I was going to write a post about BlogHer. I was going to write a post about what it’s like and how to cope and why, really, really, nobody has any reason to be nervous or anxious because everybody is nervous and anxious, but then I realized, I’ve already written that post, like, almost a dozen times already, because this will be my fifth BlogHer, and I’ve probably written two or more posts about BlogHer for every year that I’ve been to BlogHer, whether speaking or keynoting or packing an infant around, so. I figured that I’d just link to the last one that I wrote about how important it is that we – collectively and individually – just chill the hell out about this thing that many of us are going to do next week.

Go read it. Or don’t. Either way, know that whether you’re going or not, it’s not the be-all and end-all of our collective existence, and you’ll be fine either way, we all will be, and when it’s all done there’ll be some bickering and bitching – there always is – but all in all we’ll all feel better for having this community, and we’ll all need a nap.

And some of us will be having tutus surgically removed from our bodies, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I had it in mind that I was going to write about it, that thing that happened last week , that thing that was really just so horrible and awful and unpleasant – in a First World Problems! kind of way, sure, but still – that thing that left me feeling so rattled and uncertain and bad. I was going to write about how it all happened – what was said and how I cried and what more was said and how much more I cried and then how I sat, alone, in a room with no clocks, my passport seized, and freaked the hell out – and about how I wondered what it said about the State of the Momosphere in North America circa 2010 that someone could be stopped and interrogated for claiming to be a ‘mom blogger’ – not even mommy blogger! I only said mom! and blogger! – (because I am so not exaggerating when I say that I spent all that time defending the fact that I make a living writing about motherhood and that I often go to conferences – yes, even at places like Yahoo! – to discuss doing so and they reviewed my blog right there and demanded that I explain to them what the hell it was and how it earned me money and I sniffled and gurgled and mumbled stuff about ad networks and marketing and GM Canada and it was only when I pointed to a post that thanked GM Canada for sponsoring an adventure and then another one that they finally relented and let me go) (which, thanks GM!) – and! or! — DEEP BREATH — whether it even meant anything at all, and how maybe this has nothing at all to do with mommyblogging being a radical act and more to do with how there happens to be random Internet-ignorant doofuses (doofii?) working at Homeland Security! Or something! So!

I was going to write something about all that. But now I’m not. Because, I haven’t even written about it – apart from saying that it happened and that I was scared and that I didn’t know what to make of it – and already there is murmuring and grumbling about who the hell cares and she probably deserved it and it probably had nothing to do with mom blogging and she wouldn’t last five minutes in Saudi Arabia! (Which, no, I wouldn’t, not least because I am not Maureen Dowd and am totally not up for experiencing misogynist subjugation just for the hell of it and, also, I already said that) and I’m just so totally not up for that, because, why? Why should I be? I’m not. And even though I’m kind of sort of simmering with the idea that this, this sort of thing – the presumption that ‘motherhood’ and ‘professional’ are two words that should spring off of each other like water on hot oil – and that sort of thing – the some-time compulsion within our community to sneer and to doubt – are evidence of the radicalness of what we do – living our motherhood publicly, and demanding respect for it – is as bright and hard-edged as it was five years ago when this fine lady declared it so, I’m too tired to let it come to boil. Not now, anyway.

This is cowardly, maybe. To avoid discussion – to avoid starting a discussion – just because it threatens to get difficult, just because one’s feelings might get hurt – isn’t that the very antithesis of what it means to be radical in a discursive space? It is this, without question, but I might object, in my own defense, that wandering into discursive territory that I know or suspect will be be hostile only wears me down, leaves me less able, or less willing, to engage in those discussions that are productive and stimulating and interesting and – maybe – radical. (By which I do not mean, those discussions in which everyone agrees with me. It’s never interesting – although it is, I’ll admit, gratifying – when everyone simply agrees with you. I was an academic – a student, a teacher, a wave-my-Communist-Manifesto-around-the-pub-table argument-pursuer – for too long to be averse to discursive friction.) (How many times in this paragraph can I use the word ‘discursive’?) (Why am I avoiding the subject at hand?)

