Mad's Big Bloggy Thinkfest: part 3

(warning: long. I promise that I won't post again for a few days to make up for it. I promise a Baby Daisy-palooza when this series is done.)

You are not my sister.

None of you are my sisters.

I have two sisters, thank you very much. They are of the biological persuasion. I love them to death. Seriously, when I am talking family--any family--I am a mamma bear like no other. I would do just about anything for my sisters (and brothers and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews). If I think one of them is threatened, I will go all ape-shit until the situation is rectified.

Here in the blogosphere? This is not a sisterhood.

Let's be frank. I don't know you. I don't particularly want to know you. Sure I want to keep reading your writing and have you keep reading mine. If I visit your neck of the woods, I'd like to get together and stay up 'til all hours discussing life and howling at the moon. But if any one of you emailed me tomorrow to tell me you were moving here, to Sleepy Town, I would break out in a cold sweat.

You see, I don't want you near me. I don't want to make small talk in the park or get held up at the grocery store while we compare niceties about our kids. Nope. That's not what I want from you. From you, I want physical distance.

I want to preserve our distance for many reasons:

1. Like I am sooo totally crushing on you right now
I want to maintain this hyper-real state of being. I like the constructed intimacy of our relationships mainly because it is a constructed state. By bandying that term "construct" I don't mean to infer that the selves we share here are any less authentic than the selves we schlep to the park or to our local Mom's groups. I think we are authentic here in addition to being constructed. Part of this has to do with the simple act of life writing. Life is our only authentic experience; text is always a construct.

I feel that I can let down all sorts of barriers in this space that I could never let down in Sleepy Town. I will likely spend the rest of my life here. This is where Miss M will go to school. My husband and I will work our way to retirement here. Sleepy Town has become a life-long commitment and I need my barriers firmly in place to see me through 'til the end. I don't want to tell the women in my local mom's group about how I really feel about my mother's death or what maternal rage turns me into. Heaven's no. In less than ten years I will likely find myself on the opposite end of the debate with some of these women (women that I think the world of now) when it comes to implementing sex ed curricula in middle school or scrapping hot lunch programs. I live in a small city and I am from a small town. I know the cardinal rule. If you want to survive for the long haul then you need to know how and when to keep your guard up. That's why I don't really tell anyone but very close local friends about this blog. There is only one person in all of Sleepy Town who reads it regularly.

The relationships I have here in the 'sphere are different from those I have formed since moving to Sleepy Town. I don't usually think of these bloggy connections lasting a long time (if they do, that's great). Because of the physical distance between us I can't help but think we operate more according to the code of teen friendship: we can plunge head-long into our fears, our desires, our histories, and stories and not worry about the long term consequences. If it all goes up in smoke, we simply stop reading each other. If it goes up in smoke disasterously, I hit the "delete blog" key and say fuck it all. That, to my mind, is the key way in which we are constructed in this space. We can be as authentic as we like because, in the end, we can simply pull the plug if we want to.

2) Can't you tell? I am totally PMS-ing on you right now
This space respects and contains the constructedness of our conversations. If I piss you off, you can go away for a few posts and I am not likely to notice or fester. If you think some of my posts are funny (no ROFLs yet, alas) but others are self-indulgent wanking, you can pick and choose your reading without hurting my feelings. If we have a major ideological difference we can go our separate ways and it'll all be for the best. Ahem, except for you and you and you, oh special dozen, to whom I have grown quite attached. You can't bugger off so easily. But even if you do, my heart can break in silence. In this respect, blogging makes me feel like a kid again. 40-something women don't have girlfriend crushes. Bloggers and 12-years-old do.

3) I'll tell you because you are my bestest, bestest friend
Because we can live in this constructed, unguarded state, we can talk in the whispers and shouts of intimacy, frivolity, ideals and meaning that we would never dare broach in our adult, physical friendships. To top it all off, we don't have to worry that our pheremones will intermingle and give us all PMS at the same time.

Not all of us write this way but most of us have likely stumbled upon the confessional nature of the genre in our reading even if we haven't let our own guard down. I have talked frankly about death on my blog and I must admit that I am drawn to the blogs of other motherless mothers. I am still very much a repressed Protestant in that I really don't like some of the ambulance chasing that seems to go on in these parts. I will never click to a blog because it has been recommended for the pain its owner is currently undergoing. Who the hell wants a complete stranger showing up in their comments one day to say "my thoughts are with you"? To me that feels wrong. Icky.

Having said that, many of the blogs I read have taken my breath away with raw accounts of the writer's pain: death of parents and of children; infertility, miscarriage, rape; sickness; divorce, and societal discrimination. These are topics that rarely get discussed in real life. In my own posts on death I claimed that I wrote them in part because I don't like socially sanctioned silence when it comes to this natural and profound part of life. Blog reading for me has let me listen in on heart-wrenching and insightful accounts of other silenced life events. Having done this has deepened my understanding and capacity for sympathy.

