the burrito

You may have noticed I call her the Burrito.  Here's why:

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what identity and privacy will mean for me on this blog.  It seems to me that it is a balancing act.  When you publish anything, online or not, you give up a little bit of your privacy.  And I know there is no absolute privacy on the web, but even so, I decided to set some specific guidelines. 

I decided that though I won’t scream my name in your face all the time, I won’t hide who I am or who my husband is.  Trying to do that just creates a fake sense of anonymity anyway.  And it might make you wonder if I’m a real person or if I can be trusted.  And since my goal is to encourage you and share my story, I guess it wouldn’t make much sense to leave you in doubt about who I am.  It helps to hold me accountable too.  If people can figure out who I am, then maybe I’ll be careful not to rattle off things that could embarrass or hurt others…or myself.

But for now, I’ve decided I won’t use my daughter’s name in my posts and I won’t use her picture.  I know other moms have found ways to do that in their online work, but right now it’s just not something I’m comfortable with.  And maybe it will help to draw the line a little clearer between me and her.  It’s my writing, not hers.  I need to own it; she shouldn’t have to.

(Which brings up the question, is it worse to be the kid that always gets mentioned in sermon illustrations, or the kid who always gets blogged about?  Now, instead of just PKs (Preacher's Kids) and MKs (Missionary Kids), we have BKs—Blogger’s Kids.  I hope they won’t need to start a support group or something.)

So, I’ll be referring my daughter to her as Burrito.  That’s our pet name for her anyway.  It all started when she was a little baby and we discovered that swaddling her up tight in a big blanket helped to calm her down.  Daddy saw her and started calling her “my little Burrito!”  And she really did look like a Burrito all wrapped up in a tortilla.  We’ve joked that we might continue calling her that even into her teenage years.  That could be awkward when the boyfriends come to visit….