WTAM? *

The New York Times published a piece this weekend on"mommy blogs." Apparently, at this point, around 8,500 people —they didn't say whether this figure is international or domestic— log on to report, minute by minute, their experiences of parenting. Some of these are men, but as with most discussions of parenting, this one was focused on female parenting, always the target of blame and generalization. Reading the piece and following several of the links to quoted blogs, it becomes clear that the author, David Hochman, really stepped on toes with this one:

"The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption."

He meant to say maternal self-absorption. Throughout, he uses the word "parent" to hide from charges of sexism; in almost every case, he really means "mother."

On the one hand (or foot), Hochman seems awfully nasty about the idea of mothers writing our experience. But I have to admit, reading many of the blogs back-to-back (not the best way to take them in—best to find one or two you like, written by a friend or about a godchild of yours), I got a nauseating sense of American Affluence, Bombeck- (or, for the more literary, Annie Lamott)-style humor and Constant Coinage (how many words have you made up today?)—the ABCs, perhaps, of "mommy blogging"—but also staples of mainstream American essay writing these days. Some writers are relentlessly diaristic, tracking the moments of the day so meticulously that it does feel that the word is becoming justification for the life, and these mothers are forgetting how to just be. Or maybe they're unsatisfied with just being, because they live in a city where just being is practically criminal, no matter how many yoga and meditation centers there are on every block. Or maybe, I am saying Them when I should be including myself and saying Us. I confess I hope Oswegatchie does not qualify as a "mommy blog," which is obviously pejorative enough that I keep putting quotation marks around it.

I am trying to imagine keeping a public diary of my early years of mothering. What I've done instead is make baby books, hardback sketchbooks full of stories, lists of nicknames and songs and favorite books, comics drawn by me and my husband, snatches of dialogue—with the idea of giving them to our children to keep when they've left home. As I've created them, I've wondered if my children would ever regard them as invasions of privacy, or remember things differently than I presented them, or remember different things. I restrained the urge to say too much about my responses to my children, keeping as much as I could to descriptions of their development, transcriptions of their utterances, particularly their stories and dreams, because—perhaps this is a contemporary maternal trait—I do worry about being, or being thought, "self-absorbed." I wanted to give them back something of their early selves that I knew they'd forget; I didn't want their baby books to be about me.

Self-absorption is no minor accusation to level at a mother. It is to accuse her of an inability to recognize the Other, of a refusal to offer her child (or anyone, but symbolized by her child) a true reflection of self so that s/he will separate healthily, with self-confidence, able to distinguish his or her own needs and joys from those of others. This reflection is the most important gift a mother or father or caretaker can give to a child. Few people ever ask of fathers that they offer this to their children, their mates or their friends, even at this point in history. I can see why all the writers mentioned in the Times piece have responded with a blizzard of blogbarbs (<—NetLingo take note).



* Was That About Me?