Works cited

The one work I can't externally hyperlink to:

Hall, Stuart. "The Work of Representation." The Media Studies Reader. Ed. Laurie Oullete. New York: Routledge, 2013. 171-196. Print.

All other consulted works are hyperlinked to externally.

Mommy, what's the answer?

At the end of the day, it's not so much whether or not Mir's portrayal of motherhood is actually more in line with her reality than Naomi's. As Hall explains, Foucault told us that there is no one absolute truth, "but a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth." He gives the example that children of single parents may or may not actually be more delinquent, but if, as a society, we hold this to be true, and punish single parents and their children, then this may become 'true' as a result. Similarly, mommy blogs create a discursive formation that sustains a regime of truth about motherhood. 

This discourse is encoded by mommy bloggers, as they select which parts of their experiences as mothers to share with readers. Naomi chooses to encode a very positive motherhood – not perfect, but where the negatives are just little speed bumps on an overall smoothly paved road. Mir encodes a different motherhood, where the road winds a bit more, and there are some pretty nasty potholes along the way (though I suppose Naomi’s encountered some potholes, too – literally). And then it’s our job as a reader to decode these messages. I will decode them differently than anyone else. What I see as an unattainable, picture-perfect portrayal of motherhood, inline with hegemonic ideals, might be to someone else a positive inspiration to work through their own trials and tribulations. Given that we are all decoding differently, it’s hard to ultimately decide if a blog is radical.

It’s not so simply and straightforward to say Rockstar Diaries isn’t radical, but Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda is. And even if that is the case, that doesn’t make one better than the other. As a reader, I have different affective responses to different mommy blogs. Sometimes I laugh, from time to time I’ve cried, and sometimes I’m immensely frustrated. But either way I keep reading – and there’s something to that. 

Let's get real, Mommy!

So now I'm going to turn to a blog I've got a bit more of a love-love relationship with. Meet Mir of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda, a remarried mother of two teenage children. I laugh out loud nearly every time I read a post. And (despite my lack of qualifications, having never birthed another human being), I think she does a pretty good job of telling a realistic story about motherhood. Maybe I'm falling into a bit of a third-wave trap of always wanting to be the most REAL but damn it, Mir seems pretty real to me. And I like that about this blog.

You won't find many cute pictures in Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda. In fact, you won't find pictures or the real names of any of her family members. You will find this picture, though, of Phil the cockroach , who her daughter decided to rescue from the horrid fate of fumigation and adopt as a pet, in the interests of LOVE and SCIENCE.

Speaking from my childhood, my brother and I were a lot more likely to do something along those lines (I seem to recall an ant farm) than be happy and shiny all the time. I know my mother loves us both dearly, and I know she wouldn't give us up for anything, but I also know we could be a pain in the ass when we wanted to be (and a lot of times when we weren't even trying). When I was reading about Mir's struggles trying to help her daughter with a math course, all I could think about was my mother's nearly identical experience trying to teach me circle geometry when I was sick and missed almost a month of high school. 

I like that Mir doesn't spare us the challenges, because I know my own mother and other mothers have dealt with these issues. I imagine I'll have to deal with similar ones some day. I think mommy blogs have the potential to be a use-at-your-own risk parenting manual of sorts. Or at least a I'm-not-the-only-one-and-I-haven't-fucked-up-much-worse-than-them-ual. In this post, for example, Mir discusses the difficulties she's facing with her daughter being underweight and having a rather complicated relationship with food. Another post reveals other struggles with her daughter. It talks about her her reactions to a parenting advice CD her daughter's therapist wanted her to listen to, about her fears that somehow, in all her efforts to make it better, she might make it worse.

One of the things Mir does in her blog is write about experiences she's had where she's been treated differently (read: inferiorly) because she's a woman, such as this incident with an insurance salesman. And then she teaches her children why this just isn't ok, even if you do live in Georgia. In one of my favourite posts, she's looking for replacement lenses for her prescription sunglasses, and discovers they're absurdly expensive. The following conversation ensues between Mir, her son, and the optometrist:

"He smiled even wider, said, 'Tell your husband you really NEED new lenses. He'll take care of it.'

