I’m feeling some tremors just below the surface of our house that signal a change is coming. M is growing up. This morning I was thinking about how that affects how I share stories about her. I realized that it’s one thing to share a story that could be embarrassing to one of your kids when they are a toddler. It’s another to do so when they are pre-teens/teenagers and the information you share about them could be found by friends (and rivals) at school.
Even with me stripping the site of most of the information that could be used to clearly identify my family and friends, there are still enough nuggets here that someone, if they were motivated enough to do the digging, could figure out who my spouse or kids are. I figure the next few years are going to be hard enough for each of the girls without their old man sharing the story of when they threw the fit about who got to sit on the love seat before breakfast[1] on his blog and everyone at school finding out about it because someone found the post.
Which is an extraordinary bummer for me. There are a couple awesome stories from the past few weeks, moments that made us laugh out loud in the privacy of our family, that I think are a little too personal to share with the world. Or, as I posted on Facebook, St. P’s recently had a superhero day and the girls all dressed for the occasion. While I took the obligatory picture before we left in the morning, M said, “Don’t put that on Facebook!” A couple of you made comments wondering who was running things in our house. I decided I’ve given my daughters enough reasons to spend time in therapy when they reach adulthood;[2] if I can occasionally give them a break, I may dial the public sharing back a bit.
But I will say that she is a piece of work. I’m not sure exactly how old she thinks she is – could be 16, could be 19, could be 28 – but she definitely thinks she’s well beyond her 11.5 years. Many people warned as that sometime between 11 and 12 was when it would start. They weren’t lying. Serenity now.