I used to be an open book. I would write and share about anything, and I mean anything, to the point where my dad would get his wife to scan my texts before he read them, just to check there wasn’t anything that would make him shrivel up and die. (There often was, lol.) If something pissed me off one day, it would probably find its way into a poem the next. I am no stranger to the old text message from a long-lost love asking, “Can you delete that particular poem? My mum is reading it and asking if it’s about me.”
(It was.)
And then I had a kid, and that ability was wiped clean overnight. I had been cracked wide open (quite literally, in a lil hippie birthing pool in my living room) and all I wanted was to close up and live inside a little bubble forever. The world suddenly felt harsh to the point even a dog bark grated at my ears and made my protective hackles stand up. Let alone sharing something as vulnerable as my kid to the wolves of the internet.
Now, almost six years on, I feel such a call to write about where I’m at. And of course one of the biggest themes in my life is raising a tiny human from literally a squashed meatball looking creature that can’t hold his head up - to a grown ass man. That is no small undertaking and of course it occupies a very many of my thoughts. This is not the days of yore when one can send their seven year old off on a bike and tell them to stay the hell away from the house until the streetlights come on that night. I’m not sure if the world is necessarily less safe but social media sure as hell did a good algorithmic job of shoving every video of every child that has ever been kidnapped ever into my eyeballs. We’re scared, the world is new and changing every day and it feels more important than ever to take the job of mothering very seriously. And one of the questions I ask myself a lot is this:
How can I share about motherhood without accidentally commodifying my child?
I want strangers to read my words and feel like I’m the friend they could hang with without draining their social battery, the kind of friend you’re so comfortable with you can literally sit side by side with on your phones and it’s not weird. The friend you don’t need to clean your house for, the friend who can go get herself a glass of water in your home, that you don’t have to have any pretence or ‘host’. I love my readers and I’ll share every skerrick of my brain with them but. But how do I stay in the lane of narrating my own life AND staying the heck out of my sons when my very core system is wrapped around his existence?
People develop pseudo connections with people they see on the internet, and I think it’s one of the beauties of having home girls all over the world you’ve never even met yet. But when it comes to people feeling like they know your kids? That’s where I think it gets kind of weird.
The online world is a curation, and a persona. No matter how authentic and clean we are with our representation, it is still a representation, and every building block of content adds to this avatar that lives inside peoples minds. My son doesn’t need to exist in the minds of people he’s never met. At all. No judgement to parents who do, it is just not my jam.
“I think I see more photos of your dog than your son,” someone said to me.
Yes. That’s by design. I don’t have to worry about violating my dog’s sovereignty or future identity by posting pictures of her.
The other day I caught her licking a poo that was stuck to her own butthole.
She’ll be just fine.
“So why don’t you just… shut up?” One might say in a king Julian from Madagascar style.
I truly believe mothers need to share. We need each other. We need to stick our hands in the dirt and rip out the weeds that sleep in the underground of motherhood and share and bare all of it because the immensity of motherhood is honestly fucking terrifying. We need to share with women who aren’t mothers, or aren’t mothers yet, so - without scaring the living daylights out of them - they have a measured realistic fucking view of what it’s actually like.
Thank God for the women who share online, for the poems and the essays and the reels and the vulnerable pieces. It shows us we’re not alone. As they say there is no hood like motherhood and it’s good to know we’re not alone in this clown show.
For me, and it’s taken time and probably will continue to develop, I’ve landed on a rule for myself: I can write about how motherhood changes me, but I don’t write about who my son is. If the story belongs to him more than it belongs to me, it doesn’t get told. I haven’t always done this perfectly, and It’ll continue to develop. That’s for him to tell one day, if he chooses to.
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