And so this is the path I take today, the path of least (discursive!) resistance, and I walk it with headphones plugged into my ears and shades drawn over my eyes, and if anyone stops me, I will brandish my iPhone and holler, over the music blaring in my ears, WANNA SEE PICTURES OF MY BABIES???…

… and as those people move aside, I will just keep walking.

And I will feel guilty.

(So guilty, in fact, that now that I’ve come to the end of this post I feel reluctant to close comments, because I know that you would understand and I wouldn’t just brush you aside on this path that we’re on and I know that although you are always happy to see pictures of my children, you understand that there is so much more than that going on here, so why would I want to shut you out?

Lo, I have talked myself into a corner. That happens sometimes.

I’m going to leave comments open. You’ll be civil and kind, right? And we won’t debate whether or not I was silly or ridiculous or ego-inflated to have been been upset by my brush with Homeland Security? We’ll just walk and we’ll talk about the issues and the questions and the unbearable lightness of being mom bloggers, and radicals, and the beauty of my children. And it will be good. Right? So why IS this all so hard sometimes?)

So I spent yesterday being a grown up, which is not to say that I am not a grown up every day, just that I usually don’t feel like one until I put on a bra and clothing that is not made of lycra/spandex and venture out into the world without a diaper bag to talk to other real live grown ups about things not related to the relative merits of Dora versus Angelina Ballerina, the difficulty of finding good babysitters, and the high cost of yoga pants these days. Which is not to say that those aren’t, in certain very important respects, grown-up subjects, but, also, they’re not.

I felt very grown-up because I was speaking on a Very Serious Panel at the Canadian government’s Privacy Commission consultations. You know that a panel is Very Serious when there are people in a box at the back of the room translating everything that you say into French. Also, when you shave your legs for it, even though you know full well that no-one is going to see your legs because Very Serious panels take place on stages, behind lecterns and tables with swagged fabric. Anyway. I would say more about the leg shaving, but I won’t, because I am feeling very reflective about over-sharing after lengthy discussions with experts about how people navigate issues of privacy online. Anecdotes about leg shaving are probably irrelevant to any serious discussion about privacy, meaningfully understood, but still. A girl has to have her secrets, you know?

My panel was on children and online privacy, and you can watch a webcast of it here, if you’re into that. I’m writing a more serious account of the proceedings for BlogHer, so you could just wait to read that (I’ll link to it when it’s up), or you could wait to see if I decide to break my silence about the leg-shaving. That’s totally up to you.

In the meantime, I need your help on making a very important decision. Or, if you don’t give a shit about my Very Important Decisions, you can just go read what I had to say about Sandra Bullock and adoption, or my thoughts on body image, depression and the celebumommy industrial complex. Or you could go shave your legs. OH THE DECISIONS.

Last month, I listened as a friend stood up in a conference session on video-blogging and told the room that someone had once advised her to never put herself in front of the camera. “He told me,” she said, “that I have a ‘far-away’ face.” A face, that is, that is best viewed from a distance. A face that one’s mother could love, and maybe some others, but not everybody, and certainly not a camera.

Everyone in the room gasped, of course. Most, too, I suspect, cringed inwardly at some similar memory – a schoolmate teasing them about their hair, a friend commenting on their weight, a well-meaning relative remarking that ’she’d be so pretty if it weren’t for her nose’ – some memory of some statement that maybe wasn’t meant to hurt, but did, because it aggravated all those insecurities, all those doubts, all those misgivings that we have about how we are seen. We were all, I am sure, thinking that the words that were spoken to Loralee were ridiculous and wrong. But we were – many of us, some of us, I am sure – also thinking that those words could have been spoken to us. It is easy to see the beauty in others. It is so hard to see it in ourselves.

I said this to Loralee, later. I told her that she was beautiful and that what had been said to her was ridiculous and that who knows what makes people say such crazy stupid things? But I also said that I’d been there, too, that I knew what it felt like, and that I knew that it hurt. “I hope that it doesn’t hurt so much anymore,” I said, “because you are – you know this – beautiful.”

“YOU are beautiful, too.”

“No, I’ve never felt that way, but I don’t care anymore.”

