Parents First, Bloggers Second

Lisa Carver had an interesting rant on Babble last week. Ostensibly a review of Neal Pollack's parenting tell-all, Alternadad, it was structured a bit more like a temper tantrum, lashing out violently in several directions at once and ending up in a heap in the middle of the grocery store. Carver's language was loose, even careless; her attention was divided and perhaps even conquered by her subject. She also had great points to make, and she managed to muddle through and make them.

She writes:

As a generation (X), what we know for sure is how to be sarcastic and irreverent. Parenthood is bigger than that. It inspires thankfulness, humility, rage, unfixable guilt over what we may be doing to our children, unfixable sorrow over what we now understand for sure was done to us when we were their age, wonder and a quiet sense of sacredness. These emotions are so foreign to us, it took me twelve years (that's how old my eldest is) to even realize that's what was happening. Figuring out how to translate these new feelings and outlooks into literature, and still keep it amusing and intriguing and true, will probably take me another twelve. In the meantime, how pathetic to try to use the tools of yesterday (irony, dirty words, random reference to sex and gross things) to try to tell the story of this new kind of relationship and life we find ourselves in.

Thank you, Lisa, for saying this - and for the many other things you said in that wild, undisciplined, and in some ways unfair piece of attitude.

Blogs as journals - that is, as diaries of the author's daily experience and thoughts - were subsumed by theme- and expert-driven blogs among most major blogging audiences a couple of years ago; not so in the world of parenting. The top parenting blogs are still chronicles of the minutiae of daily existence, and those with the largest readerships project the kind of attitude you'd call voice in a book. Life is not a book, and we need not edit it like one, but they do. Some have honed their blogging voice with such precision that their blogs have become something like a ritual dance, a radio station guaranteed to be playing a certain kind of song, and their responses to everything they encounter has been so well-scripted by their posturing that they have nothing more to learn from being parents - or, at least, nothing they'd dare tell us. I think Lisa Carver's rage at Neal Pollack stems from her sense that his 'tude represents an extreme on a continuum of sassy bloggers who are happy to betray their children's privacy, dignity, and autonomy for the sake of a good post. And those are the people who, with a couple of exceptions, are dominating the conversation when it comes to describing what it means to be a mother - or a father - in the bubble of the blogosphere.

Asha Dornfest described the voice, much more charitably, as "a certain prickliness, an attitude that says, 'I’m a tough-talkin' mama. You got a problem with that?'" She describes the perspective as a "revolutionary" one for mothers, and says she loves to read these blogs. But she gently pointed out their limitations in "The Mommy Blogging Clique," a post on her personal blog, Ashaland, back in 2005. Taking on the shoegazing, awkward voice of a teenager trying to make friends at a new high school, she apologizes for not cussing or drinking like a sailor. Eventually she cracks the matter right open:

And I'm, like, a pretty positive person? I see the bright side of things most of the time? I'm not, like, DUMB or NAIVE or anything, but my blogs are light at times, and dark at times. I'm not, you know, cynical? And, well, honestly? I think people pass off cynicism as intelligence a little too much. But that's okay!! Some of my best friends are cynical, cussing drinkers! Really! I just don't want to have to sound critical to be taken, you know, seriously.

The main point of Carver's incendiary essay is that every role has its price, and that the price of comic cynicism is the dulling of real perception, which is pretty much the saddest thing you can lose when watching a child grow up and slowly pass you by. Rachael Brownell, a contributor to Babble's team blog Strollerderby, wrote surprisingly candidly about the unwelcome side effects on her own blog:

My initial intent, when I started writing CrankMama less than a year ago, was to give voice to what I felt was an underrepresented segment of the mothering world: the unpretty, non-knitting, domestically challenged working babes who were not always fascinated by the travails of the family bed or the joys of teaching their children Spanish before age two.

But I’m afraid I’ve merely swapped one dogma for another. Being hip and trendy is just as limited and defining as any religion, or quilting bee, or PTA meeting ever was. And maybe moreso because those of us circling around in this group are often laboring under the isolation and cynicism of our choices.

And missing the lovely beauty of our sweet elves as they grab at our legs and beg us away from our computers.