spynotes ::
  January 30, 2005
Unremarkable

Is anyone else wondering why the media is quite so obsessed with (not to mention clueless about) blogs? Once again, the New York Times ran a major feature on bloggers, this time on blogging moms (and somewhat parenthetically, dads). You can see the article on the front page of today�s Sunday Styles section or here if you�re registered.

I wanted to like this article because many of the people interviewed write blogs I read regularly. Instead I found myself irritated in the extreme by the tone of the article which seems to be yet another article questioning the value of the maternal experience. The headline pretty much says it all: �Mommy (and me).� The article�s angle is that the parent blogs are an excuse for self-indulgent obsessions about our children. To which I say an eloquent, �Duh!� The article�s author David Hochman writes, �The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.� With this, however, I quibble. First, ALL blogs are an exercise in self-absorption, as are ANY journals, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, or whatever you wish to call them. I don�t happen to think there�s anything wrong with that. After all, what subject do we know better? What subject can we alone write about with authority? Ourselves, of course.

So why should parenting blogs be any different? And actually, I should say mom blogs, because that is what the author is really talking about and it is the mom not the dad or the baby who is at the crux of the matter. The problem, of course, is that Mom is not supposed to be self-absorbed. She is supposed to be child absorbed and self-effacing. She is supposed to be invisible. The fact that she wants to write a blog is, apparently, a bit threatening. My guess is that if dads were writing blogs about their kids in huge numbers (and there are quite a few who do), they would be considered enlightened and sensitive rather than self-absorbed. The phenomenon would be praised rather than marveled at.

Apparently Mr. Hochman needs a bit of an education of what it is like to be a mother of small children. I will respond to a few citations from his article in hopes of enlightening him.

For the generation that begat reality television it seems that there is not a tale from the crib (no matter how mundane or scatological) that is unworthy of narration.

For parents home with small children, believe me, the vast majority of our days are �mundane and scatological.� That doesn�t mean that our experience is worthless. It has value to us, so we write about it. In some cases, we think it�s something our children might want to read about later. In any case, no one is forcing our readers to read. They read because they�re interested. Many of our blogs get a fair amount of traffic. Several parent blogs are among the busiest blog sites � blogrolling lists two I read regularly � asmallvictory.net and dooce.com � in the top 20 of most blogrolled sites. And diaryland�s own mimi smartypants is destined for legend as one of the elusive BWBs (Bloggers With Books).

Of the sites I read regularly, the parent blogs are consistently the most literate, funny and poignant. They tend to be more personal, more honest, and, well, more thoughtful. It doesn�t seem that most of these parents are at a loss for material. The good ones rise beyond the mundane. It is possible that they are only entertaining to me because I�m a parent too, and I respond to that aspect of their writing. But isn�t that reason enough for them to write? A huge portion of internet users are parents. Just because our kids think we were born in the dark ages doesn�t mean we don�t know our way around a keyboard, nor does it mean we need to cede our webspace. Many like to think of the internet as a youth culture, but those of us who started young are older and perhaps wiser now. This does not mean we are prepared to give up our internet real estate.

In the next quote, Hochman cites an expert:

Daniel J. Siegel, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain and Development at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of "Parenting From the Inside Out," said that what is being expressed in these Web sites "is the deep, evolutionarily acquired desire to rise above invisibility, something parents experience all the time." He explained, "You want to be seen not just by the baby whose diaper you're changing, but by the world.�

Perhaps. But exactly what about a blog makes its author visible? It seems to me that if someone wanted to �rise above invisibility� there are a lot of better ways to do that. Moreover, many (if not most) of us try hard to protect our anonymity because we don�t want to be too visible. I don�t know of anyone who started the venture of a blog who did it for any reason but to start writing. Ultimately, of course, the audience becomes a factor � for some blogs more than others. That doesn�t necessarily make them more visible. There is, however an advantage that the blogging genre offers to parents � it�s quick, short and largely unedited. This makes it a perfect fit for writers who are trying to squeeze an entry into a toddler�s ever-shrinking naptime. Take it from one who knows.

One thing that was not mentioned in the article (except very tangentially) was the issue of community. For many bloggers in general (and perhaps parents in particular due to the time constraints mentioned above), the possibility of communication with others who might share your experiences is extremely helpful. We�re not looking for child-rearing manuals � we have too many of them already. We�re looking for someone to tell us we�re not going completely insane. We�re looking for someone who understands what it�s like to change pee-soaked sheets four times a day, to be vomited on and not really care as much as you think you would, to scrape oatmeal off the chandelier. We�re also looking for someone who understands why when your baby smiles or laughs or crawls or walks for the first time that it seems like the first time it has ever been done in the history of the world. Life is not all playgroups and bridge clubs and a lifetime of devotion to childcare anymore. Many of us are not so networked that we have these kinds of support systems close at hand.

And another quote: �What is remarkable is that being a parent has inspired so much text and that so many people seem eager to read it.�

I fail to see why this is remarkable at all. It is no more remarkable than anyone blogging on any other subject. It is a part of life; it is an experience many of us share. To me this makes the parent blogging phenomenon (if indeed it is a phenomenon) very unremarkable. Just because we may be �invisible� doesn�t mean there aren�t a hell of a lot of us out there.

One good point was made in the article, which is that parent blogging takes advantage of the children on some level. This is an issue with which I have and will continue to struggle. At some point I�ll probably decide that I need to stop writing about AJ so much in order to protect his privacy and support his rights as an individual. But I think that point is a ways off yet and I think by then that I will be spending larger proportions of my time away from him and will, if I�m still doing this, have other things to write about.

As a final piece of evidence of the demand for parent blogs is the traffic to my own site today. A thread devoted to parent blogs showed up on the group blog metafilter this morning in response to the Times article. Someone mentioned this site in a post (thanks, H.!). As a result I have received what is by far the most traffic ever from a single link to my site in a single day. Thanks to all the visitors. Please sign the guestbook when you go.

[Second entry today. Click back for an entry that is both mundane and scatological.]

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