Mommy Blog Lines: Tal(k)ing Care

The recent questionable actions of two highly public American male athletes, professional cyclist Lance Armstrong and college football player Manti Te’o , have garnered much attention from social and mainstream media. While these specific cases are related to secrets kept and lies told, they nevertheless underscore the need to think through the ethical practices associated with disclosing information about people’s personal and public lives. Another example of interest in personal disclosure is found in Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, where she addressed, among other topics, the importance of privacy. Here she suggested that we’re at a tipping point regarding what is expected of people disclosing information about their private lives, and that she will continue to resist the pressure “that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a primetime rea...

Who says it gets easier? While it can’t be good to mull over the struggles of others to fortify yourself, I often pull myself away from thinking too long about older parents who have disabled adult children at home. One Christmas eve, about 10 years ago, I was at a party and a woman about 60 had her daughter about 40 with her. The mom’s evening was mostly about watching her daughter. When we were chatting her comment about life was that she cherished the present, because the future could only hold uncertainty for her daughter. “When I die, no one will care like I do. I worry about who might take advantage of her, no matter what supports I try to put in place.” This is raw. Yet, to some smaller extent we all haunted by this worry and burden. When I am gone who will care? Maybe it deflects us from worrying about the more personal stone fact of “being gone.” –so we substitute panicking about others for ruminating about loosing our own place in life. My husband does not buy in to any...

Here’s half of our team–one of my hobbies is urban walking and exploring, and here I ended up in an interesting place-inside the construction site of the CMHR. The stunning structure is a place of many present and emerging tensions, on many levels. Maybe big buildings are like families.

What a difference a name makes! Should we say we are interested in “ethics,” or look for a fresh term that doesn’t carry the baggage of being used over the centuries as an abstraction by hoary masculinist philosophers?. How do women writing blogs think differently from men writing treatises about governing values? Are they driven by a code, or do they learn as they go, by doing? Inductive or deductive, then? We want to look at ethical practices, and see from these which, if any, appear to be shared. We want to ask mommy bloggers to confirm and disconfirm our hunches about shared lines that draw us together as a community of practitioners. At this stage, we have learned to wonder if any of these boundaries can be codified, or if should be treated as fluid and moving and nascent, resistant to be written down and numbered? Fiona and I are also mommy bloggers, who have come to this art in later days of parenting. We have adult children. Ethical conundrums are rich when it comes to wri...

I agree with you Jaque, there wasn’t a lot of content that spoke to me. I was rather overwhelmed by the consumer/entrepreneurial/monetizing atmosphere and expectation of the conference. I was looking for more dialogue and discussion around the process of making decisions to post what we post, to agree to work with marketing agencies as advertisers or not and the ethical implications of sharing narratives about family and friends on line through social media and the digital world. I think we were not alone in this perspective, there were other mothers, women and bloggers who were interested in talking about the lack of concern for and, dare I say, disregard for, the feelings and lives of those they blogged about. I hope we can talk about this more here; I invite others who were at BlogHer12 and others interested in the ethics of mommy blogging to join in our conversation.