~Twelve Boys~

I have three favorite things about this blog:

Before you can access it, you are warned about adult content and you have to acknowledge that you understand you are about to trip into some adult language. This means my kids can't access it from their account, or from their school.

When I was a compulsive blogger years ago, I ran into some flack because of the things that I was writing about the people in my lives. It isn't that I was writing anything particularly salacious, just that they were being mentioned at all, especially not in a less than favorable light.

My girl wasn't thrilled when her teacher read the blog and laughed about something that I had written about her. my husband was adamant that I not write about him ever--EVER--and my outer family gave me suggestions to write about them and began prefacing every conversation with the words, "before I tell you this, you have to promise not to put it on your blog."

Towards the end of my blogging 'career', I removed content per request of people that I love and I began to think about privacy. Afteral, the people in my life do have the right to privacy, and I can understand that some of the stories that I shared were pretty personal and I didn't expressly get permission to write them. I agreed with my kids when they said it wasn't cool for me to write about their tantrum or growing pain in a public forum where their classmates could access it.

I stopped blogging when I realized that I could really only write about myself, and what is of interest about me if I omit talking about the people with whom I interact?

My second favorite thing about this blog is that it has been dead and gone for so long that nobody is reading it, it gives me the freedom to write without believing I am offending someone that I am close to.

And now I can commence with writing a blog that has adult content and thus, it is banned from all school computers, most work computers and certainly my home computer. I can write about anything I want...

and I want to write about those twelve boys at the boys camp. I spent an afternoon driving in the mountains with my dad, and he asked about the boys camp experience and I realized that I had never really talked about those twelve boys with my father. I always planned to write that story--because it is a good one about a twenty-one year old girl who goes to work at a camp for abused and neglected children believing she is going to make a difference.

I spent two summers and a winter with those boys, and I always meant to write about them, but I was reluctant because telling my story meant revealing their story--and I didn't feel as though I had the right to violate their privacy. Now that twenty years have passed, it seems okay to talk about them--wherever they are, they are far removed from who they were at the ages of 12-17.



My third favorite thing about writing this blog is that I am writing at all and that I can legitimately say to my kids, "Give me a moment of Privacy, I am WRITING!"