Revisiting Her Bad Mother

I waded through Her Bad Mother’s post archives this week and ethical grey areas aside, blogger Catherine Connors' ability to draw interest in her life as a mother stems mainly from her willingness to share detailed personal experiences (her own and others –which is where the issue lies). If reality TV show ratings are any indication, people are captivated by getting a “real” divulging peek into how others live. At times she addresses the risks in oversharing only to then dismiss them.

Based on several telling moments within her posts over the years, my take on Connors is that she sees her ability as a story teller to be of such value to her audience that it is worth any potential slight to her children’s privacy or right to mediate their own public image independently. Let me point out a few of these moments so that you can come to your own conclusions about what Connors intentions may be and how you feel about her actions.

With regards to her daughter she writes:

She is the source of my identity as a mother, and my primary inspiration as a writer – but the story that I tell about the experience of motherhood – the experience of womanhood after having children – is not, strictly speaking, her story. It’s mine. Mostly... I choose to tell my stories, tell – while she is young – her stories, tell the stories of she and I and our family and our place in this world and to pull meaning from those stories…

She seems to justify her story telling authority because of the child’s age and her position as mother. These boundaries are not so fluid when it comes to her husband, which I find odd as he (an adult) would have an advantage in understanding her use of him as a character on the blog and a greater ability in monitoring and expressing approval/disapproval with this characterization. What makes his stories privileged over others? In a separate post Connors states:

I don’t say much about my husband here, nor about our marriage. I don’t, I feel, have enough propriety over those stories to assert myself as narrator of those stories. They are not mine to share. They are his stories – or, in the case of our marriage, our stories. So it is that you rarely read anything substantive about my husband. 

In the most disconcerting post I found, Connors acknowledges her nephew's seemingly straightforward wish to be in charge of his own identity and then completely disregards those wishes in the next paragraph ….for a benevolent purpose (she claims). 

Tanner is becoming more and more the owner of his own story, and more and more concerned to keep it his own, for as long as he has it…He just wants to be normal. But that’s complicated. And talking about those complications – and all the things that go with those complications, whether they be related to the conditions of his disability, his prognosis, the social issues that he faces (don’t get me started on the bullying thing again) – is important, because he’s not the only boy whose life has been made complicated by DMD. He’s not the only child whose life has been made complicated by disability and terminal illness. His is not the only family to struggle. So I push his story forward, again. And again and again and again. Exercising my own heart as a muscle – all of hearts, as muscles – requires it.

There were so many interesting examples to choose from but I feel these snippets adequately indicate the common themes Connors touches on when discussing her blogging and especially when alluding to the controversy she’s faced over sharing intimate details about her children. I get the impression she feels that she has a duty, as a story teller, to share in order to reach others in a meaningful way as they identify with her experiences and can make use of the relatable examples she gives in their own lives. She seems to brush off issues of privacy and the right to self-representation as if this fault is both a reflection of our imperfect world ( = being honest/real) and a natural part of creative expression. Yet it appears Connors has not fully worked out what her boundaries are as she discusses the need for privacy but doesn’t apply it equally in practice, which is definitely confusing for a careful critical reader.

However, more recently Connors posted about a slightly new direction her blog will be taking. She’s had the design revamped and is looking towards the future, making decisions about how she wants to proceed with her writing. It seems like a positive change, especially compared to what I’ve drudged up from the past several years of her postings, but we will have to wait and see what the follow through looks like.

I will probably still overshare about my kids sometimes, but this time it will only be with their permission, and it won’t be published against a green background, which is the important thing, really.