“You are so beautiful.”

“No, you are.”

“No, YOU are.”

It was one of those conversations that nauseates bystanders.

But we don’t have these conversations often enough, possibly for the very reason that we fear they sound insincere. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the saying goes, but we suspect that that’s an easy out, a free pass to the kind of social flattery that enhances friendships and eases discourse and provides us with an convenient means of expressing admiration. You’re beautiful, we tell our friends and our loved ones and our would-be loved ones and, some days, anyone who says, even in passing, I hate my hair, or I look fat in these pants. No, no, we protest. No, you’re beautiful. No, really, you are. And they wonder if we’re telling truth.

We are telling the truth. We are. We could attach all variety of disclaimers and conditions to that statement – we are, because when you love someone, you see beauty; we are, because, in love and in friendship and in admiration, we can overlook things that might be conventionally regarded as flaws; we are, because even when we see flaws, those flaws appear to us as parts of a beautiful whole; we are, because whether or not you look fat in those pants doesn’t matter to us – but the disclaimers and conditions don’t change the truth that when we really look at people – people we love, people we admire, good people – when we really look at them, we see beauty. We do. We should celebrate that more often. Say it more often. Insist upon it, more often, so that it gets heard.

Loralee and I decided that we should do just that, that we should follow the example of people – like this lady – who make a practice – an art – of celebrating beauty, wherever they find it. We decided that we would make a practice of using our words to remind others of their beauty. And we decided that we would start with each other.

But then Loralee had a terrible week, and she said, I feel like crap, and not beautiful at all, and maybe we should postpone it, because, ugh. And I was tempted to agree, because I’ve been having terrible weeks, too, too many terrible weeks, and I feel like crap down to the furthest reaches of my heart and to the very tips of my toes, and, also, who knows what kind of hatred such a post on friendship and beauty might draw, and, ugh, UGH.

Instead, I said this:

You are a beautiful, beautiful soul, and my heart breaks that you’ve been subjected to that hate – a hate that I know too well, as you know – and I wish that I had words to erase it all but the only words that I have are the ones that say ‘you are beautiful, you are wonderful, you are a woman who every woman should have as a heart friend.‘

I don’t know much, but I do know that beauty fights hate and pain, and you have it in spades, and I have some, I think, and we can use it to beat the ugly back. We can beat the ugly back by refusing to look at it and by filling screens with loveliness instead.

And so we did. And so we are.

Here is what is lovely – what is beautiful – about Loralee: she wears her heart on her sleeve and in her eyes and you can see that she is kind and that she is gentle and that she would be the sweetest of friends, just by looking at her. And you would discover, very quickly, that she is the sweetest of friends, because it is impossible to not be friends with Loralee, who has arms that are quick to hug and a mouth that is quick to smile and who is unabashed in her willingness to grab hold and draw you near and make you feel as though the world has been emptied of everything that is mean and ugly and hurtful.

Loralee shines and Loralee glows and Loralee is beautiful, in every sense of the word.

And my world is more beautiful for knowing her.

Now, you. You go tell someone that they’re beautiful, and tell them how they are beautiful and why they are beautiful and everything that is wonderful about their beauty. Tell them directly, or in a letter, or on the screen. And tell us, tell the world, about their beauty: leave a comment here, describing the beauty of someone that you love or admire or see lawn-bowling on Saturdays in the park. Or write a post ( if leave the link if you do, so that we can find it.) Pair up with someone online, if you want, like Loralee and I did, or do it as a meme (do people still do memes?) and encourage others to do the same. Post a picture that speaks for itself, or just use your words. Write it about another blogger, or your spouse, or your mom or your dad or your grandma or a friend or a neighbor or a total stranger – write about yourself – anyone whose beauty deserves celebration but isn’t celebrated enough. Write to remind yourself of how much beauty there is in people. Write to remind yourself how much beauty there is in you.

Who is beautiful to you? Why? How? Why and how are you beautiful?

Let’s fill up our screens – let’s fill up all the spaces that we can – with loveliness, and revel in it.

*Title lifted from Keats, Endymion.

