Confessions of a Mommy Blogger
Written By Catherine Newman
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Blogging is narcissistic — and time-consuming. It gives strangers (not to mention the in-laws) ammunition for criticizing our parenting choices. And one day it could really mortify our kids. Here's why we do it anyway.
You are not alone. If there's a single fact to take from the 70 million blogs that inhabit the Internet, it's this: Whoever you are — however thrilled or frantic, bored or despairing, buoyant or afflicted with love like an aching in your bones — someone out there understands. Especially if you're a mother. Someone out there is still awake with a restless toddler. Someone out there has swigged the last of the cooking sherry, or dotted a nursing newborn with Doritos fallout. And someone is writing about it.
I write a blog myself, a weekly online journal that for four years appeared on Babycenter.com and now is on Wondertime.com. When I asked my readers to describe for me why, after finally getting their children to bed, they stay up half the night writing about them in blogs of their own — or, crazier still, reading about other people's children in their blogs — they described this longing for connection:
"I read blogs to feel I'm part of something larger, a whole world of other women raising children on this crazy, spinning planet."
"Being a parent is so frustratingly difficult and blindingly beautiful at the same time. Blogs remind me to celebrate the beautiful and that I'm not alone in the difficult." Only a very few admitted to what must be a near epidemic of procrastination: "What better way to not wash my floor than to take advice from strangers on the Internets?"
Postcards from the EdgeParenting is both a universal experience and one that is consummately unique in its details. And it's those dirty details, the follies and the foibles, that satisfy the sharpest bloggy cravings. I don't really want to finish vacuuming up the crumbs of cake and piñata and sanity from Ben's party only to read an earnest account of some other kid's birthday; I do, however, want to log on to the wildly popular blog Finslippy to read Alice Bradley's hilarious description of little Henry's: "At one point he got a Woody doll and spent the night observing, 'I used to have a tiny Woody but now I have a really big Woody!' We all tried not to snicker, and failed. We tried to resist the urge to get him to say it again, and failed at that too. So in other words, all the misbehavior came from the adults." Exactly. The blog entries of mine that people like best: the time we forgot to strap Ben into his car seat because we were too busy splitting a raspberry Danish; the time I left baby Birdy in tears, waiting to be nursed while I shoveled cold and guilty mac and cheese into my face, which I called the food equivalent of "putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others."
Blogging is the underbelly of scrapbooking, its tantruming, scatalogical doppelgänger. In the scrapbook version of my summer vacation, I would paste together a sunny collage of sea and sand and smiling kids. In the blog version, I might be more inclined to mention the steaming beach Port-A-John, where the final quarter of Birdy's sandwich ended up tumbling into the reeking blackness. If scrapbooking is the urge to put it all together, blogging might be the urge to take it all apart. Blogging might not make life tidier, but it keeps life in your memory, and keeps it real.
Critical MassesFor me and the millions of others who do it, blogging can also be the literary equivalent of streaking through a stadium — 15 minutes of slightly crass fame — but over and over again. I've checked for reader comments as obsessively as I once stuck my eighth grade hand into the echoing hollows of our mailbox. (Anything for me? A letter from Shaun Cassidy detailing his undying love?) Every week for five years, dozens and sometimes hundreds of women have written to me to say, in essence, "I hear you, sister." And I have just loved this — the feeling that I'm not alone, the reassurances that I'm doing my best, and even the actual advice. I once wrote about Birdy's constipation and received more than 400 tips, including instructions for an "Italian enema" that involved a large sprig of parsley (Italian, of course). The comments have been like a balm on the chapped lips of my everyday anxiety.
Jenn Mattern, author of the riotously funny blog Breed 'Em and Weep, describes the addictive affirmation of blogging this way: "There's that wonderfully seductive, press-the-lever-and-get-a-pellet positive reinforcement built into the form. By nature a blog is a very call-and-response setup, and it wouldn't be hard to get lured into saying too much by kind commenters who leave praise like bread crumbs. I like bread crumbs as much as the next person." Me too. I always feel a little cheap when I write about my body sagging away, boobs like empty banana peels, because it's such a crowd-pleaser — it floods my in-box with virtual thank-you notes.
