Cultivating privacy

When I first moved into our house, pre-addition, the back deck jutted out mere feet from the rental house next door. To say that their house was something of a “party house,” at the time, would be an enormous understatement. I stopped counting how many times Big Papa knocked on their door, bleary-eyed late at night (or in the wee hours of the morning). Part way through the summer, they pulled an old ratty couch out into the yard, where it stayed for the remainder of the summer and well into a rainy fall.

Then there were the neighbors who lived kitty corner and whose back porch we had a clear view of from our deck. First there was the morning when the fire department was called to douse the burning mattress they’d tossed into the yard. On another afternoon they smashed a bunch of chairs in their backyard yard before starting a bonfire and throwing them in.

So it goes without saying that the notion of a quiet, relaxing, and private dinner on our back deck, was unattainable much of the time, particularly when warm days were ours. One of our goals for our remodel was to bump out the corner of the house that cozies up to the neighbors, and build the new deck on the other side of the house. That way we couldn’t see them, or they us, if we chose to dine al fresco. Of course, there were many other reasons we needed to add 150 square feet to our tiny 980 square foot house, namely to make room for a child, but creating a bit more privacy was pretty high on our list.

It’s one thing to put up a fence around your house, close your blinds, slap on the head phones and crank up the volume on your iPod, all in an effort to achieve privacy at home. It’s quite another to cultivate virtual privacy.

As a blogger I’ve put a lot of my life out on the internet: stories, photos, and milestones, particularly as they relate to our adoption journey. Up to now, no one would likely refer to me as a private person. I tend to be more of an open book than a closed door when it comes to sharing the goings on in my life, be it with close friends or the woman behind the counter at the dry cleaners.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering the level of detail I want to share publicly, and online. The big question I’ve been wrestling with is this: How do I blog about our adoption while keeping some measure of privacy around things that now seem too sensitive to be public?

This doesn’t mean all adoption talk is off the table for me. There will be blog posts about my thoughts on adoptive parenthood and adoption in a more general sense, just less about exactly where things are at for us. I’ll still write about the specifics, but for now it will be saved in a folder labeled “memoir” rather than published in a blog post. Of course, I’ll continue to write publicly about our travels, cooking and gardening.

We need a breather from airing our laundry. And truth be told, it feels good to allow a bit more personal space where we might collect our thoughts and ourselves—and cultivate privacy in our own backyard.