How to Turn Your Baby Into Content
About a year ago, I sat down at my computer after a long day with my six-month-old baby. I hadn’t written anything besides a grocery list or an entry in my journal in a very long time. I wasn’t sure that I even remembered how, but, determined to try, I opened up TextEdit. “I just wanna do anything, literally ANYTHING other than think about the goddamned baby,” I said to myself. The page was blank, and so was my mind. I sat at the kitchen table, hating myself. “Why is motherhood so hard for me, and why does it seem like it’s so much easier for everyone else?” I asked, wallowing, a victim for just a minute. “I suck at being a mother AND I have no ideas anymore.”
I stared at the blank page for a while. When I started typing, it turned out that I did have ideas, and there were many of them. But they all had something to do with: you guessed it, the baby. The irony of trying to escape my baby by writing about…my baby has never been lost on me. But turning your own child into a mine for content is not without its potential pitfalls. Because I didn’t plan on writing about my daughter or my family — I vomited forth one piece, then two months later began to write weekly without really thinking about it — I formed no thoughts. I didn’t consult my husband or my daughter. I simply began, and then continued.
Before and immediately after Zelda was born, Josh and I were quite protective of her existence. Even texting a photo of her to her grandparents felt like a trespass. She didn’t feel like ours (and, in fact, she’s not; she hasn’t consented to anything). This is normal, I’m sure. Each new parent figures out on the job how to navigate the weird world of procreating plus the internet. Do you post photos on Instagram? Do you make your account private? Do you post them publicly on Facebook? When you share a photo on Instagram, for most of us, that share doesn’t travel too far, but the potential audience is actually everyone on the planet. There’s a slight — so slight — chance that your photo will strike a nerve, and suddenly your baby’s photo is famous, captioned, memed, or something worse. We didn’t want that. But I was less worried about it than my husband (probably because I have never reviewed an Apple product or an Android phone) and so I relented faster. And, truth be told, I was the one spending fourteen hours a day alone with her, so there wasn’t always a lot else to do besides… take photos of her and share them. Sharing photos of her — first in the various GroupMes created in her honor, then with my friends in Slack, then on Instagram (I toggled the privacy on and off and on and off, never able to make up my mind) — was a very direct connection. We could all agree on one thing, which was that Zelda is very cute. I was on the road to accepting the truth: My baby is Content.
Sharing a photo is almost a reflex these days; we share whatever we see around us, throwing off little tumbleweeds of moments. They are, on the one hand, the purest single unit of content. But to see a photo of someone, even if they share several a day, is to merely peek into a life that isn’t yours. These moments seem personal — and sometimes are — but they don’t really tell us much. They have no context. Writing about your baby and your family is another level of content.
When you begin to write in any manner that attempts self-reflection and honesty, you open a porthole into your life. Sure, you can still pick and choose what you say or don’t say, but writing is far more revealing than a moment captured in a photo. Reading back through these columns, I am tempted to say that I have more often exposed myself, rather than anyone else around me, but probably that’s just wishful thinking. I know that Josh is reading what I write, and though I haven’t asked him, my guess is that it’s given him a lot of insight into my experiences of the last year, many of which have been with him, but many without. Of Zelda’s four grandparents, as far as I know, just one has read anything I have written about her: my stepmother, who graciously “likes” every time I post an article on Facebook. I have aunts and uncles and cousins who are supportive and cheering me on (especially the youngest ones, who I assume are in the same wondrous, but also hellish reality of parenting along with me). Writing about yourself and your family is stressful, to start with, because you worry about people that you know reading what you have written. In that way, it diminishes and makes seem much less important one of the historically worst aspects of writing on the internet: the commenters.
Like motherhood itself, it is simultaneously wonderful and horrifying to expose yourself, your true feelings, about something so universal, so mundane, so every day. I get emails from strangers telling me they know what I mean about little details I’d almost left out. But there’s always a risk, when writing about something as hallowed as motherhood and your own experience of it, that you will offend. You will tell the truth, the one you experience, and it won’t reflect every other person’s experience. And on the internet, that is bad. Here in the content mine, it is best to try and reflect everyone and everything, simultaneously. We are all unique, and all the same. To suggest that my experience is less than stellar some days is “complaining;” to suggest that it is stellar on others is to boast needlessly. Deep in the parenting forums and almost wherever you have the nerve to glimpse, buried under the thin veneer of “supportiveness” is a monstrous subset of people lying in wait, to judge, to proclaim you an asshole. Even when you tell the truth, someone will call you a liar.
This headline is a lie, like everything on the internet: I can’t tell you how to turn your baby into content. I can only tell you that you should do it if you want to, and if you don’t mind, or — as in my case — relish being disliked sometimes. Babies are great content. My favorite Instagram accounts are ALL babies, and I know that I’m not alone. I read other writers daily on their joys and struggles with parenting. Babies are weird and funny and disgusting. They’re like chumboxes: You shouldn’t want to click because the thumbnail you see is revolting, but you simply can’t not.
Truthfully, though, I do not particularly enjoy the thought of her reading this in ten or fifteen years, and when I allow myself to imagine it, I like to think either that she’ll simply be embarrassed me, another uncool mom, or that the internet and by extension The Awl will have imploded. But I do like to think of Zelda in the fallout shelter utopia, eighty or ninety years from now, still youngish, with her own kids maybe, reading these blog posts to herself and laughing at me. I like to think she will know me better for it. I would give anything to have such a record of my mother’s experience of parenting. Oh well.
Last week, a flurry of texts between my father and I, mostly consisting of photos of Zelda’s hair, ended this way:
Dad: “You should write about Zelda.”
Me: “I am.”