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i hear it everywhere, popping out from headlines, referenced casually until it begins to smell of truth. and stink a little with the impotence and collective rot it creates.

a whiff of faint bewilderment, the fear of mortality and obsolescence. the thrill of feeling one has eaten from the prescient tree of knowledge, even if the tree is plastic, planted in sand.

our children will not be like us, it whispers. they are wired, and thus wired differently. they are beyond us, aliens of the future. sit back and watch the reckoning. wash your hands.

it is no Kahlil Gibran, this voice, cautioning acceptance and unconditionality. it is more Bradbury, laced with the pleasures and promise of the macabre. it tells us these children we’re raising are blasphemous offspring of the cultural collision of the human and the technological – beings whose integrated circuits are inherently foreign to our own, digital natives whose minds we will never entirely fathom.

in all this repeated discussion and dissection and fretting, there is one note missing.

yes, they will grow up in a digitized world. they play their games on screens, in many cases. they conduct entire relationships on Facebook. their cognitive synapses may fire slightly differently from those of us who grew up with only Candy Land. but if they are cyborg, oh my friends, do not fear.

they are no more so than we ourselves.
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if i invited you over for a playdate, if i sat you down on my couch with a coffee or a glass of water or a mimosa  -whatever your poison – and looked into your eyes and said, so, hey, i’m a cyborg…i suspect you might be taken aback.

cyborg. huh, your head might shrill, as you’d politely flatten yourself against my door, eyes wide and darting, looking to grab your precious babies and run for the hills.

she seemed so pleasant on her blog. barely batty at all… and she never even talked about Star Trek, let alone cyborgs. jesus. this is worse than an Amway party. is there an eject button here?!?

i know.

but if i say it here in this ether space where we are accustomed to interacting and performing our rites of friendship and social grooming…maybe the words will not seem so alien.

i am cyborg. and so are you. precisely because of this space.  we have evolved in our own lifetimes, into creatures of 20th century myth.
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the cyborg was never truly about technology.  we may not yet have our screens embedded into our retinae or curliqueue wiring connecting flesh to metal and plastic, and we’re still – inexplicably – bound to the keyboard and print text…but we all of us who live out parts of our identities in front of our screens, whose lives are rich with people we know and bare our hearts to and exchange ideas with daily in many cases yet have never, ever laid eyes upon? cyborgs, all of us, creatures of the integrated circuit.  and so is our parenthood.

our lives are couplings between organism and machine. our internal worlds are not circumscribed by the mere physical, and our external worlds – even and perhaps especially our days spent hands-on with the children we cherish – are not an existence solely of or in the body.  this world, wherein we write and speak and interface and connect, is always present or available on the internal screen of our minds. it is a room of one’s own, even if our houses overflow with toys and dishes and no space that is ours alone.

Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto more than twenty years ago, now.  her cyborg was, as she wrote it, a creature without origin and without innocence, resolutely committed to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” its existence breaks down the old dualisms of nature and culture, of public and private – it exists between, a hybrid.

as we do out here, in this ether. we write representations of ourselves that are partial, constructed…simply by the very nature of time constraints and audience, we cannot write ourselves whole. thus the “us” we speak through out here is an avatar, without innocence, aware of its origin as a narrative, a story told in once upon a time fashion.  we exist between the public and the private, all of us negotiating the boundaries of how these avatars interact and integrate with our flesh selves and the others in our lives. we connect. we interface. some of us pay a high price domestically for the space for self we carve out here, this intimate space where we are so often ironic and perverse.  the patriarchy, Haraway cautions, is threatened by the cyborg, its bastard child, unwanted issue. illegitimate offspring, she notes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
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the cyborg mother, of course, ought to be a contradiction in terms. the mother image is organic, the original origin story. but the cyborg is contradiction embodied. and the cyborg mother lives firmly in the postdigital age that the voices of doom and essentialistic difference do  not realize has reached us. the digital age is as much a part of us as the technology of the telephone or the pencil. we have incorporated it into ourselves – our baby monitors, our Dr. Google, our youtube videos of our children or for our children, our networks of identity and friendship and expression and marketing. who we make of ourselves as a result will be different from the mothers we grew up with, indeed, as will our children be different from the 70s and 80s versions of self we once were.

but our children as aliens, morphing inexorably into creatures of a vaguely foreboding future we cannot conceive? nay. not to those of us out here already, living on the integrated circuit, connecting, living beyond the boundaries of our flesh and in it, holding those selfsame children by the hand.

now if only the cyborg as mother could just break down the pointless polarization of good mother and bad.
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what does it mean to you, the space to be connected, ironic, intimate, perverse? if it all collapsed tomorrow, this online world, what of yourself would you find amputated?

i went to bed last night with a conversation i couldn’t speak aloud running through my head.

