AnchorMommy

Visible M(others): Inclusive vs. Intrusive

March 18, 2010 by Shannon

What We Blog About (or Don’t)

I’ve been selected to participate in a gallery exhibition over the course of the next six weeks called “Visible M(others): Images of Parenting in Visual Culture.” The show runs March 4 - April 11, 2010 at the Boise State University Student Union Gallery and is free to the public (go see it!). I’m collaborating with Amy Pence-Brown over at Doin’ It All, Idaho Style. We’ll both be writing new posts on Thursday of each week for the six weeks of the exhibition, exploring ideas of how our “mommyblogs” are a sort of “digital front porch swing,” a place to share information and be heard, a forum for asking questions, showing off our kids and our skills. Mommyblogs act not only as an informational outlet, but a creative force in our contemporary maternal visual culture, as the blogs are loaded with not only verbal creativity, but also photography, crafts, and other digital imagery documenting our lives as mothers. Provoking complex questions, the exhibition presents new perspectives on traditional, contemporary, alternative or imagined parenting and how they operate in a visible/invisible landscape of maternal visual culture.

As a local TV news anchor, I’ve always been protective of my personal life. I always wanted to connect with the viewers and them to connect with me, but I never wanted to reveal too much too publicly. In fact, when I got married I kept my maiden name as my on-air name, mostly so I could keep one more shield between myself and any crazies out there who might try to track me down. I was SO careful.

Would you just look at me now.

My online life is a fairly open book, at least according to my TV personality standards. I post pictures of my little boy, I write about what we eat, I write about all the little stuff that I stress out about, I even posted an ultrasound picture of my second child. (Boy, did I struggle with that last one. But I’ll get back to that later.) I mean, when you think about it, the potential audience for this website is MUCH larger than the audience for the local TV news. Not that I’ve got millions of people reading it, mind you. Still — anyone could read it.

But the fact is, this blog is MEANT to be personal. It is supposed to reveal the personal side of my life. I wouldn’t be fulfilling for me if it didn’t.

That said, there are things that I will not post here. I keep a lot of family pictures to myself. For example, Kellan’s birthday party photos will likely never see the light of day on AnchorMommy. And it’s a given that I will not post any pictures or video that may contain addresses, license plate numbers or identifying features of my neighborhood. That’s just common sense. But one decision I made recently is still haunting me — the ultrasound picture in It’s a Girl! My internal debate on this one was fierce. To me, ultrasound pictures are very personal. But one picture in particular illustrated a point I was trying to make in the post, so in the end, I put it up. But just one. The rest are for me and my family to enjoy. Did I do the right thing? Ugh, I don’t know. I can always take it down, I suppose.

Finding the right balance of what I should and shouldn’t post is an ongoing process. I sometimes wonder if there are too many pictures of my son, and it just occurred to me the other day that I should begin watermarking them, so at the very least they can’t be lifted and used without my permission. Well, not without a big AnchorMommy.com mark on them anyway.

I suppose the bottom line is that I don’t worry much about the little idiosyncrasies I reveal about myself. But as far as my family goes, I try to subscribe to something like the Golden Rule. I write with a light heart and don’t write anything that I wouldn’t want my family to read and be hurt by. That includes my son, even though he can’t actually read yet. I wouldn’t want to put anything out there that he might someday cringe at. So whatever I write has to fit that rule, otherwise it doesn’t go up. Am I hypocritical for not posting some family photos but posting an ultrasound of my second child’s “gender area?” Maybe. But what I do and don’t choose to post is a ultimately a very personal decision that only I can make (with some input from my husband from time to time) and there’s never a moment that I don’t question and re-evaluate what goes up here. And that’s the way I think it should be.