Truth in Mommyblogging

The other day, Frances asked me for a stepdad.

Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear that Frances has no idea what a stepdad is or what having one would entail except that her friend C has a stepdad, so she wants one too. Still, it gave me pause. As you can imagine, as anyone would feel when their child asks them for something that they're not sure they're ever going to be able to give them.

Now when I say "the other day" I sort of mean "sometime last week or the week before, I can't remember exactly," and this is the kind of minor dishonesty that the blogosphere expects and condones. It's the "I'm doing the best that I can, this is an irrelevant detail" kind of dishonesty. The important part is that Frances asked me for a stepdad, and it stabbed me in the heart--a very minor stab, like a thorn--to hear her question and try to answer her.

There were two articles in newspapers yesterday that touched on blogging enterprises both motherhood and marital, and as I've run into most of the barricades related to either in the last few years, they hit. Well, let's see: Frances's photographs have been stolen and photoshopped, I've received death threats, I have a gag order in the separation agreement so censored, I've participated in panels on mommyblogging, done studies on it, had a few celebrity sightings, the whole gamut. I've seen the good, the bad, and the inhuman.

The first article was about--what else?--the ethics of mommyblogging. There were a lot of things that were potentially objectionable in this story--such as the belief that using "innocuous" tags protects photos of kids. Listen, the photo of Frances that was stolen and photoshopped and posted on fark had no tags and its name was numeric. It was not at all googleable. It was found anyway, on a blog that at the time had 100 readers a day. But this is what I want to discuss:

"Knowing that our mothers had a hard time and loved us anyway isn't the worst thing that can happen to this generation.

"But they may only believe that in their 20s. There may be some very angry adolescents along the way."

This is true, I think; our kids may benefit from knowing us as real people who struggled with parenting but loved them anyway. But I wonder why they need to read about it on the internet. There is no reason they can't hear this from our own lips at the appropriate time.

Frances, sweetie? I love you. I love you very, very much. I love you even when you're driving me crazy. I tell you this every day so hopefully you've figured it out by now. If not, well, here you go.

In any case, writing about parent-blogging as an enterprise that is primarily beneficial for the kids is self-serving dishonesty. We're doing it for ourselves, and crossing our fingers that it won't hurt the people we love most. Sort of like adding bisphenol A to baby bottles without being sure that it won't leach out, or lining kids' lunch bags with lead for insulation, or using vaccines that haven't been thoroughly tested.

We put our kids in carseats, feed them organic food, make them wear helmets on bicycles, give them no choking hazards before the age of three, limit their television viewing, slather them with sunblock and consult the advice of self-appointed experts on every issue from when to start school to how to deal with nightmares, all in the name of keeping our kids safe and protecting their physical and emotional health; then indulge in an experiment whose long-term effects on mental and emotional health are completely unknown.

Most of us are cognizant of this, I think; and the range of stances on the subject is broad as befits any community composed of diverse human beings with different agendas. But if you tell me that you never cringe when you find a blog that you think has crossed the line, I won't believe you.

What scares me, and keeps me even more cautious than I would otherwise be, is remembering how Madeleine L'engle was publicly attacked by her children after her death for her innaccurate representations of them and of their family in the novels that we all love so much--attacked, because those misrepresentations had lifelong consequences for her children. I am willing to believe that L'engle meant well and tried to be truthful. That didn't save her kids from the consequences of her writings. And that was fiction, good lord; we're writing (or claiming to write) memoir.

Frances asked me for a stepdad not long ago; and then I told you that she didn't really mean it. But the fact is, I don't know. I can't know. And then I told you anyway. One day, that may hurt my little girl, even if I am being careful and trying hard and love her more than anything. I see her as a sunny, impossibly good-natured, well-liked golden girl who handled the end of her family with resilience and optimism well beyond her years; she may remember this time as a horrific, painful, traumatizing mess when she felt she couldn't confide in anyone, for whatever reason. By then it will be too late because I've already told the world otherwise.

So, that's maternal.

Now marital, courtesy of the New York Times. Or, more accurately, post-marital.

Until the morning her husband, David Sals, told her he “was done” with their marriage, Jennifer Neal had portrayed him so lovingly on her blog that he was called DearSweetDave. By the afternoon of that October day last year, Ms. Neal had shared what she portrayed as his perfidy with the 55,000 regular readers she says visit NakedJencom.

Soon after, readers came to know him by a far less flattering name, and as the guy whose insensitivity made Jen so sick that she was throwing up every day and so poor that she lost her house in Santa Cruz, Calif.

And when a despairing Jen discovered in February that her ex-husband had put his information up on Match.com, an Internet dating service, she linked to it from her blog, giving her readers a chance to share their thoughts.

I can't tell you I haven't been tempted to follow suit. Very tempted. There is that gag order, though; and even before I tried to be circumspect. However--isn't that the way it goes? Depictions of marriage that are cloyingly sweet and utterly false until the whole thing goes cock-eyed, them bam! and there's ugliness lying bloody and ragged all over the internet.

I wonder--and don't you?--why husbands and partners get that consideration, and our kids don't. If we don't expose our husbands etc. to that form of public scrutiny because we know they won't like it and we don't want to hurt them or harm that relationship, why do we think our kids are going to be ok with it?

We know we can't blog about our colleagues, we agonize about blogging about parents and siblings, yet we post photos of our kids in the bath. Why?

Is it because, despite what we say, we really view these little creatures as our own (until they begin telling us otherwise)?

Is it because we don't want to claim ambition and fame for ourselves, for our own stories? It's easier to say "look at my great kid!" than it is to say "look at me!"

Is it because our children are too young to complain about violating their privacy? Is it because at this age they wouldn't mind because they still don't understand what privacy is?

Whatever it is, it seems that we extend the least consideration to the people we say we love most.

Motherhood is a subject worthy of honest exploration. I'd be the first to defend that. But I think a few things are missing from this venture:

1. We need to be honest about the fact that we don't know what our kids are going to think about this or how it is going to affect them, and not blithefly affect a public stance of "I'm sure it won't cause any lasting damage" that is based essentially on wishful thinking. We need to be ready to apologize or make reparation if in fact it does hurt them in some way, down the road.

2. We need to be aware that the best memoirs and the best personal reporting does not happen immediately--it is told with great reflection, sometimes years after the fact. Our stories of motherhood and our exploration of motherhood may actually suffer in honesty from being too immediate.

3. I think we need to strive for greater consistency. If our spouses, siblings, parents and colleagues deserve not to be laid open on the blogosphere for the entertainment of our friends, then so do our kids.

I recognize this is a bit of a different stance than I've taken previously on the privacy issue, and it's true that our kids' generation may well find that privacy is an outdated concept. But after thinking about it for a good long time and watching my daughter's growing capability to structure her own story and find meaning in it, I now believe that I need to give her the right to determine that for herself. My story is mine to share; she is a character in my story, and as such my experience of her is part of my story, and mine to share (though hopefully in a sensitive and tactful way); but her story, the meaning she finds in her own life, her inner world and experience, her feelings, her attitudes, her friendships and loves and longings and dreams? Not mine.

