Mommyblogger

To be fair, I didn't even know there was a field to enter until I'd already entered it. I knew about LJ and diaryland and blogger and I had a friend who had a mommy blog (though she didn't call it that) and that was the extent of my knowledge of the blogoverse when I started Sprout, over three years ago, solely to document my pregnancy with Frances. I didn't discover the momosphere until last March, when I discovered that Kateri had already added me to her blogroll (blogroll? What's a blogroll?) and there were, actually, thousands of women doing exactly what I was doing.

It took a bit longer to discover that the momosphere is considered a bit of a ghetto, and that those of us who've made it our home find respect from the rest of the blogosphere difficult to come by. 'But you write about your kids,' the charge seems to be, 'and what's interesting or important about that?'

I hesitate to mention the obvious, but the vast majority of adults in western civilization are or will someday be parents. We're not a minority, and the issues and concerns that affect those who raise children are the issues and concerns that will affect almost all of us. It seems a bit silly to pretend that we are occupying only one small corner of the culture. We are the culture: we're almost all the adults, and we're raising the next generation of adults.

Despite the ghettoization of the momosphere, I've stayed here (and so have most of you). I even had a chance to break out--the other blog--and what happened? It starved to death. At first the momosphere was an unconscious choice, but now, it's home and I don't want to leave it--in part because of its ghetoization. Ursula le Guin wrote about how she explicitly chose science fiction and juvenile fiction as her media in part because they were marginalized, so she felt freer to stretch conventions and explore issues of interest to her.* Literary fiction gets all the respect, but it can be a straitjacket to a writer.

Similarly, while the momosphere doesn't get much respect from the big-name Real Bloggers like DailyKos, it's freeing to be able to do pretty much what I want. I can write deliriously sappy posts about how beautiful my daughter is, a few posts containing recipes or craft instructions, some community-building exercises like the Extravaganza, throw in the occasional feminist rant, digress into an exploration of anarchism or sustainable development, do some fundraising, write up a few book reviews, and dissect the Conservative government's ridiculous child-care scheme--and you all come along for the ride. Even when, two years into the enterprise, I take a hard turn into explicit environmentalism and start writing about green issues on a regular basis and, instead of abandoning Beanie Baby en masse, some of you actually join right in.

Part of it is the flexibility of Mommyblogging, which after all is a subset of personal blogging, which means you can write about any damned think you please.

Part of it is the magic of Narrative, which is our next stop:

Narrative

Politics-and-culture blogging tends to assume a predictable format: develop a thesis, collect data to support your points, organize them in pyramid paragraphs, and tie them all up into a pithy conclusion. Be funny, be angry, feel free to insult the other side. I used to spend entirely too much time (during my first interminable excruciating workless job) on sites and bulletin boards doing just that: 'You think xyz? Well, aren't you stupid! And I have the evidence to prove it.'

Strangely, it never changed anyone's mind. There were one or two occasions where I thought it might have, simply because a year or so later during subsequent debates on the same topics, my former opponents debated on my side. Very gratifying. But still. I wanted, to echo Her Bad Mother's post on internet smackdowns, to demonstrate exactly how full of shit they were and see them eat it.

And it never worked.

How odd, eh? When I beat my opponents over the head with the typed equivalent of a nuke, they refused to concede the battle.

In retrospect it's pretty obvious. Who ever concedes defeat? I mean, come on: for a real-time example, look at the US in Iraq! Look at the Middle East! Even when a person's very life is at stake, actually conceding defeat and surrendering is extremely, extremely rare. It's not going to happen on the internet. It doesn't matter how coherent or correct an argument is, no one is ever going to say, "You're right, you win."

Which means that such debates on the internet either a) turn into flame-wars or b) preach solely to the converted. I suppose if I wanted to, I could do a really bang up job of firing up the troops by writing about capitalized Politics and Culture daily and separating it wholly from the context of my life and my history, pretending to that often-criticized pseudo-objectivity that supposes a single Truth devoid of environment, but I don't want to. I'd rather think that what I write has a microchance of changing someone's mind, or at least introducing them to a new way of looking at things that they wouldn't have been open to reading if it had been couched in abusive terms or strident language.**

It isn't possible for me to write without touching on politics or culture: I am a professional environmentalist, a witch, an anarchist, a feminist, a type 1 diabetic, my daughter is a dwarf. We're a living-breathing-every-day example of the-personal-is-political in action. No matter what I write about in our daily lives, politics and culture come into play. Whether it's Frances's experiences on the playground, or the joys of encountering websites that counsel a eugenicist approach to diabetic reproduction, or a better definition of sustainable development, or my family's attempts to adopt a more local diet, or my attempts to navigate modern kiddie culture without allowing the media bigwigs to turn Frances into a Disney automaton, politics and culture are in everything we do, and almost everything I write.