I blinked some more. Then I turned to Monkey, who was standing behind my chair, and smiled at him as sweetly as I could manage. 'Honey, are you listening to this?' He nodded. 'This is why feminism exists and is still necessary in 2013, son. Because this gentleman right here just suggested that I need my husband's permission to spend money.'"

This, to me, is a more radical re-encoding of motherhood. This is a motherhood in which, sure, Mir is still responsible for her child's moral well-being, but she is able to teach him about gender inequality through every day situations. And then she tells us about it. Her husband is doing the same - the responsibility is not just on her shoulders. As I'm decoding her message, I'm thinking that if I teach my (future?) children about these things, not only am I not the only woman doing so, but that it's a pretty cool way to handle a misogynist situation. And I should expect my partner to do the same.

When I read Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda, I get the sense that Mir is producing meaning that is more or less reflective of the every day experiences of being a mother. As Dawn DiPrince explains, "When readers choose to read mommy blogs and memoir, they are seeking a truth claim and an authenticity that we relate to a person who exists outside of the text." But, as DiPrince goes on to explain, the relationship between truth and memoir/blogs is a complicated one. Although Mir's blog reads quite authentically to me, this is very much a controlled representation of herself. I only know what she chooses to share with me and her other readers. I don't know that it's important whether or not this blog is a true reflection of her experiences, just that I read it this way.

Mommy, can I be a Rockstar when I grow up?

I've long had a love-hate relationship with Rockstar Diaries. Written by young, beautiful, Juilliard-educated, stay-at-home-mom (SAHM) Naomi, the blog features pictures of her handsome husband and gorgeous children, and all the happy-shiny things they do.

I love it, because it's full of pretty pictures and it inspires me to try to be a more awesome human being. For example, if I have children, I would love to have something just like this adorable nursery (apparently still a work in progress? You sure?) for them.

I hate it, because there's no way I'm ever actually going to be that awesome. Let's be honest here. I don't even have kids, and I'm convinced Naomi leaves the house looking more put together than I do.

  

Naomi, picnicking in Central Park

with her adorable daughter Elanor - 

looking gorgeous, happy, and put together as usual

Me, with my coworkers last summer in Poland -

Wearing PJs because putting clothes on at 

8 am (sans child) is too much for me to handle

If I'm sounding a little self-deprecating here, that's the point. Because that's how some of these mommy bloggers make me feel. They're beautiful. They're put together. They're living in fabulous apartments I could only dream of. And they're doing it all while raising children - which, I'm pretty sure, is one of the toughest tasks out there. 

As Holly Hilgenburg tells us in her 2012 article in Frontier magazine about lifestyle blogging,

"Coupled with the focus on domesticity and the home, bloggers start to resemble a contemporary superwoman version of a stereotypical 1950s housewife. These women don't just maintain squeaky-clean, camera-ready homes and adorable families, they also run independent businesses, wear perfect outfits, rock exquisitely styled hair - and find the time to blog about it." 

And therein lies the problem. As Steward Hall's The Work of Representation explains, "meaning and meaningful practice is...constructed within discourse." When your discursive formation presents an idealized view of motherhood, simultaneously invoking a 1950s housewife while making me feel inadequate as a woman, it doesn't seem very radical.

Mommy blogs, at least some of them, have this tendency to whitewash motherhood. In this post, Naomi explains her frustrations towards mothers who are telling her that having a second child so close to her first won't be just sunshine and rainbows. She wants to know why everyone has to focus on the negatives, why they can't focus on the joy her children bring to her. While I don't suggest we should only look at the negatives, motherhood is (at least according to all the real-life mothers I know), a hell of a lot of work. And sometimes, it is just not a good time. This idealized representation of motherhood writes motherhood as a task any woman should be happy with.

