Anna: Mommy Blogger Drama

I don't know what made me think about this story again, but back in January mommy blogger Christie Tate wrote a piece about how her daughter confronted her about her blog. The daughter had just gotten a laptop, and upon googling her mom's name, found dozens of written pieces detailing her experiences growing up, including potty-training and losing friendships in school, all from her mom's perspective.  She asked her mom to remove the pieces and to stop writing about her, but Tate refused to stop. I remember reading a lot of the backlash on Tate's decision to go against her daughter's wishes, albeit coming up with a few compromises, like never using her daughter's real name and asking for her veto on certain topics.

One of the choice quotes from Tate's article that makes my head spin:

Promising not to write about her anymore would mean shutting down a vital part of myself, which isn’t necessarily good for me or her. So my plan is to chart a middle course, where together we negotiate the boundaries of the stories I write and the images I include. This will entail hard conversations and compromises. But I prefer the hard work of charting the middle course to giving up altogether — an impulse that comes, in part, from the cultural pressure for mothers to be endlessly self-sacrificing on behalf of their children. As a mother, I’m not supposed to do anything that upsets my children or that makes them uncomfortable, certainly not for something as culturally devalued as my own creative labor.

Even after revisiting this, I don't know what to make of it. On one hand I would feel mortified if details of my turbulent adolescence were published online by my mom, but on the other hand Tate has made a livelihood surrounding her experiences as a mother, giving her a public platform in an otherwise very insular, sometimes isolating role. Either way, it brings the issues privacy and agency into question with situations like this.

Buzzfeed article detailing the drama