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Houston, cavorting and plotting and reflecting and deep-thinking and giggling with some of the brightest and most brilliant and beautiful and bad-assed women on the interwebs. I left uplifted and inspired and more than a little in love with my community.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again - and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried.

I knew that everyone was still there, of course: this is the magic of our community, that we are always there, that there are always virtual hands at the ready to catch us when we stumble. But there are, still, moments when virtual hands are not quite enough – when they feel like spectres, shadows of the real thing – and one’s consciousness of that – one’s sense-memory of holding real hands and the betterness of that – overwhelms and one is overcome by the deep, deep need for the warmth of real flesh and one wishes for actual touch and the remoteness of that wish provokes a sadness that echoes deep in one’s heart.

(I’m not ready to write – I do not, right now, want to write – about the ugh and the oof and the shake-fists-at-heaven do-not-wantiness  that are provoked by one’s child undergoing recurrent episodes of struggling to breath. Jasper was able to come home this morning, and the immediate danger is passed, so the fear is less intense, but I feel so beaten down by it, this fear of breathlessness, and I am tired and I just want to spend a few hours telling my self that it’s all okay and not that bad and what were we worrying about anyway, even if that might involve some lying, so.)

When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.

My father is dead. My father has died. My father is gone.

Much has been said – dissected, debated, argued, asserted – in recent days about the impulse to tweet a tragedy. Some have said that tweeting during a tragedy is akin to fiddling while Rome burns, that it is evidence of a narcissistic soul. Others have said that it’s simply the virtual equivalent of calling out to friends  – by phone or by letter or over the garden fence – for help and support. I think that it’s a little bit of both.

The impulse to narrate any event, or one’s feelings in response to some event, is to some degree a narcissistic one, if we understand narcissism loosely (and perhaps literally) as focused self-regard, as a concentration of one’s attention upon oneself. It is to position oneself as author of the story that is unfolding, it is to take the first-person narrative role, it is to make the story about oneself. It is – contra Barthes – to become the source of meaning of the text. This needn’t be a bad thing. I asserted myself as narrator of the story of my father’s death because I needed to narrate that story, because I needed to assert my place within that story – grief-stricken daughter, confused grief-stricken daughter – in order to tell it to myself, and to the world. And telling the story was crucial to me surviving the first overwhelming waves of pain and sadness: I grabbed on to the story like a buoy and hung onto it for dear life. It was wet and slick and cold and I kept losing my grip, but it was there, and I kept myself afloat by reaching for it, grabbing for it, clinging to it when I could. There I was adrift, there I was battling the waves, there I was out and alone in a dark, turbulent sea with only the buoyant mass of my words to hold onto, to mark my place in that sea, to alert others – anybody, anybody – that there I was. I harbored no illusions that anyone could pluck me from the dark and save me. But I needed the world to know that I was there. I needed to know that I was there.

So: it was narcissistic of me, in some wise, to tweet my father’s death. Tweeting my father’s death made that death all about me. But it was all about me. It was my story, the story of my grief, and my tweets were the first painful lines in that story. I needed to say them out loud so that I could keep going. I also needed my community, my friends, and tweeting was my way of crying out to that community that I was hurt, that I was hurting, that I was in pain. But that, too, was part of the storytelling impulse: I needed someone to tell my story to. I needed my cries in the dark to be heard. I needed to know, I needed to prove, that the story was real, that this wasn’t just me talking in my sleep, singing myself a nightmare, narrating some terror from which I could not rouse. Is a story really a story if there is no reader, no audience? Even if I’d written the words down in a journal to read to myself, or whispered them into someone’s ear, the purpose would have been the same: to put the story out there, to get it heard. By one person, by thousands – the intent is the same. To get it heard. To make it real. To tell the story. To tell the story so that the pain and ache and gut-tearing grief become something other. So that they take on a life of their own, outside of one’s ravaged heart, as story.

The love, the hugs, the prayers, the good wishes, all of the things that come from the community when we cry out to it: these are precious, these are invaluable, these are necessary. But they are not what we are looking for – or, not the only things that we are looking for, not the only things that I was looking for – when we proclaim our tragedies, our hurts. We proclaim because we are storytellers, because storytelling has a saving power, because telling stories – telling our stories, telling our most difficult stories – saves us, or, at least, keeps us afloat. Twitter is a storytelling medium, and so it is understandable that some of us turn to it to tell our saving stories, in whole or in part.

