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.

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I’m stuck.

I have a whole post, one that is already written, down to a word, in my head, one that is pounding against the binding of my brain and demanding to be released. It’s a post that I’ve had written for weeks, months, and that I’ve kept tucked away, unsure about whether or not to publish it. And then, in the past week, discussion began to swirl online about issues related to the thing that I want to talk about – that I want so badly to talk about – and I found myself trailing my fingers across my keyboard, straining against the urge to write and hit post, write and hit post, write and hit post. But I resisted – I am resisting, so far – and so I have been pecking at tweets and making cryptic remarks to nobody in particular because it is bothering me, it is really bothering me, and I want so badly to lay it bare upon the screen and shout, see? See? This is why! This is why! This why you need to look at this differently, this is why these discussions are wrong, this is why I have been sitting here, grimacing and fighting back tears.

Because this matters, to me.

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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?

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My Dad, in another time, some time ago when he was still here and we could sit together and talk, or not talk , or (as I am doing in the background of this picture) read the paper and just not care about the passage of time because time always seems infinite until it’s gone and when it seems infinite you feel no need to fill it with words.

I don’t know whether this is the blessing or the curse of time, that you pay it no heed when you have it but feel its loss so keenly when it has passed. Had I known, the last time I saw my Dad, that our time was almost gone, I’d have filled that time with words, so many words; I’d have struggled to pull out all of the threads of our story and make them count, make them heard, weave them to some meaningful close. But I did not have that, and so I’m left now with a story that is at loose ends, that is demanding to be woven, and I think that that’s a blessing, in a way, because it allows me to yank time back and clutch it and fill it with words and images and moments of breathing, and to contemplate, now, in the sober light of grief, the wordless time that was then and to treasure it for its silence and to allow silence its place in this story, my story, our story, and to look into that space without words, between words, and be comfortable, or comforted, there.

(I’m still struggling to come to terms with the call that I was dreading – the call finally taken and muddled through and filed under Things I’d Rather Not Have Faced But Needed To Anyway, Conversations Edition – and am trying to figure out how to put that struggle – and the closure of that struggle, if it comes – into words. Or not. Until then, I need some quiet.)

Now that the whole bizarre, decidedly non-Roald Dahlian saga of The Boy Who Sailed Away In The Balloon has been examined, investigated, and revealed to be a hoax – a hoax designed for the seeming purpose of securing a reality television deal – we can get down to the important issues. For starters: finally admitting, as a community, that putting families on reality television is a bad, bad thing. If the allure of getting cameras into one’s household compels even one deranged parent to fake sending their kid into the stratosphere in a duct-taped helium balloon aircraft, can’t we say with some confidence that this has all gone a little too far? Can we now start calling for an end to reality TV shows that feature families with children?

Richard Heene, apparently, wanted so badly to be Jon Gosselin that he contemplated launching his kid into space in a homemade aircraft. Thankfully, he settled for just pretending to launch his kid into space, but still: the fact remains that the allure of the lower-order fame and wealth that attend reality television notoriety proved so irresistible to this man (and, presumably, his wife, although the extent of her complicity remains uncertainty) that he recruited his children to participate in a scam that would make hardened grifters shake their heads in disapproval.

Heene is an outlier, we might say; an extreme example of what can happen when people get caught up in a desire for fame. And his children didn’t really get hurt or anything: sure, they got caught up in their dad’s scheme, but no-one actually sailed away in a balloon, and end of the day, all that happened was that they were induced to lie.

Well, no, and also, no.

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You need to get over this.

I hope you’ll get over this and start writing about other stuff again soon.

It’s terrible what happened, but you need to remember that there’s worse. You didn’t lose a child.

Some people get hate mail. I get hate mail, but I also get mail of a slightly different strain: well-intentioned mail that aims at constructive criticism but lands somewhere in the area of a belly punch.

You need to get over this.

There are worse things.

You didn’t lose a child.

