Girl Detective

I was away for a week, but it’s still taken me some time to put together my own response to the 01/30/05 New York Times piece on mommy blogging, “Mommy (and Me) by David Hochman.

Many of the responses to Hochman’s piece have been angry and defensive. They see his piece as the latest attack in the mommy wars. I used to consider myself a mommy blogger; I even wrote here and here against those who would write against them. I didn’t find Hochman’s piece to be an attack on mommy blogs, though. There was critique, but I also found empathy, e.g.,

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.”

and

But perhaps all the online venting and hand-wringing is actually helping the bloggers become better parents and better human beings. Perhaps what these diaries provide is “a way of establishing an alternate identity that makes parenting more palatable,” said Meredith W. Michaels, a philosophy professor at Smith College and the co-author of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women.” “You’re turning your life into a story that helps answer the question, ‘Why on earth am I doing this?’ ”

Yet many of the responses to the piece, some written by the bloggers quoted in it, were unhappy with it, and disagreed with statements like

Today’s parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children’s’ lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.

I found that Hochman’s piece contained both empathy and criticism and I appreciated both. Yet the responses relayed mostly a perception of criticism:

Andrea Buchanan of Mother Shock grumbles here that her book but not her blog was named, and disagrees that parental blogging is anything “remarkable.”

Alice Bradley of Finslippy calls it “faintly damning” here.

Melissa Summers of Suburban Bliss says here that it’s “vaguely insulting.”

Ayelet Waldman of Bad-Mother gripes here that she was only quoted on the second page. Read down to a comment by “metacara” that is critical of Waldman’s comments in the article.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce notes here that

I had a hard time containing my glee � not because I and some of my fellow women writers were made out to be selfish, resentful, overreacting pigs in search of validation; funny that none of us were informed that the article would run with that notion when we were interviewed � but that my child�s green eyes were staring at me from the pages of a national paper.

T.O. Mama of MUBAR writes here what most other mommy bloggers say is the best and most balanced response to Hochman’s piece. She says “the article was not troubling itself but it raised some tricky issues.” Yet what’s interesting is the string of comments that follows her post, most of which criticise the NYT piece, and don’t acknowledge it as complicated.

Jen Weiner (pronounced WHY-ner, not WEEner, FYI) of Snarkspot clarifies, with her tongue firmly in cheek, here that her blog “isn’t just an ‘online shrine to parental self-absorbtion.’ It’s an online shrine to authorial self-absorbtion, too!”

I think Weiner’s comment is interesting, because she acknowledges on her blog, as she did in her quote in the NYT piece, that the parent blogs are self-involved. Her breezy tone, though, refuses to let this stick as a judgment. She goes a step further to say that her blog (a journal/diary type of blog) was self-involved before her daughter arrived, and has remained self-involved beyond her daughter since she became a mother. Weiner’s quote implies, correctly, I think, that many blogs are self-involved. And it’s that point that T.O. Mama took issue with from the NYT piece. Not that mommy blogs were being questioned, but that they were being questioned while other blogs weren’t; why are moms singled out for special attention and criticism?

Perhaps the most prevalent gripe about mommy blogs is that many are poorly written. True, but there are a lot of poorly written blogs out there, mommy or not. And while some are poorly written, others are both well written and funny.

So what’s the harm, then, if they’re well written and funny? They can be entertaining, and, as noted in Hochman’s article, they can also help struggling parents out of isolation.

One harm is noted by Hochman, who wonders about what the child in the future will think, “But the question is, at whose expense? How will the bloggee feel, say, 16 years from now, when her prom date Googles her entire existence?”

Hochman further quotes blogger Ayelet Waldman, “Fundamentally children resent being placed at the heart of their parents’ expression, and yet I still do it.”

Additionally, much of the content of mommy blogs is venting. Venting, in short spurts, can be a good thing. It releases pressure so that a system can function in equilibrium. But venting as a matter of everyday practice isn’t healthy, for either the ventor or the ventee. It devolves into bitching. Griping. A lowest common denominator of discourse.

The author of the weblog Mental Multivitamin noted the harm of such venting in an email she wrote in the wake of the NYT piece that she quotes here:

…if, in fact, weblogs are a historical record of the everyday (as the NYT suggests), [then] angst-soaked entries about the flu or potty training or whatever will be prevailing message of our time — not, for example, the pursuit of a rich interior life via reading, thinking, learning; that child- and spouse-bashing, however cleverly written, will represent the common experience of the ordinary mother, not celebration, wonder, merriment….

For more on parenting and mommy blogs by Mental Multivitamin, see her response to the Hochman article here. Interestingly, she also focused on the criticism rather than the empathy in his piece; unlike the other writers I’ve noted, she applauded his critique.

I have a further concern, though. Even if books and blogs contain both “angst-soaked entries” as well as “celebration, wonder and merriment”, then I believe that the former is what leaves a more lasting impression; I don’t believe a reader gets a balance of both. When writers detail the drudgery and the joy, the drudgery gets more print. It’s more concrete, it’s more physical, while the moments of joy and wonder are more fleeting and often emotional. The response to Hochman’s piece mirrored the difficult, if not impossible task, of creating a balanced portrayal that includes both difficulty and joy. His piece contained both, yet the negative got the most attention.

I wrote on one of my previous sites, Mama Duck, here, about how telling the truth about the difficulties had been a trend in recent motherhood books that I found myself unwittingly repeating in my mommy blog. I vowed to try harder. That was last June. Even with that awareness, I still feel like I failed to overcome the focus on the mundane that Mental Multivitamin decries.

In the 1950’s, we had a June Cleaver portrayal of motherhood as noble and tidy. Then there was the antithesis of telling it like it is, starting in the mid 1990’s, perhaps most notably with Ann Lamott’s memoir Operating Instructions. Now that antithesis is reaching a fever pitch with the mommy blogs. Again, we have a backlash, the unfair criticism that T.O. Mama questions. The backlash means that the antithesis of the truth-telling is no-better than the fog filters of yesteryear. I take this as a challenge to move toward a synthesis: something that celebrates the joys, tells the truth about the pain, but doesn’t dwell so much on the latter than the former is effaced.

Like many others, I was blogging before I became a mom. I blogged about pregnancy, birth and motherhood because I was so gobsmacked by the experiences. I felt unprepared and very alone. What the New York Times piece and what the multitude of responses to it have done, though, is to make it very clear that while I felt alone, I never was. There is an ever-growing number of books and blogs that proves that many women (and men) are surprised and frustrated by the challenges of parenthood. The point I have reached, then, is that there is no need to add my voice to the crowd. I no longer care to participate in the “motherhood is hard” discussion. This is not just true of writing, it’s also true of reading. What I write is inextricably tied to what I read. Reading and writing about the tough stuff just encourages me to focus on the difficulties, instead of keeping my eyes open for the moments of joy and surprise.

I became a parent because I wanted to learn. What I want to write about is that learning process, both in being a parent and in general. I will still write from personal experience, which includes motherhood. But I’m going to write in a way that emphasizes the learning and the joys. I’m not going to pretend that the tough stuff doesn’t exist. But I think I’m going to share that privately, rather than with all and sundry online.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Parenthood, Reading, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.