Uh, will you come sit at my lunch table?
One of the big critiques of mommy blogging is that it is a rarified and homogenous space. I agree. I agree with every ounce of my poor, single-parent raised, social assistance dependent being. I will never make a claim that blogging speaks to all mothers or for all mothers because it doesn't. Period. There are issues of race and class and access, sure, but for me the big hurdle that blogging presents is literacy--high-functioning literacy. How many women are out there who not only can write thousands of words a week but who want to as well? Blogging will always be a genre of privilege just as publishing has always been a genre of privilege. Sure, it would be great if the blogosphere was more representative of non-mainstream groups who also possess this degree of literacy (because I don't think it currently is (the Equity argument)) and it would be even more ideal if the social fabric changed such that there was true equality when it comes to high-functioning literacy (the Affirmative Action argument). These are problems that cannot be solved today, this minute, this hour, or this year. (I will come back to this again in my last post in this series.)

Having said this, I would like to look at the composition of my lunch table. When I think back on my IRL friendships from over the years I realize that I have tended to be extremely insular. When I was a grad student, most of my friends were grad students. Now that I am an academic librarian, most of my friends are academics. I think this is likely the case for most of us. We are drawn to people we have something in common with. Sure, I've branched out a bit here and there over the years, but modern life takes up so much of what I have and there really is very little time to be with friends as it is, let alone to diversify one's community.

Before I started blogging, I spent my evenings listen to Simon Cowell speak formulaic crap while I either knit teddy bears or did dishes. Now I blog and I have developed a rather smallish (though treasured) collection of readers and commenters--this is the community that I respond back to through my comments. In this community I see the following:

two or three academics (just like real life)
two or three librarians (except none of them academic librarians)
a few SAHMs
a lawyer
a few civil servants
a woman who runs a homeless shelter
a therapist
a doula
an artist
a musician
a bunch of Canadians
a few Americans
a couple of Brits
an Australian
a woman living in Germany
a woman living in Mauritania
a couple of childless women
a lesbian
a grandmother
women as young as twenty four and as old as forty five
a few women with special needs children
a mother of a child with physical differences
a few Christians
a Jew
a Wiccan
a bunch of agnostics
some atheists
a whole whack of city dwellers
a few country mice like myself

Pardon me for playing identity politics with you all but I need to say this. Never in my real life have I been exposed to such diversity in my peer group. Never. We may all be white, middle class women in the West but we are more diverse as a group than likely most of us could manage to hobble together for a Wednesday night reading group. I certainly couldn't pull a group like this together in Sleepy Town. Not in my wildest dreams.

Oh and did I mention that if I weren't here, I'd be watching TV. Now that would be homogeneity.

Sure, this degree of diversity may not be world altering but it does have its trickle-down effect. My ideas and opinions have been broadened. The way that I respond (and will respond) to issues in my local community has been altered. I have learned heaps and mounds from all the social justice posts that have come to my attention of late. I have broadened the scope of my charitable giving since becoming a blogger. I have been able to speak with other mothers in my community about parenting issues that have been addressed in this space. In short, blogging has done a lot more that just make me feel fulfilled and smug. What I have learned here is starting to seep out a bit into the concrete world that surrounds me.

I guess you don't have cooties after all
Blogging has also done something else significant for me. Let me explain. Over the last few months I have read several posts where bloggers explain the awkwardness they feel in conventional parenting situations. Often the lament is "I don't feel like I belong with the other Mom's in the park/ at play group/ in kinder music..." Usually the comment section on such posts overflows with "I know what you means" and "I've so been there's." From this I have taken away that a goodly number of us don't in fact wear this mantle of motherhood easily. That makes me wonder if any mothers really do. Now when I go to the park, I try not to feel alienated and isolated. I try to align myself with what the other mothers might be feeling. At the public library this past Saturday, I watched a mother chasing her two exuberant boys around trying to round them up and draw their attentions to books. The pre-blogging me might have thought "poor her" or "can't she control her kids." The blogging me wonders "what is her life, her inner life? What is her experience as a woman and a mother? How does she feel in this moment? Does she feel awkward, like she just doesn't belong here?" I guess you could say that blogging has made me feel not only more comfortable as a mother but also more at home with other mothers.

Will you remember me if I sign your year book?
You may not be my sisters but you are something quite real and quite significant to me. I have grown quite fond of this hybrid of Sim City and midwifery. Does this mean you are my friends? Sorry. I'm afraid I don't know yet. Over the last two weeks I have been in touch with or thinking about friends from my past. One is a woman who I haven't seen in over a decade and who emailed me out of the blue to tell me she is a new Mom. Photos and a flurry of emails ensued. The other is a friend and mentor who is sick--a man I have seen four times since I moved to Sleepy Town seven years ago. In both these instances, the immediate rush I had upon hearing from/about them was a physical rush. K's infectious laugh and the warmth of her smile. T's earnestness. His smell. The way he lives each week as if it were Random Acts of Kindness Week. My memories of them as friends are deeply corporeal. These people feel as if they are part of the flesh and blood that has brought me to this place and to this person that I am.

How will I remember you (and by you I mean the bloggers that I have developed a strong rapport with)? I can barely remember the plots of books that I read five years ago. Characters fade from my imagination so quickly. Who are you to me? Are you text or are you flesh? I guess time will tell.


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Yet another bloody caveat
This post is my experience of the blogosphere; it won't reflect every blogger's experience of it. I tend to focus my reading on parenting blogs that engage with social issues, that reflect on what motherhood and what parenting mean from a theoretical or even metaphoric standpoint, and that aren't afraid to speak to the full-range of dirty and sublime emotions we encounter in our day-to-day lives. This kind of reading isn't everyone's cup of tea. Perhaps your experience in these part differs dramatically.