I haven’t been doing a ton of blogging lately. This should be obvious.
What have I been doing lately? I’ve been working. And I’ve been sleeping. And I’ve been doing a lot of lying around (on my side!) doing nothing.
Because I’m pregnant. Eight months pregnant, in fact.
But I don’t write about that online.
Why is that? It’s not because I don’t have anything to say. (Although, this whole thing has been pretty easy on me, relatively speaking, so I don’t have *a lot* to say, even in person.)
It’s just that when every once in a while I go to write a post about this or that or the other and it might involve pregnancy or my child in any way, I immediately lose interest. I immediately don’t want to do it. So I don’t.
After six months of this, I decided there must be something going on in my head beyond blogging lethargy. So I thought about it for a while. And here’s what I realized:
Because of my profession, my blog is a product. It is both an advertising platform and a place for me to present my more casual writing for public consumption. That’s what my product is, and no matter what other intentions I have, no matter how sincere I am or how candid the writing is, I cannot put anything online without it becoming part of my product and my brand.
And I do not feel okay about turning my child into my product. She is not even born yet. (Yes, she is a girl.) As my husband said when I explained this to him, “so many people are going to turn our daughter into an object over her lifetime. It doesn’t need to be you.”
It doesn’t need to be me.
And as soon as I realized that’s how I felt about it, I knew I couldn’t explain it without offending some people. Because the blogosphere is full of people who turn their children into their product. And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that in an abstract sense.
But today, right now, this year, it isn’t me. My inner Marxist can’t blog about my child (even fully from my own perspective and experience) without thinking about commercialization and alienation and feeling wrong about it. That’s the product of my education. It is what it is; I am what I am. Public availability of personal information is something that everyone with a website has to deal with, and this is my answer, at least for now. It’s not about security. For me, it’s about the way I think about my child.
So, hi! Now you know. You probably won’t know anything else on the subject. unless you’re a person I see in real life, or you have my phone number and call me about it. Because that’s all I have to say about that.
(I hope you’ll still read for other things, though. There are likely to be plenty of those, especially once I don’t have to hoard most of my typing-posture time for actual work any more.)
