Fictional Me

Written by Aviva Luria

One question that comes up often when writing a personal blog is just how personal to get. Before embarking on Old Mom, Young Child, I debated (for instance) whether to refer to my child by his real name, his first initial, or a pseudonym. I settled on the last, both in respect of his privacy and to offer him a little protection, because, well, you never know.

How much of my personal life should I share to make this blog “authentic”? I wonder about this regularly. On the one hand, I’d like to have the cajones to just lay it all on the table (so to speak), but on the other, that seems like a truly boneheaded thing to do. Especially in this day and age when you can’t take stuff back: You never know where in cyberspace your shit is floating around.  Uh… so to speak.

A friend, whom I’ll call Sue Collins, left Facebook for privacy reasons. She was afraid the opinions and affiliations she disclosed might one day come back to haunt her. I told her, C’mon. Your name is Sue Collins. If one day somebody confronts you with something you wrote you can claim it was one of the other 63,452 Sue Collinses on Facebook.

Moi, last I checked I was the only Aviva Luria on Facebook. (There is an Aviv Luria, though. He’s a young Israeli.) Still, without being a complete moron about it (“Going on vacation. Door unlocked. I’m sure no one will steal the heirloom jewelry”) I make my posts available only to my Facebook friends and state my opinions pretty freely. I’m sure I piss even my friends off at times, but I truly consider airing my opinionated opinions on Facebook an expression of free speech. If someone decides not to hire me one day because I stated that Rick Perry is an ass (which is a fact, not an opinion), then they’ve saved me the misery of working for someone who doesn’t think Rick Perry is an ass. And that can only be a good thing.

But back to the question at hand, which is, in case you’re wondering, What is “authentic,” anyway? It’s not just an issue of what makes a blog, or a memoir, or novel, film or whatever else authentic, but what makes a person authentic? How can we tell if we, ourselves, are authentic in everyday life, or with our partners, or children?

One of the wonderful things about spending time with young children is their lack of skill at covering up who they really are. That’s not to say my little guy doesn’t exaggerate his injuries sometimes, or try out the persona of a friend, or pretend he’s Luke Skywalker. All these are experiments in branching out into other selves or ways of being or feelings or what-ifs, and perfectly understandable and healthy. But with most of us adults, we’ve built up layers and layers of sediment and rust and residue over the years, which we’ve carefully applied and accumulated in order to protect ourselves and to project certain images in different situations. Yet with each additional layer it becomes more and more difficult to strip down to our essential selves. You couldn’t remove some of that plaque with a chisel. What’s underneath it all? What the heck are we, anyway? Am I a jumble of my thoughts, impressions, feelings, opinions? Some might say my actions determine who I am, but what about motivations and intentions? Which is more real: my public or private self? If my tastes and sensibilities, opinions and even political affiliation (gasp!) change over time, am I the same person I once was?

Crap if I know.

There’s that old philosophical conundrum: You buy a car and keep it for decades. (Because you’re cheap or poor or sentimental—I don’t know why. Just work with me.) You replace the brakes, then the engine, then whatever else until, over the years, every last bit of that car has been replaced by a new part.

Is it the same car?

Sometimes, after running into someone I haven’t seen in years, I have this odd sensation. I’ve changed so much: my hair is shorter and grayer, I’ve aged, I’m skinnier or fatter than when they last saw me, I didn’t own this sweater then…. How the heck do they recognize me? What is it about me that’s the same, that makes me me?

That also raises the question of appearance, how much emphasis we put on it, and how much of our identity is wrapped up in it. When someone gets plastic surgery, aren’t they hoping it’ll change something more than the size of their nose? Really, aren’t we hoping a haircut, new makeup, those expensive new shoes will transform us more wholly, more profoundly?

And isn’t that very, very silly?

…

Aviva Luria recently created the blog Old Mom, Young Child, which can be found at omyc.wordpress.com, a glimpse into the mind of a sometime writer who became a mom at the ripe age of 42. Aviva, who has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in English and creative writing, has published work in an array of places, from The San Francisco Examiner and The National Post(one of Canada’s national newspapers) to the literary journals The Mississippi Review, Kalliope, andGrain,and the magazine Canadian Living. A radio junkie, she also contributed stories to a couple of CBC radio programs. (That’s in Canada, eh?)

Having grown up on Long Island, she has lived in London; San Francisco, Berkeley, and Davis, California; Ontario, Canada; and other odd and wonderful places. She lives with her husband, a physics professor, and their son, born in 2007, who is the wonder and light of her life.