my OB – or rather, my former OB, as Dave, my mother, and various medical professionals have begged me to swear that i am never, ever putting anyone through another of my “special” pregnancies – has become something of a friend. which is great and weird at the same time, likely on both sides. she was here last night with my book club, and when the conversation turned to twitter i flipped open the laptop and showed off the shiny silly wonder of social software and explained how i feel like i “know” most of the people i follow because we’ve been reading each other for years through my blog. oh yeh, i have a blog, sez me. nearly three years. and then my eyes caught on her face and i wondered if she were wondering like i’d be wondering about trust and the strange double-edge sword of professional intimacy and being a character in others’ stories, and whether there was anything in here that in a town this small she’d rather not have broadcast and the words came chirping up in my throat oh! i said nice things about you! but i swallowed them because they seemed so trite and obsequious and sometimes the elephant in the room is perhaps better left alone with the cake crumbs than spoken of, or to.

but what i wanted to say, what i went to bed still trying to give voice to in my head an hour later, was
i only started this two weeks before Oscar was born. after the bedrest was over, and almost exactly a year after that day in Room 2 when you said “i’m sorry, it IS amniotic fluid after all” and you called for the airlift and i still somehow thought everything would be okay but it wasn’t.

i started it because i’d been a mother since that day but not in a way i could speak of and i was facing down another birth and apparent, hopeful normalcy and “real” motherhood and it frightened me because i had no idea how to reconcile those selves and all the subjectivities relating to motherhood that i’d ever seen reflected in culture didn’t resonate with where i was and i figured if i could write, maybe i could reconcile the mess in my own head.

but we don’t talk that way at book club.

i don’t talk that way out loud much at all. unless i’m teaching, and even then, i stumble. verbal me and written me have different fluencies, different contexts. written me is comfortable with the language of the subject, the myriad of selves we humans portray and embody and understand ourselves to be. written me could negotiate motherhood with all its fierce love and exhaustion and bewilderment and grief and mundanity in a way that verbal me still trips over, feeling exposed and guilty if i articulate the ambivalence of parenting aloud.

the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.
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i woke up this morning to the news that John Updike died yesterday, and i thought, yes. that’s it.

i feel like i’ve been watching the blogosphere – or at least this corner of it – run out of steam lately. i suspect we’ve collectively hit a place where our revelations feel like deja vu…like i could write this but so-and-so wrote in the same vein last week and hell, why bother? so many of us don’t, self-silencing because the sheer volume of what we’ve put out here has made us aware both that we’re not alone in our experiences of parenting but also that we’re, well, maybe not particularly special in our experiences of parenting. saturation.

but i also see an overall sea change in the ecosystem we release our posts to, when we do write them.

what blew me away when i belatedly discovered that i wasn’t blogging in a vacuum out here was the richness of the subjectivities mothers were exploring in their writing. like the seething mid-century suburbs of Updike’s Rabbit series, the public veneer of motherhood hid complex inner lives and a multitude of aspirations and secrets and feelings and validations. i didn’t see this version of mothering on tv, or in most of the ads and products aimed at my burgeoning belly…at best i found commodified hipster defiance without other content, at worst the same vapid recycling of mother-as-tender-selfless-fulfillment image that’d been hanging around Tide commercials since my childhood. but in blogs, i found conversation and exploration, stretching of these images, poking fun at them and at ourselves. i found moments of honesty and disillusionment and connection. i found a place to speak truths that verbal me could never say aloud…and people who would say, “i hear.”

it was no sheltered idyll, detached from a crass real…by the time i wandered into it, the blogosphere was actively trying to figure out how to make money, and new aggregator sites popped up all the time. but it was an economy that hadn’t yet figured itself out and narrowed its options. many fine writers found recompense for their words; many more found the recompense slim. pros and cons and implications of ads were discussed. comment whoring was owned up to. the subject as mother/writer/marketer became a common one, an overt one…and we were all marketing, even those of us who never ran an ad.

we still are, except the market has flattened out and the meta-conversations are no longer so fresh. lately, i feel like the mass, stereotypical mainstream mommy images have re-emerged to suck up too much of the conversation, subjectivities once imposed on us taken up as self-fulfilling prophecy, especially on the commercial side of things. snide tones that once seemed refreshing or ironic now resonate with weary, petty bitchiness. the aggregator sites drip with celebrity gossip and cheap wit and outrage and clearly they succeed so this must be what we’re buying with our clicks, our comments, but the tireless self-promotion of it all feels brittle to me. our little ecosystem of multiple possibilities is more toxic, the subjectivities narrower.

and yet i’m still here, blathering on. and reading, just from a smaller pool. and still happy with blogging, for what it is. because twitter’s 140 characters don’t quite allow me the scope to say more than the kids? oh, they’re good. baby has colic. ummm…but she’s a joy. cue smile.

and if you’re still here…i’m glad. and if you’re my former OB, i promise not to write about you anymore.
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if you have a blog, how would you describe its subjects, the yous that populate it?