To Share or Not to Share?

“Sharenting.” Have you heard this portmanteau? Add this concern to the list that today’s parents must consider when they contemplate the unfolding life of their child. I, however, am weighing grand-sharenting!

When my husband posted a precious photo of our son holding his son during our first visit at the hospital, I was unaware that he had done so. The room was FULL of activity. The baby was taking his day-old exams, undoubtedly rivaling any ACT or SAT in importance: bilirubin; extremity circulation (right wrist, left foot); blood tests(those innocent little smears, five of them, that the nurse poked his little heel twice to extract); and hearing (headphones and monitors, oh my). I wondered about what had transpired when they whisked my son away to the nursery after his birth.

This family was settled in a baby-friendly hospital. The parents stay in the room with the newborn—all together. It made me question how I so willingly surrendered my infant be borne away to a remote—down the hall—location after harboring him so closely for over nine months. My daughter-in-love wasn’t letting this hard-won wonder out of her sight. Tears pooled as I watched my son handle this newcomer with all the love in the world, quite present for his first Father’s Day!

Once we headed to the car for our ride home, my husband showed me the post. Immediately I asked whether Sam knew. Being in schools has sensitized me to the issue of dependents’ rights and privacy. Now with AI and facial recognition, my radar is on high alert. Immediately my husband began to worry alongside me.

The NPR article I found the next morning allayed a bit of concern, and my son dispelled the rest when my husband discussed it with him yesterday. It turns out there is a “members only” photo sharing app, Tinybeans, a Google product that safeguards privacy and is what they are considering for those who want to keep up with family developments. Whew! My favorite grandson won’t be gracing Facebook or X or Instagram. Now we know.

I think about my fellow bloggers who write about their children or grandchildren and have given them aliases, photographing the children’s backs or tousled bent heads. That is necessary, I realize, in this world of rapidly advancing facial recognition and ubiquitous social media. I would miss the wonderful anecdotes they share, the small moments, true slices-of-life, that enrich my days. So truly, now more than ever before, word pictures, the power of story, matters above all. It’s not whether we share or not, it’s how .

When we rue the advance of AI and invasive social media, it humbles me to hold personal storytelling sacred.

Well…

There’s a Wellness Challenge I’m following at the New York Times. It’s about “Friendship.” I don’t think I’m a terrific friend. I am loyal, but I wonder how much time and effort I devote to developing relationships. Truthfully, I grew up with my younger sister as my best friend and despite time, distance, and differences, that remains true. Luckily I’ve also become close with my older sister in the last decades—something I would’ve declared an impossibility in my twenties. Since I’ve returned to Oregon, I’ve also reconnected with my sister-in-love. I say that honestly about my older brother’s wife. While she has a boatload of friends and hardly needs me to climb aboard, I’m standing firmly on deck; she knows how to weather storms! Sweet Serendipity in Sisterhood.

Yesterday I discovered I’m a firefly friend, according to the survey attached to this challenge that I completed. Do you know what that means? Here’s what the analysis says about us fireflies: “Imagine a firefly flitting through the air on a warm summer night, glowing brightly in the company of its fellow bugs, then receding mysteriously into the dark night sky. Fireflies like you limit how many social engagements they have in any week or month, but light up when they feel deeply connected to others.”

It also owns that fireflies recharge with solitude; that is me in a nutshell! No matter how much I love you, if I need time out and away, I’ll take it! What it also recommends is that I keep interactions more casual, that interactions don’t always have to be intense. (I think I do that pretty well, actually…Maybe friendship styles aren’t easily categorized?!)

Day 1 of the challenge tasked participants with texting a friend. In her encouraging anecdote, the writer recounted how a bad day was saved by a text that came unexpectedly from a friend with whom she connects periodically—out of the blue? not quite—but it did lift her blues.

I realized I hadn’t texted a couple of close friends who are on the other side of the country for awhile. I did so, and I’m not sure how they felt, but I’m hoping they got some of the boost from me that I got from them. So simple, such fun.

Connection #1

Connection #2

Tomorrow I should be “repotting” a friendship, taking someone I know and enjoy in a specific context and branching out, doing something different with them. I’ll have to think about this one a bit. I have done this before, but it asks more of me than a text. I’ll keep you posted.

If you are interested in the challenge, or might want to take the quiz just for fun, check it out here. Life has so many challenges though. Maybe friendship shouldn’t be one of them. What do you think?

Come What May

And this from “On Work” by Kahlil Gibran:

“…And what is it work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.”

What day of the week welcomed you to this world? In searching, not having been very day-conscious at the moment of arrival, I discovered that Saturday opened its arms for me. What the nursery rhyme says about personality traits is certainly true for me. That alone is less important than the words of Gibran that follow. I have been lucky to “work with love.”

I’m thinking about this today because it is the official due date of my first grandchild. Were he to arrive today, looking less and less likely, he’d arrive on the same day as his parents, both of them Tuesday’s children, both of them, “full of grace.” I hear that word bandied about these days—grace—and perhaps because of its religious overtones, I tend not to use it.

When I think about the word and consider its range, I realize that my two “Tuesday’s children” also embody their nursery rhyme characterizations fairly well. They were married on a Tuesday, also, in the middle of the redwoods during the pandemic surrounded by their immediate families, 11 of us. It remains an experience of grace.

When I consider the poem’s descriptions of Wednesday’s and Thursday’s children, my superstitious self says, “Bide your time, little guy. There’s no rush,” even though what Thursday promises and what life delivers in abundance, the opportunity to grow, a journey—and long at that, seems mostly positive.

This morning one of my brothers called to wish us all luck; another showed up unexpectedly at our door yesterday saying, “Give them a squeeze for us,” and my sister? already planning on our joint babysitting, auntie and gamma together from the beginning.

With that in mind, I’ll take a Wednesday’s child. To worry about what woe life predictably delivers can only fade in the face of all this support, all this love.