Sometimes people ask me how I can post personal stories on the Internet. It’s really not that difficult for me because I’ve realized one thing: I lost my privacy a while ago, and it had nothing to do with the World Wide Web.

No, I lost my privacy the day my daughter uttered her first complete sentence. Since then she has been broadcasting the details of my life to anyone who will look her in the eye — her babysitters, her teachers, my parents, my siblings, our friends, occassional strangers.

For those of you without small children, here’s what it’s like: You are throwing a massive party and have invited lots of guests. You have cleaned your house for a solid week, shoving all the shit you don’t want anyone to see into a messy upstairs closet. When your guests arrive, your child takes each one of them by the hand, leads them upstairs, throws open the closet door and says, “See what Mommy did?”

Thankfully the people who know every last detail about me are kind enough not to tell me that they do. So how do I know that they know what they know? I had an epiphany two days ago when I was teaching Sunday school. Just sitting at eye level with these seven and eight year olds opened up some sort of floodgate and they spilled and spilled and spilled.

I talked about this phenomenon with my sister, an elementary school teacher. “We teachers know everything,” she confirmed. “And a lot of times, we don’t know what to do with the information. It’s TMI.”

So those of you with little children, don’t be surprised when you get a strange look from your child’s teacher during your next parent/teacher conference. They’ve seen inside your closet. And it ain’t pretty.