But it's written as narrative. It's a story, with characters, plot, setting and dialogue. I've agonized about narrative arcs often enough, gods know, that this is no big secret for most of you. Narrative is more interesting, more approachable, less threatening. I will follow fiction into a place that non-fiction could never take me: novels, stories, plays and movies have accomplished tremendous social change by describing the explaining the inner life of persons and communities that are not part of the mainstream--prison inmates, or slaves, or women living in repressive religious communes. All narrative contains values; any narrative that claims to be "just entertainment" has simply adopted the culture's dominant values without examining them. For example, a few days ago I read a quote by a director of suspense movies who was defending his practice of putting female characters in dangerous and sexualized circumstances: "It's a suspense movie! What else am I going to do with them? Besides it's just a genre convention." I'm paraphrasing, but you get the gist. And his work and those defenses say at least as much about his and our culture's views on the roles and worth of women as an extended non-fiction treatise would. To more people, who are more vulnerable to the message because they are not reading critically but have entered a state of the willing suspension of disbelief, they have opened themselves to the story.

I'm under no illusions that I will "convert" anyone, and I don't want to. Whether or not you agree with me means much less than it used to; and that's due in part to motherhood, too, where I met and befriended so many women who had views so different from my own on everything from tummy-sleeping to diapering to foreign policy. So I'm not sneaking a subliminal political message into harmless-seeming stories about Frances and the adorable way she climbs onto the bench on the back deck. Really, are you going to change your world-view because I wrote a nice post about Frances? No. But maybe it will open up a small crack in a window to another way of living.

How many of you, in your regular day-to-day lives, know a type 1 diabetic anarchist feminist environmentalist witch? Well? Show of hands? And anyone who knows me in real life, you can't count me for this exercise. See? Zero. One of my small hopes for Beanie Baby is that just by telling everyday stories about my life, and the life of my little girl, us type 1 diabetic anarchist feminist environmentalist witches will seem a bit less frightening. Maybe even (looks furtively right, then left, then drops voice to a whisper) kind of normal.

I don't look that scary, do I? In my blue jeans and plain t-shirts, carrying the WBBE, BN, dirt-brown hair tied back in a ponytail, reading a book or talking about how we just went to the farm and how much Frances loved the goats?

Narrative makes bridges. It makes things comprehensible, shows what's going on in someone's mind down to the smallest cracks, not so that you agree with them or convert, but so that you can maybe understand why they are the way they are and why they think the way they do. And what I have here is a narrative: our story of finding (and then not-finding) a diagnosis for Frances's short stature, our ongoing story of figuring out what that means, my story of navigating the Canadian health-care system as someone with a chronic illness, my various stories of my environmental passions including our new stories of trying to remake our family in a greener image, my story of pursuing publication--all stories. Narrative is less threatening, it's not intimidating, it doesn't yell at people (ideally--read Tathea by Anne Perry for a good example of how not to write a story). But the politics and culture is there--it's just more like Margaret Atwood or Ursula le Guin (who are obviously on a different scale of quality), as opposed to Naom Chomsky or Peter Singer.

For most of you, this means absolutely nothing. You want me to shut up about the inner workings of the blog already and make with the Francestime. (Coming right up.) But for some of you, who read for politics and culture and prefer it straight-up, I hope you'll think about it. There's nothing wrong with the well-wrought soapbox, but just because I'm not standing on one doesn't mean I'm not talking about politics and culture. I am.

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*If I were at home, I'd look up the exact quote and essay, but I'm not. If anyone is interested let me know and I'll get it for you.

**Straight-up politics and culture has a very big place, of course, and I'm not saying it accomplishes nothing. Firing up the troops and preaching to the converted are both respectable undertakings, as Mary Pipher describes in her recent book Writing to Change the World, which I highly recommend and will probably review over the next little while. But I think that straight-up debate-style Politics and Culture rarely changes anyone's mind, and it isn't what I want to do here. Just in case anyone reading this is -->this close<-- to offering me money to blog about Big Issue subjects, which is highly unlikely, or even not offering me money but wants me to write for them anyway, which is only slightly less unlikely, I'm not opposed to it. But I wouldn't approach it as a means of convincing anyone of anything, since it almost certainly wouldn't.