October 2, 2010

Pseudonymity

In the interest of openness and fair play, and for the new readers who aren't finding me through my Facebook page (which still surprises me, but thank you), I want to let all y'all know: My name's not Rosemary. My name is something totally different. And, apparently, it is totally distinctive in a beautifully ethnic kind of way, which I know because I Googled myself and there's only like two of me out there, and most of the me's out there really are me.

If you followed that.

Because I'm one of only two of me, I'm easy to find. I don't want to be easy to find. I've got three gorgeous and vulnerable kids who deserve their mom's best efforts to keep them safe and whole and see them through to adulthood.

So I use a pseudonym. I don't refer to my kids by name, not even by made-up name. And I don't (generally) talk about where we live.

The Rosemary bit came from my blog name. And that's a bit of a story. I meant to call my blog "Elbows Off the Table," and that is, in fact, the title. I chose it because that's the phrase I heard at the dinner table over and over and over again growing up. That, and "Put your napkin in your lapkin," which I thought would be a silly title for a blog. Either would have made sense, though, because the original idea of this blog was to write about family life through food. Kind of like M. F. K. Fisher for the blogger mom set. But "Elbows" was taken in the Bloggerverse, so I created a subtitle and used the end of it as my URL. Family life through rosemary-colored glasses. Rosemary. Herb. Food. Get it? Yes, folks, I am just that clever.

Except that this blog has become much more than life through food. It is about food, but only sometimes. Mostly it's about family. It's about my beautiful children. It's about Asperger's Syndrome and how we manage that particular difference together. It's about the challenges of being a single parent. It's about me and my friends, who make up a kind of family of our own. And it's about the stuff that ties my family together, across the generations: stuff like knitting, which I learned at my grandmother's knee, and my mother's lemon Jell-o cake, and the fact that I'm afraid to fly. Which is relevant because important parts of my family live very far away.

And, always, it's about finding the bright side. Those rosemary-colored glasses are my way of looking at the world.

So now I'm Rosemary. Because, as it happens, I'm a rose-colored girl.

2 comments: