Daily post : Mom and Dad bloggers

Tags

blogging, parents, postady2013, writing

You don’t have to be a die-hard mommy or daddy blogger to write about your family — it’s difficult not to share the hilarious yet harrowing story about your three-year-old’s decision to chop off her hair with safety scissors so she could look more like SpongeBob. (We hear the dishtowel necktie was pretty cute.)

But where are the boundary lines when writing about children? What don’t you share? What happens when they’re old enough to read your blog? What about comments critical of your parenting? What about posting photos?

This is what I consider to be an excellent question. It is something that I think about everyday that I write on my blog. How much to I share about my babies and their lives, what pictures do I share and how personal do I let it be?

If my children were younger and their escapades were of the silly natured ones, I would be eager to share how my baby girl cut her own hair during the middle of the night right before school picture day or how when my baby boy got a hold of a carton of eggs and pretended that they were little bombs and dropped them all around the apartment. Now that they are young adults, I haven’t any business sharing anything personal about them with the world, it is their privacy and their boundaries. My blog is only about me, the only way that I will share anything about my children with my audience is how I feel about them, how proud of them I am and how I still worry because it is my job and because no matter how old they are, I still see them as my little babies.

My baby girl has her own blog, I am a subscriber to hers as she is a subscriber to mine, I think that we create some instant censorship because as a writer, I am influenced by my audience and having my daughter as part of my audience, it keeps me on the straight and narrow. My baby boy is a writer as well, but his writing falls under the umbrella of melodies and lyrics. It makes me so happy to know that both of my children are writers, not in a professional capacity or at least not yet, but I feel comforted by the knowledge that their writing, for whatever reason they write, is therapeutic and cathartic for them.

That unexpected phone call

Tags

communication, loss, parents, phone, postaday2013

You receive a call from someone you don’t expect. Who is it, and what is the conversation about?

The one person this question brings to mind would be my father. It will be 10 years this February 25 that my father was killed and if the phone rang and his voice was on the other end, it would definitely be an unexpected yet welcome phone call.

My father comes to mind because he, unlike me, loved the phone. When he would be at home in the morning, he would take a break from his morning chores and start dialing, I would usually be the first call on his list and he and I would talk about everything under the sun and he called everyday. He especially loved to hear about the latest antics that either the baby boy or the baby girl would be pulling off. We talked endlessly about food, recipes and future concoctions. Politics was probably our favorite subject because politics encompasses everything; sociology, psychology, economics and history. We would spend at least an hour every day talking. It took me a long time to wean myself away from the huge void left in my life and my heart when my father was taken from me.

I can now honestly say that whenever I think of him and it is all the time, the sides of my eyes crinkle upwards, because it's a memory of someone that I loved unconditionally and I keep that alive in my heart. I think that it's true what they say about love, since it's energy, it can never die. I am grateful for that.