Yep, She Continues to Be an Unreasonable Bitch

The remo­ra to whom my part­ner was for­mer­ly mar­ried called tonight to pitch a fit—excuse me, “express a con­cern” over me men­tion­ing “her” kids in my LJ posts. In par­tic­u­lar, she was quite sure that the boy would be embar­rassed by some­thing I’d said about him, using his name. And she claims that some ran­dom friend of hers in San Fran­cis­co showed her a post (almost cer­tain­ly the first one linked here) and said “Isn’t that your son?”

I’m rea­son­ably cer­tain that I know who point­ed that out to her or caused it to be point­ed out to her. But I sup­pose some ran­dom guy in San Fran­cis­co MIGHT have just been read­ing a strange wom­an’s LJ for no par­tic­u­lar reason&mdashbut he’d have had to go back sev­er­al pages to even get to the first entry that men­tions the boy’s name. I per­son­al­ly doubt I’m that bloody interesting.

So I went look­ing. I can only find four instances in which I’ve used the boy’s name, ever, in my posts. And I can­not find any­thing remote­ly embar­rass­ing about any of them—he was singing along to “Par­ti­cle Man” seems to be as close as we can find. Or maybe that he went grub­bing for worms to feed the strand­ed hatch­lings? Per­haps that he was run­ning a D&D game, or that he’s watched Mon­ty Python’s Holy Grail?

http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=technomom&itemid=16257
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=technomom&itemid=14689#cutid1
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=technomom&itemid=6685
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=technomom&itemid=12240

So okay, I won’t use “her” kids’ names here. Seems stu­pid, con­sid­er­ing that they are men­tioned by name on sam­bear’s site, my site, and our fam­i­ly’s site. That info has been out for YEARS with­out a com­plaint from her. And the kids use their first names on their own websites.

She also kvetched that I referred to the boy as MY son. And I can­not find ANY record any­where of hav­ing referred to him that way. I’ve referred to the kids, col­lec­tive­ly, as ours, which is absolute­ly cor­rect. I usu­al­ly refer to my daugh­ter and sam­bear’s son and daugh­ter. I’ve been known to refer to him as my step­son at times for sim­plic­i­ty’s sake, although we are not legal­ly mar­ried. I even did a freakin’ Usenet search to see if I’d said some­thing like that at some point. Because believe me, I don’t want to engen­der any con­fu­sion about which chil­dren I birthed and whose rear­ing I’ve been respon­si­ble for from day one.

So most of my entries are friends-only or cus­tom secu­ri­ty now. And if there’s some­one on my friends list who is show­ing my friends-only posts to some­one who is not on that list (and not your spouse/life part­ner) or is oth­er­wise com­mu­ni­cat­ing what is said in those posts to any­one who is not on that list, you’re slime.

One of the rea­sons I find this so very annoy­ing is that peo­ple who actu­al­ly give a fly­in’ fuck about their kids don’t move a con­ti­nent away from them, so it’s pret­ty damned hyp­o­crit­i­cal of some­one who does that kind of thing to then wor­ry about what the per­son who LIVES with them and is involved with them on a dai­ly basis says about them on the net. ESPECIALLY when that per­son who is actu­al­ly present in their lives is extreme­ly care­ful about infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty any­way, and the egg donor there­fore refers to said co-par­ent as “para­noid” when she isn’t using oth­er less com­pli­men­ta­ry terms.