Half Changed World

I have a new DotMoms post up today, about my loss of a few months of digital photos.  (For those who were concerned, I was able to get a bunch of them back by pulling the deleted images off of my memory card with PhotoRescue.  But some, including most of the first day of preschool this year, are gone for good.)  FYI, there was a story about DotMoms on some NBC stations earlier this week.

Thanks to The Zero Boss, I found this very interesting essay on writing about our experiences as mothers, by Andrea Buchanan, author of Mother Shock.  She starts by talking a bit about how the publishing industry consigns writing about the experience of mothering into either "mommy-lit" (which is not seen as real literature) or "momoirs" (which is less respectable than real memoirs).  She suggests that mothers have turned to blogs because the mainstream media portrays such a narrow and unreflective slice of our experience:

"So mothers who do not find themselves in what they read have begun to create their own narrative and to publish it in a place where anyone with access to a computer can find it: the internet."

And then she argues that mothering blogs are a powerful feminist tool because they provide unvarnished access to a range of experiences broader than any of us are likely to encounter in person.  By writing in her blog, she says,

"I write about such private things in a relatively public place because sharing my experience as a mother-in-process, as a mother continually learning and evaluating and questioning and contextualizing and theorizing and evolving, may touch someone. It may touch someone who is in a similar emotional place, or in similar circumstances, such as the readers who write me to tell me that what they read makes them feel less alone. Or it may touch someone like my mother-in-law, who is in a vastly different place, a mother with grown kids, a woman for whom feminism is a non-issue – in other words, a person with a completely different viewpoint."

I’d like to tie this back to a discussion that happened on Misbehaving.net about a month ago, about whether women are under-represented in the blogging world.  The thrust of the discussion was that while the pundit blogs that get most of the media attention and that get the most daily hits (especially during the election) are largely written by men (with the notable exception of Wonkette), if you go by sheer numbers, women are quite likely the writers of the majority of all blogs.  And many of the blogs written by women are mothering blogs, focused on "the real, gritty, funny, mundane, sometimes boring, sometimes riveting secret life of mothers." (Buchanan again)

So why aren’t parenting blogs getting more attention?  I think much of the media attention the pundit blogs got over the last year was driven by the presidential election, and will fade now that its done.  Some of the inbalance is mechanical — ratings in both the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem and the Technorati 100 are driven by links from other blogs, and while the political bloggers routinely link to several other blogs a day, many parenting bloggers never post links.

But some of the issue has to do with the very democracy of experience that Buchanan praises; while I enjoy spending a few minutes reading most of the parenting blogs I run across browsing on BlogExplosion or following the chain of blogrolls, unless a blog is especially well-written, I’m unlikely to bookmark it to return to again and again.  The ones that I’ve blogrolled here are all ones that I enjoy reading.

Thought I’d take a few minutes to comment on the services that I’m using to run this blog.

I’m hosted on Typepad, which is the hosted service from the creators of Movable Type. I’m coming to the end of my 90-day free trial, and I’m definitely going to continue with them. I wanted a service that would let me blog without having to get elbow deep into HTML, and it does that, without any hassle at all. I haven’t fiddled much with the layout, but you can, and my friend who uses a screen reader tells me that it works well for her.

The only thing that I’ve been less than thrilled with is the statistics and referrals page, which only tells you how many page hits you’ve gotten, and makes no attempt to tell you how many visitors you’ve had. So I’ve signed up with StatCounter, a free service that provides more detailed tracking. I know there are other services that do this, but this is the first one that I found that I could figure out how to implement with Typepad.

I’ve signed up with BlogExplosion, which is a service designed to help you increase the traffic to your site. The idea is that the more you surf other members blogs, the more they get sent to visit yours. I’m somewhat dubious as to whether any of the people sent to my site are staying around for more than the required 30 seconds, but it’s been fun to play with. I find it quite fascinating to see what people feel compelled to blog about.

Today my first post appears on DotMoms, a group blog of about 20 different mothers, writing in alternation. I’ll be posting there twice a month, writing less about policy and more about my family.

Their website also includes links to a hundred or more mothers who blog. Most of these are just women writing about their lives and their families. I am fascinated by the brief views they provide into different worlds — mothers who work and mothers who homeschool, single mothers and married mothers and lesbian mothers, mothers of infants and mothers of college students and mothers of children who died. And I love that all these women think their lives are interesting enough that someone might want to hear about them — and they’re right.

Hi. I did write a book review last night, about Helen Simpson’s “Getting a Life,” but then I did something wrong and the computer swallowed it. I’ll try again, maybe next week, maybe sooner. Right now I’m feeling like I need to spend a little more time on my own life, a little less time on this blog. Tracking down all the paperwork needed to get my son registered for preschool and for the speech services he gets from the public school is taking far too much energy.

Ok, blog ettiquette question. As soon as I posted Monday night, I had some more thoughts on the topic that I wanted to add — in particular, I realized that I blurred together not wanting to be on the high-stress grab the bronze ring track and not taking work seriously. What’s the etiquette on going back and revising, versus adding a new post with additional thoughts? I get the impression that someone receiving the blog over a RSS feed might never see the edits; is that right?

So, why am I starting a blog? With a full-time job and two active kids, I need another timesuck in my life like a fish needs a bicycle. (two points to anyone who can name the reference) But I’m doing it anyway, because each time I read an article on women and jobs and families and choices, I have two basic responses:

1) How come they never talk about the men?
2) I could have written that.

I remember as far back as when I was a teenager reading Anna Quindlen’s columns for the NY Times, and wanting her job. Well, the beauty of the computer age is that anyone can pretend to have a column — and if you’re lucky, someone who isn’t related to you might even read it.

I’m also hoping that the journal-like nature of a blog will help overcome my natural inclinations to: a) try to include everything I’ve ever thought about a subject in a single article and b) edit obsessively, which when put together make it near impossible for me to ever finish a project that doesn’t have an external deadline.