Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...