"I would get up early each day to log onto my email and see what birth announcements would pop up. With ninety of us on the list, it was a pretty exciting month. I took my laptop to the hospital with me when I had my son so I could fire off my good news to the group within a couple of hours after he was born. My nurses and even my husband thought it was a little weird, but I didn't care. I wanted my friends who had been through so much with me over the past nine months to be the first to know!"
Frenzel's husband's reaction to her online relationships is not uncommon. Many women who have developed meaningful Internet friendships report that their spouses, other family members, or friends have difficulty understanding the significance of these connections or the amount of time spent logged on. In some cases, this concern may be well-founded: what should be a healthy new medium for talking with other parents can become a compulsive behavior. According to Dr. Kimberly Young, director of the Center for On-line Addiction at the University of Pittsburgh-Bradford, Internet Addiction Disorder is an increasingly recognized psychiatric malady. Dr. Young has reviewed of more than 400 cases of the disorder, and says the relative anonymity of Internet communication, which allows a person to escape from reality, has great potential for compulsive behavior or misuse. However, many enthusiasts of Internet friendship say that spending time each day with cyber-friends in front of a computer screen shouldn't be considered any more "addictive" than spending the same amount of time each day with other friends on the phone or in person.
Cecilia Mitchell Barfield is a forty-three-year-old accountant from Florida and the mother of two who participates in several parenting listservs. She says that her online friends are among her closest and that she draws no distinction between her friends with whom she has physical contact and her cyber-friends.
"I have met some [online friends] in real life too, and our friendship is even closer now," says Barfield. "But I have many online friends I haven't met and may never meet whom I consider good, close friends and with whom I desire frequent contact. They make me laugh, cry, think . . . they have had a strong influence on the way I live my life, in some cases."
Meredith Jones, a single mother from Ithaca, New York, resents it when people trivialize her online relationships.
"I hate it when people talk about my 'real' friends and my online friends," says Jones passionately. "My online friends from my email list for single mothers by choice are my real friends. You don't have to see someone's face to care for her or appreciate her as a human being."
However, many cyber-friends do make the effort to get to know the faces behind the email addresses. Some listservs and newsgroups organize annual "photo albums": group members mail photos of themselves and their children to one participant who agrees to collate, bind, and copy the album for distribution to everyone who contributes to the effort. In other cases, online parents host a password-protected group Web page, with photos and biographical information for each member-family. And often, online friends even meet one another in person. When you have cyber-friends living all over the United States and in a number of other countries, it's easy to plan trips integrating visits with Internet buddies. In the case of larger online parenting groups, there are almost always several group members who live in the same city or area, making group get-togethers possible.
"I've discovered local friends from my email lists," says Cindy Miller. "I have developed face-to-face friendships with several women around the Twin Cities whom I see fairly regularly. We get together with our children at various child-friendly places like the zoo and the Arboretum. I have also participated in picnics coordinated by online list members in the Twin Cities."
However, once the veil of email anonymity is pierced with real-life encounters, cyber-friends may prove a disappointment, if they don't turn out to be the people they presented themselves to be. But generally, over months or years of corresponding about the highly personal and emotional issues related to parenting, Net users develop a pretty accurate sense of who their online friends really are.
In my own case, as I think back to the loving care and thoughtfulness demonstrated by my online parenting community during the frightening early days of my youngest child's life, it isn't difficult at all to know who these women are. They are my friends. My real friends.
Katie Allison Granju is a Knoxville, Tennessee freelancer and the mother of three. Her article about cohousing communities appeared in the December issue ofMinnesota Parent, and her once-frequent contributions to our publication are resuming now that Elliot is three months old.
