This morning I awoke to 1,414 e-mails in my blogging baby e-mail folder. A story I wrote yesterday about a woman who left her 1-month old baby in Sears for 90 minutes got picked up for AOL's front page and received something like 18 gagillion hits.

At blogging baby we get paid by the post, which means there is little incentive to spend too much time on any given story. Because I view blogging baby primarily as an opportunity to reach more readers, I generally spend enough time on a story that I'm not even making minimum wage. I usually try to incite controversy, and generally that means taking an "asshole stance" and then watching the furor erupt. Yesterday I wrote several stories that I didn't spend too much time on, one of which was the story that received more hits yesterday than Sweet Juniper has received in its 10-month history.

It's a strange phenomenon, watching what catches fire on the internet. Yesterday I suggested that a father who stripped his daughter naked and beat her with a leather belt and then tried to use the "Bible defense" may "have gotten a little too excited watching that subtitled S&M porn movie that Mel Gibson made a few years ago" and only one person called me out on it. Yet when I dared suggest that, though TV may be fine in moderation, "the very existence of [portable DVD players] seems to betray the idea of moderation, that televised entertainment isn't limited to the living room but knows no boundaries beyond battery life" people were chasing me up towards the windmill with pitchforks and torches.

My favorite comment was this one from "Steve davis":

YO..NUTZ...welcome to the year 2006 ! WE use DVD's ...OMG wouldnt u have LOVED to have had a DVD as a kid instead of staring out the window like a dog dealing with your parents music or worse yet NEWS station on the radio.... I LOVE TV, ELECTRONICS, MOVIES and everything else NEW & EXCITING we have i 2006 !I am one for technology, our girla 8 & 11 are both str8 A students , smart as any "tv deprived " child..DO NOT TORTURE your kids and think that for one minute they would rather be without a tv..,.stop being so CHEAP and BACKWARDS and let the kid into HIS WORKLD!! This is THEIR age, the age of Electronics, Information and yes TV....EMBRACE IT donr be so CHEAP or AFRAID of today ! YES your kids want a damn DVD in the CAR and on trips and in a Restaurant but with the volume down or headphones !!! If u dont like it u are to backwards !

Either that is brilliant satire, or Exhibit A for my argument. Either way, hilarious.

I don't deny that I'm asking for backlash. When you take a strong stance against anything that the vast majority of parents have turned into a parenting crutch, people are sensitive and quick to anger. It makes sense that my "rejection" of television as a parenting tool would be interpreted as a "rejection" of anyone who uses television as a parenting tool.

Even Stefania wrote:

It's like the whole "my kid is only going to play with wooden, faceless toys" spiel. Does the kid care? No. It's the parents that love to say that shit cuz it makes them sound so, I don't know, full of it? Are my kids less imaginative, less creative, less, intelligent because we've allowed Groovy Girls and a Barbie nightgown into our household?

This is criticism that I have had to face over and over when exposing the vulnerabilities of my (not so revolutionary) ideas to the blogosphere, and I have thought deeply on it but I still won't back down. Here's the thing:

I know by letting Juniper play with plastic crap made in China, by letting her watch Baby Einstein till her eyes bleed, or by shopping for her at Wal-Mart and generally "giving up" I would not be harming Juniper in any tangible way. I am not disputing that.

By writing about why I don't want Juniper to watch television or why we don't like plastic crap made in China, I am not trying to put myself above anyone. If I wanted to feel above everyone I would just shut the hell up and not say anything at all and walk around simpering through San Francisco in my superiority, looking down upon the errant fools wandering through the heartland, buying unnecessary crap at Wal-Mart and voting for crooks and liars. I would stay in this fantasytown where everything is organic and fair trade and locally owned and I would spend the rest of my life looking down on everyone else in this country. But that's not what I want.

I am exposing myself here, people. I feel very vulnerable sometimes. I know there are some readers out there who hate my overly-sentimental posts or my efforts to get all "literary," but I can't tell you how much the kind comments have meant. In particular, I love the comments where you tell me that I have put things into words that you have felt. There is no greater compliment to someone who writes. Even though we are all very different people, as we go through this common experience, finding those little connections makes this worthwhile to me. I do hope that part of my purpose with this blog when you wipe away the snark and mundanity is finding the words to share with others about what is truly important to our roles as parents (and people): love, and time together.

I want to find a connection. And maybe I sometimes write to challenge, or perhaps to try to change a few minds. It's not a crime. Perhaps I do sometimes try to make people think about things in a way that they may never have had a chance to think about them. I am just one of many people out there trying to scrutinize what is "normal" or "popular," perhaps doing my best to try to change what those things mean.

I do not believe that normalization is necessarily the best outcome for my child. Not when being normal or popular means things like fucked-up body image issues perpetrated by the advertising and entertainment industries; cruelty to those less beautiful or less wealthy; materialism and obsession with symbols of status, and all of the coveting of MORE and MORE and all of the entitlement despite overwhelming lethargy and the resulting toll on those who help create our standard of living and the environment that we are destroying to achieve it. Ultimately what is normal or popular is really a highly abnormal and deeply fucked up system of unsustainable values that I simply do not agree with. So yes, I could give up and stop raging and raging against the dying of the light and just accept things as they are easiest, and my daughter will still be normal. She could be popular. She could join all the assholes making fun of me right now for trying to say something honest and real. And I'm sure she will one day struggle on her own through all this. But like I've said before, I want to give her the space and opportunity to be weird if she wants it.

I have kept note of this advice from thatgirl that I encountered somewhere while tilting toward internet windmills: "Like I told my son on his first day of school 'You dont realize this yet but our whole family is very weird. You'll never be normal or be like other kids. I can't teach you how to be like other kids. But I can teach you how not to mind being unique.'"

I can't think of anything more I would want to say to Juniper, other than to add that, "I have done my best to change what normal is, but I have failed and it's now your job to go out and make things better than I could make them. "