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?
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