Anyway, I think it will be more fun to help her learn how to tell her own story.

~~~~~

(This post was a very loose interpretation of Julie's Hump Day Hmm topic for the week--truth and honesty.)

Posted by Andrea at 9:33 AM | Comments (15)

this dance is getting harder

It just so happens that these days, and for much of the last year, most of what I have been driven to write about are subjects that cannot be posted here, for both legal and personal reasons.

I've tried to write around them, write through them, pick allegories and analogies, be elliptical and obtuse, and get it all out somehow, and it's not working. I end up frustrated that I can't say what I want or need to say; and because I can't say what I want or need to say, I believe that many of you simply have no idea what I'm saying, period.

It also just so happens that I have been blogging most of this stuff elsewhere (under a real! live! pseudonym!); with the result that, because I can say what I really think without all this misdirection and confusion, the weight of personal blogging has been tilting more and more to the other place. It stinks, because it's all stuff I'd like to be able to share with you, but it's just a fact that The Combo Book can't go here. It's tilted far enough that it's fallen over, basically; I'll continue blogging here but it's not going to be the same. The dance has gotten too complicated and I'm giving up.

As LauraJ said on her old blog, spring is a good time for new beginnings; it's also a good time for clean breaks. I will still be posting here, but probably not much about what's going on in my head. Which for some of you might be a welcome relief, who knows?

I'd like nothing more than to be able to post a big sign saying "this way!" and show off my new home, but for obvious reasons, that can't happen. If you're interested in following you can ask. If I don't tell you, please don't be offended; the pseudonym won't work if everyone knows who I am.

This has been a fun project and, in some ways, a big adventure for the last three years; but it's natural lifespan has been reached and now it's time to try something new. I hope you'll stick around (but I promise I won't get snippy if you don't).

Edited to add: and the stars agree. From this morning's Toronto Star:

Aries (March 21 — April 20)

Change is easier to accept when it involves a direct substitution of your choice. Ideally, it's best to be in full control, but the road ahead in your transition is rather unclear. A hidden hand is guiding you into this new world. Trust it and believe in it.

And who can argue with that?

Posted by Andrea at 8:19 AM | Comments (36)

Frog, Meet B(l)og

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us — don't tell! They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring b(l)og!

(Emily Dickinson, slightly modified)

Hi. My name is Andrea McDowell. It says so right up in the url. See?

It's funny. When I started blogging, I never bothered to be anonymous because I figured no one would ever read it.

When I found out people were reading it, the pseudonymity boat had sailed--I couldn't get into the habit of using handles, and couldn't go back through all the old entries to replace them. It's ok, I thought. Fifty million blogs on the internet, what are the chances? Andrea is a very common name. How likely is it that someone I know will stumble on my little hideaway?

Umm. Hi, everyone.

Having it brought home to me exactly how easy it is to find someone's blog on the internet--and then making it more public myself by putting my name in the url--has made the whole brutal honesty thing a bit more challenging. One of the first things I did when I bought the domain name was go back and unpublish a few hundred entries--because while I could fool myself once upon a time that no one would figure out who my parents are or my ex-husband, it's easy enough now. Since then I have hobbled my typing fingers many, many times to prevent myself from telling some story which is, I think, true and good and meaningful, but which could cause humiliation or upset to someone I care about if anyone were ever to figure out who they are or what I am talking about.

But I hate it. Not (only) because I'm a heartless bitch who wants to burn all her bridges behind her, but because I'm torn between what we as writers owe to the people in our lives vs. what we as writers owe in terms of honesty and truth to our readers, and also, if truth be told, what we as writers owe to ourselves (more on that in a minute).

No one, first of all, volunteers to be blog fodder.

Then again, no one volunteers to be the alcoholic abusive mother in a best-selling memoir, or the tragic childhood case of terminal cancer in a doctor's autobiography, or even the clueless and obtuse highschool guidance counselor who failed to see the biography subject's obvious innate brilliance and so tried to steer them down the path of frygirldom. And yet without such characters, if all people in all writing both fictive and not were presented in the best light and with the most charitable of intentions--no one would ever read a god damn thing. Besides being utterly boring, it would have nothing to offer us, because people are often ugly, petty, selfish, trivial and self-absorbed, and without showing that, writing has nothing to offer us.

This is the crux of it: if a writer shows consideration to the people in their lives despite what it costs their writing, then the writing itself will be flat, bland and meainingless. We need writers who are willing to extract blood from the people nearest and dearest to them to fuel the words on the page. That is what writers owe to their readers--the truth, the gory, messy, sloppy, inconceivable, sometimes glorious truth.

No, we can't use our blogs as kangaroo courts either.

But I don't think the answer is to paper over the faults of our loved ones (or unloved ones, as the case may be). I think the answer is to be as brutally honest about ourselves as we are about others. Find a way to accept fifty per cent of the blame wherever possible. Try to explain someone else's actions in terms other than "he's an asshole" or "she's a bitch" (even when it's true). Sometimes it's just a matter of timing, and there may be a story you need to sit on for a year or a decade before it can be told usefully (and in most cases, sitting on it for a year or a decade will only improve your ability to tell that story with honesty and insight, so it's not a bad thing).

But censoring ourselves to make the people around us look like heroes even when they're not so that we can maintain intact our public image of Nice Girls is not the answer. (Yes, I am blaming sexism for this--there is a fundamental incompatability with the feminine mandate of maintaining relationships and fostering intimacy with the writer's or artist's mandate of revealing Truth. You cannot do both.)

I'd rather be Brave than Nice.

And what about us? What do we owe to ourselves?

I can think of two aspects to this. There may be more.

One: If the cost of maintaining relationships is keeping secrets for those who have hurt us, so that we pay for the consequences of their actions, is that right?

I don't believe so. I believe that if someone has done wrong, then public exposure for that wrongdoing is not out of the realm of acceptability. It is not our job to swallow that bile. We don't have the right to inflate or inflame, to defame or harass them, but if what we are saying is the truth--if we have claimed our own part and not painted them as simply evil--then I do not believe that we have the responsibility to protect them.

Two: Doesn't it get boring?

Don't you get awfully bored trying to make every story about you so that you don't have to worry about walking over that line?

I do. I am so tremendously bored by myself some days I can't write anything at all. Who cares? Why are you here? Why am I here? Doesn't it ever make you feel like a croaking frog--"here I am! here I am! here I am!" So what?

I'd rather tell stories, whether fictitious or not. Stories involve more than one character. That's not just what makes them useful. It's also what makes them interesting.

I think it was in Stumbling on Happiness that I read that people generally see themselves as reacting to other people's actions, and other people as instigators. That is, they see the world as a the cause to which they are merely the reaction, and normally fail to realize the ways in which their own actions cause others to react. The way to be honest and fair to the others who appear in our writing (whether on blogs or elsewhere) is to be aware of this and fight it, analyze our own behaviour and motivations for the ways in which we too cause others to react. Work to accept fifty per cent of the blame wherever we can.

Posted by Andrea at 12:04 PM | Comments (24)

Passing It On

I still owe you all that wicca post--January has been one of those months and my blogging time has been drastically restricted--but in the meantime, I wanted to say thank you to Sarah Lynn for this:

Do you like how she said that I challenge her comfort zones? Is that I nice way of saying that I push her buttons? I'll take it anyway.

Now I'm supposed to pass this on to ten other bloggers--never an easy thing, because I like a) not to repeat myself from previous blog-link-posts and b) to showcase something that you might not already be aware of. But given recent scheduling constraints I haven't been tracking down the new and wonderful much lately, so I'm a bit stumped. Let's see if I can get to ten today:

1. Sci Fi Novelists, a group blog by a bunch of published novelists who mostly write about writing and writing-related things, which is a great joy to read and very motivational, if only because all of the writer-bloggers are so normal and all work in different ways.

2. Toronto Craft Alert, which is exactly what it sounds like. Fun fun fun.

3. Casey doesn't post enough anymore, but when she does, it's worth it. Read back a few to find her posts about depression as a mental illness (or not).

4. Apophenia because she writes about social network sites (blogs, myspace, facebook, etc.) and she knows what she's talking about, unlike a lot of the head-up-the-ass baseless opining that goes on elsewhere in the blogosphere. Sorry. I know head-up-the-ass baseless opining is a favourite passtime in some parts, and I'm not innocent of it myself, but that doesn't mean that any of us actually have a clue.

5. Feminist SF Carnival. We're out there.

6. Don't we all already love Jen? It's not just that she writes about homelessness and poverty from a position of knowledge and empathy, but that she does it with a novelist's eye for detail and imagery.

Hmm. I think six will have to be enough. How about this: if there's someone you think I'm missing, you can fill out slots 7-10 in the comments.

Posted by Andrea at 10:31 AM | Comments (7)

The Peril of Positive Thinking

I was, once, dumped by an entire group of women because I was "too negative."

(You're scratching your heads. Too negative? Didn't I just write about how Frances is nearly perfect? Didn't I write earlier in the year about how I was determined not to wallow in self-pity because of the separation? That I was lucky to live in a time and place where I had the legal ability and financial resources to be able to leave? Too negative? Am I sure it wasn't because I was too treacly? Yep. I'm positive.)

See, there once was a place called Fertility Friend, which might or might not still exist, I don't know. And on this site there was a forum, and in this forum there was a group for Canadian women who were trying to get pregnant. And in this group there was bonding; unfortunately, the bonding was unequal, and cliques did develop, as they have a tendency to do.

The shit eventually hit the fan, as shit manages to do, and one of the little bits of shit flung here and there was an email (sent by someone I thought was a friend), enumerating in great detail my faults without any attempt to talk to me first about what I thought had happened, and sent not only to me, but to several of my close friends and many of the women who most disliked me--this, Dear Readers, is not an effective conflict management strategy. Should you ever be tempted to try such a thing, might I advise you to first, for the love of god, talk to the scoldee privately and get your story straight. At some point near the end of this particular email chain was an exhortation from the author that perhaps, if I had only been more positive and worked harder on my attitude, the first year of motherhood would not have been so hard for me.

Consider: I had given birth one month early to a child who might or might not have a genetic disorder, who had numerous feeding problems, did not grow, had reflux and so needed to be kept upright for 24 hours a day, refused bottles, and would only sleep if in physical contact with me. The advice came from a woman who'd given birth to a healthy full-term son who grew at the appropriate rate, slept well, had access to a free in-house babysitting service, and still had not managed to be happy during her first year of motherhood. I was Not Amused--especially as I'd done my very best to be as positive as I could be, under the circumstances.

The thing is, there are times when Positive Thinking does not and cannot make you happy. It can only make you less unhappy. This is what irritates me about the hardcore Positive Thinking/The Secret crowd: Jesus Murphy, if someone is down in a pit and crying for help, if you can't manage to throw them a rope, at least you can avoid spitting on them!

The worst of Frances's first year I kept to myself, until it was well over with--how terrified I was that maybe she was sick, and might die; that I might be starving her, and maybe that's why she wasn't growing, that I might be killing my baby; that this undiagnosable genetic syndrome might carry horrible health risks; the weeks I could not bring myself to leave the house because I was so sick and sore from hearing the things people said about her, or looked at her. How I'd lost weight below where I was when I got pregnant because I spent all day walking walking walking my sick and in-pain baby across the floor, never able to put her down, and never able to eat anything I couldn't grab with one hand. What I shared, instead, was what seemed to me the typical difficulties of new motherhood: getting so tired from a baby who won't sleep days on end that, eventually, you lose it and yell at them, even though you take it back right away; fights with partners about childcare and housework that you've never had before; trying to find the time to do the things you used to do that make you you. Gods know such stories are all over the momosphere, interspersed with the first smiles and milestones and adorable photographs.

That first year was a deep black hole, in many ways; and hold that lantern as high as I could, crane my neck back as far as I could, I still could not see the surface world. I could only see a shallower hole. I did my best, but I defy anyone in similar circumstances to spend time like that in a maternal glow, positive attitude or no.

I think it's probably obvious from the bulk of what I write that I do try very hard to keep myself on the upside of an even keel. My happiness is my job, not anyone else's, certainly not the world's. No one can count on having ideal circumstances every moment of every day (or any moment of any day); therefore, any real and lasting happiness will depend on how I manage adversity and difficulty (keeping in mind that these difficulties are of a pretty minor sort, globally speaking), not how successfully I chase the things or situations I think might make me happy. Things and situations never make happiness, not for long; there are always better things and better situations to long for; we make happiness for ourselves. (Which is not an excuse for not trying to better one's situation, or I'd never bother to try to publish; only a reminder that whatever one wants and is working for in the future, one needs to pay attention to one's happiness now, in the present moment, or happiness will always be out there somewhere.)

And so, yes, there are times when it seems that someone is unhappy out of all proportion to what I know of their circumstances; but that is the key, what I know. Which isn't going to be perfect or complete; how can what I know of someone else's life compare to what they know of their own? If they tell me they're doing the best they can, then who am I, standing on the surface of the world with the sun shining on my face, to wag my finger at them and tell them they could leave that hole if they really tried? If I care about them, then surely it's my job to throw them a rope, or a ladder, or a brighter lantern, or at least a paperback novel and a tin of cookies to pass the time. Not a derisive lecture.

There are times in the years that have passed since then--since Frances learned to sleep in her crib and overnight became a joyful, smiling creature; since we learned to live with the permanent undiagnosis; since I acclimatized to the stares and comments and questions we still sometimes get--that I worry that this blog of mine might hurt someone who is sitting in that hole. That my focus on using my thought patterns to manage my moods (it's a conscious thing, Dear Readers; I work at this) might be construed as a direction for you to do the same. I hope not, though. I hope it's clear that while I believe in this for myself, I don't believe in this for you.

Posted by Andrea at 6:02 AM | Comments (12)

Online Bullies (or: The Internet IS the Real World)

Sometime in the summer of 2006, a little girl named Megan Meier had a falling out with one of her friends.

Her friend's mother, incensed by the thought that Megan didn't want to be buddies with her daughter anymore, concocted, along with her husband and daughter, a fake MySpace account for a cute boy named Josh. She recruited some of her daughter's friends into the effort, and "Josh" began flirting with and pursuing Megan. Shortly, Megan believed she had a boyfriend named Josh, until October that year, when "Josh" dumped her. And told her that everyone knew what she was like, that she was an awful person, and the world would be better off without her.

Megan killed herself after reading that message--ran upstairs to her bedroom and hung herself in her closet.

The behaviour of the friend's parents during and after this is, if you can believe it, much, much worse than described here; but I don't want to turn this into a(nother) public castigation of people who clearly have some serious issues. If you're curious, google Megan's name and you will learn much, much more than you ever wanted to know.

I just don't know what the rule is for this one.

As a parent, I don't know how to protect Frances from this kind of assault (because let's be clear, that's exactly what this was).

I know to tell her not to send her photographs to anyone online, no matter how nice they seem, until she knows them and I know them and trust them. I know not to let her meet someone she has only known online without me present, and I know that it has to be in a public place. I know that she can't post her private details (address, phone #) online. This can protect her from physical threats, but not this.

Anyone reading this obviously has a certain comfort level with the internet. I tend to take people at face value online--if you tell me you're a 28-year-old married homeschooling mother of two, I'll believe you. Because in my experience, it almost always turns out to be true; and when it's not, enh, I have a thick skin, I get over it. So while many people might argue that kids just should not be allowed to use the internet, or that their use should be highly restricted so that they are not interacting with anyone they don't already know, I know I don't want to do that, and my guess is you don't either. I don't want to teach Frances that the world or the internet is full of scary people she can't trust and shouldn't talk to. I don't want to teach her to be afraid.

All of the news coverage I've seen of this case has focused on how there is no law against what the friend's parents did, and so they will not be punished for any crime. But what I want to know--as a parent--is: what do you teach your kids to allow them to avoid this? What is the rule? What are the red flags that say "this person you are talking to on the internet is probably a composite put together by vindictive parents of an old friend of yours who are trying to make you vulnerable so they can break your heart"?

What about you, Dear Readers? What are you going to tell your kids about trust and the internet?

Posted by Andrea at 9:14 AM | Comments (11)

Collaborative Narratives

"Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve 'verisimilitude.' Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and 'narrative necessity,' rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness, although ironically we have no compunction about calling stories true or false."

The above is a quote from Jerome Bruner's The Narrative Construction of Reality, an article published in Critical Inquiry several years ago (and which I found via This Woman's Work a few weeks ago). The article is, on the whole, needlessly obtuse in the way academic articles often are, so just in case this quote reads as so much jabberwocky, let me translate: science and math and other 'hard' disciplines can be proven true or false because they deal in facts, but narratives--stories--can't, because they don't. They can only be true by seeming true, even though everyone who reads or hears one knows that it is false.

Further, "narratives" include not only those fictional forms you are probably already thinking of (novels, stories, TV shows, movies, etc.), but also memoirs, family histories, institutional traditions, mythology, and, uh, blogs. The last being an addition of my own.

This article lists out the ten features of narrative as defined by Bruner, and I'm going to inflict them on you. Partly because I think this stuff is fascinating, though I know most of you won't care; mostly because the ten features of narrative (as defined by Bruner) can easily, though not seamlessly, be transported over to blogging. And it's the non-seamlessness I think is interesting.

So:

