The Burrow

The Burrow is a personal blog.   That seems to be the current catch-all for those of us who don't concentrate on politics or fashion or giving advice.  I started writing in April, 2009, at the suggestion of my then 20-something son, Big Cuter.  He told me to write because he liked reading my words.  He thought others would like them too; "You are much hipper than you think you are, Mom." That was my favorite compliment for many years.  I write what I like to think about.  I adhere to Dooce 's primary blogging rule: I don't write about anyone whose feelings would be injured by my words.  There have been some marvelously snarky unwritten posts over the years.  They rattle around in my brain, tempting me with an apt phrase or description that perfectly captures the absurdity I'm not posting for you.  There are some mournful posts which touch on the lives of others in a way that might be intrusive; those, too, live only in my brain.  T...

I cleaned out a piece of my desktop just now.  Not a big piece, or an intrusive piece, just a piece that has been nudging the edges of my consciousness every time I go to the Blogger Dashboard (the handy dandy place for all things The Burrow).  I'm mourning the losses. The Dashboard is also the site for my Blog Roll Reading List.  Snippets of the most recent posts by the bloggers I follow show up right beneath the working buttons (new post, view blog, post list).  I'm always interested in what Ronni Bennett has to say over at Time Goes By , but I rarely saw her posts.  Instead, I was bombarded by daily, sometimes twice daily, pictures and references and verbiage from someone who no longer interested me at all.  There's no reason to share the blog's URL; you might really like it and then wonder what's wrong with me.  It wasn't offensive or poorly written.  I was just done with it.  Once I figured out how to hide it from the feed, I was a...

How I got caught up in this I'll never really know.  I was struck by a comment, I ruminated, I couldn't find an answer in my own brain, I wrote it up and published it.  I found that my readers had strong opinions, and their answers helped me clarify my confusion.  I'm still not sure that I'm right, bu now I know how my audience feels. I also hurt my friend's feelings. This blogging stuff has lots of points and corners and twists and turns. I seem to have made a wrong one. Little Cuter called me and wondered if my friend was hurt. She saw what others saw  and what I had not considered: I was calling on people to disparage another's parenting.  Though that wasn't my intent, I quickly came to see how it could be construed as such. I really didn't know what to think. Her son, after a long hard week of single-parenthood, offered to make her a margarita. She'd be giving her son the opportunity to make her smile, to present her with something she ...