feedback for "Bad Parent: The Muse"

1. Rachel,
   Thanks for such a thoughtful piece on this. I know whereof you speak. I write about my child in my blog, Crabmommy, both in a personal medium as well as at a magazine. Like you, the question of her rights/my right to write about her bothers me. The line between our lives as their mothers and their lives as our children is blurry. Like you, I have set up rules. In my medium the big ones are: no photos, no discussions that will potentially embarrass later (but of course that's impossible...she will be embarrassed about me no matter what when she's a teen!); I just try and avoid what to me seem clearly across the line of privacy: for me, that's things like poop humor that so many parent-bloggers traffic in (cheesy, unfunny, and to me, unfair), and then it's also stuff involving highly personal family info. There are other rules. But of course these are just lines in the sand. In the end, we know we will be judged by the kids, on their own terms. And that their rules and ours aren't going to be the same. Keeping that "judgment day" in mind is good as a writer, I think, while at the same time weighing up one's own needs for self-expression.

   posted by : crabmommy on 5/8/2008 at 1:12 PM Flag For Abuse

2. Comparing your use of your child in writing to Sally Mann's depiction of her children in photos is a stretch. How can you not be inspired by your child - particularly when you spend every waking moment with them. That seems natural and I would almost say it would be awful if you could separate your creative self from the reality of your child. Who would want to do that? Sally Mann, on the other hand, was exploiting her children. There is no question as to whether what she did was appropriate or not. It absolutely was not. The mere thought that some nut job is out there using photographs of her children as sexual objects should have been incentive enough to keep those types of photos private. Instead she chose to make money.

   posted by : Jacks Mama on 5/8/2008 at 1:39 PM Flag For Abuse

3. Without getting into Sally Mann (I haven't seen the photos), I agree that inspiration is different from exploitation. Thank you for a thoughtful and interesting piece!
   
   Perhaps Babble will consider eliminating the ridiculous "Bad Parent" phrase from the title of these articles. Few of the stories involve bad parents, though maybe some occasional isolated incidences of poor parenting...but mostly not even that.

   posted by : CaliMama on 5/8/2008 at 1:54 PM Flag For Abuse

4. totally agree, calimama.

   posted by : crabmommy on 5/8/2008 at 1:59 PM Flag For Abuse

5. I have to say that I don't think Sally Mann's photographs are the work of a "nutjob" or that they are photographs of her children as sexual objects.
   
   My husband is a photographer and has taken many pictures of our son. Some have provoked a lot of discussion, some have offended people, some have been very well-received. But none of them were exploitative, none of them were sexual.
   
   I think your viewpoint depends upon how you, yourself, view nudity more than anything else. Yes, there are some of Mann's pictures that are puposely disarming, but there are some that are also just a beautiful reflection of childhood - of that freedom to be naked, to be covered in Popsicle drips, of not worrying about what people are thinking about you and your body, of just being able to live freely. It seems to me that seeing nude photographs only in the light of sexuality might be a knee-jerk reaction and that maybe the commenter above needs to realize that if nudity is, for her, only sexual, than perhaps she could rethink her views on being naked. We're all nude underneath our clothes, we're all born naked, and there is nothing at all inherently evil or sexual about being that way.

   posted by : superblondgirl on 5/8/2008 at 2:30 PM Flag For Abuse

6. Thanks for writing about this. I agree that the line between inspiration and exploitation needs to be explored. I use pseudonyms in all my mother-writing, and won't post photos of the kids on my blog - at least until they're old enough to give me the okay.
   
   I recently posted on blogging as exploitation at:
   http://twinutero.org/2008/03/is-blogging-about-your-kids-exploitation/

   posted by : Ali Collette on 5/8/2008 at 2:38 PM Flag For Abuse

7. I, along with Catherine at Her Bad Mother, were recently accused of exploiting our children by many readers of the Globe and Mail (Canada's national newspaper) after we were featured in an article on the ethics of mommy blogging.
   
   I don't know about Mann's photograps but I suspect they may cross the lline if they can be fairly easily interpreted as sexual or disturbing. Writing about our children and parenting, however is writing about life as it is lived day to day and that type of writing has been done for thousands of years.

   posted by : Don Mills Diva on 5/8/2008 at 4:13 PM Flag For Abuse

8. I'm really curious to hear what the writer's daughter felt about reading her mom's negative feelings about her as a baby. A lot of moms have these feelings- we battle with these emotions on a daily basis. The question is does a 13 year-old need to know about that? If I'd known my mom felt like that about me when I was 13, it would have been devastating to my fragile teenage heart. This just raises questions for me.

   posted by : DecafPlease on 5/9/2008 at 6:38 AM Flag For Abuse

9. My columns about my daughter in the community newspaper where I'm a staffer have made her a household name. So much so that I have had people come up to me in the grocery store eager to meet "the famous Jillian." Like the mom who posted at the top of this chain, I am careful to edit out truly personal bits of information just as I edit out the truly personal parts of my marriage.
   
   My daughter will be embarrassed when she grows up. But will she be more embarrassed by my columns or the 8 x 10 of her bare hiney on my living room wall? What I write about are the central themes of motherhood, the stories that draw older women to me to say "I love your column because it brings me back to the days when my children were young. It makes me remember the frustrations and the joys."
   
   When my daughter is a mom, I like to think that she will read my columns and see that she was loved so much that I couldn't help but write about her. Is that exploitation? Am I peddling our private stories to make a quick buck? I don't think so. True, I'm paid a pittance that has helped cover her hiney with diapers and fill her tummy with Gerber, but I'm also writing a very public love story to my daughter, printed piece by piece in the newspaper. (oh, and online.. . http://jeannesager.blogspot.com)

   posted by : jeanne on 5/9/2008 at 9:33 AM Flag For Abuse

10. Your self-awareness is so refreshing, so rare in this society of parenting blogs and momoirs. You have come to realize you have written a novel about the motherhood struggle and felt the guilt of it. There are many, many writers who are parents that never venture into that realm. They write of childfree characters or young adults or vampires. You have explored your own issues of motherhood. I don't believe you have exploited your daughter in the process. Any comparison with parenting blogs even here at Babble, clearly shows the difference.

    posted by : writingwoman on 5/10/2008 at 7:56 AM Flag For Abuse

11. I really appreciate the nuance of this article. So often on Babble, these "bad parent" segments set up straw people so that we can all get outraged. But this article reflects a thoughtful and complicated point of view. I too blog about my sons. I don't post pictures of them, either, for fear of nutjobs... My oldest is five and I can feel a shift towards greater protectiveness of his privacy. Of my writing about his babyhood and toddlerhood, though, I think he will appreciate this window into what he was like and what our life was like when he was little. I know I would be so happy to have more than scant memories from my disengaged mother and a few stray pictures in terms of understanding my early years. I think the trick though is to be aware all along that the subject has feelings and will read all this one day. That's hard, though, sometimes, especially when they do things that are so bizarre and funny. I was just about to say that it's okay to write about our children if we do so with love and respect... but then I had to recognize that the post I put up just today (mothers' day no less) titled "The Young Eccentric" might actually cause him embarrassment one day!
    
    http://catherine.blog-city.com

    posted by : cleverland on 5/11/2008 at 9:52 PM Flag For Abuse