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Sharenting

This Washpost essay by a mother who has used content from her daughter's life and despite protests will likely continue doing so makes for an interesting read. This blog has been about many things but my kid J has been written about regularly since I started blogging in 2005. I hit a huge writer's block when she transitioned to a young person from being a child. Any confidences she shared with me I treated as off-limits for my blog. The same was true for all significant highs and lows of her life. I did not think I had the right to talk about any of that. But like this author, I experienced the feeling of being stifled. Being J's mother is a very significant part of my life and who I am as a person. When I amputated that from my writing, I was hit was an all-consuming emptiness bordering on identity crisis. The intent of sharing anecdotes about J had always been for me a way to create memories I might otherwise forget in the shuffle of the daily grind. Through the process of sharing, I learned from other parents in various life stages and benefited a great deal from their collective experience. 

When I read my posts from over a decade ago, I feel relieved that I have a way to relive those days again - and remember J as she had been then. Every parent has a different way to preserve their memories. Some want to have pictures and videos of moments that don't want to lose - others like me want to write. Whatever good or bad we bring to the lives of our children is driven atleast in part by how we curate our memories of their time with us. I have over the years been able to use writing as a way to clarify my own feelings and become more objective in how I addressed issues with J. Instead of dealing with a situation head-on often in the heat of the moment, I was able to use blogging as a way to re-articulate things in my head, create some space and emotional distance from what needed to be addressed. For J, it may have been for the better. There is no one or right answer to the issue of "sharenting" but personally, I am very much in favor of privacy.

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