Good-bye Christopher Robin

If there was a set of books I wanted to inhabit most as a child it was Milne’s Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh books. There was a lovely completeness to the world of this boy and the companionship of his toys, with their range of personalities, a gentleness to the adventures and a general celebration of friendship. It was always the books, mind you, never the Disney version. That voice was so wrong! My father could recite many of the Milne poems from memory and so can I now somehow, so they were the poems that taught me to love poetry. I have a memory of going to a children’s theater production of the stories and being so caught up in it that that was all I would play for weeks.

And at some point it was explained to me that there was a real Christopher Robin, and that he had had an Edward Bear (Winnie the bear was at the London Zoo) and that his father had preserved his childhood play in these books, and I was, honestly, envious. Why did my own parents not write down every charming thing I said and did, create storybooks centered around my dolls and toys? My father told me that the real Christopher Robin had actually had a very difficult time being Christopher Robin. He’d gone to boarding school and been taunted with classmates reciting the poem: Hush, hush, whisper who dares? Christopher Robin is saying his prayers… and he hadn’t grown up very happy.

Did Alan Milne exploit his son?

Exploitation is probably the most devastating charge laid at the feet of mommy bloggers — and while I don’t feel like I fall easily into a category of mommy bloggers, I do blog and mention my kids by name and feel compelled now and then to protest that I’ve thought about this, a lot. It gets periodically discussed and analyzed, especially in the endless blogging about blogging, and goes back, even to before everyone had a blog and Anne Lamott and then Ayelet Waldman took flak on Salon.com for writing about their families. And I tend to fall in with the “Parenting is hard and important and potentially isolating work, and writing about it is a way of recognizing its difficulty and its importance and even, by reducing the isolation, making it more bearable” camp of defenders. Then again, I tend to also be a person that believes that not talking about things makes them bigger and scarier. Which can be tricky to balance against privacy and modesty.

It seems like some blogs are written by people trying to promote themselves professionally and personally, so their names are, reasonably posted all over the place, and other blogs are written by people who would rather not have thier names obvious because of employers and exes. I don’t think of myself as a self-promoter, but I also am not willing to spend lots of energy concealing who I am because I am comfortable with what I write being out there for the world to read. Of course you might decide that your children have nothing to gain from having their names out their even if you refuse to buy local news paranoia about child predators or you are worried about their potential dates googling their names when they are in high school and getting too much history of their potty training. On the other hand, I think my children are reflected lovingly, and when my children’s uncle says something about how great it will be for my children as adults to have the window of my writing on their childhood to get this glimpse, I think I must be doing something ok.

People have all sorts of approaches to levels of disclosure and need for privacy and I am not sure that any one of them is right or wrong, or that I am even capable of seeing all the factors and consequences I ought to be considering, and yet I hope my love for my children shows as I write about them, that they do astound me frequently and as exhausting as motherhood can be, I couldn’t ask for more amazing people in my life. I have faith that my husband and my children’s grandparents and aunt and uncles reading would let me know if my judgement in publishing something here were questionable. Because I have offended a child of mine talking on the phone with a friend about something he did, I am going to ask for the permission of the children who can read before publishing anything that has their names in it.

Anyway, I am not worried about them going to boarding school and being taunted by classmates who have memorized my writing — I suspect for their generation there will be sympathy for those few oddballs whose parents didn’t blog about them.