Not all of Twitter’s stories are saving stories, sure. Some of Twitter’s stories are banal. Most of those stories, maybe, are banal. But, too, some are great and some are beautiful and some are terrible and the great stories and the beautiful stories and the terrible stories – all the saving stories – live alongside the banal stories and all of them, all of them draw us ’round the fire to hear and to share and – sometimes – to survive.

And that’s all that we need to know.

(On the question of stories that hurt – stories like the story that prompted my words above, the story that suggested that telling the story of a tragedy in real-time was a terrible thing, a deviant thing, a thing that we should not trust – we can, as I said last week, choose to not listen. We can choose to close ranks and not let such storytellers in. That particular storyteller stood outside our circle and narrated her hate and at first, only a very few heard her, and she would have gone away if we’d ignored her – she was outside, she had no megaphone, no speakers, no means of forcing her words upon any more than the few whose (Twitter) ears were tuned to listen – she had no way in, until we, some of us, responded to her and talked about her and pointed our fingers and said, look, look over there! and by doing so opened our circle to her and let her in. And drew everyone’s attention to her. We have to take responsibility for this. We opened our ears to her, opened our circle to her, we listened and by listening gave her reason to keep talking. And then we began shouting, and by shouting drew even more attention, and by drawing more attention we helped her bring her hateful story to life.

Next time, please, let’s not.

If a troll farts in the forest, does anybody hear? Only if we wave our torches in that direction and spark combustion. PLEASE TO REMEMBER.)

(Title from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elegy 1)

I don’t believe in petitionary or intercessory prayer. I’ve written about my reasons for this at length, but it boils down to this: I don’t believe in, can’t believe in, a God who responds to such prayer. As I said some months ago, ‘why should God help us find a cure for cancer, and not for muscular dystrophy? Find one lost child, and not another? Help the Red Wings win while leaving children dying in sub-Saharan Africa? If God is a god who lets bad things happen, the only way that I can understand that is if the point of letting bad things happen is to compel us to cope with pain and heartbreak and evil ourselves, alone, to better understand those things. And that idea of a didactic God doesn’t square with a picture of God as a moody patriarch who dispenses favors to his children on the basis of who supplicates most fervently.’

So, no. I don’t, when I pray, plead for God’s intervention. But I do pray. I pray as a means of searching for some inner calm, some understanding, some peace with whatever is happening to me or someone I love. I pray, too – and I realize that this could be understood as a form of intercessory prayer – that they find the same. I was praying last night, for my friend Anissa. But it was hard, for the same reasons that it’s hard when I pray about/for Tanner: I can’t help but slip into pleading, into wishing, into childlike demands that my wishes – that he be made better, that she be made better, that it all be made to be okay – come true.

But that is not what prayer is for, I don’t think. It’s not a letter to Santa, it’s not a note to the Tooth Fairy, it’s not a solitary or collective clapping of hands to show that we do believe in fairies, we do, and please don’t let Tinkerbell die. Not that there isn’t some force or value in letters to Santa and notes to Tootherella and fervent Tink-saving hand-clapping: these are powerful expressions of our faith and our desire and our will. And when they are wrought collectively, they give us shape as families, as communities, as circles of love and hope and friendship. But wishes – even the strongest ones, even the ones that issue from a thousand hearts at once – don’t come true from the asking. They just don’t. And as go wishes, so go petitionary and intercessory prayers.

It sucks to write that. I wish with my all heart that I could make a difference by praying, for Tanner, for Anissa. Especially, today, for Anissa, who I simply cannot bear to imagine in any context other than humor and joy. But prayers for Anissa are not enough – prayers are never enough – and so set some time aside today to do something else, to act – to offer some real, tangible help to Anissa’s family, and/or (because my wishes are not necessarily your wishes; the fairies I clap for are not necessarily your own) to someone else, anyone else, who might – and you know that there are so many such people – need it, too. Do it in her name, or in your own, or in the name of whoever or whatever it is that you most pray or wish for. Take the energy that you might have put into praying or wishing and do something with it, something stronger than clapping, something real, something that helps.

