Mommyblogging
Does blogging empower women? A very short essay.
Thursday, June 14th, 2007My youngest son is now a glorious seventeen months old. It’s a good age, seventeen months: old enough to make your feelings known, young enough to elicit a hug simply by looking up, eyes brimming with unshed tears, old enough to bait your brothers, young enough to have a mother’s unquestioning protection from them.
The last seventeen months have been a slog but I have - in some sort of masochistic way - enjoyed them. In the last month or two life has become easier, taken on a slower, less stressful pace. The baby (no longer a baby but always my baby) sleeps, eats, guided by days which have a gentle routine. I know his every expression and can anticipate almost every emotion that any one particular action will precipitate in his little body. I feel like a competent mother. And I am happy - sometimes startlingly so.
It wasn’t always like that. When my middle son, William, was seventeen months old I started this blog. For the first seventeen months of his life and for several months after that I was severely, desperately, unknowingly depressed. When I stumbled across the blogging world my world was absolutely, unutterably transformed. After a while I wrote:
writing this blog has helped me overcome some really dreadful times, given me a sense of purpose, given me a view beyond my little baby-driven world, allowed me to find other like-minded people and given me hours of fun reading some of the truly witty, poignant and clever blogs. ….. Part of the reason I suffered from postpartum depression is that I felt like I didn’t measure up to the stereotypes put forward in the media, I didn’t measure up to the parenting manuals, I didn’t measure up to how I thought every other mum was coping (nobody talks about depression, not really), I didn’t feel I had anything other to focus on than babies and I didn’t have anything other to focus on than my babies and how I wasn’t coping with them. Reading other people’s real experiences - not some biased media account, nor some parenting manual scenario - and hearing from other people in similar circumstances has helped me beyond measure.
Blogging is extraordinary: it has created networks of people with shared experiences, it allows us to make connections with others, it gives us an outlet where we can express ourselves without fear of judgement. Women, and mothers in particular, are a critical part of the blogging world, proof that the medium of blogging works so well in creating networks to share information and experiences and to support and empower each other, and in creating virtual villages in which we raise our children.
The blogging world, like life, is full of niches: politics, religion, opinions, everyday events, hobbies, hacks. No one area is any ‘better’ or any more important than another and to dismiss ‘mommyblogging’ as trivial is inaccurate. Mothers need each other and blogging is not only a logical extension of that desire to connect and to support one another, but a way of deconstructing the myths of motherhood and, in doing so, empowering all of us who take part in it.
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Dull Blogs of the World, Unite! Again!
Monday, January 31st, 2005God, journalists piss me off sometimes. Yet another article about the self-absorbed nature of bloggers. Not only that, but the author has seen fit to pick on the self-absorbed nature of mommy bloggers.
For heaven’s sake! At least be fair and pick on all types of bloggers. Don’t we, as parents, get enough grief without journalists weighing in with their two pennies worth as well?
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have had to defend blogging before when this blog was featured in an article which implied that bloggers and their blogs are dull. I was not arguing that this blog was anything other than dull (Heaven forbid!). I was arguing, however, that blogs serve a purpose for those that read them and more importantly those that write them. In my case, without sounding too melodramatic, writing this blog has helped me overcome some really dreadful times, given me a sense of purpose, given me a view beyond my little baby-driven world, allowed me to find other like-minded people and given me hours of fun reading some of the truly witty, poignant and clever blogs. Not all blogs are great, but all of the good mommy ones I read ARE. I read one or more posts a day which make me laugh out loud (and that’s before I’ve hit the gin). Part of the reason I suffered from postpartum depression is that I felt like I didn’t measure up to the stereotypes put forward in the media, I didn’t measure up to the parenting manuals, I didn’t measure up to how I thought every other mum was coping (nobody talks about depression, not really), I didn’t feel I had anything other to focus on than babies and I didn’t have anything other to focus on than my babies and how I wasn’t coping with them. Reading other people’s real experiences - not some biased media account, nor some parenting manual scenario - and hearing from other people in similar circumstances has helped me beyond measure.