1. Diachronicity. (What is with the ten-dollar words, Bruner? Translated: narratives contain events that occur over time. Stuff happens. Then more stuff happens. Eventually enough stuff has happened that you can stick "the end" on it and declare the story complete.)

This is obvious, yes? Blogs, with their dated entries and archives, are diachronistic even more than other forms of narrative, in which the telling occurs at a single point in time, no matter the duration of the events being told.

2. Particularity. (Narratives deal with a particular set of events, not a general set of events. That is, a narrative might be about John and Susan getting married, but it's not about marriages in general. Or it might be about the War of 1812, but it's not about War. Even if the particular instance is used to illustrate some general principle, a narrative or story is about a particular instance.)

Personal blogs, at least, achieve this in spades. My blog is my thoughts about my life. Even when I'm writing about the world, it's written from my perspective, making it particular by definition.

3. Intentional State Entailment. (!!! Meaning that the characters in the story have to have goals that they are working to accomplish. It's not enough that stuff happens to John and Susan; they have to want to get married and be actively trying to achieve it (or be trying very hard not to get married and somehow end up married anyway--but they need to have a goal that relates to the point of the story.))

This, I think, is perhaps one of the things that separates the superstars with thousands of readers from the rest of us: the superstars have A Point. The blogger has a goal (overcoming infertility, dealing with a diagnosis, etc.) which naturally coalesces into a narrative over time. The rest of us are in danger of producing "first I woke up, then I had toast for breakfast and brushed my teeth, and then I decided to wear the green shirt though at first I thought maybe the teal...." Eventually, if you have A Point, the blog will have a beginning, a middle, and an end, though it might be messy.

4. Hermeneutic composability. (This mouthful means that stories are not simply the product of the author or teller, but a joint product by the author/teller and the audience--that the meaning of the story is determined by the meaning given to it by the creator and by the receiver. It also means that stories consist of parts (words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, etc.) which have individual meanings themselves and which also contribute to the meaning of the whole, and that the creator must build a story out of these little parts with an eye to the meaning they will give to the piece.)

This is where we stop being seamless:

One of the most interesting things about blogs is how the blogger's life can be so variously interpreted. I can tell you all about Frances and our life together and the prenatal misdiagnoses and my thoughts about that etc. ad nauseum, and it is still possible for someone to come along and read it and decide that I am advocating terminations (or trying to stop other people from having terminations, as the case may be). What I've come to realize over the last few years is that I don't have a monopoly on the truthful interpretation of my own blog. I know what I mean to say, but other people bring their own experiences and viewpoints to what I write, which makes their interpretations valid in most cases as well. This is one reason I've not been trying to drill myself down to One Interpretation in my posts so much lately; ambiguity is fine. I'll put out what I think is what I mean and if it gets interpreted another way, then I think that gap is interesting. I can learn something from what I sent and what you received.

However, Bruner also argues that creators of narratives intentionally structure all the different pieces to contribute to the meaning of the whole, and it goes without saying that personal blogs don't and can't achieve this, because we as the creators are only discovering what it is we mean to say as we go. I wrote blog posts during Frances's first year that are diametrically opposed to my current stance on some parenting issues; I let them stand because change is a part of human nature, and the evidence of change is good. But I can't say that all the pieces of this blog add up into anything, unless it's Change is a Part of Human Nature.

5. Canonicity and breach. (There needs to be a set of rules--a canon--that is then breached. If John and Susan meet and get married and there are no barriers to be overcome, it's not a story. There has to be some barrier to their success.)

OK, so here's an example, because I think this one might be tricky: Mommybloggers often fuel their blogs on the canon of either The Good Mother or What Mothering is Supposed to be Like. The Good Mother as posited by any particular mom blogger might be, say, a stay-at-home Attachment Parent who spends her free time pureeing homemade organic meals into perfect babyfood for child #5. What Mothering is Supposed to be Like might be all about the Hallmark Halos, the cuddles and snuggles and notable lack of shit and vomit. Then the blog is about the breach, or all the ways that the mom blogger in question does not meet that canon--that she gives her baby formula, lets her baby cry, and intends to stop at 1/2 because OH MY GOD I CAN'T TAKE TEN MORE YEARS OF THIS (though I love my children very much, thank you); or what the hell, and where did all this shit and vomit come from? What makes the blog interesting in that case, what drives it, is how the blogger breaches the canon, or defies expectations.

6. Referentiality. (The story needs to refer to real life somehow.)

One can only hope that any self-proclaimed personal blogger is writing entries that are related at least tangentially to his or her own actual life.

7. Genericness. (It needs to have a genre, even if only to flout it, to tell us how to interpret or make sense of the story.)

Blogs are a genre. A genre-in-progress, to be sure, but a genre, with plenty of genre conventions.

8. Normativeness. (The norms of a culture, group or family will be in some way highlighted by the story.)

Personal bloggers, in writing about who they actually are, will without thinking about it, make clear who it is they think they are supposed to be. As in the above example, a mom blogger who writes about her own life and all the ways she is not the Good Mother or how her experience doesn't match up, even if she never names or describes those stereotypes, in the process of writing about her own perspectives or experiences those stereotypes will be detailed. "I use formula, and I don't feel guilty about it!" makes it pretty clear that someone out there thinks she ought to--and there is the Norm.

9. Context sensitivity and negotiability. (We assume what the author's background knowledge might have been, the society they lived in, and what their intentions likely were; we assume what the audience's knowledge is likely to be; and then the author/teller and the audience meet somewhere in the middle in some spirit of charity.)

When that mom blogger says "I use formula, and I don't feel guilty about it!" we know she's not talking about math, but about commercial infant food. She assumes a contemporary audience who will be familiar with her vocabulary; we as her readers assume a contemporary blogger who is writing from this context. If this blogger had been writing in 1273, we might have stopped to wonder--formula for what?

For a literary example, think of Shakespeare: he was anti-semetic and sexist to the core, but it doesn't detract from what most people think of his genius because we assume that the context he wrote in shaped his views. Someone writing The Merchant of Venice today would not have such a sympathetic reception.

10. Narrative accrual. (Over time, stories add together into something called a tradition, a history, or a culture.)

This is also an example of non-seamlessness, because in oral storytelling, the narrative accrual is more a case of narrative replacement: earlier versions of the story are forgotten as the story develops. In literary narrative, the narrative accrual is a process of reference and allusion, as when Zadie Smith wrote On Beauty based on Howard's End. There are plenty of clues in On Beauty that she based the whole thing on a particular classic, but there's nothing direct in the text. You have to have read Howard's End to get it, or have someone tell you.

But when it comes to personal blogs, narrative accrual is visible and fixed, much like the fossil record fixes and makes visible the evolution of some particular organism in sedimentary layers of rock. The creator and the audience visibly negotiate the meaning of the text together, and part of this negotiation is in visibly adding to the narrative, in comments and links and blog posts and social networking sites. And this all adds up, just as Bruner said, to a tradition, a history, and a culture.

Not all of the examples Bruner provided were high-minded. For instance, a company's annual spring softball game is a tradition that probably built up around A Story: once upon a time they had a softball game, and hey! It was lots of fun! Let's do that again--so now they do it every year. The End. Or a family tradition: One year at Thanksgiving Mom burned the turkey and Dad went to get take-out, and we liked it better because it was easier, so now every year we have chinese food instead. So a narrative accrual that results in a tradition or a culture doesn't have to be cerebral or even important.

I think my favourite evolving example of this in the blogosphere might be Jen and Mad's Social Justice Roundtable series. It has a founding myth (the group wedding); and it has creators and audiences who jointly create the meaning together; and it has all of the other ten features of narrative--occuring over time, being particular, having goals, canonicity and breach, referring to real life, norms, context sensitivity and negotiation, and narrative accrual. Especially the last, as the series consists largely of narrative glue designed to hold dozens or hundreds of other narratives together (and I'll bet lots of you thought it was just a big list of links and a short op-ed). Together it's all adding up into at least a new tradition, and possibly a culture.

Bruner's point was that while we discover the physical world through trial and error, experimentation, observation, and other methods of gathering objective knowledge, we learn about people and societies and our place in the world through narrative--stories. We tell stories about ourselves and our families and our homes and our people, we tell stories about parenting and marriages and friendships and teams and castes and classes, we tell stories about men and women and children, we tell stories about work and play and faith and meaning and loss and growth and hope and achievement and despair and failure and all the rest of the panoply of human experience, because by doing so we both create the social reality we inhabit and learn how to navigate it.

The problem comes when we realize we cannot fit ourselves into the narratives, and as a result, can't fit into the culture either.

As you can tell, I find this pretty interesting. I will probably write about it again. Maybe a few more times. You've been warned. Feel free to use the comments section to complain.

Posted by Andrea at 6:00 AM | Comments (11)

Psst

Updated to add: it's working now. Sorry for the weekend mix-up. I know it ruined all of your plans.

Look at the url.

That's change #1.

(Yes, ok, feedreaders; you might have to click through for this one.)

Posted by Andrea at 5:04 PM | Comments (6)

This isn't the way most people celebrate Mabon, but it works for me

More bloggy changes are afoot, Dear Readers.

I've mentioned a few times that I wanted to keep this blog for three years, if only because three years is an average blog's lifespan and I wanted to see it through at least that long. Three years is next March. I've also said that I wanted to create a written record of Frances's earliest life, until she is able to remember events in great enough detail to create her own story. In December she will be four. That seems like as good an arbitrary deadline as any.

I've had a lot of fun with this, but it's becoming obvious that for various reasons, it's time to pack in what I've been doing up to this point. Not at this exact moment, but the renewal date for my website is coming fast, and well, I might as well make changes when it is most convenient to make them.

For one thing, it's going to move. My real name is already all over this thing, I can't think of any good reason to keep the pseudonym in the url. For another, due to various legal issues I'm not permitted to explore in any great detail, I'm actually barred from discussing a lot of the things I would like to talk about--and for personal reasons a lot of other topics are off-limits, too. If I can't write about personal things, then it's not a personal blog. And the headache of trying to write about things abstractly and obliquely is just not worth it. I end up not saying what I want to and it's evident that most of you have no idea what I'm going on about anyway. This means a lot of old stuff will be coming down when I move the site over. It stinks, but it can't be helped.

I'll try to make this as painless as possible and give you plenty of warning. If you define "plenty" as, you know, a few weeks.

Posted by Andrea at 6:15 AM | Comments (19)

RIP Privacy

(You see, I'm not actually done yet.)

A bit more about privacy, resulting from the same article about the privacy generation gap, because my brain's still gnawing on it:

"'If that girl’s video got published, if she did it in the first place, she should be thick-skinned enough to just brush it off,' Xiyin muses. 'I understand that it’s really humiliating and everything. But if something like that happened to me, I hope I’d just say, well, that was a terrible thing for a guy to do, to put it online. But I did it and that’s me. So I am a sexual person and I shouldn’t have to hide my sexuality. I did this for my boyfriend just like you probably do this for your boyfriend, just that yours is not published. But to me, it’s all the same. It’s either documented online for other people to see or it’s not, but either way you’re still doing it. So my philosophy is, why hide it?'

"For anyone over 30, this may be pretty hard to take. Perhaps you smell brimstone in the air, the sense of a devil’s bargain: Is this what happens when we are all, eternally, onstage? It’s not as if those fifties squares griping about Elvis were wrong, after all. As Clay Shirky points out, 'All that stuff the elders said about rock and roll? They pretty much nailed it. Miscegenation, teenagers running wild, the end of marriage!'

"Because the truth is, we’re living in frontier country right now. We can take guesses at the future, but it’s hard to gauge the effects of a drug while you’re still taking it. What happens when a person who has archived her teens grows up? Will she regret her earlier decisions, or will she love the sturdy bridge she’s built to her younger self—not to mention the access to the past lives of friends, enemies, romantic partners? On a more pragmatic level, what does this do when you apply for a job or meet the person you’re going to marry? Will employers simply accept that everyone has a few videos of themselves trying to read the Bible while stoned? Will your kids watch those stoner Bible videos when they’re 16? Is there a point in the aging process when a person will want to pull back that curtain—or will the MySpace crowd maintain these flexible, cheerfully thick-skinned personae all the way into the nursing home?"

I am not convinced that privacy deserves its sterling reputation. Yes, it's a good idea to keep your PIN numbers and all eight bazillion passwords to yourself (except if you're anything like me all eight bazillion passwords strongly resemble each other because there's no way you could keep them all straight otherwise) and yes, there are times when keeping your mouth shut is the respectful, polite and kind thing to do. But I think when most of us consider privacy, we probably envision a wall between ourselves and the rest of the world, and the right to keep things that involve ourselves on the inside of that wall whenever we like. Which is exactly what has made domestic violence and rape so difficult to deal with; they have been defined as acts within the private sphere, which puts all of the shame and most of the blame on the victim, not least for daring to make it public.

People seem to react with a deep sense of moral outrage when they perceive someone else's inviolable personal walls being breached, even if that person has done things behind that wall that are beyond the pale of human decency. Or at least, they did. And I think that if this particular moral code is going the way of T Rex, it's a very, very good thing. Any child you know who was abused in whatever way was abusable for years, and maybe decades, because our society gives their parents mile-high foot-thick privacy walls and puts the onus on the child for maintaining that wall for the good of the family.

To return to a concern of Mad's from the last post, and which coincidentally made the news yesterday morning, a young disabled boy was bullied by his classmates, and the bullying was captured on video and posted to You-Tube. On the one hand: Boo! That poor boy, his bullying made public spectacle. On the other hand: Yay! That boy's bullying, because it was made spectacle, was also made visible, which allowed the adults in his life to deal with it. In the days before camera phones, the young bastards would have perceived that there was no one to watch and they could get away with it indefinitely. Indeed, it seems they believed that the entire You-Tube audienceship would find their larks hilarious; instead, they found horror and outrage and a swift reporting to the authorities. So, given that the bullying was inevitable, would privacy have made it better or worse? Who would have benefited from privacy? Who would have paid?

I'm about as far from an exhibitionist as you can get and still have a live, breathing human being. I don't live my entire life on the edge of my skin. BUT: I am very aware of the many times that the impulse to keep something behind the wall has been destructive to me, personally; and aware moreover of how the code of keeping almost-everything mothering-related behind the wall is destructive to both mothers and their children, by making invisible the hard work and sacrifice required and obscuring potential solutions. I have always believed that by blogging publicly about the difficulties of motherhood, Frances has a better chance of mothering herself in a society more genuinely supportive of that role. So just call me Mrs. Banks and let's all sing a rousing chorus of Sister Suffragette.

(Take that, Time Magazine. I'm not blogging about Frances despite my love for her, or in a frenzy of self-aggrandizement that is blind to vast potential harms. I've actually sat myself down, looked at the potential consequences of both actions in the short and long term, and concluded that less privacy around the work of mothering while it might lead to short-term embarassment (though that is far from clear) will be one of the best tools in the fight for greater societal supports for families which Frances herself will probably need and hopefully benefit from one day.)

So how those walls can be made to support human rights rather than subvert them, or what really belongs behind the walls vs. what's there from habit and is better brought out into the light of day, seems to me very much an open question, and probably not one best answered with gut feelings. Consider abortion: currently, the number of people who are open and out about their own abortions is very small, leading to a public perception that few women terminate pregnancies, when actually the number is close to half. Our gut feelings keep our mouths closed; our interests would almost certainly be better served by tattooing our reproductive histories on our foreheads. We should have the right not to have other people know if we don't want to; but why don't we want to? Where does this impulse to privacy come from, and who does it serve?

Or remember Jeffrey. If a guest of that family had captured his terrible abuse on camera phone and uploaded it to You-Tube, regardless of their motivations, would that little boy be alive today? Wasn't it precisely privacy that killed him?

I am not unaware of the risks I am taking, which range from the practical (could lose my job) to the relational (could lose my parents) to the more fanciful (considering persistent myths that abortion is a conspiracy to provide witches with human fetuses for blood sacrifice, gods only know what I'm getting myself into. I'd originally provided a link on the last, but decided that's not the kind of attention I want to draw to myself; but if you google witchcraft and abortion, you'll find them)).

Privacy is not an unmitigated good. One can only determine whether or not privacy is part of the solution to any given situation by asking who it would benefit, and who would pay. When it comes to blogging on any particular person or story, the answers are not cut and dried. Anyone who claims that blogging is necessarily a violation of privacy that will lead to harm (especially when done by those scribbling women) is probably a person who has benefited from privacy far more in their own lives than has paid for it.

The only exception I make to this is photographs. But more on that later.

Posted by Andrea at 7:17 AM | Comments (21)

Privacy Post-Mortem

There is something you need to know about me:

If you have a blog, and one day you decide to make it private and password-protect it, I will have all the best of intentions. I will visit diligently for a few weeks. Then I will lose the password, forget to email you about it, and you will probably never hear from me again.

It's nothing personal. It is--in the classic break-up locution--not you. It's me. (Jane Dark, Kristen, and Kirsten, I am particularly though not exclusively looking at you.) But I want you to know, because if recent trends continue, this corner of the blogosphere will be empty. Everyone else will have boxed themselves up to protect their families' privacy, and they'll hate me because I never come around anymore.

And I understand.

But I wonder if we aren't all dead wrong.

