Unexpected Uses for Children

Paid a visit to IzzyMom.com, one of those marvelous mom blogs that saves me the trouble of thinking my own thoughts and putting them into words. She writes about browsing internet sites looking for:

...moms to date. Well, not to date exactly but something like that. I want to meet them for kid playdates during the day and for grown-up playdates at night.

I’ve decided that I need to find some local friends as cool as the ones in the little white box on my desk (uh…that would be you guys). My closest IRL friends live in other states and my friendships here with other moms are mostly based on the friendships shared by our kids.

In other words, she's searching the internet for friends so she won't have only internet friends.

Thank goodness we have our kids to lean on! Before Robespierre was born, when I was slightly disappointed not to have someone to dress in a tutu and fairy wings (well, I could have, I suppose, but it would have attracted unwanted stares), I decided a boy might come in handy when he was old enough to program the VCR and do the heavy lifting; until that time I could use him as a paper weight.

But after he came along, and then Cleopatra-Queen-of-the-Nile two years later, I discovered an unanticipated benefit to having kids: instant community! Kindermusik -- check! Nursery school -- check! Gyminee -- check! Playgroups -- check! Turns out having a kid is similar to having a cute dog -- at the very least, it's a conversation starter.

And it turns out, they really can program the VCR and lift heavy objects.

I Get It Now...

My fifth grade son, Robespierre, is exploring actual history this year instead of the more intangible "social studies." They've begun with prehistory, ie the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age (or is it Iron first and then Bronze? I was so young back then...) Anyway, he's been bringing home his assignments so I can help him, and so far the questions have to do with issues that seem instinctive to me but obviously must be learned somewhere, and I suppose fifth grade might have been where I learned about them originally. For example, he needed to write a paragraph about the effect of a surplus of food on people and society; I suggested he think about improvements in health and strength, increased population, and increased power of a community over their ill-fed, weaker neighbors.

Meanwhile I've signed up for a blogger boot camp to learn to maximize my blog exposure and help build my internet business, which was my original goal when I began blogging. As I browse other people's blogs and observe how they create their own communities, I see us engaging in the same kind of alliance development as our Stone Age / Iron Age / Bronze Age ancestors, although to my knowledge the Starbucks caves didn't offer WiFi.

I explore other blogs like eMoms at Home, 5Minutes for Mom and Mommy Haven and see a tapestry of connections whereby almost anybody can link to almost anybody else about almost anything, and I see the huge disparity between what they're building and what so many vanity bloggers do. The difference between community blogging and individual blogging is like the difference between participating in a book discussion group and standing on a street corner declaiming about your favorite book to anyone who happens by; in the first scenario you're engaged in a conversation with people whose interests resemble your own, while in the second you're throwing your thoughts out there in the hope that someone might be interested. It's an astonishingly potent tool, and those who harness it can be seen as having attained super powers.

And really, haven't we all at one time or another harbored secret fantasies of being super heroes?