So a weird thing happened on the way to the internet last weekend.
I was wondering what happened to a youtuber I used to watch, Smokey Glow, who had recently said she was
getting sober. I couldn’t find much since she last disappeared and then for some reason I remembered Dooce.
Heather Hamilton, Heather Armstrong, the OG mommy blogger.
I started my online journal before 1998 on my own website using notepad or homesite. Then moved to Livejournal.
At least I think it was before I went to Blogger. After I said things on LiveJournal I shouldn’t have. But didn’t
we all back then. Say things we shouldn’t have. I mean Dooce got fired for saying things about her co-workers
on her blog and then “Dooced” meant to be fired for what you said on your blog. After LJ I went to Blogger for both
my and a blog for Em, Bean Soup. Cause her nickname is Bean. Her site was called Bean Soup
Why Bean? Of course because of the Ultrasound but also because I was so terrified of something going wrong,
because I was convinced I was inherently a bad person, possibly diseased (thank you DeadJackie, you really
did some horrible things to my self image) that I called her “The Bean” as the only way I could get close to
her with some distance in case my evil caused something to happen. Which it didn’t because she has grown into
an amazing and wonderful human being.
A few years later I went to WordPress and there I’ve stayed. My blog was orginally a lot of navel gazing and
things that happened in our spooky group or in my relationships and carefully at work. Not too much has changed
really. A lot of us that started off back then mined our own experience for the writing of the blog posts.
Dooce was the queen of that. She had a quirky voice and wrote about things that weren’t really written about.
She talked about post partum depression, something I experienced but what was not discussed openly way back
then. I also have treatment resistant depression and have at times struggled with my alcohol use.
I started writing more and more openly about the way I was raised with it’s violence, abuse, gaslighting and
drug and/or alchol addiction of both parents. I said things about scene and roomate drama I shouldn’t have
too. Probably about work, though never fired for it.
And in 2002 The Bean came along. And I embraced mommy blogging because she was my everything. She was the
center of my world and honestly remains so even as an adult who is working on 3 degrees and has a fiance.
She was endlessly adorable and interesting and I didn’t want to forget a thing.
Perhaps something like that drove Dooce to write. She wrote very detailed and often hilarious posts about
parenting. Some of them were pretty gross, as parenting often is. Some of them were heartbreaking and some
were just bits of a day in the life.
And there was a community. I was a part of it. Not a big part, but I read and commented. I think once she
replied to a comment and once to an email I sent her about post partem depression. I think, it’s been
a long time. I did read her for years and continue to check in for years after that. I read about her children
growing up as my daughter of a similar age did.
After a while though when it started to feel like I was being intrusive to the Bean’s life, I noted that
Dooce’s blog started feeling too intrusive. Our kids were the same age and we lived in a small town when
Miss Bean was 11. I’m sure you know how nasty school kids can be. And they were. So were some of the teachers.
(Small southern town, we weren’t christian and that was the cure her 4 and 5th grade teacher’s suggested.
Then I started back to work, in the k-12 system in our town and stopped posting about her except when she
was ok with it. And it became about the balance between being a mom and working. And figuring out who I was
after moving back to where I grew up.
It’s not that I quit writing about The Bean, I just gave her refusal rights. Or made myself more circumspect
about it. I think we learned later what we didn’t know at the start–putting your kid’s whole life online
isn’t the best idea. Not nearly as bad as what happens with family vloggers or family youtubers today, but
still too intrusive.
I think Dooce may have been one of the first digital parasocial relationships. We felt like we knew her and
her family when we really didn’t. And now those kids are teenagers or in college and their whole young lives
are still out there, maybe still making money even. Oh what a kerfuffle that was when Dooce put paid banner
ads on her site. We were so naive then, back before anything and everything became monetized.
Dooce was relentlessly bullied online. Sometimes she gave back as good as she got, but there were so
many of them and one of her. Some of the things that were said were vile. And it just went on and on and on.
She wasn’t a paragon of virtue, and she could certainly be a mean girl, but she never deserved all of that.
All this to say I found out that two years ago Dooce/Heather shot herself and completed suicide. It sent
me down a whole path of trying to go back to where I’d left off. But I couldn’t. I did read back a ways, but you could
tell how sick she’d been and for awhile. Years it seems like. Alcoholism, severe anorexia. And that last entry was
heartbreaking. I hope her kids…no, I have no idea what I hope her kids know. I just hope they have peace and can process
all of that in a healthy way.
It makes you think about what you share online. I know I share too much, but I do after years of hiding too much. And
honestly at my age, what in the hell can happen to me that hasn’t already? And no, none of this is embarrassing to James
and Bean. All of this to say this hit me strangely.