10/31

I thought about writing an entire post about what it was like to watch Zac, sitting in front of the television last night, diaperless, pooping out an incredibly firm, greenish-colored pile of turds. With dawning horror, I watched as he lifted up a buttcheek, reached out to grab some shit off the top of the pile and was mere seconds away from putting it in his mouth before I stopped him, shrieking, "Zac, Zac, Zac, Noooooooo. Don't do that!......It's ok. It's ok. Stop crying. Momma didn't mean to yell at you, you just can't eat your own poop - or anyone else's poop. Just never eat poop, ok?"

It was Precious Moments figurine waiting to happen.

I wanted to blog about this, but then I read an - I'll call it an article for lack of better word - yesterday that made me reevaluate my decision to participate in "mommyblogging". The author of the work asserts that:

"Earlier I suggested that the typical mommyblogger may be too attached to the money to quit now, but that’s only partially true. In reality, I think it’s the attention mommybloggers crave and they’re so firmly addicted to it that they’ll sacrifice their child’s privacy and well being if it will help them reach Internet Prom Queen status a little quicker. Let me just stress that point a little because it seems a lot of you are missing it; your children have a right to privacy. They have a right to have stories of their own to tell, if and when they decide to tell them. "

It's a sad state of affairs that I don' t generate any revenue from this site. There are no ads here, which isn't a judgement on any other blogger of web designer that utilizes blog ads. It just hasn't really been something that I've considered important, although I reserve the right to totally and completely change my mind at my own whim - and to potentially fund a trip to the Bahamas.

The larger issue here is whether or not children are guaranteed an inalienable right to privacy. They can't assert their own rights, but rights are meant to protect the very individuals that specifically can't assert their own will. We don't assign our children the right to even have a will of their own until they reach certain developmental milestones - like say college graduation. Certainly, no lawsuits have ever been filed by the tween set demanding monetary compensation for emotional damages wrought at the tender age of 3 when Mommy told the grocery checkout cashier that you like to poop in the bathtub.

Writers have been writing about their children for hundreds of years: the embarassing, the touching, the funny moments that only parents remember because their children are too young to create their own memories. Blogging is a whole other animal, though. "Mommyblogging" explodes the size differential between an embarassing story told to a casual acquaintance and a story published on the internet. Almost every day I document something that Zac did or said (or tried to point and grunt at). Have I doomed Zac to a horrendous pubescent period full of bullying and cruel taunts of "Shiteater!"? The author of the article seems to think so. She argues that mommybloggers are irresponsible in our writing because none of us, in her mind, have considered the Big Picture involving the consequences of our actions on our children.

I hope for the sake of humanity, the "Big Picture," as she says, doesn't start and end at junior high school. She writes that, "The enemas, the boogers, all the cute little stories that you realize are just a part of growing up will turn into weapons in which to humiliate and objectify your children." It's interesting that she assumes a child will be humiliated by his peers when they find out he had his rectal temperature taken or once used an Oreo to cover his entire face in cookie crumbles. Hell yes, Zac and I will need to have a talk about my confessional blog about Motherhood before someone stumbles on it (like his English teacher or the freakishly large 13 year-old with a chip on his shoulder), but what junior high school student will really care about Zac's ringworm and the allergice reaction on my face that caused a burning ring of fire? Not any that I can think of.

All I can say is that in my version of the Big Picture, my blog will be a small portion of my son's history. As he gets older, he will have his own stories to tell as he moves further and further toward establishing his own identity and personality. When he's an adult, I hope that he can look back on this writing and see me as a falliable, caring woman that struggled with depression and weight loss, made mistakes as a human, a woman, and a Mom, and loved him, every day, as much as I possibly could.

For now, the shit stories will continue.