The New York Times in January ran a story about parents who blog, and there have been a lot of comments regarding the article on the mommy blogs I check out regularly. So I thought I’d add mine. I’m sure all of my 8 or so readers have been dying to read my reaction!
The American family has changed drastically over the last century, leaving many parents on their own with newborns, their own parents far away, living their own lives. Many mothers find themselves alone for many, many, many hours, trying to find the humor in being covered with infant spit-up and sore boobs and weird-colored substances coming out of their new little angels. Usually, the fathers have to return to work. Mothers are admonished by their pediatricians to stay indoors, away from other people for the first few weeks, so that baby’s immune system can kick in. It is these two or three weeks that indoctrinate new mothers into the brain damage that is parenthood.
Now, Bill Cosby first told us about the brain damage. He hypothesized that the brain damage was something our children suffer from, and he was mostly right. What he forgot to mention was that it’s contagious. Mothers get it from their babies.
OK, it’s perhaps not fair to say that it’s “brain damage” so much as just “brain rewiring.” It is intuitive in new mothers to attune their bodies, their minds toward keeping the dear little bundle alive. In simple terms, and forgive me if I sound condescending, it’s necessary to the continuation of the human species. Women find very early on in their new careers as mothers that their once-sharp wit has been lost; that big vocabulary words get stuck somewhere on the back of the tongue, never making their way into normal conversations. Many call this “mommy brain,” and it doesn’t matter if the mother goes back to work when her child is 6 weeks old or 6 years old, every mother I’ve met has suffered from mommy brain for at least the first year of her child’s life. It’s hormonal, and it’s natural. I used to feel true shame, as I have a whole lot of student loan debt that needs to be paid off someday, loans that I used so that I could shove vast amounts of knowledge into my brain for use in a career and in life. Now, I’m lucky if I remember to brush my hair in the morning before heading off to the playground.
One way many mothers have coped with the mommy brain is to blog. For some, words flow more loftily and easily out of the brain and through the fingers than through the apparatus of the mouth. And I think to combat the fact that many mothers are alone, they seek to throw their voices like ventriloquists out into the world to convince themselves they’re not dummies. They find community with other mothers who are in the same boat; they find useful tips or just damn funny stories from mothers who have navigated the same snark-infested waters.
I cracked up yesterday when I read about Leta figuring out how to stick her finger in her nose! Sure, Bill Simmons might not find this terribly entertaining (well? Actually, he might…), but as a mother, I thought of my own stories of my kids’ first nose-picking incidents, and I thought it was funny what Leta’s mother’s reaction was: “Pick a winner, little one. Pick a winner!”
It’s self-absorption, yes. But isn’t all blogging? For that matter, isn’t all writing? Why do we write? Why do we privilege writing, setting mommy blogging below, let’s say, blogging about politics or the electronics industry? What is blogging, anyway? It’s opinion, first-hand account experiences, written down and presented in a medium that anyone with an Internet connection can access. Every interest has its niche. I’m just glad that, during these years when I am dealing with rotavirus, snot, potty training, and bloody noses, I can read about Zach and VomitFest 2005.
Thank you, mommy bloggers and the people who read them. You make my job much more amusing!
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