~~~~~

An article I read recently noted that there is a generational divide brewing around the issue of privacy: that below a certain age, more and more people simply don't understand privacy at all, and above another age, people regard the younger generation's carelessness with horror. Below a certain age, you have a profile on every social networking site out there; above a certain age, you can't fathom wanting a personal website. We (bloggers in our late twenties and above) are the filling in the sandwich, valuing privacy but willing to violate it for certain ambiguous rewards.

One of the points made by the writer was that perhaps the kids of today are the only ones who have yet realized that privacy is already dead. Our debit and credit cards leave a trail of our preferences and purchases behind us; this information is frequently leaked by the companies despite their intentions; as a member of the federal civil service, my job, my employer, and my work contact information are legally a part of the public record; my employer owns my emails; when I leave a comment on a blog from work, my computer tells you where I'm calling from; stores and other semi-public places are covered with surveillance cameras; the home addresses and phone numbers of bloggers are frequently posted publicly by folks who dislike them; I'm sure every email I've ever sent from hotmail or rogers or sympatico has been cached somewhere--how much sense does it make to talk about privacy?

Maybe the question isn't "how do we protect our privacy?"; maybe it's "given that I have no privacy, shall I embrace it or fight it?"

Even if you, personally, are not yet willing to cede the point: If this is the world our kids are growing up in, do we need to at least understand this viewpoint enough to help them navigate a world that is radically different than the one we grew up in? Much of the conversation to date around the ethics of writing about our children's lives presupposes the value and even the possibility of maintaining privacy. It presupposes that the playgrounds and schools and social networks of our children's experience will be the same ones we navigated--that it is possible to keep things private, and that our children will want us to. But is it, and will they?

Danah Boyd (who was quoted in the article) has been researching youth and online communities/privacy issues for years, and I've been following her blog since I started my research for last year's Motherlode presentation. She comes at this topic from a different (and more rigorously researched) vantage point: Erosion of youth privacy--the local panopticon Besides the purely geek pleasure of seeing "panopticon" used correctly and in context, this post makes an excellent point. We had privacy growing up, not only from 'the world' but also from our family and school. We were allowed to ride our bikes alone, go out into the weed field two blocks over without adult supervision, go to the park and play with our friends. Our kids are growing up without any kind of privacy in part because we don't give them any out of safety concerns--it starts when they're babies, mutates into playdates and supervised activities from dawn until dusk when they're older, and then when they get online we watch every move they make, monitor their conversations and emails, watch what sites they're visiting. But regardless of whether or not this is a good practice, the result is that we are part of the reason that our kids will not grow up with a meaningful sense of privacy.

And hell, so why shouldn't they put their entire lives online once they're old enough, then? They're used to being watched and scrutinized. At least this is a kind of scrutiny that is under their control, or feels like it.

Mix vigorously with my own doubts about the whole origins and worth of privacy--which, let's face it, originated with the industrial revolution primarily as a means of keeping women in their place. The private sphere was where women worked and men rested, and since women never got to leave the private sphere, they were always working and their entire lives were invisible. So what is privacy good for? (Not a rhetorical flourish: where should privacy begin and end in order to reinforce and enhance rights rather than erode them?)