In another post, Naomi talks about the overwhelming responsibility placed on the shoulders of mothers to raise their children. Not parents - mothers. A task she states she feels unworthy of. If she, an icon of picture-perfect motherhood, who diligently cleans the dust up from her daughter's chalkboard wall every day - painted with non-toxic paints of course, is unworthy, then how am I to view myself?

Viewed from this angle, mommy blogs such as Rockstar Diaries, to use the words of Dawn DiPrince, "reify the normative cultural script of motherhood based on domesticity." From this perspective, mommy blogging is by no means radical. Mommy blogs are not encoding anything new. They appear to be re-encoding the same problematic social expectations women have come up against for years - they're just doing it Web 2.0 style. And taken in this format it's an easier pill to swallow. I'm not being told I have to be be happy as a mother, or conversely a mother to be happy, from an advertisement or a TV program. I'm reading and interpreting this message from another woman, sharing her personal experience with me (via a public medium). Why shouldn't I believe her?

Radical, mommy!

There's a lot to dissect about the mommy blog. For starters, what exactly is a mommy blog? It seems like a simple enough question to answer. But is it a mommy, who happens to blog? Or is it a genre with specific content and form - can you only be a mommy blogger if the focus of your blog is motherhood? If we manage to figure out what a mommy blog is - and who mommy bloggers are - we can begin to look at the discourse around the term mommy blogger - a complicated term that is simultaneously viewed as condescending and problematic, but also useful for marketing purposes and creating a community amongst mommy bloggers. We can also look at mommy blogging as an industry. Take, for example, the Market Mommy blog, dedicated to helping mommy bloggers market their blogs so they can make a profit by blogging. We can then look at the audiences that consume mommy blogs. Why is it that my dear friend and myself (both childless) have a bit of a mommy blog obsession?

All of this interests me, but for now I'm going to leave it behind. In 2005, blogger Alice Bradley rocked the blogging boat when she stood up at the BlogHer conference and said, "Mommy blogging is a radical act." While I would love to be able to agree whole-heartedly that mommy blogging is, indeed, radical, I don't think I can do that yet. Some mommy bloggers are certainly radical. But some reinforce the hegemonic narrative of motherhood, painting an unrealistic picture that other mothers have little hope of living up to. I don't think that I'm ready to agree (all) mommy blogging is radical, but (all) mommy blogging isn't not radical. We need to step back and complicate Bradley's statement.

What I'm really interested in is how mommy bloggers represent themselves - how, through the blog, they're able to create a controlled identity they present to the public. Through the lens of representation, I think we can start to tackle the question of whether or not mommy blogging is a radical act. As Stuart Hall explains, "Representation is the production of meaning through language." Does the language (written word, as well as photographs) of mommy bloggers challenge the status quo, or does it reinforce it?

Hall goes on to explain that, "Producing meaning depends on the practice of interpretation, and interpretation is sustained by as actively using the code - encoding, putting things into the code - and by the person at the other end interpreting or decoding the meaning." What I hope to consider in my next posts is what it is the mommy blogger is encoding. Are they encoding the notion of motherhood with idyllic beach scenes and adorable, well-behaved children, or with a list of indignations? If mommy blogs are able to re-encode our narratives of motherhood then that, my friends, is a radical act. But if they reinforce those narratives, it's anything but. What do you think? Can something called "mommy blogging" ever truly be radical?

Disclaimer: The two blogs I am focus on for this project are by no means reflective of the unbelievable range of mommy blogs out in the big ole' blogsphere. They are two blogs I have (mostly) enjoyed reading in the past, and are both quite popular. I'm looking at popular blogs because they reach a relatively large audience and they are also more likely to be crafted for consumption by the public. The thoughts contained in these musing are my opinions and I am not trying to suggest that any of the women are good or bad mothers, or good or bad people. They just happen to write the blogs I've chosen to use as texts.