Blogging
It’s a common discussion among folks who blog not just their lives but also their family lives (i.e., pretty much everyone I read) — how much do you share? Jenna blogged it both at blogher and at Chronicles and then it came up in a concrete way for Julia.
What happened was this: Julia blogged her son Gage’s recent emotional breakdown as she blogs the rest of his healthcare challenges. She wrote about it because, well, because it was happening and she blogs her life. When she had to have her son committed, she wrote about the agony of walking away from him and also the hope she had that this step would help. Happily, that next step was the right one and Gage is on the way to having his mental illness managed appropriately — cause for celebration! Instead several of Julia’s readers took her words and used them against Gage at school and several people criticized for sharing so much on her blog.
Now Julia has always been an activist for her kids and for other special needs kids. She feels strongly that silence would be tantamount to shame and that not blogging this part of Gage’s story would send him the message that he is not at fault for his kidney disease but he is at fault for his mental illness. So she’s going to keep on blogging.
I appreciate that her decision is not everyone’s decision and I’m not interested in a debate about whether or not it’s the right one. Any one of us blogging has to make sense of public storytelling on her own. I do think, though, that activism is more powerful when we are willing to put our names to it and that sharing our stories can be an important tool for creating change. In the adoption blogosphere, I’ve been sympathetic to people who share a lot less but also a little frustrated because what makes those stories sensitive is also why we so need their representation.
In my own life, my family has veto power although so far it’s been rarely used. It’s an imperfect system (I am way more open than Brett is so sometimes it doesn’t occur to me to check in about something I think is innocuous and then I find out later that it made him cringe, which is why I leave him out a lot) but it’s what works.
Recently I asked Madison for help in something I was working on about her adoption and asked her what she wanted me to share. I told her I was thinking of X and she put the kibosh on it and suggested Y. The essay (fingers crossed it gets past editors) starts with her sharing what she wanted me tell, which made for a more powerful (IMHO) essay. I was pleased that she could be so clear with me about what she will NOT talk about and also what she WANTED me to talk about.
Likewise Julia has ongoing discussions with her family including her kids about her blogging, her public advocacy and her sharing with the media. She does not do any of this lightly (none of us do, really). Again, it may not be the decision you would make as a blogger but it doesn’t mean that her choice is wrong either. Really, if it gets past her own family censors then that’s the only people she has to answer to.
Over at Madison’s blog, she always has an enthusiastic sign-off but it loses something in the blogging. So I got her to perform them for you.
Madison signs off from Dawn Friedman on Vimeo.
As you can see, Madison is the most fun person in our (very fun) family. She also has personality for days and days and days. I like that y’all can see her because I think it lends more to the stories about her. I think it helps a lot of what I write here make more sense because THAT is the kid I am talking about!
I’m posting this from my iPod as a test. When I started this blog nine years ago little did I know that one day I would be able to post from a tiny handheld computer. Oh the wonders of technology!!
Brett and I are researching plan B grad schools without much luck. Haven’t heard back yet from OSU but it’s crazy competitive and I keep hearing from brilliant people who didn’t get in. (sigh)
According to my internal stats program, these were the posts that received the most traffic in 2009:
#9 An Answer that Talks About Barbie
#8 I’ll Get to the Not Adoption Questions Soon, I Promise
#7 No Such Thing as a Best Blog
#6 Getting Explicit About Size (actually this is a tie with the Soniccare Review & Giveaway but that was promoted all over blogdom so I’m not counting it)
#5 Let’s Talk About Kids and the Wii Fit
#4 Continuing with the Q&A (with a bonus pic of Pennie holding Madison at our first visit)
#2 The Night My World Caved In
And the most popular post is:
Definitely see a trend in these! You like to talk about parenting, adoption and kids & body image, right? Apparently so. Also this list might be different if I looked at comments instead of traffic. I think #10 and #1 are interesting because I’m not sure why the traffic would be higher. The #7 one is likely because people linked me up for TheBump.com contest and chose that entry to do it so it’s kind of an anomaly the same way the Sonicare review one is.
(One of these days I’ll do the top ten posts of all time. Maybe to celebrate my first decade of blogging next year!)
I created an annex to my blog over on Tumblr to share multimedia-type stuff. It’s easier than sharing it here.
I wanted a place to put stuff that I find inspirational because I am getting more and more interested in video/mp3 possibilities especially as I’ve gotten ready for this digital storytelling class I’m helping to teach later this month over at The Fuse Factory.
I’m teaching the narrative piece of the class and then sticking around for support for (and also to learn from) my co-teacher Jason Gonzales. I first met Jason way back when at Katzinger’s where he was on the line (home to the dead heads) and I was in retail (home to the feminists). But I knew OF him before that because he used to go to the same bar I went to (and where I’d later meet Brett) in a long black trench coat (because it was the 80s) with sticky-up, electrified hair (again, it was the 80s) and his big blue eyes. I had one of those semi-crushes on him. You know where you don’t think of the person except when you see them out and then you LOVE them? But I never talked to him.
Then at Katzinger’s he showed me his old driver’s license and I screamed, “OH MY GOD! You were that blue-eyed boy!” Because by then he sorta looked more like a hippie with granny glasses and a long, straight ponytail.
Heh.
Anyway, he’s the nicest guy ever and also a very passionate teacher so I can’t wait to watch him teach!
Back to my tumblr. I want to be able to stretch creatively and see what I can do with my writing OFF the page (screen). I really want to learn more about video and audio editing and that space is going to be where I put stuff that catches my fancy in that arena. Feel free to grab the RSS feed but it’s also pinging my twitter and facebook. Yes, I AM saturated in social media. Thanks for noticing!