That’s what I’ll be doing. And then, I’ll be praying some more. Because despite all that I’ve said here, I still pray. And I still clap for fairies. How could I not?

(Help for Anissa is being organized at the Aiming Low site, and at Izzy’s. Do what you can, if you can. Or help another cause – because there are always other causes, other hurts, other things to pray for – or just give someone a really big hug today. Or clap for a fairy. Or, best, do all of the above.)

(Pass it on.)

I’m not sure what is funniest about this recent post at Salon: that Googling ‘bad fathering’ automatically prompts the suggestion that what one really wanted to search for was ‘bad mothering’ (because, as we all know, there are no bad fathers, just bad Google algorithms), or that the first time (ha!) this blog appears on Salon is as a screen-captured example of Google’s determination to put all the blame for bad parenting on mothers.

My husband will be relieved to hear that there’s no point in him starting that ‘Her Bad Father’ blog, seeing as I have, apparently, pissed all over that territory for both of us. He’ll also be relieved to hear, that, according to Google, he’s off the hook forever for every and any bad parenting decision he makes, seeing as it is, apparently, a Googlistical impossibility that he ever be accused of bad fathering.

(Which, while we’re on the subject: bad fathering? Why employ the active verb in a Google search? I suspect that a search on ‘bad fathers’ might yield different results. Turning my attention to that, however, would deprive me of the opportunity to say this: BAD DADS ARE THE NEW DRAG.)

(Thanks for all the warm wishes yesterday. Jasper seems to be improving. And the claw marks on my head are healing nicely. Need to sleep for, like, a week, though.)

It started as a discussion about Balloon Boy and reality television and the corruptive effects of the pursuit of fame and whether children should ever be compelled to live their lives as performances, the better to line the pockets of the entertainment industry, but it became a discussion about whether writers – memoirists, bloggers, whomever – who deal in family anecdote can be said to be guilty of the very sins that we deplore in the Gosselins or the Heenes or the Duggars or whatever slimy, child-eating producer we imagine lurks in the offices of TLC. In writing about our children, some of you asked, are we guilty of the same kind of exploitation (if, in fact, we can call televising the lives of children for profit ‘exploitation,’ which I think we can), the same kind of troubling opportunism that is displayed by the Gosselins and the Heenes and the parents of Toddlers wearing Tiaras?

I’ve wrestled with this issue before. I always come down on the side of no. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes lay awake at night, interrogating myself about whether I am always perfectly conscientious in putting the best interests of my children before my impulse to tell stories, but it is a more or less clear-sighted ‘no.’ My children figure in the stories that I tell here, but they are not, for the most part, the main characters. I’m not writing their stories; I’m writing mine. And to the extent that they appear in that story – and, obviously, they do appear regularly – they appear as (as I said the other day) narrative constructions. Emilia and Jasper are not, like the Gosselin kids or the Toddlers in Tiaras, compelled to perform upon a literal or figurative stage. They live their lives, they do their thing, and I write stories about motherhood in which they sometimes appear – characters, sketches, reflections of their real selves.

But, but… can it not be said that living under my writerly gaze imposes a kind of (to mangle the term) performativity to their daily lives? They do not perform, but do I not take their movements and moments and weave performance out of these? Can story be understood as a form of performance, in which it is not just the storyteller who performs, but the story itself and the characters therein? In which case, does my role as a storyteller not put me in a relationship with my children whereby I view them, and the things that they do and say, through a performative lens? Do they not live under (and here I jumble Foucault and Lacan and others into a postmodern psychoanalytic jumble that I may not be able to disentangle) performative gaze? And if this is true, is it any better – any less harmful – than living under the lens of television cameras? Do I exploit my children for my own creative (and, yes, to some extent, material) gain?

Ah.

I don’t know.