I don’t know if the authors meant for their words to hurt, but hurt they did. I can no more make myself get over my grief than I can make myself stop loving my husband and my children, nor do I want to: my grief over my father’s death is part of me now, part of the emotional landscape that undergirds my whole lifeworld. But my critics – if I can call them that – didn’t mean that I should resolve my grief. They meant that I should stop writing about it. Because, it seems, the death of a parent, while painful, doesn’t warrant long-form narrative consideration. It might be sad, sure, but it’s not the death of a child.

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Husband: “So, that whole thing, earlier this week? That made you a little crazy, didn’t it?”

Me: “Yeah. Kinda.”

Husband: “Why? Why did it bother you so much?”

Me: “——-?”

Me: “——-.”

I tell stories for a living. Mostly, I tell my own stories, the stories of my motherhood, and reflections on same. I do it because I love to do it. I do it because it has become, in some ways, almost like breathing: automatic, unavoidable, necessary. I do it because I believe in it: making public the lived experience of motherhood is, I think, crucial to empowering mothers, because it allows us to share, out in the open, where everyone can see, what motherhood is really like, once we’ve stripped away the glossy magazine covers and the laundry detergent commercials and the longstanding cultural insistence that family be private, that mothering be private, that we just hush, and not talk about how hard and how terrifying and how utterly, confoundingly, gloriously complicated this whole experience is.

I also do it because I’m vain, and because I crave approval.

Someone (actually, more than one someone) commented on the post of the other day that if I’m committed to telling my stories publicly, to mothering publicly, then I should just accept that I will face criticism and judgment. Moreover – some commenters added, here and elsewhere – since I am semi-well-known for what I do (I never know how to talk about this semi-sort-of-little-bit well-knownness. Being well known in any capacity on the Internet is, I think, kind of like being well-known in Korea for that one karaoke video that you “acted” in that one time: meaningless to anybody outside of a micro-specialized niche of aficionados, and so very probably meaningless in any broader socio-cultural context. Which is to say, nothing to brag about) it is disingenuous and/or hypocritical for me to claim to be bothered by criticism or judgment or whatever slings and arrows get hurled my way. I blog because I’m shameless, right? And I’ve earned some recognition for being shameless, right? So what’s the problem?

The problem is that I’m not shameless. I sometimes wish that I were: Socrates described himself as shameless, and argued that any true philosopher is by definition shameless, because the true philosopher loves wisdom/truth above all else, and certainly above any concern for social approval. If you’re going to interrogate social mores to the fullest extent possible, you need to be above them, at least intellectually. Shame (understood classically) is what we feel when we cower under some disapproving social gaze. It is not – contrary to what someone asserted in comments the other day – what we feel when we know that we’ve done something wrong (although we might feel shame under those circumstances); it is not necessarily associated with guilt. One can believe whole-heartedly that one is entirely in the right with a given action or behaviour, but still feel shamed by the disapproving reaction of some portion of one’s community. We can feel shame for living in poverty, for loving a member of the same sex, for breastfeeding publicly, if any measure of social disapproval is directed at those things. It doesn’t mean that we feel guilty for those things, that we feel in any way blameworthy – it means that social approval matters to us, and that social disapproval stings.

I am vulnerable to being hurt by social disapproval. It doesn’t matter whether that disapproval comes from one person, or a hundred, or a thousand, or more. I’m vulnerable to it. I fell vulnerable to it earlier this week. (All please note: what follows is not an invitation to direct further opprobrium against anyone who expressed such disapproval. These are my feelings, I am owning them and trying to make sense of them, nothing else.)

As it goes, the shame that I experienced earlier this week had – at least at first – little to do with my writing or my public persona. I felt shamed (note the distinction here: I did not feel ashamed of myself – I felt that I had been shamed, effectively, by the exercise of social disapproval toward some action on my part) for an action that I took in real life, that took place in the arena of lived space as opposed to written space. I did something and was observed and my actions were held up (in a misleading manner, which, as everyone knows by now, bothered me to no end) for interrogation and judged. Which, if that interrogation and judgment had occurred in some private space, or had remained unknown to me, might have been no big deal, but it occurred in a public space and was made known to me and so I felt – in a way that was different from how I would feel, have felt, about being judged for my writing or my online persona (I usually take that in stride. I’ve had lots of practice) – shamed. My real-life self had been observed doing some real-life thing and that real-life self was judged, publicly, and so that real-life self felt shamed.

