If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. This post is a perfect example, and the subject of pontification late this evening.
So, on the table, what the fuck happens if one day, my favourite (and only) daughter reads these words, all fourteen months of them, and swallows hard and then hates me? What if she hates herself? What if she sees something about herself that she never had before, and it’s not good? What if she’s just plain fucking mortified?
What privacy do I owe her – especially given that I’d like to make writing a full-time career, which means that if I face success, this little unmapped bit of blog terrain might one day face microscopes of peers and critics. Including her, her friends, her boyfriends.
Or girlfriends.
I can only hope that her growing up at my side, with my constant honestly and bluntness, my willingness to state the obvious in a usually sarcastic manner, will inure her to be able to read the words I may have written about her first years and embrace them as a part of who I am. I can wish, daily, that with each post I’ve said how I might feel at the moment but that my unwavering devotion to every nuance of her is abundantly clear.
I hope that she knows that I write these words not in spite of her, or to spite her, but because of an overwhelming need to utter the inside thoughts so that I don’t harbour them for any undue amount of time.
Of course, this is the negatives I’m dwelling on – something you may know, I’m wont to do.
Maybe, in spite of all the colourful language and anti-mommyness of this mommyblog, it won’t be the negative she sees. Maybe she’ll read and know that even though I struggled in this role – something that was marketed to me as something that should come naturally and start with a pink line on a piss stick – that I’ve tried and failed and tried again because she was ever so important. That I documented all the failings as a means to let her know how unperfect I am, in a way that has no relationship with whether she may or may not be bought a car on her 16th birthday.
Maybe she’ll be able to see me as the person I truly am, and instead of feeling only as if she’s been stripped naked for the world to laugh about, she’ll love me deeper, knowing I was willing to cast myself out there, first. Knowing that, and knowing the things I chose to be made unimportant because I loved her so, including another human being and an entire lifestyle (or three) could be like proof on paper.
Maybe I’ll just have her hypnotized to never be able to read or acknowledge this blog.
What would you do? Would you race through your archives and remove all misconstruable mentions? Would you turn mommyism into a full-time happy-joy-fun-town? Would you change the entire brand of the blog, to read “is moody” and neglect to mention the child in the first place – and if so, how would that effect them, that you excluded them?
There’s no right answer, I think.
Forgive any mistaken syntax, etc. My Internet’s been shitty this evening, and I’m plunking this out without the benefit of guaranteed service to edit. I mean…not that I ever edit. Everything I write is a gift from god, straight from the fingertips, right?