That’s not entirely true: I do know that, as a writer, I view my children – about whom I write – somewhat differently than I might otherwise. I view everything differently, inasmuch as everything is potential fodder for narrative. The question is whether my ‘writerly gaze’ has any kind of troubling effect. Is that view distorted? Does it distort? Do I – in engaging with and responding to and thinking about my children – or anyone/anything else, for that matter – amplify or ignore or construct certain details in the experience to better prepare it for narrative. When I watch my children play, am I watching them play, or am I observing them as subjects? Both? Am I more attached/detached in one condition than in the other? Can I be attached to the experience while retaining my critical, writerly eye? Does it matter?

I think that everyone imposes something of this gaze on their lives and the experiences and people in those lives, inasmuch as we are all conscious of what other people think. We are all, after all, bourgeois in the sense that Rousseau meant when he criticized modern, Western man for being constantly preoccupied with the judgments and opinions of others. We think about the stories that we will tell our friends and families about this incident or that, we are alert to what any given experience looks like to outside observers (my children are behaving badly in this restaurant; do people think I’m a bad mother?/my children are behaving so well; does anybody notice? doesn’t this reflect well on me?/I wonder if anyone has noticed how awesome my shoes are?) and in that way, arguably, we are constantly viewing our lives through a critical lens, imposing narratives, editing the details, worrying over the visuals. But is there something different going on for writers, if only because those narratives make it out of our heads and onto the page?

I don’t have a good answer to this question. I worry about it, sometimes. I worry about thinking too much about story when I watch my children strut their lives upon the figurative stage. I worry about how my own narrative impulses impose a certain form and structure and feel to my life and the lives of those around me, not least when I consider writing about the most difficult things, like depression and anxiety and grief  – have I written myself and my loved ones into a story that is all about sadness? Am I turning my struggles into spectacle, and to what effect? (I turn off comments on some posts – some posts about my father, for example, some others about my children – when I want to remain clear with myself that I am writing for myself, and not for reactions, when I want there to be no mistake that I am not writing a given story for attention or positive reinforcement. Why, then, not close comments on all posts? Because the dialogue that emerges from commentary is important to me, as is – obviously – the community. Turning off comments sometimes is just a reminder to myself that I do not write – primarily – to generate vocal response; it keeps me honest about why I’m writing about certain things, i.e. because the story demands to be told, and not because the story will yield tons of comments.)

End of the day, I take the temperature of my integrity by appealing to my gut: why am I telling this story? Do I tell it out of love and/or joy and/or enthusiasm and/or fascination? Out of sincere concern or worry or heartfelt handwringing? Will my children read this someday – or my husband or mother or sister or friends read it now, or my father read it on whatever iHeaven app they make available in the great beyond – and recognize and appreciate the feeling behind it? Will their reactions be informed by (so far as possible) a clear awareness that they appear in my stories because I love them, because they are important to me, because I wanted to remember and understand every moment with them, because I wanted to share all of this, because I wanted to the world to know? Are the stories that feature my loved ones gentle in their treatment of them as characters? Are they – so far as is possible in narrative construction – true? If I can tell myself – honestly, as honestly as possible – that the answers to these questions is yes, then that is the best that I can do.

I hope that it is enough. Is it different enough from what goes on in the cruel and shallow money trench that is reality television? I think so. My writerly gaze, as it falls upon my children and my family and my friends, is a loving gaze. This cannot be said of the gaze of a television camera, and that difference, I think, is key. It is, in any case, enough to help me sleep at night. Mostly.

(What do you think? Do writers invariably exploit their subjects, and if so, are parent-bloggers guilty of exploiting their children? Are we all just Gosselins now?)

(Excellent discussion on this very subject can also be found chez Mom-101. And she doesn’t trip over her words as much as I do.)

It’s the kind of thing that happens in recurring nightmares: you’re standing on stage in front of a vast auditorium, a thousand expectant faces turned toward you, the lights burning your eyes, when you suddenly look down and realize that you’re naked. Nude. Starkers. Completely and totally sans pants. And although you want desperately, desperately, to flee the stage and cover yourself, you can’t, because for some reason your legs won’t move, and you’re stuck there, under the burning lights, under the gaze of the audience, terrified as shit, and you must, somehow, go on.

