Mommy Blog Lines: Tal(k)ing Care

Welcome back SUS and happy belated new year! FFF here. Thanks for your sharing your thoughts and questions in your last post on ethics and blogging and relational identity. You’ve offered me, and others I expect, a lot to think about. Coincidentally, I too have been thinking about the complexities and realities of speaking about our children, our struggles with parenting and balancing our personal privacy, the privacy of our children, and the need to find support as parents. I realize that as our children mature and age into and through adulthood, the issues may become more serious, complicated, and socially stigmatized, which also adds to the challenge of finding ways to continue to parent while also finding support in the practices of parenting that we choose to engage in, not engage in, or disengage from. I also expect that there is a difference in the decision and outcome of sharing stories orally and sharing stories through the written word. Verbally confiding in another pers...

Witnessing... This hasn't left me – the concept of having responsibility to listen to things that disturb. It is related to notions of individual privacy and relational identity. AND to storying the self–we are not Dr. Jekyll only, but also Mr. Hyde – trying to be in the light all the time is a bad act. If you have something difficult to tell, and I won’t listen, it is in a way me saying that I hold myself above the trouble. Any thoughts about witnessing? I am new to this and fascinated!!

ethics and blogging and relational identity SUS here – been away awhile, but am all in now: time to look at mom blogs and see how art / sociability / education and commerce all come together. Rich mix. How to talk about the self when to do so implicates others?. How to talk about family when to do so violates their right to privacy? I imagine all mommy bloggers think long and return often to this troublesome matter. When we speak about children, the need for ethical guardianship is even stronger. When I wrote an article about daughters, including mine, I read that this was relatively infrequent – that daughters often write about mothers and children write about parents. For moms to write about children is at the heart of mothering studies, but I wonder if there is resitance to it on many fronts because it is conceptually transgressive ie., moms are not supposed to "tell on" children (I borrowed the phrase to "tell on" from Maxine Hong Kingston’s daughter-writer...