365

Happy International Women's Day

Happy Blogiversary to me. OK, it's not really my blogiversary. Tomorrow is. Today is simply day #365 as a blogger. When I was a youngin' growing up in Ontario, the learner's permit that you got so that you could drive a car was called a "365"; it allowed you 1 year in which to practice before you had to take the driving test. Pass the test and get your license; refuse to take the test or fail it before the deadline and your learner's permit would expire.

And so, on this, my last day as an apprentice blogger, I plan to take the test. It's an all or nothing, single essay question worth 100%

On International Women's Day, how would you theorize blogging as related to feminism and motherhood? You have 1 hour to complete the test before you must fold laundry and help wash dishes. Begin.

(insert: I tried to complete the test in my blogging hour but it was just too big. When my husband came home from work, it took me over a half an hour just to explain all that I was hoping to write. This means that there will be installments over the next week or so. I did make a decent go at the beginnings of it all and maybe the comment discussion will open up the rest of the conversation. Please tell me that I didn't fail. Please don't take my learner's permit away.)

Let me begin with a quotation from that first post a year ago:

"While the wage gap between women and men is still so pronounced, here in the blogosphere we have the multiple voices of unpaid women--unpaid as mothers but, more to my point, unpaid as writers--offering up their talents free of charge: speaking because they need a voice NOT because that voice will be heard, recognized, or remunerated. It's an age-old story. Women do what women must and the economy largely ignores them despite being utterly dependent on them.

When I studied English literature years and years ago, I learned a little about the rise of the woman novelist in the 18th century. So many women flocking to a new genre that afforded them room to speak. Some, like Charlotte Smith, found writing novels distasteful--their true calling being poetry. But alas, novels paid the bills and with a good-for-nothing husband (she left because she "feared her life was not safe") and 12 children, she did what she had to.

And so we now have another new genre and throngs of wired women looking for that room of their own. Most will go unheard, many will be heard but unrecognized but, with hope, a few will not only gain influence but will also be well-rewarded for their efforts."

This is how I saw the parenting blogosphere through my idealized eye one short year ago. So much has changed in my thinking yet so much remains the same.

Back then I modeled blogging on conventional career paths and tied it to the economy. I never thought of myself as someone who wanted to be or would be remunerated for my writing but I did think that some of the bloggers I read would go on to make money in the more conventional fields of journalism, freelance writing, and creative writing. In short, I saw blogging as a means to an end. I did not see it as an end in itself. I didn't know about adSense or career blogging then; I was a babe in the woods. I'm still a babe in the woods.

A year later, I do see blogging as an end in itself. The parenting blogosphere is a strong community (or a community of separate communities that overlap and are as complexly interwoven as that cable-knit sweater in my last post). Although this community is not exclusively made up of women, it is a female-intensive space and like most female-intensive spaces, it tends to be undervalued by society. Conventional articles in newspapers and magazines usually deride mommy bloggers as scribbling women who are not adequately attentive to their children, who egomaniacally place their needs above those of their children, who think of their children as fashion accessories and who recklessly compromise their children's privacy to serve their own ends. The fact that the parenting blogosphere has created an alternative means for distilling received wisdom on child rearing practices is usually ignored in the conventional media. The fact that mothers are communicating with other mothers in a way that is articulate and wise is overlooked. The fact that parents turn to the blogosphere because they spend their evenings attentive to crib monitors rather than frivolity is not really mentioned. The fact that family life has become increasingly fractured and broad-based community support of new parents has been eroded over the last few decades is also not mentioned.

You see, to acknowledge these things would be to acknowledge that something quite revolutionary has sprung up here. Mothers (gasp!!) have taken back their authority to mother from the experts; the parenting books are now being read simply as supplements, not gospels. Yes, blogging mothers have recreated much of the support network that has always been a vital part of parenting. They have gained confidence in their roles as mothers and have crafted a sense of agency to think and act as women integrated in the various mantles they are forced to adopt (employee, mother, wife, intellectual, activist...). In short, they have created a whole new set of operating instructions for what it means to be a mother.

I end with this question: why are the fellows who developed Linux (a distributed, cooperative, free operating system) hailed as heroes of the computer age--Robin Hoods in a world of Gatesian monopolies--while the women (primarily) who have developed a counter-culture discourse to pseudo-scientific parenting considered reckless egomaniacs?

OK, that's all I could muster tonight. There will be more installments, I'm afraid. I have a lot, lot, lot that I still want to say.