Sticks and Stars

The thing that I hate about blogging these days is that I feel like I’m being watched. Ever since my boys’ dad starting threatening to use the contents of various posts as justification for taking my boys away from me, I’ve felt pretty stifled. I don’t know that he reads this blog and I’d like to naively think that he respects my wishes that he not, but given the veritable treasure trove of incriminating evidence he might imagine finding on my “anonymous” blog, I can’t imagine he’d stay away. And this blog wouldn’t be hard to find, especially if he was specifically looking.

He’s not currently making threats. That ended months ago and although I am intensely wary of our current interactions, we are managing civil conversation (as long as we avoid everything but the most banal of topics). I still don’t trust it though, and I certainly don’t trust that anything I post on my blog, anything that could possibly reflect me in less than a saintly light of perfection, won’t be twisted against me at some yet unnamed future date.

I really hate blogging like this. I start blogging about something, anything, and I start feeling more and more tense. I delete and rewrite and delete and rewrite and eventually I just stop writing because it feels too dangerous. What angle am I missing? What small detail am I overlooking that could lead to my downfall? I feel pressured to write only posts about my good examples of mothering or my good examples of [insert endless array of topic demonstrating that I am a mature, highly competent adult]. And of course, I really am a highly competent adult, but I always think of my blog as the place where I can let my hair down, snarls and gummy tangles and split ends and all.

I desperately want to blog about the difficulties of parenting. Right now my five year old is having a rough time and as a result we are all having a rough time. I am handling it as best I can and when I can step back and look at it objectively, I don’t think I’m doing a bad job, maybe even a good job despite the fact that nothing I’m doing is working. But I really want to blog about it all and I can’t. Because of course, if my five year old is having a hard time, it must be my fault, right? It must be evidence of my terrible, terrible parenting that my children aren’t specimens of perfect emotional health, that their every moment isn’t peaceful, serene, precocious wisdom. Of course, I am saying that facetiously, but I know for sure that’s what their dad thinks. He’s made it clear on many occasions that everything bad is my fault and everything good is good in spite of my poisonous contamination.

The hardest thing about parenting alone (or one of the hardest anyway) is not having anyone to help you have context, to help you see that other parents aren’t perfect either, to back you up in the choices you make. I find myself constantly, constantly reading between the lines of all parenting tales I encounter to see whether I am the only one who [insert potentially questionable behavior here]. It’s much harder, though, when you feel like someone else is watching too, waiting for you to slip up and reveal your ordinary, well-intentioned, imperfect horrendously abusive ways.

I don’t know what to do about this. Do I create a super duper secret blog somewhere else and never reveal even the most vaguely identifying information? Do I just stop blogging and give up this form of expression that I’ve been doing almost every day for the past five years (almost exactly five)? I don’t know. But that’s why I blog less than I ever used to and why I never post about anything interesting. Just so you know.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.