the dreaded metablogging

It's so self-referential to blog about blogging, but here goes: I'm wondering whether I should use the real names for my innocent spouse and children. My oldest child is getting to the point where she can be embarrassed by silly anecdotes. On the other hand, I personally find it annoying when I read blogs where a mother refers to her children as "The Boy" and "The Girl" or by pet names (not that we don't have pet names, we're oversupplied in our house with those). Columnist Ellen LastnameIcan'tremember always wrote about her daughter, and she paid her daughter a token sum whenever she did. The daughter, though, was affected by this (I say this from the viewpoint of having dated someone in college who went to private school with the daughter). On the other hand, Ellen Whatever was nationally syndicated, and this is a fairly obscure blog. My own role model in writing about my children is the inimitable Shirley Jackson, who wrote a couple of delightful books about her own children using real first names, but not the last name used by her children, when she wasn't writing gripping horror novels (sidenote: the fascinatingly strange Sally I loved in those books grew up to be my acquaintance Sadie, who lives on the Russian River, goes to Burning Man, and urged me to freeze my placentas and make a form of "tea" from them).

My husband asked me if he could give the URL to the blog to my mother-in-law, and I (in my mind shrieking, "NOOOOOOO!") said, "I'm not giving it to any family yet. I don't feel comfortable with that. It's one thing for my friends and total strangers to read it, but I don't want my parents reading it." I wanted to give the URL to my niece and nephew, but I don't want my sister to have it. (Yes, the family dynamics which produced our flawed Drunken Housewife are obscure and often unappetizing).

Blah, blah, blah. It seems a bit grandiose to think or write about this sort of thing, but I have started to get comments from people whom I do not know and did not give the URL to, so someone out there is reading this. Also, the blog may get an infusion of British readers, as it will be a stopping point on Ayun Halliday's virtual book tour when "Mamalamadingdong" is released in the U.K. (More, much more, on this later, when the Drunken Housewife declares Ayun Halliday Day, which is quietly in the works). But does that matter, that British people whom I personally do not know will learn that a girl named Iris taunts her sister, named Lucy, into peeing in the backyard under the pretence of "having a penis" and "being a rockstar"?