How to write about motherhood without oversharing
The Erma Bombeck Rule
My first Diary of A Gen X Mom entry, a series with The Writing Cooperative, will tell a first day of school story of sorts, and while editing it, I realized that I should probably explain my Erma Bombeck Rule about setting sharing boundaries as a parent.
Why we need a sharing rule
There is a huge discussion among parenting writers about how much, or even if, we should share our children’s stories. The explosion of blogging, mommy blogging in particular, in the early aughts exposed a question that had really never been relevant before the internet. Who owns our stories? I don’t mean in the copyright sense, but in the ethical sense.
Back in the past, if your mom told an embarrassing story about you, she told it to family or neighbors. All my childhood friends know about the time my baby brother was trying to be like me and glued his eyelashes together after mistaking nail polish for eyeshadow. Such stories were embarrassing, sure, but limited in audience 30 years ago. When they’ve become public, it is long after they’ve made the transition from embarrassing to laughing out loud at reunions. (My brother’s nail polish as eye shadow story made that transition years ago, hence I have no worry mentioning it in a very public forum now.)
In the modern era, family and neighbors aren’t around in real life as much. Whether they are leaning in or opting out, modern moms are relatively isolated in the domestic sphere.
One of the effects of that isolation has played out online. Without many neighbors or family with whom to chat or workplaces that have neither the time or patience for domestic discussions, these moms were some of the quickest to turn to online communication. (Techy geeks and engineers, conservative news hounds in pajamas, fan fiction writers, and stay at home moms. I think those might be the first groups to popularly use the internet for something other than porn. Huh. Interesting.)
With mommy bloggers, funny stories that once were only known to immediate neighbors, and which didn’t usually have video evidence, went viral within hours of their occurance. There was no time for the ‘cry now but it’ll be funny later’ transition. Plus, while those immediate neighbors might forget a story over the years, or only bring it up during a wedding reception or graduation party, the internet is forever.
Originally the kids moms were writing about were too little to complain, but, for example, the early mom blogger who had a two year old in 2000 has a 19 year old now. That 19 year old has been able to complain about “sharenting” — yes, the practice is so notorious it has a name — for a while. And complain the kids have.
And not just the kids, either. Last summer, when one mom wrote about her son’s puberty in the New York Times, concerned grandpa intervened.
What stories to tell is an important question. We learn though stories. We get carthasis though writing stories. But we do not own every story in which we happen to play, and that is especially true for our children.
In the early days of the internet boom, two dueling books came out. I don’t recall the editors but the first was The Bitch in the House. It was a compilation of women’s stories that became known for its complaints against husbands. A husband replied — it might have been one of the husbands from the Bitch book — with a compliation from men titled, The Bastard on the Sofa. And, this is the part I remember, someone at Slate or Salon wrote a review wondering when the inevitable Monster in the Carseat would get published. The book would come sometime in the future when these kids were old enough to find, read, and understand what their parents really thought of them: as difficulties to be managed.
It was a douse of cold water read. No matter how unending the infant-toddler-schoolkid stage seems, it will end. They will grow into adults with opinions and feelings all their own. While online identities will be part of their life, how much of that identity will we, their parents, have already established? What will they think of our public pronouncements then? What will we think of them then?
By the time I started writing my expat blog, I had given much though to what I would share. As my publications and audiences changed, I changed. Over time, I developed a practice.
The Erma Bombeck Rule
Erma Bombeck, for the younger readers who might not know, was a famous and very funny syndicated columnist from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. (Think Charles M. Shultz’s “Peanuts” but for housewife humor.) She started writing her “At Wit’s End” column in 1965. She had been a journalist prior to having children, but had only penned a few columns in local papers for about 10 years. She was “on-ramping,” as we call it today.
“At Wit’s End” got picked up for syndication in three weeks. She went on to author 15 books on suburban life and motherhood, with fabulous titles like: The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, Family — Ties that Bind…and Gag!, and If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?
Thirty years of a weekly column on suburban life and motherhood (the second oldest profession, per Bombeck) and 15 books on the same — she told lots of stories about her children, yet didn’t seem to invade their privacy.
At one point, I bought a collection of her old columns and paid attention to what she did. She told stories about typical kid stuff, like the scintillating phone conversations they have with new romantic interests:
“What are you doing?” “Nothing, what are your doing?” “I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re doing something.” “I told you I wasn’t doing anything.” “You sure?” “I’m sure.” “So, what’s new?”
Her complaint for that column was that the girlfriend in question lived in a different area code so the Bombeck parents were paying 1970’s eight cents a minute for such riveting conversations. (Remember long distance charges?) This is not unlike parents today who wonder why they are paying a data plan so that our kids can FaceTime each other but not actually talk. They are just hanging out, virtually, I am told.
Bombeck told stories in the past. I can’t verify this but her tenses and other context suggest that she wasn’t telling stories as they happened, and regardless she didn’t have the instant publishing capablities of Facebook and blogging. But it was the common themes that I noticed. She told stories that wouldn’t mortify her kids one day because all anyone would see was typical kids.
So I feel fine mentioning that once upon a elementary school time I needed a forklift to get mine out of bed on school days only to have them wake at dawn on Saturdays. With a clear conscious, I can complain about their unerring ability to start loudly bickering while I’m trying to merge onto the freeway. I can commiserate with you, the reader, about how they do these things. Is it some single-digit age conspiracy or does God simply have an annoying sense of humor?
I hope that if one day others looked up stories about my children, they will “see” that they were once typical children, because like Bombeck, I don’t post many pictures of them either. Even for all of the detail of telling a story, there is something extra personal about using someone’s image.
Finally, one must consider the kids themselves. Some kids tolerate more sharing than others, and frankly, that counts. Consider the life of the real Christopher Robin.
My kids, like Bombeck’s, seem to be on the higher end of tolerance, sometimes even asking me to write on some event. Occasionally, I deviate by kid request, but mostly I stick by my Erma Bombeck Rule.
And while looking up a bit or two for today, I stumbled upon one of her columns. It was a 70’s column but it became one of the first viral emails when she passed away in 1996, Erma Bombeck’s Regrets. One of the last: “I would have gone to bed when I was sick, instead of pretending the Earth would go into a holding pattern if I weren’t there for a day.” Well, I just spent three days in Austin, Texas after a hard freeze. Hard freezes prompt the cedar trees to release pollen. I do not react well to cedar pollen. I can barely taste, smell, or hear. Since following Bombeck’s lead has yet to lead me astray, I think I’ll go back to bed.
