Andrea dealt with over the pics she found of Frances, but I decided that I would hope for the best, and try to stay as generic as possible when discussing our locations and real names.

Amen. The title of the David Hochman NYT piece was so telling. Mommy (and Me). It is the fact that the child is not front and centre than caused him to label mom blogs specifically as "online shrines to parental self-absorption." That being said, I'm still a cuatious blogger. I'm simply waiting for the time when everyone is blogging so much that no one has time to read blogs and then it will all be moot :)

Thanks, Mary.

I'm not sure that's true in this case, KLee, simply because the technology we have now enables different forms of privacy violation than would have been possible before. Worst case scenario in 1910, someone ruins your reputation by telling lurid tales about your sex life, you leave town and on the other side of hte continent no one heard about it. Now, your boyfriend uploads a homemade sex tape, and there's nowhere you can go to get away from it.

One point the article made that I found interesting was that a decade or so ago, what happened to Paris HIlton would have ruined a girl's life. Now it's considered just another form of celebrity. I do think this says something about our cultural perspectives on privacy.

Andrea,
I don't know the story of the photos of Frances. I'm not asking you to retell it but I just want to say "rickin' frickin'what in sam hell is wrong with the world?" After what you told me about the Sweetney pictures, I can only imagine that the story is not a good one.

I love everything you've said in this post (still not as much time to read it as I would like), but I did want to add one ... I don't know, counterexample doesn't seem exactly the right word. It's not a "but," more like an "and."

To get to the point -- privacy BETWEEN parents and children is a tricky subject, too -- it's where I come from, since I'm not a mother. Privacy from the world? That's a construct, certainly. And I am usually content to accept that fact. But the reason I went private for a while, and the only thing that occasionally makes me want to do so again, is the possibility that my parents, specifically my mother, took vicarious living to a whole new level.

It's the exception rather than the rule, I'm sure. Nevertheless, privacy from the world was never what I sought -- only privacy from family.

Well, I thought when I read this post that I'd have a whole lot to say but now, having read all the comments, I don't know that there's much that I could add.

I agree with you, Andrea, that the idea of privacy today is a bit of a fallacy. In a lecture today I told people, truthfully, that if you gave me the postal code, gender, ethnicity and level of education of a person in the neighbourhood I live in, in some cases I could probably (if I was industrious enough) narrow that down to a household, if not an individual. I post photos of myself and Mme L and I use my and my husband's first names. It wouldn't be too hard to find us...and I don't feel naive when I say I'm not too worried that anyone would.

I've taken a few precautions (we consistently address Mme L by a nickname, and if anyone sought her out using her full name, it would be a red flag) and I have taken a post down in which I was testing to see whether people could guess her real name, at Joe's request. On the whole, though, I think that she is likely at more risk of danger from people who know her than from some unlikely person trolling the endless numbers of blogs out there.

I think, like rape, attacks on our children by strangers have been sensationalised and get more attention, serving to obscure the far more common predator, who is more likely to be someone who is in a position of trust.

Oops...I guess I did have more to say.

JD, yes. You might really enjoy that apophenia link, she makes the same point--that kids' privacy is primarily violated by parents adn teachers, not strangers.

NSS, I agree completely.

holy crap. how have i not come across your blog before. there's so much to say (and i've already waxed lyrical in the comments of Bub and GGC). but yes. what we have here is the emerging of an alternative and messy rhetoric about parenting, mothering, and womanhood. one that has been relegated to the private sphere as unimportant, not worthy of narrating. and i think that what many (male) writers see as a violation of privacy, women bloggers see as a means to share experiences, connect with one another, come together as community.

totally adding you to my bloglines now. thanks so much for this.

I think our society is asking mothers to re-evaluate priorities based on what society wants out if its next generation of children - it's a smack down, when you are doing something wrong that will impact society mothers take the hit cause the kids are "our next generation, our future leaders" blah, blah, blah...When you board any airplane by the way your children our not "our future leaders," they are "those brats in aisle 15,I hope I'm not sitting near them and if I am I hope they are quiet." There is, apparently, no village on aircraft.
Hang with me a sec here cause I'm gonna stretch this to dealing with education/schooling. Most schooling whether public or private serves the needs of the greater society more than the children it educates. I have chosen to send my son to public school and it has some real upsides, but I have to be careful. School is teaching him how to "fall in line," how to accept somethings as inevitable, which maybe aren't really inevitable. Maybe he should go out and change the world, maybe having a me will help him get out of line and shake up what needs shaking. He is 7 and hates war, AIDS, hunger and cancer - He also hates potatoes, not having any snow days and not having his own room - am I a better mother for the fact that I don't "play house" all that well? I make great cookies, but he's also likely to find me weeping at the computer when I read the news.
I will be home to my kids, but I won't play house for Western Society. I'm a moving target with passions of my own, stuff to get done and a cell phone for when he has the pukes at school, cause I'll be right there. It's part of me and part of him, the space between us, it belongs to both of us and I've as much right to write about the mothering as he has (or will have) later to write about the being mothered (cause that's a critical part of everyone's autobiography.)
What happens before school is well just parenting and pre-school - our "betters" are indicating that they don't like the results at school that are cropping up as a result of all this parenting-consciously/hipster-blogging/ whatever they can't name it cause they won't take the time to differentiate between things, just they just no like...
sorry very ranty, for a minute, but I love the points you are making.

Thank you, joy.

Karen, I completely agree wrt school--it's Corporate Citizen training, how to show up on time and do what authority figures tell you even when it doesn't make sense and subvert your own needs to the priorities of the organization.

Wow, what a really great post!

I don't have much to add, except that if my mom had written about me like I write about my son, I would be fascinated. I wouldn't have been when I was 16, but everything she did embarrassed me anyways. I think that's why I haven't struggled too much with the privacy issue (except the scary safety thoughts)... because I would enjoy reading about myself as a baby, and my mom as a newer mother.

Again, great post!

Found my way here from Bubandpie. Great post! You are an amazing writer. I had to follow up on some of your ideas at my place.

Thank you!

This is a wonderful post.

I think your thesis is intriguing and thought provoking, and I utterly agree with your point about the ridiculousness of the "What if the bully googles her???" stance.

I try not to put anything too humiliating for my 8 year old into my blog, but still blog about her, warts and all. And I do so because these are MY stories to tell. And also because I find it hard to believe that there won't be dirt on every one of her peers all over the net by the time she gets to high school.

I truly think having been the subject of a mommyblog will be a non-issue for this generation of kids, simply because so many of them are.

Great post! Privacy is an illusion - regardless of whether you use pseudonyms or post photos of your kids. Still, the lure of full public disclosure beckons. We forget, and we bare all. Is it as treacherous as the elders fear? I guess only time will tell.