But, of course, this kind of narcissism — sweet, sweet, sweet as soda pop — can revolt you with its germy backwash. The worst have been the stinging, judgmental comments about the very things I choose to reveal most honestly; I occasionally seem to give readers exactly the right length of rope to hang me with. When I once wrote a post about my struggles with impatience — after expressing shame and horror for snapping at Ben about his sudden, inexplicable dread of recycling — readers wrote in to say, "You should be horrified and ashamed of yourself." Sex always gets a big response, especially the time I jokingly suggested that obstetricians convert the six-week rule to a two-year postpartum sex moratorium — and a lot of readers thought I was serious! ("It's amazing Michael doesn't leave you," someone wrote, understandably if not kindly.) Lots of topics have been hot buttons: weaning, asthma, shade perennials, the Little House on the Prairie series, hemorrhoids, stuffed zucchini. You just never know.
Undercover MotherRogue criticism is only one of the dangers. Another might be — I'm just imagining here — your parents, along with all your other readers, finding out that you've seen a therapist. Or perhaps — again, just imagining — being recognized while you're kneeling in the airport bathroom to blot pee from your toddler's jeans with a paper towel. "Aren't you ... ?" "I am! Thank you, that's so nice! Hang on a sec, honey. Holding on to my hair isn't working ..." Do I worry about being stalked? I always laugh when people ask that; the only people who stalk me wear dirty nursing bras and mashed yams. They are, in other words, my people.
But my children might feel differently. A teenage Ben might one day balk over the fact that tens of thousands of people have chuckled about his pooping in the stairway. I console myself with the idea that, hey, teenagers are going to resent the very way we take air into our lungs, so why not give them something to really resent? (I do picture these kids in college, though, turning their blogged childhoods into a drinking game. "Everyone whose mom wrote about their diaper leaking ... CHUG!") But the truth is that while I may tell funny stories about the children, the only person I reveal over and over again, the person whose neurotic habits and flaws and struggles lurk in everything I write, is me.
Some of the most significant events in our lives are ones I haven't been able to write about — friends who've been gravely ill, others who've divorced — and I always feel strange about that, waffling on about string cheese while my heart is breaking. Similarly, I don't tend to write about the darkest places in my relationship with Michael because, well, my relationship is at stake. But as a result Michael often sounds kind of sickly perfect (which he often kind of is). I never fret publicly about my parents aging because they're as hale and hearty as oxen, not to mention they are loyal readers and would kill me. (Being read by one's parents changes things, doesn't it? When I use the word "bong," even jokingly, I cringe.)
Virtual Reality
Writing helps me pay attention as the years fly by. I'm forever scrawling notes on Target receipts about things the kids say. (Birdy: "I'm china do something. Is that right? China?" Ben to me, while I'm naked: "Mama, those are some drizzly nursings you've got there.")
But because I'm always seeing our family's life as a funny story I could tell, the question that troubles me is, am I really paying attention? Sometimes I feel like one of those tourists arguing about the camcorder while Niagara crashes down around them in frenetic blue wonder.
One blogger told me she feels the genre can actually lower the parenting bar: "Oh, your kids make you crazy? Mine too. The little parasites. Have a big glass of wine and let them watch Sesame Street for an hour." And while I see where she's coming from, I think blogging actually makes me a better parent because I feel like I'm being watched, even if the feeling is self-imposed. It's like the way I'm a better parent when there are guests in the house — more inclined to make waffles and play Monopoly. Maybe you could describe it as feeling like there are guests in my psyche.
Or as the anonymous author of the blog Bub and Pie puts it: "I go through my day in a kind of 'compose post' mode, where I'm actively selecting words to describe my children — their beauty, their quirkiness, their inner lives — and that process helps me to see them, to be mindful of who they are." Writing gives me a way to step back from my life and really see it. To watch my kids and feel the gratitude flood through my veins. To connect the dots so I can tell the story the way I feel it, even though, my God, there are a million true ways to tell any story.
Plus: See Catherine's favorite mom blogs
