It was bound to happen. You try to protect them as long as you can. You educate them on the dangers and the downfalls of doing it. You pray at night that they will never be faced with giving in to the pressure. But you wake up one day and it has happened. You’ve lost them to a force that, although you yourself have been sucked in by, you hoped they never would be a victim.
Yes, friends, Brandon has a blog. (And, no, I am not going to give out the url. It is bad enough that I talk about him as much as I do here. You certainly don’t need to read anything he has to say about me.)
Ahhh, those first days of blogging. Several entries a day. All the bells and whistles you can find to put on your new space on the internet. And asking Mom NONSTOP questions about how to do things.
“Mom, how do you add pictures?”
“Mom, how do you get more traffic to your site?”
“Mom, can I link to you?” (I believe my answer was something sweet like: ‘Oh for the love of god, hell no, son!’)
“Mom, come look.” (This one is heard only about 9,745 times a day. On a slow day.)
But it made me think about something. I wrote yesterday at DotMoms about seeing your children inherit traits of yours that are less than stellar. (Not that blogging is a bad habit. I’m a blogger. A lot of you are bloggers. It’s not like he is broadcasting personal information across the internet. I am careful to monitor that part of it.) But it does make me wonder what he would have picked up from me had I not been a writer. Had I been into art or music. Would he be as eager to get his artwork displayed or his music played?
I know that there are a lot of teens that blog. A lot. So, would he have become as caught up in it because he found it through his friends or was he doomed to be a blogger because he is raised in a home where it is more common to hear “I am SO going to blog that” than it is to hear “Eat your vegetables”?
We may never know. When it comes right down to it, I suppose there is only one thing about his blogging that really worries me…
There is another person learning the phrase “I am SO going to blog that!” (It’s bad enough when I have to compete with him!) My own son damn well better not steal MY blogging fodder.
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