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My friend and I were having a conversation over lunch the other day about what gets shared on a blog and how our comfort level for sharing any given scrap of information may change over time. This was inspired by her recent blog reboot and my penchant for reading mommyblogs and quasi-mommyblogs in which children can be reasonably identified. I think reading other parents online has seriously improved my parenting skills, as well as my ability to maintain a grownup brain in the face of endless potty training hurdles, and there's no reason we should all go into deep cover for holding the type of conversations we would have on the playground. (That is, if my playground were only cool enough to attract the likes of Alexa, SundryJulie, Moxie, Bitch PhD, et al.) Then again, when my child goes applying to that high-powered Ivy League school in sixteen years, I don't want his toddler tantrums coming up in Google's top ten results.
For that matter, I suppose I don't want them coming up in any search conducted by the fancypants preschool we applied to either. My son, whether he knows it or not, has his first interview in a week and a half. GAWD.
So it's really a question of timelines. If we're recording all these moments as they're happening, without time and perspective to smooth out the rough edges, they will tend to spoil or decay as we go farther away from them. Which doesn't mean they're not still valuable--but to whom? For how long? And how much value does there have to be to balance out the harm of strangers (or real-life contacts) reading and misinterpreting them? There's no frame in which to make sense of all these events. And if I can't keep up with what's actually happening in my life this week, there's no way I could possibly go back and revise and revisit these moments.
In that spirit, I just spent the afternoon skimming through the public bits of the blog, in case this new reader does show up. (Hi, New Girl! Hope you can stay a while!) Two years passes in the blink of an eye, and I'm struck by how much important stuff gets left out. In six months, maybe I'll say the same about this post. Or maybe I'll have moved on to my own 2.0 by then.
For that matter, I suppose I don't want them coming up in any search conducted by the fancypants preschool we applied to either. My son, whether he knows it or not, has his first interview in a week and a half. GAWD.
So it's really a question of timelines. If we're recording all these moments as they're happening, without time and perspective to smooth out the rough edges, they will tend to spoil or decay as we go farther away from them. Which doesn't mean they're not still valuable--but to whom? For how long? And how much value does there have to be to balance out the harm of strangers (or real-life contacts) reading and misinterpreting them? There's no frame in which to make sense of all these events. And if I can't keep up with what's actually happening in my life this week, there's no way I could possibly go back and revise and revisit these moments.
In that spirit, I just spent the afternoon skimming through the public bits of the blog, in case this new reader does show up. (Hi, New Girl! Hope you can stay a while!) Two years passes in the blink of an eye, and I'm struck by how much important stuff gets left out. In six months, maybe I'll say the same about this post. Or maybe I'll have moved on to my own 2.0 by then.
