Dearest Babbleonians,
This is the last official post of Babydaddy. It’s been a pleasure sharing Josie with you guys, and a big thanks to everybody who read the blog and made comments and didn’t threaten to sue. The best thing the internet has to offer (so far as I can tell) is a sense of community. It allows the members of a fairly lonely culture to feel less alone.
Whatever else it might be, parenting is scary, particularly for first-timers, and we’ve been thankful for all the help we can get. This includes Liz, the world’s most awesome babysitter, Susan, our visiting mom, and both sets of parents, who we don’t see enough, but feel blessed to have around. And it includes you guys. Both Babymamma and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to share our experiences and ask questions and hear back from parents who are either struggling with the same problems, or have found ways to solve them. You guys rule.
The reason I’m stopping the blog has more to do with something one of the commenters brought up a few weeks ago: the idea that Josie may eventually read this blog. Both Babymamma and I always saw this space as a kind of public album, something that would allow us to keep a record of her first year or so. We never envisioned it running much longer than that.
That’s not to say that we won’t write about her again. She’s at the center of our lives. But the blog medium has a certain kind of immediacy, and a reciprocal surrendering of privacy, that we don’t want in our lives forever – and that Josie may not want, either.
As a writer who puts myself out there in public a good bit, I’m used to hearing back from folks who think I’m an idiot. But both Babymamma and I were disturbed to discover that there were folks using the blog as a way of expressing their animus for me, or their perception of me. It made Babymamma, in particular, uncomfortable. And as much as I urged her not to let these trolls bug her, I could see why she was upset. When you make your private life public, when you seek attention in that broad a manner, you’re inviting not just the cool and the loving, but the angry and aggrieved.
It’s also true that Babble itself has changed. In its best incarnation, the site is a wonderful way of building community. But as with any new business, the bottom line is the bottom line. For all the wise and thoughtful writing the site offers, it also depends on peddling a certain kind of lifestyle, one that sometimes confuses emotional necessities with material luxury.
My own take on the future, now that I have a kid (with more to come, hopefully) is that we’ve got to start changing our own lifestyles, on behalf of our kids. I don’t want to get too grandiose or didactic – and Lord knows, I’m prone to both – but I do want to urge the folks who read Babble to think about the ways in which we might change our lifestyles to deal with the realities that face all of us: the end of the cheap oil era, climate change, depletion of water.
No, I’m not suggesting we should throw away our computers and go live off the grid. (In point of fact, I would perish if forced to live off the grid.) But I am suggesting that certain modern conveniences – the fast-paced, super-abudant ones – should come to an end. And that we’re going to need to slow down and connect more, not through screens, but in real life.
That’s part of what Babymamma and I are trying to do these days. We’ve joined a babysitting cooperative. We’re looking into pre-schools that have volunteer programs. We’d like to limit our screen time to working hours. It’s Spring, after all, even if Boston still hasn’t picked up on the hint. The flowers will be blooming. The birds will be out in force. And Josie will want to hug all of them…
