Looking back, I realize that my reaction had little to do with the primping photographs of young girls, creepy "bulletins" and occasional foul language that I found on her site.
It was more the shock of discovering a different Taylor, a cool-teen version of the girl who used to cuddle up on the couch and watch cooking shows with me. My daughter was too young for such an uncensored world, I decided.
I immediately shut her site down.
I had to ask her to do it for me.
This is how she responded:
\o7 "I'm really mad \f7\o7because it feels like you're saying I can't talk to my friends anymore. On MySpace, I get to talk to my friends and see people I don't see a lot. You get to keep in touch with everyone and it's fun. You took away my fun!"
\f7\o7*
\f7Several things happened that made me change my mind.
My 49-year-old sister, Christine, joined MySpace and told me she was having fun using it. She urged me to set up my own account so we would have a free, easy way to exchange e-mails and photographs.
I thought about the technical skills Taylor had acquired in creating pages for herself and for her friends. And I started noticing a lot of news stories about MySpace, usually focused on its dangers.
What if I allowed Taylor to maintain a page while keeping a close eye on it? I'd join too, to become familiar with the site's benefits and drawbacks.
So I typed out the contract and Taylor enthusiastically signed it. She created an account for me and assigned me a URL, www.myspace.com/im_a_cool_mom, that reflected the giddiness of our truce.
Taylor was thrilled by this turn of events:\o7 \f7"\o7Yeah! ... I can't believe you're letting me do it. I guess it's OK that I have to sign this thing. I don't want you supervising me. I think I can do it on my own. But I'm glad you let me have my own page. It's a generous thing for you to do."
\f7Taylor was generous too.
She helped me find a pretty orange background and showed me how to link to a Joni Mitchell music file that would play "Big Yellow Taxi" when a visitor landed on my Web page.
Meanwhile, while I was content to leave my page alone once she set it up, Taylor constantly tried out different looks on hers, as naturally as if she were changing clothes.
Almost daily she linked different music files (from a MySpace-sanctioned cache) to her site. From my daughter, I learned that Beyonce is hot and that Britney Spears definitely is not.
