When I started thinking about blogging, I started to read a few quite regularly as research, really as entertainment. I found some blogs that seemed to have weird sense of humor, some with quite extreme versions of my psychosis and some that made me think deep thoughts about life and whatever. And then I got hooked on this mommy blog that did not resemble any piece or part of my life. And when I say hooked, I mean I can’t stop reading it though I have nothing in common with the author and she and I probably would not be friends in real life because we have no shared ground and she mentions God every other sentence and I was raised by an atheist who thinks that… yeah, I’m not getting into that right now.
Anyway, this blog with Perfect Mom; I look through her selfies trying to spot a crack in her armor, in her “perfect.” Her smile glistens from each photo and even the ones with her son crying could be a print ad. I’m not saying she’s fake; I’m saying she’s overly polished. She fascinates me in her sound bites of perfection. I have never been the nails done, makeup on, cute clothes wearing girl but she is and I scroll through her pictures of the pants to wear this season and the necklaces that make her happy and I don’t get it but I cannot stop reading. And I don’t know why I’m so intent on finding the fissure in her pictures, in her relationships. I know, like me, she’s not likely to post the really horrible stuff but, unlike me, she seems content to gloss it over more with makeup and shine… And then she adopted a baby and I saw a person for the first time. Sure the posts were still glossy and shiny but she became more three dimensional to me than she had before. Even though she only posts each weekday morning, I found myself going back several times a day to check just incase I’d missed something. Was it because she was revealing she’d suffered? No, she’d shared that before in mentioning her inability to conceive. I don’t know what exactly was the thing that humanized her but suddenly she was more real to me than before and I was even more fascinated. And then this past weekend, I stumbled onto a Reddit post about a guy who caught his wife cheating and posted the blow by blow action of what the PI was finding and what the lawyer said and what he planned to do next. True story or not, the posts are now national news. The updates were bizarrely written, awfully personal and raw and I could not stop reading. I found myself wondering about them in the middle of my day, wondering if she knew he knew, if he had left her yet, if we would ever know the ending. It was a fascinating read, this end to a relationship and, true or not, it was a pretty interesting take on our society as it stands today. With the over-share and the personal selfie and the mini worlds revolving around self-important people, where will we go from here? And then I realized that it’s the current drama that is intriguing to me. It’s the unknown that is unknown to us all. As I’m reading what The Reddit guy is posting, we both have no idea where this is ending up. I mean, I know where I think it’s going but it’s live so his path may change at anytime. And my Perfect Mom now has this situation to share that might be filled with imperfect moments that she doesn’t have time to polish and I can’t wait to read about her bumps in the road. It’s not the bad things that are interesting to me – though I will be honest and admit it’s fascinating. It’s how folks are handling the bad and bumpy roads that suddenly appear in front of them. I know I post my little bits of life here but I wonder if I would be that impulsive, to share everything with strangers while the wound is still fresh. I know, my posts can be personal but most of what I write, well those are old stories. The wounds are healed. I am able to take pleasure in my past misery, self-Schadenfreude as it were. And the current things I write, I think carefully before sharing if they are something I would bring up to anyone, if they are something I’d be ashamed I’d shared years from now or if knowing that someone read I’d been briefly diagnosed with a regrown uterus that turned out to be a large cervix would kill me or not. It wouldn’t. In fact, recently I shared my womb picture with a friend and she posted this on my wall later. Now, would I post if Husband cheated? Probably. After lots of time had passed. And his penis had been reattached. Would I post as it was happening? No. I can’t see sharing the worst of the worst in my life until I have healed a bit, until I have a take on it that is funny to me. I don’t share things until I know what it is I should have learned, as obscure as that lesson might be, my mini moral as it were. I’m okay with you feeling better about your life while reading about the pratfalls in mine – but I have to find it funny first. Really funny. (Here are the Reddit posts should you want to read them One, Two, Three)
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AuthorMy name is ej. I'm a girl. I say that because with the short hair and the short initials, folks aren't always sure. More brilliant insights to who I am in About me Archives
April 2019
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