When G. is old enough, Carol plans to tell him that "Uncle George" is actually his father. Fine, but will she also tell him that caring for G. causes George "a profound despair," that George doesn't "feel paternal toward" G. and "certainly" doesn't "want to be the child's parent"?Every minute on the internet there must be a whole lot of kids discovering the kinds of things about what their parents think that in bygone decades they'd have never learned. But not every kid is going to find stuff that was written up in the New York Times. At least G. will have the pleasure of reading it in a carefully written style piece intended to flatter him and his parents. Pity the kids who find out how they looked to their parents when they run across Mommy's First Post Partum Depression Blog.
Because G. will find these things out in due course. This isn't the 1950s anymore, when to find old newspaper stories one had to spend hours going through library stacks or microfilm reels. Unless the New York Times goes out of business and its website is shut down, this story will live forever on the Internet.
That means that as soon as G. can punch his name and his parents' names into Google, he will be able to read the cruel things his father said about him when he was 3. So, by the way, will his school friends--and enemies. That's why we left the names out of this column. We don't want him to find out from us.
Oh, my lord! Cooking up a name for a blog you wouldn't want the child to discover, I experience a flood of ideas for blogs by parents that would be horrible for a child (and his friends and enemies) to discover. The photoblog showing the inside of every diaper ever changed accompanied by one poetic sentence about the mother's emotions the moment of the change. And I presume somebody has already done a blog like that. It could be very artistic... and utterly blind to the life of... emphemera on the internet.
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