On Parenting and Blogging

School’s out for sum­mer!  Who knows what this will mean for my sched­ule? I plan many things, but often they are under­mined by tricky life. I may be more erratic than usual over the next few months, or I may find that not hav­ing to inter­rupt the flow of my day to meet an 8–3 sched­ule means that I get more time to write. We’ll see.

Often issues come up that I con­sider dis­cussing per­tain­ing to my fam­ily, par­ent­ing, school sys­tems, or reli­gion.  Even though I want to hear other points of view, I am leery of expos­ing my chil­dren in any but the most broad terms. Recently, a local deleted most of her long­stand­ing blog because online per­sona was directly affect­ing her children’s lives.  I didn’t read the offend­ing post, but appar­ently she vented her spleen about some­thing, expect­ing the anonymity of the ‘net to pro­tect her chil­dren, and moved on.  Appar­ently some very lov­ing and Christ-like Chris­tians (ahem) some­how took it out on her children.

This was one of my worst appre­hen­sions about start­ing up a blog.  Often­times I don’t feel I can be really open about cer­tain issues, so I avoid them. When I want to talk about par­ent­ing, or being an at-home Mom try­ing to work out the par­tic­u­lars of going back to school and work while keep­ing her place in the fam­ily as the coor­di­na­tor and man­ager, I always decide against talk­ing on those things.  If I want to talk about my strug­gles with being sur­rounded by a fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian fam­ily that I feel is over­whelm­ingly intol­er­ant at times, I cringe.  Cer­tain top­ics are just taboo in my mind.  I don’t want to inflict any pain on my chil­dren because some close-minded peo­ple of any stripe decided to use me against my chil­dren.  I know that game, because I was intro­duced to it as a child.

I know I could deal with my fam­ily find­ing the site, but it’s the strangers who would judge me with only this blog to go on, and pun­ish my chil­dren as a result.  I know that it’s very easy to “out” some­one on the inter­net, and I’ve been fairly open about my real life iden­tity.  My Face­book and Twit­ter accounts, which both have real pic­tures of me, are linked to this web­site. At times I won­der if I should cut all those lit­tle strings lead­ing up to me, but I know that there will still be a trail, somewhere.

See­ing SJ’s blog go down for the sake of her chil­dren gives me pause.  While I under­stand com­pletely why she packed away her writ­ings for a later time, I do think it’s a shame.  More diver­sity, espe­cially in such a homoge­nous com­mu­nity, incites con­ver­sa­tion and under­stand­ing.  So, if I’m dis­ap­pointed that SJ closed her blog down, I feel like I should not be a hyp­ocrite and feel free to talk more openly about par­ent­ing and reli­gion. On the other hand, is it pos­si­ble to be open and hon­est with­out it bit­ing me?