There is nothing more unsettling than a mother's relationship with time. The first few months of your baby's life feel like an eternity. And yet somehow between that beginning and now, I blinked, and my baby is about to turn 12. He is roughly the same height as me. And he has a phone.
We arrived at the moment where he would start googling me so much faster than I expected. I thought I had more time to shape the imprint of me he'd find on the internet eventually. To delete those blog posts with more expletives than I'd hoped. To explain the less-than-generous opinions others hold of me, which he'd most certainly come across.
Having been a blogger and freelance writer on and off now for the better part of seven years, it is safe to say that I didn't practice many of the things I regularly preach to him now in my own internet past. When I started writing online, my laptop was my therapist, and into it I would type my deepest, darkest reflections. Then I would share them with as many people as wanted to read them. I would share cute personal anecdotes about him or our family. Editors would ask for pictures and I would eagerly supply them, all the while never thinking about the way things are shared and manipulated online. The way nothing is real or tangible, yet everything seems to last forever. We are together online, yet alone. We are real, but also heavily curated, versions of ourselves. I both am and am not the internet versions of myself. Yet I must own them all. And now, so must he.
Last week during some spare time in class in his middle school library, he googled me. And there it was. The full fire hose of my internet experience. The parts of his story he didn't know were public. The viral blog post I'd written six years ago that became its own news story. The strange descriptions of what I wrote and said and did in that post as told by other people who needed filler in their news cycle that week in 2013. The comments of people grateful I spoke up. The comments of people who said I deserved to have my children taken away from me. All of it accompanied by pictures of him and his family - pictures from sites that had asked to use these photos but were then lifted and repurposed without permission because once it's out there, it's out there. And because the rules of the internet road are little or none.
My son knows well the story I wrote about in that post, the day I let a device distract me while my daughter was in the tub. He knows that I wrote about this. He knows the television cameras came to our house to talk about it. He remembers being on TV. What he doesn't know is the deep shame and regret I still carry about this moment in my daughter's young life. I suspect he doesn't know that at the same time as feeling this deep shame, I'll never regret starting a national conversation about digital distractions. And he doesn't realise the way in which this story was then and still is now twisted and reframed among the wilds of the internet.