When I think about it, every baby I know is already far more public than I ever was as a baby. They all have baby scrapbook sites, those sites have journals which are blogs in disguise, most of them are not password protected; they have been flickred and youtubed, posted about on bulletin boards, entered into photo contests, and modelled in Toys'R'Us and Baby Gap advertising campaigns. Some of them are even blogged about which, given the rest of it, does not seem like the egregious violation of their basic human rights that it is often made out to be.

So what is really going on? Why are bloggers who write about their kids despised above every other form of blogger? I don't know about you, but I'm not kidding myself--one day I'll go online and google Frances and her blog will come up and one of the entries will say "I HATE MY MOTHER." Because teenagers think those kinds of things sometimes, and they normally tell their friends about it, and now this involves letting the rest of the world listen in, too. I will probably neither enjoy nor agree with the substance of that post. That's life in the 21st century.

And as I've often alluded to, my diary was published in a very large-circulation newspaper when I was a teenager. This is an ambiguous act, privacy-wise, because while yes I volunteered for this honour--it was my diary. But you know? It was no big deal. My friends were impressed by it rather than otherwise; it certainly wasn't used as fodder for schoolyard or cafeteria bullying. Isn't the idea that some kids will Google a hated classmate's mother in the hopes that she has or had a blog that is still cached and read through a few hundred or a few thousand entries to find something that makes a good insult a tad ... inconceivable, given that it's so much easier to pick on the glasses or hair or backpack or out-of-style bluejeans? Even moreso when you consider that most of our kids' classmates will also be public babies and public kids, if not blogged about, then photos and videos uploaded for sure.

Does it really seem likely that posting a photo of a baby on a blog is more risky than emailing it directly to family? Does it seem reasonable to suppose that the grandmother doesn't receive it and forward it to all her friends to brag? As soon as an electronic recording of any kind leaves the originating computer, the potential is largely the same. (This isn't going to change my policy of posting photos of Frances's face; twice burned is infinitely shy.) Backing away one more step: how is this different from parents signing their kids up with modelling agencies and getting them to pose in Babies-R-Us flyers? Can't pedophiles access those and use them for nefarious purposes? Don't bad guys have scanners? How is it different?

Here is my thesis:

The difference is that mothers blogging about their kids are themselves in the spotlight, instead of backing out and letting their kids inhabit the spotlight on their own. It isn't the act. It isn't the potential consequences. It's that the act of blogging about our kids means that we, as mothers, are claiming a spot in the public sphere and asserting ourselves as separate persons with desires and stories of our own. Mothers are supposed to be--not just background figures, but background. We stand in the doorway waving a hanky and weeping when our child goes out for adventures, while we stay safely at home, because we are home. It makes motherhood itself an arena of ambition, desire, potentially competition--which of course it always has been, but now it's visible.

Thoughts?

Posted by Andrea at 7:10 AM | Comments (34)

Slippery

The Trickster is a character in various mythologies whose job is to make fools of us. He is a Coyote or a Rabbit or a Satyr, merrily inviting us to dance while leading us, with wide grins, straight for the open pit. The meaning of the Trickster, if such a simple thing can be applied to a slippery character, seems to be "Life isn't fair" and "Nothing is what it seems" and "Follow the rules, or else."

In University I met a person who recounted to me with great glee a story of a fellow neo-pagan who had made a ritual to Loki, a classic Trickster. Within a short time her car had exploded and she'd lost her home and job and relationship, but as the recounter chortled, what do you expect when you ask Loki for help? There are some people and, yes, some gods, you simply do not take seriously, you smile politely and watch your step and check any offered gifts for evidence of tampering. That's just the kind of creatures they are.

Personal blogging is, I think, like Loki. You dip in a toe and the water's fine so you throw on a suit and jump in. And over there is the flashing tail of a merman, inviting you to swim deeper and deeper. He points the way to rewards just ahead, though what those rewards are is never made clear. Friendships, maybe. Approval. Accolades. Something worth it. And then, when land is out of sight and your arms are beginning to tire and you'd like to crawl out on the shore, he whispers in your ear, "Just try." What began as a way to vent and think and process with a small group of friends becomes a performance art. As more people read, there is less you can say.

I wonder if this is more a problem for women than men? Part of a woman's role is managing the relationship, fostering the emotions and bonds and occasions and gifts and Special Moments (tm) of everything from friendships to marriage to the in-laws, a role which clashes directly with discussing that relationship honestly with any group beyond one's closest friends. It's why women bundle up their resentment and buy the fucking presents for their god-damned forgetful husband's critical and overbearing mother again, even though they swore last year would be the end of it. It's why they spend two months harping on their beloved to remember to buy the card the card the card the card the card it's your sister's birthday tomorrow did you remember to buy the card? No? Guess I'll do it then. It's why they smile and pretend to be nice to people they would rather stab with a poisoned stake and can recite, off the top of their heads, their children's friendship histories back to the age of two along with the toy and colour preferences of their current playmates. It's our job, part of the modern femininity project, to manage the relationships, all the relationships, all the time. And blogging starts off as this safe little corner to bitch and moan about it, until people start reading it, at which point the bitching and moaning become a direct threat to one's ability to manage the relationships and, typically, cease in abrupt fashion.

Thenceforth the marriage, the in-laws, the children, the friends, the ex-boyfriends from highschool, are subjected to critcism of only the most tepid and flavourless and opaque sort. "I knew someone once who" and "I'll call her M" and "I won't tell you his name because I don't want him to google this." And "let's just say" and "in other words" and "to make a long story short."

When I read the entries of a new blogger, the honesty and immediacy shock me. They aren't scared yet. They aren't thinking about so-and-so finding that entry and figuring out who wrote it and what they were talking about.

Dear Readers, I have not been sleeping well since September. It comes and goes, as it always does. I have a bad night, then a good one, then a bad one, then it's Saturday and I get to sleep in. I never catch up but, as I keep telling myself, at least it's not as bad as it was when I was 24 and getting one or two hours a night, the pounding of my heart like a jackhammer on a titanium slab such a constant course of adrenaline that I could hardly even close my eyes even when I was too exhausted to stand. Except that it has been like that, lately. Last Tuesday night I lay still in bed and stared at the ceiling until four o'clock. I was exhausted, but my heart would not stop beating. And I know why I'm not sleeping, but I can't tell you.

I couldn't even tell myself until recently. Acknowledging the cause of my insomnia would involve Making Decisions and, as anyone who has known me for more than five years can attest, I am terrible at making decisions, especially where there are no good choices.

I alluded a while ago to a recent trance (you read a witch's blog, you take the flakey with the profound, my friends) where, instead of finding the forest I usually do, healthy and green and crawling with life, I found a charred and blasted clearcut, the landscape so dry that even the riverbed was cracked and fissured. For the non-witches in the audience, aka most of you, water is the element of emotions. And it was as if a fire had raged through and evaporated even every drop of groundwater. It was frightening; considering what I thought was going on, it was also extreme. When I found a river I followed it to a waterfall with a cave behind it; the cave was like a geode, inside all amethyst crystals so sharp they cut my feet to ribbons. (I have not figured out why my feet were bare.) There was a scrying pool in the middle, and I smoothed out a patch of stone beside it using a file and a hasp. As I did, the rocks bled. The rocks bled, and soon my hands and feet were slick with it.

Once I had that patch smoothed and could sit without pain, I determined to stay there until I had seen whatever it was that had caused this. I think I have, and I wish I hadn't.

People have from time to time admired my stoicism, and while I think this is hilarious given my ability to cry at Hallmark commercials it is true that I can be an unemotional person when the situation seems to require it. Or even if only I require it. I will let you in on the secret: distract yourself. Practice over and over the words you have to say until they are meaningless sounds and you can repeat them without emotion. Stare at a spot on the floor and count to ten, over and over. Be aware of what your facial muscles are doing so you know when they are betraying you. Learn how to force them into passivity, or better yet, a smile. Keep something in your hand. Don't look people in the eyes. Cross your arms over your chest, or put your hands in your pockets (the latter seems less defensive). Stay busy. Read a lot. Visualize the pain as a physical injury. Fidget. Never just sit.

I have become so proficient at this that even I am not always aware of what it is that I am trying not to feel, which is why I need back-door tricks like trances and tarot cards. Sometimes only over the course of weeks or months or years do I become aware of a pattern of behaviour, something strange I am doing that I can't explain. Something like, I'm not sleeping. Something like, Why can't I look him in the eyes? Something like, He only asked you how your day was, Andrea. Something like, The rocks are bleeding. And then the monster is out of the cage and won't go back in again.

This is cryptic and confusing and you are all, I know, drumming your fingers on the table and thinking "Out with it!" I wish I could, but even this has all my internal censors screaming. I am risking too much, but I can't talk, and without writing I can't cope. So this is both not enough and too much.

This monster is familiar, but I am not yet ready to look directly at its claws or teeth or yellow eyes. I was so sure that if I just kept walking around that cage it would starve and die, but it hasn't. And I am so ill equipped to deal with this thing, so resistant to the idea of relationship wrangling, so uninterested in taking primary responsibility for what should be a two-person job, so tired of having the same conversations over and over and in the first place so revolted by talking about feelings and so disgusted by the sight of tears (my own included) that I think I would rather poke out my own eyeballs with a rusty fork. Which explains why I had no conscious idea that the monster was still sitting in its cage.

But now I know, and it knows that I know, and the questions is: What am I going to do with this thing? Can I live with it? Because it has proven itself too adept at survival for me to believe it is going to die.

Posted by Andrea at 7:07 AM | Comments (32)

Small Hands, Big Head

First, an announcement:

Jen over at Under the Ponderosa officially wins the first-on-the-dancefloor prize for posting on the Momifesto discussion over at TheWholeMom. Huzzah! Yay Jen!

I think this point may have been lost in my latest dissertation, so I'll reiterate--briefly! (Imagine that.) I'm not going to participate myself until there is actually a conversation. First of all, you've already been deluged with my opinions on this, and I hardly think you all need more at this present time. Secondly, since TWM is half my site, I'm concerned that what I say would carry more weight than it's worth; and considering I already come on very strong when I'm talking about something I care about, that could be disastrous for any kind of open or honest conversation.

