Last week, Dooce defended mommybloggers.
But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence….
Am I violating your privacy? If keeping 95 percent of what goes on in your life off limits in terms of what I write on my website, then yes, I am totally invading your privacy. And what about that time I wrote about your poop, aren’t you going to be mortified when your classmates read about that in sixth grade? Leta, I stopped writing about your poop many, many months ago, and chances are that all the kids you’re going to know in sixth grade will have spent the first three years of their lives shitting their pants, too. Oh wait, THAT’S WHAT HUMANS DO. WHO KNEW.
Finally, I’ve seen it suggested in my inbox and by various critics online that what we do on our websites is egotistical and exploitative. Some even refer to it as child abuse. I know I am not alone when I say that when I sit down to update my website I do it to connect with other people, I do it to reflect on the absurdity of everyday life with the hope that the people who read it will find similarities in their own routine. I did not know that wanting to be a part of a community qualified as egotism.
… Leta, some people will one day try to convince you that what I’ve done here is some sort of sickening betrayal of your childhood, and what those people fail to recognize is that I am doing the exact opposite. This is the glorification of your childhood, and even more than that this is a community of women coming together to make each other feel less alone. You are a part of this movement, you and all of the other kids whose mothers are sitting at home right now writing tirelessly about their experiences as mothers, the love and frustration and madness of it all. And I think one day you will look at all of this and pump your fist in the air.
I mommyblog at least once a week here at 11D, but I’m too shallow to concentrate on any one issue on this blog. (Note to people who want to make cash and fame from blogging. Do not do what I do. Be consistent. Or else people will offer you opportunities to syndicate your blog and then take back the offer, because you’re all over the place.)
I do the mommyblogging for a couple reasons. Those posts may be the only ones that I will print out and give to my kids some day. I loved our talk about Voter ID laws. It might inspire a longer post elsewhere or an academic paper, but I probably won’t print it out and save it in a nice binder. The mommy stuff might be worth saving. The official family record. (Though I may end up deleting the posts about Ian’s speech problems.)
I also get off on the politics of it. I think that parenting is undervalued as a profession. I think that mommyblogs tells the world, "I spent 4 hours getting a kid a haircut and 8 hours doing a stupid school project and I work damn hard. Damnit. When I need to leave work early to go to a school conference, I’m not going off to play. I’m doing more work". I think the mommyblogs also shows how we are better people because we have kids, and spawning is a worthwhile pursuit. Damnit.
The problem with my radical parenting blog scenario is that few non-parents read parenting blogs. And if they do, it’s only to scoff and mock. They don’t read enough to get it. Well, Dooce seems to be satisfied with the community of parents that come out of the mommyblogs. I would have preferred bigger social change.
Update: More from Geeky Mom.
Apt. 11d 
I also get off on the politics of it. I think that parenting is undervalued as a profession. I think that mommyblogging tells people, “I spent 4 hours getting a kid a haircut and 8 hours doing a stupid school project and I work damn hard. Damnit. When I need to leave work early to go to a school conference, I’m not going off to play. I’m doing more work”.
I think this really misses the mark, though. There are very few people who don’t understand that child-rearing is time-consuming or physically exhausting. But, they say to themselves, so is maintaining my meticulous garden, or caring for my “furbabies” (ew), or training for the marathon, and I don’t get to leave work early.
If mommybloggers want to get political, there has to be more open, if uncomfortable, discussion of why childcare should trump most other personal endeavors. The only place I’ve seen anything even close to this recently was the limitations of flex-time discussion at Half-Changed World, and even that was presented as a even-steven pros and cons list.
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We’ve reached a moment where raising the next generation of citizens is no longer a potentially de facto endeavor for every adult. As more and more people choose not to have children, the challenges of raising children come to look like one more category of personal endeavor. Parents think they’re losing this debate, the childfree think they’re losing the debate, and the whole think gives me a headache. I just spent ten minutes having a frustrating conversation with a service person whose childhood lessons in mathematics, database manipulation, and empathy definitely affected me.
Either caring for children is a community endeavor in which all adults have a stake, or public schools are a special benefit to parents, child-focused flex-time is a special benefit to individual parents, and children are luxuries whose care should fall on their own families alone. There’s a lot of heat generated on the internet about these issues, but not a lot of light.
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Sure, the politics that directly deals with parenting doesn’t go deep enough in the blogosphere. Most mommybloggers never talk about social security credits or the positions of the candidates on childcare. The politics there is much more subtle.
Collectively, the mommybloggers are showing that being a mom or dad doesn’t have to mean the Leave it Beaver stereotypes. They are hip, tattooed, cursing, funny, quirky people. They aren’t boring old frumps to be disregarded and laughed at.
They are writing about their everyday lives. Parenting is no longer done behind the closed doors of suburban homes. The mommybloggers are saying WE ARE HERE! WE ARE HERE! For some reason, that seems to irk some people.
They are saying that raising the kids is work, but it’s rewarding work.
They don’t necessary say those statements in those words, but it’s always there between the lines. And those are the necessary baby steps that we need to make before we can get into any real changes in the office place or at Washington.
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It’s funny–I don’t really read any mommybloggers. But I do gravitate towards people who write about their kids sometimes. Back when I was a freshman in college, I was wandering around the Freshman (Writing, but the courses were offered by departments) Seminar signup trying to pick a FS and not being able to decide. I wandered over to the History department’s table and got pitched the Women’s History Freshman Seminar. And honestly, I made my decision when the History person said “Well, the professor just had a baby, and she might even be bringing him to class sometimes.” I thought to myself, *this* is the kind of person I want to take a class from. I want to be talking about politics and history and literature and big ideas with people who are also parents and who value parenting. But I don’t necessarily want to talk about parenting all the time.
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At MOMocrats.com, we are progressive moms who were mommybloggers first, but our husbands and readers got tired of our rantings, so we formed a separate blog-space to talk about things like social security, immigration policy, and the direction of the democratic party. We’re tired of being pandered to by MSM who THINK they know us and what we’re interested in (Hillary’s tips for raising teens, for example).
We were invited to cover the California Democratic Convention and when we introduced ourselves, some of the political bloggers were condescending and not exactly welcoming. One of them said to my colleague, “Oh, so you have what, 2 readers?” Actually, more like 30,000 a month, after only 5 months online, and growing steadily. You gotta start somewhere, right?
So, do you think mommybloggers can cross-over into the poltical blogging sphere?
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I love hearing about other people’s kids. I like it in real life, too, but doing it in blogs is easier, because no one has to worry about whether you’re annoying the person. If I didn’t want to read about your weekend, I certainly didn’t have to. Whereas, in real life, you wouldn’t give me a blow-by-blow account of your weekend, even if we were good friends.
I do think the practical record of what life looks like, lived from the point of view of a “middle class” (I don’t think you actually are, Laura, when it comes down to money, but we’ll use it as an attitude) looks like, with children is informative to the political debate, even if that’s not its purpose. It helps us think through these issues. Not directly, but my attitude, towards private schools/public schools/special needs/bullying/middle class schools/ . . . is influenced by the blogs I read; I become a more educated voter. I think there’s real value to the “WE ARE HERE” shout, and that’s true for other we are hears to, who you might not encounter in real life.
(now the violation of children’s privacy is a complicated, and separate question.)
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Sure, Glennia, I think that mommyblogging can also be overtly political. Elizabeth and I do it once in a while. It’s great to see you folks do it full time. Great, but irksome, story about getting dissed by the political bloggers. They don’t get it yet.
Yeah, I’ve held back on most info about my kids on this blog. But there might have to be some deletions from the historic record at a future date.
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