My online self, my written self, was, of course, not completely detached from this experience. I made public my act, by Tweeting about it. I fully intended to blog about it. I had most of that post already scripted in my head. I was a little bit in love with it, to be frank: it was going to sort through all of my complicated feelings and ambivalences and reflections about what had transpired. I was going to tell the story as I wanted to tell it. It was not going to be a story about whether nursing another woman’s child was the right or wrong thing to do – there was no doubt in my mind that there was nothing wrong with it, even though I knew that it was not something that everybody would do, and even though I knew that some people, even people that I love and respect, would find it off-putting – it was going to be a story about what the experience was like, and about my complicated feelings surrounding it (for example, that it was an act that was both intimate and not intimate, that it felt both ordinary and extraordinary, that I initially felt a little afraid to do it, etc). But I was not able to tell that story, because sometime in the late hours of Monday I heard word that I had already been judged for my actions and I made the mistake of seeking out that judgment and reading it for myself and becoming upset by it and the rest, as they say, is history.

Part of my upset, in other words, was that I felt robbed of my story. It had become someone else’s story, told in a different way and with different and misleading details and I no longer had any control over it. It took on a life of its own and my feelings about it changed and I felt that, in addition to having been shamed, I had been robbed of my experience and my ability to define the terms of expressing and sharing that experience. I don’t necessarily have any rights to those things, but still: the deprivation of them hurt. Had I written about the experience myself and received shaming comments (by which I do not mean comments that expressed disagreement, but which attached moral judgment to that disagreement, i.e. it is wrong to do that, you were wrong to do that, women who do that are disgusting, etc.) I could have addressed them directly, on my own terms (or, yes, deleted them). I could have incorporated them into the larger story – which was not, as I originally imagined it, about mothers being shamed, but about trust and intimacy and support and community in motherhood, and also, maybe, about eros in motherhood (not in the sexual sense, but, rather, the classical sense. What of our profound physical and emotional connections to our children? How are these disrupted or affirmed by something like nursing another child?) – and controlled the impact of that shaming upon, and its place within, the story that I was telling.

That, obviously, was not to be. And so the story became something else entirely, and I struggled with and against the experience of feeling shamed and with and against the feeling of having lost control of my story, and it made me, yes, a little crazy. A little crazy and a lot exhausted. But beyond that crazy there was reflection, and reflection is good, right? I know now that I’m not as thick-skinned as I thought; I know, too, that I am – rightly or wrongly – possessive of my stories – told or untold – in a way that is much more intense than I understood. I learned more than I wanted to of the personal experience of shame, and I know that I have no desire to revisit it. But I am a writer and a woman who remains committed to sharing, publicly, the experience of her motherhood and of her life, generally, and so I know that critique is inevitable and judgment is inevitable and, probably, some further experience of shame is inevitable. The first I will embrace, as best I can; the second I will tolerate, as best I can. The third, I hope to continue to fight, however weakly, however awkwardly, however ineffectually, because although criticism is good, and judgment to some extent inevitable, shaming – when it is directed at any action or behaviour that is (and I realize that these are fluid concepts) well-intentioned and/or harmless and/or necessary and/or none of anyone else’s damn business regardless of how public the action is or how well-known the actor is (Salma Hayek, call me!) – is neither of those things. And the only way that I know how to fight that kind of shame is by continuing to tell my stories as if shaming didn’t matter. As if I was, in fact, shameless, in the best sense of that word.

That, and I’m going to make sure that the next time I go traipsing down the Internet rabbit hole in pursuit of stories being told about me? That I just don’t.