So I am purposefully keeping myself quiet. Consider this your great chance to strike back at my vast and terrible empire.

~~~~~

According to Dani, it's World Kindness Week.

"Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom." Theodore Rubin

"When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people." Abraham Joshua Heschel

What has struck me several times in the blogosphere is how often attention is meted out to those who least deserve it--a relatively lucky person with one or two hard problems who makes much of them will often receive more sympathy and attention than a person who has lived their whole live as a string of bad luck and who still manages to be generous and kind.

Yesterday I got an email from a new blogger that almost made me cry. She introduced herself, told me all about her life, and then asked if she could send me a gift. An actual gift, not a product for review or a beg for traffic. I don't want to embarass her by naming her (but if you'd like me to, G, let me know and I will).

LauraJ, too, is so damned kind. If you've read her blog, you'll know some of the things she's had to deal with; if you haven't, then you should. What amazes me is that with everything she's had stacked against her, she remains not only optimistic and full of good cheer, but also generous. She doesn't have a lot of money, but when she saw a book she thought my daughter would like, she bought it and sent it to us, along with a lovely hand-made bag scaled down for Frances's size (and which she brought out for Hallowe'en).

Kindness is more important than wisdom; and there is more I can learn from it. It humbles me, and gives me something worthwhile to strive for.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Philo

Sometimes those hard battles make someone bitter, or mean, or cruel.

My mother spent most of my teen years depressed. She was never diagnosed or treated and I didn't see it at the time; I believed only that she didn't love me. With good reason--she said so often enough.

I didn't recognize the hard battle she was fighting. I met her cruelty with anger, and stayed angry with her for fifteen years. It was only when I became a mother myself and realized the intense investment that raising a child entails that I saw that she must have loved me once, or she couldn't have mothered me. She might have threatened to kick me out of the house on my sixteenth birthday on a weekly basis--but she didn't.

This remains my greatest challenge. When I've been hurt, the desire to hurt in return is overwhelming, and for weeks I can feel myself skittering on the edge of intentional and outright cruelty. Sometimes I slip and fall despite my best efforts. Sometimes you see that here.

If I learn nothing else in the rest of my life but how to meet pettiness, hostility, cruelty or contempt with kindness, it will have been well-lived.

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate." Albert Schweitzer

"Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence or learning." Frederick W. Faber

"In this world, there is nothing softer or thinner than water. But to compel the hard and unyielding, it has no equal. That the weak overcomes the strong, that the hard gives way to the gentle -- this everyone knows. Yet no one acts accordingly." Lao Tse

I know I don't.

I chose Athena Dreaming as my craft name when I was in my early twenties, feeling a bit sick, after reading The Biography of Athena. It was too apt. She was the goddess of craft, wisdom and war. When the city of Athens was almost lost to Poseidon, god of the sea, she sold out the women of the city (agreed that henceforth they would be named for their husbands) in order to keep it for herself. She believed in winning at all costs.

Unfortunately self-knowledge does not always lead to change. When I sense a battle, I want to charge in. I've been told that most women are conflict-avoidant; not me. I want to win. My impulse is to meet hard with hard, fire with fire, and hash my opponents to smithereens.

It is hard to remember that more battles are won and more change is wrought by determined kindness than by a clash of intellect.

"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique." Benjamin Jowett

And so I find it. How easy it is to set "kindness" as a goal, and how hard it is to remember in the instance of each particular choice, which path leads there. How hard it is to subjugate my own impulses and deliberately choose the right. How hard it is to recognize a choice between selfishness and charity or television and activism/volunteering as a choice for or against kindness.

It's easy to be for kindness (as it is easy to be 'for honesty,' 'for justice,' 'for equality'). It is hard to be kind.

"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest." Maya Angelou

Kindness isn't niceness.

Nice is the path of least resistance in social interactions. Nice is a concern with self-image. Nice is being dishonest to and about people and situations you dislike in order to avoid conflict, or to be perceived as a good person when you are feeling anything but good. Nice is cowardly.

Kind isn't.

And as much as I find it dismayingly easy to be honest about people and situations I dislike, and perhaps it requires some courage (or perhaps not), that's not kindness either. Kindness is more difficult. It requires us to meet hate with love, stinginess with generosity, closedness with openness, dishonesty with honesty, slurs and taunts with silence or blessings, no matter how often, no matter how much it hurts, and not falsely; we are required to mean it.

I am bad at this.

I try. I try to find ways to dissipate the urge to hurt. I remind myself of the three-fold law (what you send out comes back to you three times over) and the rede (do what you will, but harm none). I meditate, I go into trances (and how dismayed I was recently when I did so and found, instead of my normal forest, a charred and clearcut landscape). I read myths and stories and books that remind me of what I want to do and who I want to be. I post reminders in the welcome message to my blog software about how I want to conduct myself here. It's not enough; I fail. I fall often.

Kindness means a lot to me. I value it highly.

So you might be confused that I am not participating in the "kind blog" thing sweeping the blogosphere.

In part, because I am uneasy with blanket declarations of being pro-morality or pro-virtue. Just as calling yourself pro-life automatically declares your opponent anti-life, or pro-family declares the other anti-family when they are anything but, I am troubled by any group of people (no matter how well-intentioned) declaring ownership of kindness, as if anyone who doesn't sign on becomes anti-kind, when they may simply have a different definition or express it in another way. For instance, I don't believe that kindness requires me to write only things that will make you feel better when you leave here. Not at all. If I write about global warming and it's a bit depressing, does that mean I am unkind?

But mostly, because I am uncomfortable with claiming a virtue for myself.

Matthew 6
1 Be careful that you don't do your charitable giving before men, to be seen by them, or else you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

2 Therefore when you do merciful deeds, don't sound a trumpet before yourself, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may get glory from men. Most certainly I tell you, they have received their reward.

3 But when you do merciful deeds, don't let your left hand know what your right hand does,

4 so that your merciful deeds may be in secret, then your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.

This might seem an odd motivation for a witch; but truth is truth, and I believe in doing the right thing for the right reason.

I would not, on the one hand, want to publically proclaim a virtue I do not deserve. If I am unkind, I don't want to cheapen it by championing it loudly while undercutting it in deed. How much damage have a few hypocrites done to christianity by preaching loudly about family values, and honesty, and countless other virtues, while living lives that are anything but? I would hate for a virtue I hold so dearly to become a commonplace, cheap word, the world's best sheep costume for a lot of duplicitous wolves who know how to act nicely in public and who wouldn't know the difference between kindess and niceness if it tripped over their feet. I wouldn't want to be part of that cheapening. I wouldn't want to be the reason why you stopped believing in the value of kindness, because I had a pretty button on my sidebar that declared my belief in its value while being cruel or cowardly or false in my dealings with you.

Especially when there's no accountability. What will the 'kind blog' community do if someone who posts that button is routinely cruel? Or publically nice on their blog but then savages bloggers they don't like on bulletin boards or by email, or who calls the CAS on a blogger whose parenting decisions they don't like, or who routinely uses slurs in their writing, or who in any other way spreads pain while declining to take responsibility for it?

And on the other hand, I hope that anyone who reads my blog over time will know what my motivations are. Yes, you'll see me fall down. I'm not perfect. But I want you to know how much I value kindness by my actions, not because of a button I stuck in the sidebar. Maybe you believe I am unkind, and maybe I deserve that. Isn't my kindness, or the kindness of this place, for you to judge?

Kindness means, to me, being a light. Choosing consciously to be a light, as much as you can. Sometimes it means being a light with other lights, which is easy; sometimes it means being a light in the darkness alone, which is hard. But not in any situation I can think of does kindness mean pinning the picture of a light to your chest.

If you are participating in this (and I know that the intentions of most of the participants as well as the creator are good), I have a favour to ask you:

Please mean it. Don't let it be just a picture of a light you pin to your chest. Don't forget it's there, along with all the rest of the blog bling twinkling in your sidebar, down at the bottom with the hit counter and your TTLB rank.

Let it be real. Don't make it a way of speaking on your blog that doesn't reflect the way you conduct your life, don't make it equivalent to being 'nice.' Look at the long and sometimes hard road before you, and choose it willingly. If you do, you will at times be confronted with the worst impulses you have, and asked to overcome them, because kindness contains within it all of the other virtues: generosity, honesty, love, forgiveness, charity, courage, humility. Kindness sounds easy, but unless you're perfect, it's not.

Kindness has been a touchstone for me my whole life. It is the highest compliment I have, and one I bestow only on the people I admire most. If it is broken and cheapened and turned into the equivalent of 'nice,' I think it will break my heart.

~~~~~

(This sermon brought to you by the Church of Andrea, practicing hypocrisy since 1975. Please leave your tithe in the collection plate on your way out, and don't forget to collect your Momifesto t-shirt from the vestibule. I know. Don't think I don't see parallels between the kind blog thing and the Momifesto. But I will say that I have argued in private conversations that accountability, the willingness to be called on one's failures, would need to be a feature of any code of blogging ethics; and there's a reason why we're trying to have a public conversation instead of making a pronouncement on blogging ethics then asking people to link to it.)

Posted by Andrea at 12:13 PM | Comments (19)

