The Perils of Blogging

This afternoon, my email pinged with new notification.

Hello I know you don’t know me and this may sound a little creepy but there is a fake profile on Facebook using pictures of your sons from your blog. This girl added me a while ago and i couldn’t help but think she was fake, I searched on of her pictures of her so called twins and your blog came up. I just thought you should know that someone was using pictures of your children to pass as their own so her is her information if you would like to say anything to her.

I figured it was a scam. But curiosity got the best of me and I navigated right on over to Facebook. Sure enough, clear as day.

I saw red.

What’s the issue? Two sweet boys who need love and prayers, right? Here’s where I drop the bombshell.

THOSE ARE MY BOYS.

1)    You are not their mother.

2)    They were not born yesterday morning – they are now 3 years old.

3)    If they were just born and now in the NICU, how the heck do you have 3-month old photos of them already.

4)    You got their names wrong.

I immediately reported the page to Facebook and requested friends and family who use Facebook to do the same. Thank you, truly, to all who took the time to do so. I am hoping the offensive impersonation will be deleted in short order. And thank you to the stranger who took the time to investigate what seemed wrong to her and let me know what she’d found.

I’ve heard of the fake pictures before; I don’t know why people do this. Alas, I have a sneaking suspicion – with ObamaCare/Affordable Care Act permeating the news ad nasuem recently, I can only assume a GoFundMe page or the like would appear shortly after creating the Facebook page. Donations requested to help with medical care, etc.

I won’t lie. This felt like a violation – mundane as it may be. My first gut reaction was that this post should be a farewell, time to shut down the blog.

But I knew going public with my story had its perils. So I’m not going to take my ball and go home. I’m going to take my ball and throw it directly at the head of the nincompoop trying to pass off Search and Destroy as her own. (Like she could handle them.)

I am, however, removing the photo section from the blog and closing off access to my Flickr site. I’ll still post cute representations, but the full archives are no longer available. I am also going back through to watermark the photos I’ve posted previously.

Blogging my story became the outlet for me to share day-to-day news about Search and Destroy back when they were going through a very tough time. (Breathe in. Breathe out. Now do it again. Forever.) Much to my surprise, people began reading.

I found a great number of blogs that helped me get through the days as I read what they had gone through. In turn, others with young tiny babes of their own have found my ramblings as my ex-preemies continue to pave their own way. (To hell with statistics!)

I love the community I’ve become a part of (albeit one I was dragged into kicking and screaming). And for the most part, I’ve never “met” the wonderful preemie moms I follow.

I love being a storyteller. It amuses me to share the highlights and hilarity of raising tiny twins. For the one person I can make smile, give hope, or simply add a quick “thank god that’s not me” to someone’s day – writing is worth it. I do not like having to add the fear of “but is it real” to the mix.

It seriously bums me out that someone would try and steal my story for their own strange sympathies. These are the perils of the new technological world I guess. Privacy and security – still very much an undefined dance as Skynet swirls about us.

I wear my stories and my scars proudly. So back off bitch – those are my kids.