If there’s one thing I know about motherhood and the Internet, it’s that the two pair up with snark so very, very easily. Give a mom a blog and the next thing you know, there’s someone who wants to rip it to shreds. There are whole websites devoted to the stuff, and while it may be akin to an ice cold popsicle in summertime to read other people get raked over the coals…it’s also the case that so often, everyone’s trying to just do what they can to survive.
The thing that really gets me about the haterade towards mommyblogging in general is that it’s the same thing that’s been lobbed against women writers since the dawn of time! I’ll bet the very first woman to sit down and write out her experience of motherhood got less than a warm welcome to the writers’ circles…and probably wasn’t ever invited to it in the first place! Women’s work and women’s writing have always been snidely viewed as less-than, as some sort of drivel, nothing literary or important or thought-worthy at all. And why? Because it’s women telling their own lived experiences of motherhood, a realm thought of as less-than. Much like stay-at-home-mothers have to contend with the societal sneering that gets directed towards people living lives not directly focused on making money, so too do mommybloggers get maligned as unworthy tellers of their own tales.
My book, HELLO LOVELIES!, probably sums it up best this way, when my main character, Ruthie, is trying to explain how much mommyblogs mean to her:
It was funny, whenever I tried to explain the blogging world’s social networks to Graham, he would shrug. As far as he was concerned, I was living in an entirely invisible world. There were all these women out there telling the stories of their lives, and if you weren’t following their feeds (and Graham definitely was not), you would never know they even existed.
But to me, they were as real as the people I saw every day. They were teeming with life and ideas and feelings about the long, lonely nights, the thankless days, the endless trips to Target, to the pediatrician, to the grocery store. And hard stuff too: the botched C-sections, the birth injuries nobody dared describe in polite company, the parade of small indignities heaped upon them day after day, even, I thought as I looked out on the water, the ‘mommy’ blogging name. What dude would ever allow himself to be called a ‘daddy’ blogger if it came with all that condescension? No, men writing about fatherhood online weren’t sidelined nearly as often. But the mothers–it was the theme, the churning waves that carried our lives like so many small ships. Underneath the unbroken surface of daily life were the thousand screaming shouting mothers telling their stories online like schools of silent, shoaling fish. Sometimes with teeth. But always, always beautiful and real.
So here’s to the mommy blogs, and writing about motherhood and babies, and eyeroll the snark, because we’re here, beautiful and real.
And speaking of books, because my other main character, Jesca, is a fashion blogger, what better place to share what I think Jesca would wear during a breastfeeding photo shoot?
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