Whoops! You Missed It!

Yesterday a Big Thing happened in the MomQueenBee family. I will not go into the details, but I will say that it involved explaining to Husband the significance of becoming Facebook Official. Is that vague enough?

The reason I include this tantalizing tidbit is because about 13 of you, my dear readers, saw a completely different story associated with the heart graphic on this post. It was accessible between 11 a.m. and noon yesterday, and it is now archived and inaccessible because I came to my senses.

I happened to really kind of like the post when I wrote it, but when one of the Boys read it, his reaction was different. "Yeah, I'd be irritated if you had written this about me," he said. So I immediately and frantically Googled "How to remove a Blogger post," and "How to remove a Facebook status update."

The episode reminded me again that this blog will never be exactly what I had intended when I set out. My vision was that this space would be a place where empty nesters would say "Oh, yeah, I get that! I thought I was the only one dealing with (insert issue here)." It would be like those many, many mommy blogs where the bottom line always is that the new mother didn't realize this would be so haaaaaaard, but so woooooonderful. I wanted other moms in my demographic to see that they weren't bad moms just because they didn't miss high school band concerts. Or because they did.

The difference between this blog and the MommyBlogs, though, is that the young bloggers own more stories. They have discretion over sharing or not sharing their own experiences and thoughts, and they own the sharing of their children's stories until those children are old enough to take the stories back.

All of the persons now in my life own their own stories. The Boys, Husband, my 89-year-old mother-in-law, my co-workers--all are old enough to be embarrassed or hurt by things I choose to write, so when I think this might be the case, I give these people who share my experiences veto rights. At least twice I've refrained from publishing a post that made someone uncomfortable. (I know! I'm normally not that considerate.)

That's why yesterday the post went up and down in record time. It's staying in my archive folder, though, and maybe some day it will be appropriate for me to publish it again.

In the meantime it will be like one of those postage stamps with the background printed upside down: Rare and valuable, and not mine to give away.