And then you pinch yourself and you wake up, the relief washing over you in cold sweat.

Or, if you’re me, you don’t wake up, you just look up and realize that, yes, this is really happening, and that although you are (small mercies) wearing pants, you are sobbing your heart out, on stage, in front of more than a thousand people, and that public emotional nakedness feels an awful lot like how you imagine public pantslessness to feel. Which is to say, scary, and more than a little embarrassing.

In hindsight, of course, it was a liberating and empowering experience. I feel courageous in a way that I didn’t before; I feel that I accomplished something important in having walked through the valley of fear and come out the other side, whole. It’s not unlike the feeling of accomplishment that I felt after having given birth to Jasper under such trying and terrifying circumstances: I didn’t expect to feel such fear during his birth (just as I didn’t expect, as an accomplished lecturer, to feel fear during my community keynote address), and so surviving that fear turned out to be something of a unexpected gift. I surprised myself with my own strength; I discovered that I could, as they say, feel the fear (and the parts tearing) and do it anyway. But just as with Jasper’s birth, although I was proud of myself, in doing the keynote, for getting through something that was unexpectedly frightening, I can’t say that I’d want to do it again.

Or maybe I would. I don’t know. Sharing the story that I did with the thousand-plus women in the Sheraton Ballroom was in many respects more intimate and personal than was sharing that story here – this surprised me, because although I know that more than a hundred times that number have read the story online, I had figured that speaking the story would be less intimate than writing the story. I sobbed my heart out when I wrote that story, both because it is a story that breaks my heart, but also because, in writing it, I felt as though I was whispering it to my dearest friends, inviting those friends to share my secret, my mother’s secret, and to pull closer to me, and to comfort me, and to urge me on. I did not expect when I read it aloud, in an auditorium, through a microphone, my head blown up a thousand times its size on giant flat-screen monitors, that I would feel that intimacy again. And that I would, again, cry.

And then I cried (photo courtesy Ree/The Pioneer Woman)

This, of course, is the beauty and magic of BlogHer: the feeling – almost always unexpected, for me, although you’d think that I’d learn by now – that you’ve wandered into a landscape filled almost entirely with friends and fellow-travellers (yes, even with all the sponsors, really), that although you believe that your most intimate moments in sharing your writing occur online, in the virtual space that has come to feel like a kind of home (it is, after all, where you wear your pajamas), that intimacy can be multiplied a thousand-fold, in real life, in a room where you are surrounded by people who understand, who even though they might not know you, the real you, the you that hides behind the screen, they know your stories and they love your stories (and even if they don’t know and love your stories, they know that you love storytelling, and you know that they love storytelling, and that matters) and that binds you in a way that you can’t imagine possible until you are there.

You simply can’t imagine until you are there.

Even sobbing your heart out upon the stage, even strumming your own pain with your own fingers, even killing yourself softly, publicly, with your very own song, even then, you feel the bond. Especially then. Because it’s then that you learn, or re-learn, that the community out there – that tribe of moms and foodies and fashionistas and bargainistas and techies and pundits and crafters, that tribe of women, that tribe of geeks, that tribe of storytellers – is your community, in all of its difference, because it is a community of people who understand why you are compelled to tell your stories, and how hard it can be sometimes to tell your stories, and how good the telling feels, even when it is hard. It is a community that shares its stories, that loves its stories, that honors its stories, and the tellers of those stories. Even when those tellers drop their figurative pants upon the stage and moon the audience with their souls. Especially then. So it’s my community, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to bare the ass-cheeks of my soul in its direction, and grateful to have felt the waves of love and encouragement in return.

Which is to say that, yes, maybe I would do it again. With or without pants.

*******

Because many of you have been asking, yes, there has been progress in the search for my brother. It has been complicated and emotionally painful (for both myself and my mother), and so I have had moments of wanting to give up the search. (If you plug “Lost Boy” into my Lijit search widget you’ll get all the posts that I’ve written on the subject, most of which I’ve linked in the previous sentence.) But I have not given up and will not give up and I will keep you all posted, I promise. Thank you all, so much, for your love and support.