Brandon's Puppy

To post, or not to post

My friend Tere posted this entry, inspired by this one over at Her Bad Mother (which I had never heard of, but I enjoyed reading and will be frequenting often). Since the inception of this blog, I had not given much thought to posting pictures on here, mostly because I have about ten readers and don't think anyone really reads much of what I have to say. I am not naive to the possibilities created by the internet of ill-intentioned strangers finding images and using them in ways that I don't want to think about, but I did not want to take away from the stories I am telling. I have never claimed or considered myself a good writer, and I'd rather post a picture with a few words about what happened, or why I took it, to tell the stories you read on this blog. However, about three months ago, my sister received an email forward with one of those slideshow parodies set to music with an image "stolen" from here. (For this curious about the image, it was the first one in this post). I was infuriated that an image of my child was taken from under my nose, and if they used an image for this parody, what other, possibly worse thing might be circulating in cyberspace? My first reaction was to never post another picture again, and once I calmed down a bit I looked into watermarking the images and other “safety” measures, none of which guarantee that this won’t happen again. I decided not to do a thing about it. Removing images from this blog will diminish the sentiments I try to communicate about this wonderful adventure called motherhood. This blog also serves another purpose, which I have fully taken advantage of: it is a live, day-by-day scrapbook of our lives. Removing pictures would completely alter these two intentions, and that’s not something I’m willing to do. So I will continue to post pictures until my children are old enough to have a say about it, or until this blog no longer exists, whichever comes first. I am glad to see that I am not alone out there, thinking about these kinds of "what-ifs" that tend to tear at a mother's heartstrings.