Mom, where’s my blog??

Warning: You’re about to read a rant.

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As I mention in my obligatory About Me page, Mommy Misadventures is just one of my many online incarnations. I began blogging way back when in 1999 when Pitas — an online diary service — became popular in the various anime fandom circles that I was a part of at the time. The idea behind the service was to keep an online diary to write about whatever caught your fancy and allow folks online to read your thoughts.

Over the years, my various blog incarnations have captured my life as I knew it. I have written about my last years in college, forever memorializing a horrible commute, lack of money for coffee and worries about how to get a job in the Silicon Valley just as the dot bomb was claiming casualties over the Valley. Once I graduated and began (officially) living with the man who would become The Hubs,  I moved onto the chronicles of a young professional, eking out a meager living, still complaining about my horrible commute and bemoaning the fact that I still couldn’t afford Starbucks. My blog followed has me not only from various services and domains but also to and from various jobs and homes and stages in my life, going from fully public to fully private and everywhere in between.

Arguably, my blog could be more correctly categorized as a journal because I have recorded actual happenings in my life for the world to see but not necessarily for my audience. For years, I wrote in my blog for one person and one person only: me. And for years, I was happy to blog. From 1999 to 2008, I could say that I recorded an entry for nearly every week of my life, if not every day for some days. Sometimes, I’d even have multiple entries a day.

That all changed in 2008 when I took the plunge to become a stay at home mom and embark on a new career as a freelance writer. At the time, it seemed like just about everyone and their grandmother (almost literally!) was keeping a Mommy blog. The media was all over the power of the so-called “Mom Blogger” and how Moms were changing the face of the Internet, one post at a time. As a longtime blogger, familiar with the ins and outs of WordPress, self-hosting and all that other rigmarole, I figured that Mom blogging would be a natural evolution and extension of what I had already been doing.

And in a way, it was. Choosing my domain, setting up my WordPress install, joining a few groups and letting folks know where my blog was… that was all easy-peasy. Been there, done that — it was nothing new, so I thought. About the newest thing I did was sign up for the BlogHer ad network. Ad revenue would be nice, I thought to myself, but if I didn’t get much in the way of it, oh well.

As I continued to blog, I began visiting other Mommy blogs in an effort to get to know my “neighbors” online and noticed that their sites were all festooned with things I hadn’t bothered with before — giveaways, affiliates, sponsors. I found myself having a bit of, well, Mommy blog envy. Look at these nicely designed sites! Look at these nicely designed buttons! Look at how easy they make it to add their RSS feed!

By comparison, my site looked… amateur. Really amateur. I didn’t have a nicely designed button or layout. Heck, I was using whatever old layout looked good to me at the time. Was that so wrong?

These Mommy blog sites, they had so much to read. It seemed that the majority of popular blogs that I came across had valuable tips and tricks, articles on things like homemaking, homeschooling, frugal living, all those sorts of things. And I couldn’t ignore the fact that these blogs had huge numbers of followers. On a good day, I would get happy over a comment or two on my blog. These blogs, they’d have one or two pages of comments per post. Crazy!

As I was starting to learn more about professional blogging as part of my freelance writing, I began to realize that more and more mom blogs were following the basic tenets of pro blogging: define your niche, craft valuable content, create connections with other bloggers and networks, etc. These blogs were pretty most likely because they had spent money on a professional layout, read up on and employed SEO techniques, had a Twitter and Facebook page which they used to promote themselves and their product.

I knew then what I needed to do to make Mommy Misadventures a “successful” Mommy blog.

Except… I just couldn’t do it. All that marketing, worrying about how to increase my readership and keep my readership, having to promote myself via Twitter and Facebook… it made my head hurt. I started blogging way back when for myself, primarily to have something of myself to look back upon.  If others found it interesting, great. If not, it was no big deal. Similarly, I signed up for Facebook and Twitter when the services became available to interface with other people that I knew or would like to get to know. (Yeah, signing up for Facebook and Twitter as a communication tool rather than simply a marketing tool? Who woulda thunk it?!)

Simply put, I didn’t want to think of myself and my writing about my life as a product.

I discovered that blogging in this capacity,worrying about whether or not my content would attract visitors, just was not fun for me. I wanted to talk about my attempts at crafting, photography, homemaking and my work at home business but was unwilling to make any of those the Mommy Misadventures niche. Dejected from my failure as a Mommy Blogger and disillusioned by the larger world of Mommy blogs, I stopped blogging.

But I never stopped reading blogs. And while my Google Reader was filled various Mommy blogs, I found that while I subscribed to their RSS feeds, I generally never read their articles unless the particular subject really caught my fancy. And I deliberately use the word “article” here because, by and large, that’s what so many Mommy blogs published. They were articles on their niche subject, chockablock full of information but largely impersonal.

As I read, I realized that the Mommy blogs that I preferred to follow and read regularly were not the niche, article driven blogs. The Mommy blogs that I truly enjoyed were by folks who were unafraid to share their life — the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly — with their reader. These Mommy blogs gave a more real glimpse into Mommy hood, sharing snippets of their lives as mothers without having to tie in with a particular theme. These Mommy blogs were authored by real Moms, Moms who I could relate with, Moms who I honestly wished I could be friends with.

In short, the blogs I enjoyed reader were more in line with what I had hoped  for on my own blog.

By the time I came to this epiphany — yeah, I’m slow — I had not blogged for several months. And you know what? I was miserable. I am a writer. I can’t not write. It is how I express myself, bad grammar, gratuitous usage of commas, semicolons and run on sentences inclusive. (Just in case you were wondering if I’ve ever noticed I use way more commas and em dashes than should be legal. Yes, I know. I can’t seem to stop, either.)

And for better or worse, writing online is my medium of choice. For me, it isn’t so much that I know I have an audience but rather the fact that I may possibly have an audience. If folks enjoy what I write, cool. If not, well, at least I haven’t left any question to how I feel on any given subject.

So as the days go by, you may see more entries on this blog. They may be about parenting. They may be links. They may be deeply thought provoking, bitingly sarcastic or profoundly stupid. They may be about whatever popped into my head that I just felt I needed to share and was too long for Twitter. But rest assured, there will be more to share. Will the content be valuable? I don’t know; you’ll have to decide for yourself if stories of chasing after my toddler yelling, “OMG, get that diaper off of your head!” is valuable to your life. It may be. It may not be. All I know is that I’m done trying to satisfy a niche. I never fit into them before and I certainly won’t try to squeeze into them now.

This is me and this is my blog. Hello.

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