Mommy Blog Lines: Tal(k)ing Care

My Winnipeg is an art movie that is about place and personal memories. At its root, the film depicts the family home as a place of great love and sorrow (a brother’s suicide) and this tragedy clings to the young artist for life. He tells about this “being stuck in family sorrow” retrospectively, using actors, embedding the personal in the cultural / communal and realism in the fantastic. All these elements render art, yet do not remove the human story from life pulse. OK mommy bloggers: what would you do with a death of near family member?. If you use a blog to ruminate, isn’t the relationship between event and participant too close? the voice and perspective too vulnerable and intimate, with no saving ironies to make “story”?

The family house is full of happy memories. Yes? And yet... It is also a place of sadnesses-– and this can be treated as a kind of difficult knowledge. People in power (moms as writers)need to take care. The video is not offered here as disproportionate parallel to link holocaust to home: but the link initiates an interesting point of comparison. To be careful trading in family secrets. To let people tell their own stories and choose silences. How the video fits/helps? This man with memories is able to reflect on meaning and past and then to share it with dignity and hope. He took time to think about what to divulge and how to offer it in a useful way. “You have a very well thought out narrative.” What if a blogger had talked for him?? What of blogging this experience, adding an element of immediacy and reporting? Story is itself a funny reassuring word for this difficult memory sharing. I am suggesting more of what we go through needs to be regarded as serious and owned.

Is it imposing the diet or telling about it all? About her child’s struggle? I do a lot of things that people would criticize if they were to know. For example, sometimes when I’m mad I swear at my children. And in day to day life, I don’t often swear, so it’s weird and horror show like– like a demon gets hold of me. If I reveal this character flaw, I expect people might (even should) be critical. But if my children told this story, and others tsk- tsked, I think I could even be forgiven for blazing in anger.The trouble would be their telling on me. I like my privacy. I can talk about private me: Nobody else can! And the other part of this “tacit bargain” is that I can’t tell the things I know about my kids, nor even about anything I may have done for them that is confidential–things done in trying to respond to their needs, not done as drama for prime time. It seems so simple. We have this blog tool for talking tell-all at our fingertips. But we need some discretion. When I mee

I really enjoy listening to The Current on CBC Radio One as I drive into work. This week, on Monday Febraury 4, the program broadcast an episode entitled “The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet” . The show, hosted by Anna Maria Termonti, delves into the experience of Dara-Lynn Weiss, the mother who put her 7-year old clinically obese daughter on a diet and wrote the book The Heavy documenting their journey. Dara-Lyn speaks with Anna Maria about the response she recieved from other parents while she was helping her child struggle with obesity by monitoring and restricting her food intake, as well as the ways in which she has been challenged for writing about it in Vogue Magazine . What I found most intersting about the show was the way in which the panelists Shelly Russell-Mayhew, a registered psychologist and Associate Professor of educational psychology at the University of Calgary, and Tom Warshawski, a pediatrician and Chair of the Childhood Obesity Foundation, evaded talking