I (and most mommy-bloggers, I suspect) don’t blog in the hope of getting a book deal. It’s never going to happen. And it’s not why I do it. I don’t blog to invade my children’s privacy. I write about the crap aspects of parenting; I don’t write about the crap aspects of my children. As for previous generations, they couldn’t blog because it didn’t exist, but I bet they might have if they could have done. Blogging is a technological development, one which has brought about a sort of online social development, not a psychological ‘it’s all about me, me, me’ development. Previous generations also often had family around them to help them parent. Even so, they probably suffered from the trials of parenting in the same ways we do now, but time is a great healer. I can’t even remember some details about my first baby and that was only two years ago. And blogging certainly doesn’t answer the question “why on earth am I parenting?” I only have to look at my children to answer that, to know that I love them and I want to do the best for them. Blogging is simply an outlet for what I am experiencing and feeling. And I like reading about what others are experiencing and feeling. No more, no less. It doesn’t need some psychological analysis and certainly not some ill-informed comment from a journalist who sits at a desk, far removed from what many parents experience day-to-day.
If journalists have a problem with mommy blogging, they either haven’t looked hard enough for the good blogs (not true in the case of the New York Times articles as many of the mommy uber-bloggers were featured), or they don’t ‘get’ blogging - and the idea of an uncensored, immediate, world-wide community - generally, or more likely they fear that blogging and blogging communities, and the internet generally, might be a threat to their journalistic skills, readership and the future of print media.
The old adage ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ might serve these critical mainstream commentators well because, as we all know, you can’t keep a good blog down.
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Dull Blogs of the World, Unite!
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005To the readers that came to me from the feature in The Independent “Have you read the one about me?” and who keep coming back I would like to say thanks for reading, especially as it seems that not all people agree that blogs or blogging are interesting.
There has been a surge of interest in the British media recently (in particular the British press) about blogging as they begin to cotton-on to the fact that blogging is perhaps THE next big web trend. But the article in the Independent (in which this blog was featured) couldn’t wait to argue that many personal journal-type blogs are dull, dull and dull again.
Above the article they featured a number of one-liners from blogs. It is odd that the article chose several blogs from celebrities (which are most likely faux blogs, written by assistants and PR people rather than the celebrities themselves). By their very nature they are going to be banal: Scully is hardly likely to say on her blog who she spent the night with last night. The four ‘unknown’ blogs were picked presumably to reflect the variety of bloggers out there in the blogosphere: a baby blog (that one’s mine), a teen-angst blog , the one-with-the-medical-condition and the all-out-weird blog . The journalist, Michael Bywater, argues in his article that many blogs are dull but he is not the first: John Dvorak has argued the same thing more than once and I’m sure there are plenty of others. Bywater appears to have chosen quotes designed to reflect the self-absorbed nature of many bloggers, celebrity or not. But what these blogs have in common (celebrity ones aside) is that they are written from the heart and often without any particular desire for an audience (although any blogger will tell you that when you start getting large numbers of people visiting your site, it is WAY COOL). I am entirely aware that unless you are a mum to small children, you probably don’t care that I want to pee in private one day. But if you are a mum to small children, peeing in private may be just one thing on a very long list of things you miss. And hearing that someone else is having the same troubles, well it can just make life that little bit easier, can’t it? Why else would I read Three Kid Circus and dooce regularly except to regain my own sanity? But I don’t write for an audience, I write because it helps me. ME. So perhaps I am self-absorbed. But other people write about their cats, their poetry, their divorce troubles. None of us is asking anybody else to read what we write unless they get something either from what we write or perhaps how we write it. So at the risk of repeating myself, Mr Bywater, you don’t have to read what’s written on a particular site, or indeed any site, if you don’t like it.
Bloggers are self-absorbed? Well, maybe. But for the readers of these blogs, they offer a window into someone else’s world and often a sense of being part of a larger community. And more importantly, for those writing blogs, if writing a personal diary online is their thing, who is anybody else to criticise?
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