Accessibility Statement

(Apparently, it's Diabetes Blogging Day in the blogosphere. And, uh, I missed it. So much for BlogHer's contention that I'm a type 1 diabetes blogger, eh? Anyway, just because I can't contribute today doesn't mean you can't learn a lot about daily life with a difficult chronic condition by surfing the diabetes blogosphere today. And November is Diabetes Awareness Month, so it's practically your patriotic obligation. "But how can I find them?" you ask. You're in luck! To make up for my diabetic blogger slackitude, I have linked to four fabulous diabetes bloggers in the "blogs I'm reading" section in the sidebar on the right. There are, literally, thousands out there, and I personally read and enjoy many more than these four, but time's limited, so four it is.)

~~~~~

This is only a mini-soapbox, promise; mostly, after doing some reading I've learned that once one has implemented accessibility features, the thing to do is a brief post to let people know what they are.

Hey, I've implemented some accessibility features! Isn't that exciting? Aren't you excited? No? Umm, ok. Well. Let me tell you about them anyways.

1. I've put in access keys. So far, "1" for "Main page." I may add more. If I do, I will update this page. Those of you for whom this feature means nothing, feel free to ignore.

2. I've added alt tags, where appropriate, to all the repeating images, and in future I'll add them to any photos I post.

I know, I know, I'm bad, I should have done this from the beginning. Sorry. Won't happen again.

For those of you who don't know, it's not just a nit-picky designer thing. Text-only browsers and site-readers will read the entire text of the image location for any image without an alt tag. That goes for the header, for spacers, for photos, for pretty line breaks, and so on.

It is a pretty line break, isn't it? Such nice colours. Too bad that for anyone reading this site through a reader on a page with thirty-odd comments, god help them, they would have heard "athenadreaming dot org slash spacer dot jiff" between every one. And the sidebar!

3. I put the sidebar on the right, as previously noted, so that users of certain browsers aren't forced to read through or listen to the entire sidebar text before getting to the actual entries. Gah, how annoying that would be.

4. I tried really hard to change the stylesheet to use relative text sizes and header tags. I did. Promise. Truly. I haven't given up yet, but when I tried, everything went completely bonkers (Jen/utp, that was what you saw). And I am not a css pro, only a hack, so I had no idea how to fix it. UPDATED: I have switched to relative text sizes.

If anyone wants to point me to a solution more recent than 2002, please do!

5. I changed my templates to note that this site is written in English. (News for all of you, I'm sure.)

6. I also promise to use link titles in future whenever I get all cutesy with the link references.

7. If there is anything in particular--besides the text size issue noted in point 4--that I haven't done and that would be useful, please let me know.

8. Oh, and I put label tags on the email form below entries. Not sure how useful that is, but I did it.

Most of the rest of Dive Into Accessibility's suggestions were ones that Moveable Type incorporated into their standard templates, so I didn't have to do anything. I have no idea how this works in Blogger (I know Miche has been working on this, so maybe she has wisdom to share). This means that, instead of spending thirty days on the task as the website recommends, it took me about two hours.

This is the mini-soapbox part:

Some people reacted to my posts about bloggers with kids with disabilities by saying, "That's not my fault! Parents of kids with disabilities haven't commented on my blog, so how am I supposed to find them?"

I'll leave entirely aside the question of how they are supposed to find you if you won't comment on their blog. Entirely. Almost.

Let's pretend this is a reasonable statement to make, and tackle the two other issues raised by it:

1. Parents of kids with disabilities may not knock on your door and introduce themselves if you've posted prominent signs saying, say, "Blogtards Keep Out." For example. Considering that "tard" is considered by many to be a derivative of "retard" and is a highly offensive term to anyone who is related to someone with a cognitive delay.

2. If you live in a house with steep stairs and lots of hard-to-open doors with itty-bitty latches, hidden light switches, trap doors and secret nooks, perhaps it is also a bit unfair to stand on one's front porch and shout, "Why won't any blind people come to my house? It's not my fault no one in a wheelchair has ever sat in my living room!"

Especially if you happen to have attended this presentation on website accessibility issues at BlogHer 2006. (Thanks to Nickie for the link, I learned a lot.)

Because, yes it is your fault. You've made your house into a place where only fully-sighted and able-bodied people will feel comfortable and welcome. And yes, I do know that we're not all designers and we don't all want to be designers and we'd rather just take a template out of the box and start writing in it. I get that. But if that's the case, do be aware that there is a "KEEP OUT" sign hanging on your front door, visible only to some, and that your readership may be restricted as a result.

I'm reminded of a comment by Liz--I think it was Liz--back on my post about vernacular and how preferences about dialect can reflect classism and sexism and other unsavouries. She asked how it is you get yourself to slog through a lot of unreadable poorly written prose to understand the potentially-valuable but potentially-rotten meat of it? Now I'm going to turn that question around: How will a blind person or a person who can't use a mouse motivate themselves to the tremendous work required to get at your precious words if you throw up unnecessary obstacles? Why will they listen to five minutes of "user dot blogspot dot com slash spacer dot jiff blogroll link link link link link link link user dot blogspot dot come slash header underscore image dot jiff" to read the lovely prose you've crafted about your life?

Also remember, if this seems like a huge pain in the ass, that someday you too will be old, your vision will fail, your fine motor control will weaken, and you may still want to surf the internet. It will be much easier to get up on your high horse then and criticize the young people for being inconsiderate when designing web pages if you take the time to do what you can now, yourself, for web users who face accessibility challenges. Just a thought.

There is a difference between systemic discrimination and bigotry. Systemic discrimination does not depend on any one individual being an asshole. Sometimes, all it takes is ignorance. Ignorance by out-of-the-box template designers who don't take accessibility into consideration, because it never occurs to them. Ignorance by end-users who don't think to wonder whether those out-of-the-box templates can be read by everyone or not. All you have are a lot of people who just never thought about it, and the end result is an internet that is largely inaccessible to certain people.

Hey, I try to maintain a welcoming site and actively work to foster an atmosphere of acceptance. And I still goofed. It's not hard. It doesn't depend on being a jerk and hating disabled people, or their parents.

There are times when "thinking about audience" means all the wrong things: getting wrapped up in numbers and ranking and trends and link counts (just because I used it as an indicator doesn't mean I think it should be the be-all and end-all of blogging. You take a canary into the mineshaft but that doesn't mean that you build the mine for the canary). But "thinking about audience" can also mean trying to imagine your words and your design from the point of view of someone different from yourself, to put your mind behind their eyes and imagine what they see when they look at your blog. Is it welcoming? Does it feel safe? Have you inadvertently insulted them? Have you put a lock on the door that some people can't open?

Posted by Andrea at 6:42 AM | Comments (22)

Motherlode Part I: The Talk

I think I'm the last one to get to this, but you know you're dying to read it:

Links to the slides and handouts are embedded at the appropriate spots so you're not left scratching your heads and wondering, what is she going on about? A bit of the post-talk discussion is included at the end.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog: Blogging About Mothering a Child with Physical Differences

Hello. My name is Andrea, and I write Beanie Baby. I’m here to talk about writing about the experiences of mothering a child with physical differences on the internet.

The New Yorker published a cartoon in 1993 that has come to symbolize the supposed anonymity of the virtual world. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Now, I have dear friends, old friends, friends who are kind and generous and loyal and who say that they admire my tenacity in debate, who call me a pitbull. And let me tell you, if I can’t hide my metaphorical dogness online, there is no way a literal canine could ever get away with it.

Sadly, not only can everyone see who you are, but it matters. In my nineteen months as a blogger of a child with a physical difference, I’ve realized that other bloggers whose children are different receive, on average, less traffic and attention than bloggers whose children are healthy and develop typically.

Two questions present themselves: How do we know this is happening, and why is this a problem?

How do we know this is happening?

I pursued two lines of research: a literature review and a statistical analysis of blogrolls (my own and several others).

The literature review was surprisingly fruitful. Bloggers are a self-referential bunch--if we didn't like to talk about ourselves, we wouldn't blog, after all--as shown in the annotated bibliography (http://www.athenadreaming.org/bibliography.doc ). Clay Shirky's paper "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality", known as Shirky’s Law is the most frequently referenced. His thesis was that in any field where there are too many choices to be aware of them all—say, the blogosphere, which Technorati now pegs at over fifty million—the choices of those who have come before will have increasing influence on the choices of those who come after. For example, blogrolls function as advertising, making more people aware of the existence of a linked blog, and therefore more likely to read it and link to it than to another, unlinked one. Shirky argued that the inequality was fair because the system is a meritocracy.

Other researchers take issue with this and trace how gender and age affect a blog’s perceived legitimacy; in one paper, the lower status of LiveJournal as a blog medium is argued to be in part a result of its dominance by women and teenagers. However, there is nothing in the literature I’ve found that covers mothers.

On to the blogroll analysis. I first determined the connectedness of the various communities represented within my blogroll—that is, I visited each blog on it and read through its blogroll to see which other blogs that I read it linked to. I then divided it roughly by community—diabetes, adoptive, special needs, and so on—to see to what degree blogroll links were segregated by community. As you can see, segregation was dramatic. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/connectedness_chart.pdf) (The lines separate various vaguely defined communities (adoptive parents, post-infertility, 'regular' parents, and what SarahLynn from 'Yeah, but Houdini didn't have these hips' calls "Double Dutch Mamas"--after much reflection I think I'm stealing that phrase.) Anyway, the pink squares are the links between the blogs, and there are definitely more links between blogs in the same community.)

I also collected some basic statistics on each of the blogs I subscribe to through bloglines—number of bloglines subscribers as a proxy for readership, number of blogs that linked to that blog, and the number of blogs that blog linked to; these were labeled “subscribers,” “links in” and “links out” respectively, in case your head is starting to ache from the number of times the word “blog” is repeated in the previous sentence. I then calculated the number of links in per subscriber and the number of links in per link out and ranked the list by each metric, then analyzed it. I found, again, segregation.

One might argue that my blogroll is not representative. I agree. It’s not. It’s likely to be optimistic, because I participate in so many different communities. But assumption is not proof; so I incorporated data from five randomly chosen blogrolls. I chose the first five mom blogs on each of these blogrolls that were not previously included in my research, visited them, and gathered the same information. I found the same patterns. This list of blogs and their data was then incorporated into my own blogroll list and analyzed as a group; again, the same patterns emerged. The recitation of the statistics alone would take all of my remaining time; but I’ll point out a few of the more suggestive ones. Moms of children whose children have a physical difference or a physical, emotional or cognitive delay were more than twice as likely to occupy the bottom quartile of blogs when ranked by any metric than the top quartile. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/Statistical_Summaries.doc) (This summarizes three of the metrics; I think the results are fairly dramatic.)

In fact, while five of the ten blogs on the bottom of the list when ranked by the number of bloglines subscribers are written by SNM bloggers, only one of the top ten is. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/subscriber_rank_list.pdf) (The coloured bars are the Double Dutch blogs.) Even worse, blogs featuring children with physical disabilities--coded purple--were twice as likely to occupy the bottom quartile than the top three quartiles; and blogs featuring children who were different or ill but not disabled or delayed suffered less of a penalty. This list summarizes the SNM bloggers separately so that this can be seen more clearly. (http://www.athenadreaming.org/snm_bloggers.pdf) (Purple is physical disabilities; green is T21; orange is for health issues; yellow is rare or generally unspecified; blue is autism.) In other words, even within the world of SNM blogging, there is a hierarchy.

This was not what I expected to find when I was putting my proposal together last year. I intended to stand here today and tell everyone about the wonderful support and community to be found in the momosphere for moms of children with special needs—but this is hard to do when you don’t have a community. My daughter has a genetic syndrome resulting in dwarfism so rare that it’s never been diagnosed and isn’t likely to be. I have yet to find a single other family online with a child who has Frances’s particular mix of symptoms.

However, I have managed to dip my finger into many online communities to which I have a connection. It’s afforded me an opportunity to witness how these communities interact, or rather, don’t. The strongest example I have is when a mainstream radio station, movie or TV show uses the word “retard” or one of its derivatives (fucktard, blogtard, etc.). There are posts from dozens of DS blogs for weeks about what a hurtful term that is, how it devastates them to hear it in popular usage. This has never, to my knowledge, moved outside of the DS community. Arguably, it’s the folks who don’t live with DS who need to hear this message, but I have seen little proof that they do.

So there’s the first part of my answer to the question: Why is this a problem? Because we can learn from each other; but not if we never step foot outside of our own communities.

When I began to put my talk together, I blogged about it. While the overall response was positive, in some quarters it set off a minor firestorm of incredibly useful blog posts. For instance, I hadn’t before considered that people might not see segregation as a problem.

Several alternative explanations for this phenomenon presented themselves on multiple occasions, and I will take a few moments to refute them:

1. maybe they don’t write as well
2. maybe they don’t self-promote
3. maybe they don’t care about attention or traffic to their blogs
4. maybe the segregation is voluntary
5. maybe this is all a carefully concealed plot to become prom queen of the momosphere. Because we all know nothing makes your popularity skyrocket like a rousing conversation about privilege.

There’s no reason for writing ability or a desire to promote oneself to be unequally distributed between mothers depending on the health or development of their children, so the first two can easily be dismissed.

It is possible that SNM bloggers are so enlightened that they simply don’t care about traffic or visibility; but I don’t think it’s relevant, anymore than it would be relevant to argue that we shouldn’t care about the gaps between men’s and women’s wages because maybe women don’t want to earn more money. Besides which--again--there's no reason for mothers of children with special needs or differences to be less desirous of validation and feedback.

It is true that the segregation is partially voluntary, as evidenced by the first chart, (this goes back to the first slide: note that outgoing links and incoming links are both segregated to a large degree; however, also note that half of the Double Dutch blogs have outgoing links to blogs by 'regular moms,' whereas only 3 of the regular mom blogs have links to Double Dutch blogs) except for those SNM bloggers like myself who have no community to self-segregate to. But SNM bloggers need to have more outgoing links for each incoming link they have, for instance, which shows that it takes more effort for the same reward if your child is different. (This goes back to the statistical summaries slide.) So voluntary self-segregation doesn't fully explain it. And it is a waste of the internet’s potential.

Our lives are already segregated. Most of us spend our days surrounded by persons whose class, racial and economic backgrounds and levels of physical ability are equivalent to our own. The internet offers the increasingly rare opportunity to learn about the first-person, real-life experiences of persons in radically different circumstances, unfiltered by experts.

There is lots of rhetoric on the momosphere about how valuable this is. About how the momosphere represents the “real voices” of “real moms” and can front a new mother’s movement by fearlessly voicing our truths. As one woman said in one discussion on this topic (http://urbanmoms.typepad.com/the_mother_hood/2006/09/politics_101_a_.html), “I was amazed when I first happened upon a few blogs how profound and raw they were. Here was the true voice of the modern mom! This voice was not stifled or sanitized but was honest and true...I felt understood as a mother and challenged as a free thinking woman. I immediately knew that other women, non-bloggers, needed to hear this voice and know that someone, a whole community of 'someones', was speaking their truth, articulating beautifully their struggles, their woes, their fears as well as their passions, their joys and their dreams. This is the value of 'mom bloggers' from the perspective of an outsider.”

The consensus appears to be that the truths about regular moms are not represented by books and magazines about moms—so why would that be less true of other groups? The internet is where we can learn first-hand from people different from ourselves.

Who cares?

First, the same people who overlook or dismiss these children online will do so in the real world where it has real consequences on jobs, housing, school, bullying and so on.

Ontario implemented legislation to make all of our public spaces accessible to persons in wheelchairs. But why aren’t our public spaces accessible already? It wasn’t because architects and urban planners hated disabled people. It was because they simply never thought of them. It doesn’t have to be malevolent, it doesn’t have to be intentional, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy; overlooking a class of people through ignorance will have significant real-world consequences.

Secondly, exclusion and invisibility hurt, no matter the environment. One of my favourite bloggers, Bad Mama (badmama.blogspot.com), writes not only of the typical mom struggles and triumphs but also of mothering a child with arthrogryposis, a skeletal dysplasia. In a comment on one of my posts on this subject (http://www.athenadreaming.org/Beanie/archives/2006/08/more_with_the_v.html), she wrote:

“I've thought about taking the name of my daughter's condition out of my profile, so that people wouldn't read it and be turned away, thinking that they'll end up feeling sad to read about the poor crippled kid, but I want others to find it with a search for AMC. I've already been the subject of more than one 'pity post', as in 'reading this blog made me realize just how blessed I am with my beautiful children', and while I can appreciate what I think they are trying to say, I can't say it doesn't sting a bit.

“I can tell by my stats that there are a *lot* of people who come to the blog, click on the links to the posts where I explain what she has and what we went through, and then are done. Apparently my writing isn't scintillating enough on its own to keep them reading--they just want to find out what is wrong with her and move on.

“I can deal with my blog being boring. But few people read beyond the explanatory posts to find out. I don't know how to get people to look beyond to see that while my mothering experience is different in some ways from theirs, most of it is more alike than not alike.”

The third problem is representation. The momosphere in Canada is relatively homogeneous. Fewer than 40% of Canadian women qualify for maternity leave; yet how many Canadian mom blogs are started by women on mat leave? And what does it say that the voices of women who don’t share this “universal benefit” are not included? What experiences and perspectives might they have to offer on the bloggy hot topics of the day, whether it’s the Choice in Childcare benefit or division of household labour? Over ten per cent of Canadian mothers return to work by six weeks after the baby’s birth; yet I can’t say that ten per cent of the blogs by Canadian mothers I’ve found were written by mothers working when their babies were six weeks old.

Similarly, if the voices of Canadian mothers with children who have special needs are not represented in the momosphere, then the discourse is lacking a vital element that reduces its ability to represent Canadian mothers as a group. We know things that other moms don’t get a chance to learn, about access to health care, doctors, how the fear of CAS can influence your parenting decisions, the accessibility of playgrounds and schools. Can there be a mother’s movement without our voice? I don’t think so.

This is a problem inherent in feminism since its earliest days. Robert Allerton Parker wrote an essay in 1915 in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine in which he said, “ [feminists] grow eloquent over ‘work’ and ‘economic independence’—revealing a pathetic detachment from the woman that does work, who might tell them something of the ‘glory of Labor.’ They would open all careers to women; but it is painfully evident that they desire only well-paid servile posts of the middle class.”

If the internet as a medium is not capable of bridging such divides (which I am too much of an optimist to believe) then at least we need to be honest about who we can represent, which voices are included and which are not. It is simply wrong to state that the momosphere represents “mothers.” It represents a specific, relatively privileged subset of mothers. Those mothers have legitimate interests and concerns that deserve representation, but they do NOT deserve to be represented as the interests and concerns of all mothers.

Lastly, as Jennifer pointed out, blogging is becoming a career choice for a few lucky individuals. Such opportunities as mainstream media exposure, advertising revenue and freebies for review are offered only to bloggers with the traffic and visibility to make them worthwhile. If traffic and visibility are allocated based on such markers as race, class, sexual orientation or the physical or cognitive abilities of one’s children, then the money and goodies will be awarded based on those markers, too.

Right now, we have the opportunity to make blogging what we collectively want it to be. The unedited real-life first-person experiences of real mothers have the potential to be very powerful—the question is, who gets the power?

We can stay with the status quo, and the already-privileged can benefit even further from the increased visibility that blogging will afford them, as well as the financial benefits that the corporate world is starting to bring.

Or we can challenge ourselves to move beyond privilege so the benefits of blogging can be enjoyed by all communities, so that all voices can be heard. If we do, the momosphere could be revolutionary.

To begin this, we propose a Mom Blogger's Manifesto--a Momifesto, if you will--to incorporate the principles of transparency, honesty, bridge-building, dialogue and community that blogging does so well and so uniquely. This would be an evolving document--since we don't have all the answers--that other bloggers with an interest in these issues could contribute to, link to and publicly declare so the reading public can know where we stand. We hope that during the Q&A session--in just a minute, and thanks for your patience so far--you will contribute your own ideas about what it should include and how to make it work for all of us.

The five of us care deeply about blogging. If we sound critical, it is because we have invested perhaps too much of ourselves in this medium, an art that has also connected us to many other amazing women. We want to see it become what it is capable of being—a revolutionary tool, a political tool, an art-form, a community. A real community, not one that is built around a brand name, and not one that is restricted to a narrow demographic group.

