When Worlds Collide

A strange thing is happening over on Facebook. As the sons and daughters of some of my high school friends are reaching high school age themselves (!), suddenly their parents are showing up on FB. And while it’s great to see them, it’s presenting an interesting cross-pollination of the neat compartments of queer mommy life.

For a while, it was all neat and tidy. Queer friends online, mommy friends offline or e-mail only. That kept things nicely compartmentalized, so I could plan play-overs in a totally separate world from checking out a friend’s erotic art-photography or reading critical analysis and comparative theory of vaginas over on the boards. As someone who is a tad bit paranoid by nature, I’ve been something of a lurker in those discussions, but you know, I’ve shown ya’ my legs and all.

I got my first inkling, however, that things were changing, tectonics in motion, the day earlier this year when my eleven-year-old called from the kids’ computer in the kitchen, “Did you know that if you Google *** (my Significant Other’s first/last name) you don’t get anything relevant at ALL?”

This is like suddenly the needle on the seismic event monitor of my life starting to bounce like a superball. Shit. What might be out there? I’m pretty Googlesafe, but what about her? Or my other friends who hang out here at my house all the time? I know, I know, we’ve all dealt with the ‘what happens if my mom Googles me’ question forever. But there are some people quite dear to me, whose lives (when they’re not playing videogames with my kids in my basement) aren’t rated G. Or PG. Or PG-13.

As the weeks went by after those first tremors, the aftershocks continued, for this was the year my daughter and her friends enveloped themselves in the interwebs, cruising YouTube for Fruits Basket vids; Google-chatting about endangered animals, Twilight, and who’s crushed out on whom; sending brightly colored e-mails splattered with emoticons. I try to be a responsible mom, monitor as best I can, and have some small advantage that I’ve conducted friendships via IM and e-mail, and can counsel appropriately that sometimes the medium is lacking. By being the Parent Over Shoulder I’ve also discovered that she and her friends have a larger vocabulary of cuss words than I thought, and are all finally learning to touch type with some speed. She’s still too young for Facebook or MySpace, but I know that’s coming. And Google? She’s dangerous with Google. So it’s only a matter of time.

See, over on FB, somehow I friended a couple of my best buds from high school. I don’t have my full name on my FB (see note above about paranoid), so I’m not easily searchable. But either they found me or I found them, and it’s been great to have them back in my life. These were my closest circle for some important times, who happened to be online types, so we added each other in. Then, some of my other high school friends appeared. And then my brother found me.

This means I now sit in the middle of a FB friends list with my bro and his wife’s Mormon family on one side, and my queer erotic-arts and porn producing friends on the other. And my high-school-friends’ Mason buddies circling. Is it any wonder I keep telling my daughter, no, no FB until you’re fourteen?

Then it hit me one afternoon… if I’m on my brother’s friends list, then my mom can find me. And if she can find me she can find my friends… she can find you, Queerky, she can find you! And oh boy, if my mom can find you, that means your mom can find you too! And I sat there (in an almost Dr. Seussian way… too many bedtime readings of The Cat In The Hat), and thought… what does your mom think when she’s reading you talk about your cunt? When she’s reading about those life changing moments? When she’s looking at the pictures you took of the guy at the doctor’s office’s boner? What does she think of my legs? (No really, what does she think of my legs…?)

And circling back to the beginning… what do your kids think? Those of you with five-year-olds have a while to ponder this one, but those of you with older kids or pre-teens are facing it square on.

I belong to a book site too, one of those places where you log what you’re reading and have read, and can see your friends’ books as well. I was recruited there by my kid, and have her and a few of her friends on my friends list. But I have some of my grown up friends there too. Some who occasionally read rather grown up books. And whose settings aren’t locked down tight, their lists are public, their lives not guarded and girded against inappropriate onlookers.

I pondered this one as well. I don’t really have a problem with my eleven-year-old reading through my friends’ booklists and finding books like Exhibitionism for the Shy or The Ethical Slut. Well, maybe a little, but not enough to shut them down. However, because her friends link to her and to me, I found myself reluctant to take responsibility for putting those titles in front of someone else’s kid. Thus I created a second me. Now I have me and me lite. I feel like new Coke.

But when I stopped to think about it, I’d just done the kind of thing I wouldn’t want my kid to do, sneaking around, hiding parts of me that are real to try to look better in someone else’s eyes. So I sat her down and we talked, and I explained my reasoning, and that I get to parent my kids but not other people’s. She nodded and agreed, and I’m sure made the mental note, ‘oh, so you can make a second name and just not tell everyone, cool!’ And I went back to pondering the Facebook conundrum: tattoo artists and teeball mommies…can they all just get along? And what will they think of you?

Written by Darby Blue