Good bye, mummy bloggers

I used to belong to a mummy blogging forum. I say, used to. I still do, technically. They've got my password. But recently, I lost interest. I don't go there anymore. I haven't anything positive to post, even though I'm a mummy, and I blog.

Really, I should leave it for good. Idleness will probably overtake my resolve, and their unread messages will steadily stack up in my mail folder.

It started okay. It was a forum where women went to spill out their innards on motherhood. Because parenting is hard work, right? Shit and blood, literally. 'Things are a little traumatic here, because never having handled a baby in my life, I'm holding one right now. It's this mewling blob. The one I ripped naked from my womb while screaming. Er, it didn't come out with a wardrobe of clothes, an instruction manual, or a car seat. It's making a weird face. Any suggestions?'

Then I needed those online forums. The world I inhabited before kids was one where I was in control. I could use my own words. When I had three kids, swapped office for home, exchanged wife for mother, lost colleagues and gained health visitors, then everyone else's words defined me: a language was given to me; other people explained my experience to me; my place in society was determined and managed without me. My change of status became a world turned upside down. Meanwhile, I slowly dissolved and became invisible. That's before we get to the emotional labour. Love, loathing, need to protect, urge to abandon, desire to run, screaming to stay behind. In sum, I know how important those online triplet forums became to my knife edges of in/sanity.

But there's this particular forum. I just don't want to go there anymore. I feel it's inevitable, having watched how things have changed. What's separated me from this particular place is not only that my kids have grown older, or that I'm far away from the urgent hours of babyhood. It's proof that the online mummy world has shifted, too.

I still believe there should be a powerful sound that rings out around the world about what shit and blood and emotional anguish is motherhood. How it works, what makes it tick, what society says, how society acts. Women's voices can turn the invisible into the visible. Women bursting with their own words can effect political change; they can challenge assumptions, demand services, expose social hypocrisies.

But this mummy blogging forum. I go there and first on my screen I see, How do I increase my stats? Making your blog pay. Top tips for working with PRs. Then there's all the products to review! And yet another post on how social media can change everyone's life.

What they mean is, not life, but patterns of consumption. You can model your identity through the products you choose. You can change who you are by the items you review, by the brands you work with, by the corporates you endorse. That's not changing a life. That's not pressing for political change, or yelling at society that they can do better. That's making motherhood fit the market.

But I've lingered on, complaining a bit here and there. Then, what finally turned me off was a post about how a blogger had tried to muscle in on a PR network using an 'inappropriate' approach. The nanny voice urged all the mummy bloggers not to be so rude. They wrote, 'Don't give mummy blogging a bad name'.

So that's it. The values of the words mummy and blogging are defined and policed. A good name in mummy blogging is not about shit and blood, bringing about change, taking on politics and power. It's about approaching PRs in the right way to increase your market visibility.

I'm done on this particular forum. I'm still a mummy, and a blogger. But not at all, I think, a mummy blogger.

Thanks to Rachel

Shark, Squirrel, and Tiger look at me sternly and say, 'Mummy, never meet anyone in real life that you know only on the Internet'.

Pah! What's with the finger wagging? I know lots of people on the Internet! Of course I'm happy to meet them in real life!

Anyway, here's no danger: the person I've arranged to meet can't be a stranger. Because for two years I've read her blog, alright? She let me see pictures of her kiddo covered head to foot with sand. I know which of her shoes feels comfortable. She's wondering if it would be cool to live in Vietnam.

This is what it is, I'm telling Shark, Squirrel, and Tiger, to live in the Kingdom of Blog. We pick our paths. Let dialogue change places. Rest in someone else's space. We can come and go. Most important, we can pick the blogsters who generally don't just tell you want you want to hear. They do their own thing, observe life, tell it how it is, what it means to them. Making it easier to wave, and say, Hi! If you're passing, would you like to sit on a bus?

That's what we do today. We blog-crossers and life-tellers, US to UK, we exchange paths and saying hello, face to face. We sit together on a bus, travel up a mountain, ride a tram, walk round by a beach, eat dinner.

There, I tell the kids. What went wrong? Absolutely nothing. She didn't step off the ferry with a rolling eye and a shotgun; I didn't turn up with my face in bandages and ten police in hot pursuit. No. Everything was fine. And, thanks to Rachel, I'm now wearing a fantastic new hat.

(Tales of wall eyes and no teeth are merely part of the mythos)