~~~~~

It's true, as Dani said, that I was so nervous I almost electrocuted all of us; but so what. It was a good nervous, a nervous that steadily heightened because I could see, as I spoke, people nodding in the audience, or scribbling notes while I talked. 'People are listening!' my brain chirped; and it's hard to concentrate on one's notes while one's brain is chirping at one.

Sadly, we didn't get to the momifesto bit during our Q&A, because we had such a fabulous discussion on various mom blogging topics. What was incredibly gratifying was the number of people who said one of the two following things:

"I remember ... what happened a month ago, and I could not believe that anyone would argue the homogeneity of the momosphere."

"I'm so glad you brought up the homogeneity issue in your panel, because it's so true!"

Depending on whether or not the speakee blogged. Both of which set of an internal cheering section. You know, I never thought it would be a controversial topic. I mean, what am I saying? That human beings are human beings, and continue to be human beings on the internet, including their less savoury aspects. How can that be shocking? Yet apparently it was.

The first time someone put her hand up, introduced herself, and I realized that I knew her name from a major newspaper article about motherhood activism, I thought maybe I had electrocuted us all--it was a shock, literally, to see that some real movers and shakers decided our panel was worth their time at a conference jam-packed with interesting and inspiring sessions. Eventually I got used to it. Sort of.

The discussion portion went to almost 7:30 (we were supposed to end at 7), which is always a good sign; and once we'd decided to wrap it up I had a chance to meet Emily and Cooper from Been There, a large portion of the Toronto mama blogging scene, and Andrea Gordon from the Star. Everyone was so complimentary, which was kind, and happy-making.

The next post on the topic will be on that evening's Mother Talk, the lunch beforehand, and breakfast the next morning. Now that I put it that way, I realize there was a lot of eating involved.

Posted by Andrea at 6:18 AM | Comments (31)

Blog Antipathy

I watched the season premiere of BattleStar Galactica. Anyone else? Anyone want to agree that it might have been the most depressing two hours of television in history?

In those two hours, everything wrong with humanity was encapsulated: Fanatacism. Rigidity. Cruelty. Demonization of others. Abuse. Intolerance. Torture. Exploitation. Dominance. The destruction of families. Hopelessness. And the utter futility of being one person or a small group of people who stand up for truth or justice and risk their lives to do it--how meaningless a gesture it is. How their bravery palls beside force.

It does not escape me while watching such shows that, although the actual characters and events depicted are fiction, someone, somewhere in the world is almost certainly experiencing precisely the events shown. Six and a half billion people is a sufficiently large group that just about any event one can conceive of is happening somewhere, right now, as I type this or as you read it. Somewhere a mother is being ripped from her children. Somewhere a man is being tortured in a small, dark room. Somewhere someone is being killed for a crime they didn't commit, and everyone knows they didn't do it, but they want to 'set an example.' Somewhere, a woman is being held and abused violently by someone who claims to love her.

You can see why I don't watch a lot of TV. My internal empathy thermostat is stuck on 'high,' so that even when I know it's all fake, a seditious little voice whispers in my mental ear, "Yes, but you know it's happening to someone. This is what people are like."

It also does not escape my notice that what I have, I have by an accident of geography. By the fates of four billion years of random evolutionary blips and squiggles, I was born into a peaceful, wealthy country with a professed belief in human rights including free speech and the equality of women.

As it is, no one is asking me to risk my life or my family to throw an illegitimate government from power. I have a level of privilege and comfort almost unimaginable for generations prior to our own, and for most of the rest of the world. Imagine, here I am, talking to all of you with a little magic box that sits in my lap.

~~~~~

Being brought up in a fundamentalist family in a secular society has notably few advantages, but there is one: An innoculation against groupthink.

You scoff; and it's true that Sunday mornings and family discussions tended to exhibit a marked degree and fetishization of groupthink, however, for the rest of the week, I was surrounded by heathens and sinners from whom it was my solemn duty to preserve myself. This required leaving any questionable situations or activities, including not only swearing but using slang. The mental gymnastics involved in studying biology in a large public highschool while repelling the evolutionary virus were particularly challenging and, I know, frustrating for my poor teachers, who only wanted me to prove that I understood what they were talking about on certain grade nine science tests that I may or may not have refused to take.

Growing up on one kind of fringe prepares you to take unpopular stances in many situations. I've never felt myself to be part of the mainstream, so I feel no pressure to join it now. I've never experienced belonging to a functional community, and while the idea is nice, as a rule I'd rather find good people to associate myself with. Communities, in my experience, tend to come with baggage. Whole lists of things you can't say or people you can't talk to about certain things or particular ideas that everyone knows are true but mustn't be mentioned or particular forms of cruelty against certain people or groups that everyone must engage in--and I never do well in them. Maybe it's just me, but after a while, I end up leaving--sometimes spectacularly, sometimes quietly. The only community I've joined and felt myself to belong to is the little one I built here with Erik. Otherwise, I form relationships with people, or persons rather, not groups.

Which doesn't mean that I don't belong to groups, only that the group memberships I hold make me uncomfortable. I grit my teeth and get along simply because the alternative is impossible--for instance, work. I show up around 7 and leave just before 4, and I do this every day, not because I have 8.33 hours of work with which to fill my time but because this is the requirement for receiving the lovely thing known as 'health insurance.'

There are some groups I belong to by the self-same accident of geogra