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[**BLOG POST #3 IN MY MEDIUM EXPERIMENT that should really be #4 but who’s counting?]

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lammott contains within its pages one of my all-time favorite quotes:

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” — Anne Lamott

Whether it be a blog post or a memoir, the complication/exception/confusion on the ‘shoulda behaved better’ rule, to me, is writing about one’s children. Don’t get me wrong, it’s freaking literary gold — the actions and utterances on a daily basis — you are in the midst of a small human developing, and the everyday fodder can be hilarious, entertaining, confounding, frightening.

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But the question remains: just because it’s juicy or disturbing, is it aboveboard to write unreservedly about your children? You know, privacy. Like, already they didn’t ask to be born. Now we’re going to talk about the details of their bodily functions and mental processes with strangers? Kid A — who once thought it entertaining to appear on mom’s computer with a blog title like, “Help! He won’t give up his paccy!” — might wake at 15 and be pissed that his parent waxed poetic publicly over his social anxiety.

Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.

Many a mommy blogger says, “hells to the yes I can write it, they don’t mind, they won’t even know, and they’re my best material!” I get it. Some writers/bloggers provide their children with aliases or attempt to maintain some sort of anonymity, some don’t, but most seem to feel okay kvetching about their children’s details.

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This could include poop habits, adorable mispronunciations, and grocery store meltdowns in the younger years and expand to mental health symptoms, fill in the blank tryouts and diagnoses as kids get older. Nothing, it would seem, is off limits.

But often, it should be noted, these posts are helpful, a God send even. Because when you feel out of control as a parent, responsible for some worrisome behavior, or a physical condition, when someone else reveals that yes, they too have had the very same situation with their kid, and they might write, ‘Here’s what we did that worked like gangbusters and now my child is perfect’ or even better ‘now he’s on the top level at Kumon!’

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I find myself at a crossroads. I’ve written fiction, articles, and narrative non-fiction pieces about my family of origin and my dysfunctional childhood (see Miss the Boat, previous Medium post). If it’s about the tattoo I got at 21, like my post yesterday, that can feel vulnerable, but ethical to post; it’s about me, before marriage, before kids. But then, what about marriage? It’s been almost 20 years; I’m sure I could dredge up something. But there’s this guy I live with. And what about my children? Well, let’s just say I am NOT in want for material, ya’ll. But these are my real-life characters. I make their dinner.

I’ve dipped my toe in. My daughter will be 11 on Easter, a 4th grader who loves dogs, baking, and fashion, and while I write of her existence, I’ve stopped short before discussing whatever struggles she has had in private. My son is 17. There have been several key situations as he’s grown up that I waffled on whether to write about but ultimately chickened out. We had a recent discussion. He said, “I don’t care what you write— show me first if you think there’s something that would humiliate me. But I can’t imagine I’ll give a crap.” I’m paraphrasing.

My 26-year-old stepson and I dealt with this issue: I accidentally wrote what turned out to be a totally-based-on-a-true-story story in which he was front and center. I sent it to him and asked, but communicated I would quash it if he would rather I not put it out there. He said he was okay with it as long as I didn’t identify him by name. I honored the request.

So what’s the issue?

Well, some writers question the legitimacy of “memoir.” At times, it’s dropped like a dirty word, like “lice” — “memoir”! The subtext seeming to be, “I don’t know. Isn’t that like publishing your diary?” One writer suggested writing about your children without their “consent” (which can only be given when they are old enough to understand exactly what they are consenting to) would be “whoring” her children. Ouch. Being sturdily American, I loathe the suggestion that I am egocentric (presumably because I am so egocentric).

So to recap, I’m conflicted and I want everyone’s approval. And it’s coming to a faceoff.

Because what keeps bubbling to the surface when I write is what has actually happened (or is happening) in my life. I could fictionalize, of course, which I’ve done, but in the last few years (after about a century of therapy) I feel more honest with myself, more accepting, able to imagine people can know “the truth” about me and likely be more understanding with me than I am with myself.

But it also feels dicey. When you have a dysfunctional childhood it comes with a wallop of shame. There are situations I simply wasn’t able to confront before, so it was easy not to write about them. But now I can’t unsee. I am a writer who writes to make sense of what in my head feels a jumble. It is as if I can’t know quite what something is unless I talk it through with a person or a page. And I have come to feel my life doesn’t need to be relegated to the pages of a journal because what I write might make some people uncomfortable. I don’t owe immunity anymore, particularly to adults.

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I am not the first or last writer who will wrestle with this issue. The following from writer Dani Shapiro gets it near perfect:

“One can’t write with abandon if one is worrying about the consequences. And to have children is to always, always worry about the consequences. From the time my son was an infant, I became aware that he hadn’t asked for a mother who is a writer. Up until then, the people in my life — parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, friends — had felt like fair game. If I was going to be hardest on myself, then, well, they were grown-ups; they could handle it. But if I was going to write about my son, I was going to have to be very, very careful. And as any writer will tell you, careful has no place in making art. My atavistic desire to protect my child (against myself!) was at odds with my creative desire to write from an internal landscape that now included him, one which had been forever altered by his birth. Certainly I can imagine him saying, I wish you hadn’t told that story about yourself. But as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page. Then, and only then, do I know what I think, feel, believe. Without these attempts (the word essay derives from “attempt”) I am lost.” — Dani Shapiro

I also love this from Joan Didion:

“All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

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The act of writing through something reveals it to me. I write it to find it. Maybe I am a narcissistic reality TV fool hiding behind the cultured veil of the tag ‘literary’. But even if that’s true, my silent friends — I know you are out there, I can hear you breathing — I cannot be like the Pixar Andrew Stanton created character Wall-E. I am not on this cold trash techno planet alone. Climb aboard, comrades. I offer no answers, just a buoyant ride.

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As Gloria Steinem once put it, “Writing is the only thing, that when I’m doing it, I don’t feel like I should be doing something else.” We don’t receive a report card as adults, but what would your grade be for being IN IT right now if you did? Are you standing on the outside? Do you understand the notion of safety, taken to extremes, is more deadly, quietly epidemic, than any virus?

To put it in Wall-E speak — are you finally willing to utter “EEEVVVAAA!!” without worrying how stupid you might sound? To write it down for all to see? The it that keeps you up at night, that steals your breath?

Without writing about what is true for me, how can I truly live with purpose?