A Different Sort of Mommy Blog

I am a mother and I am a blogger, but I have felt completely foreign to the world of parenting blogs. I know many mom blogs are run by diligent, hard working mothers who are hustling on top of their grueling child care duties to connect with other mothers and bring in a side income. I admire their tenacity in making space for creativity and putting words and pictures and crafts out there in the scary internet world.

I have never felt like I belong because I am simply not interested in the topics covered in such blogs: chasing down deals for child products, reviewing children’s clothing brands, venting the exhaustion of both parenting and cultural mommy wars. I don’t know how to write cutesy, funny one liners, or make curly q fonts for my blog header, and I don’t do crafts. I am, what they call, intense. I can dampen the liveliest of parties in no time flat by bringing to everyone’s attention the injustices that plague the world and the latest global tragedies from NPR. But being a serious person doesn’t make me less of a mother because I don’t love my children any less than the next mother. My serious, critical engagement with faith, theology and culture has brought me to launch this parenting blog, where I want to lay a vision for how best to lead the next generation into a faith that is life-giving to the world. And I guess with this project it makes me now, a mommy blogger.

One of the chapters in my Unfundamentalist Parenting book is on raising our children into gender equality. It is discouraging to me to see the current blogging scene still does not offer a diverse representation of mothers. I want there to be mothers who blog for an audience of not just other women but men as well, because the expression of our ideas should be valuable beyond our gender. I want mothers who blog who are acclaimed for their work outside of the work they do with child rearing. I want mommy blogs with a design that isn’t pinterest-pretty, but professional, streamlined, bold, fierce, artsy, subversive, gritty, gray, and serious, because there are mothers who reflect all of those above qualities.

Image: Pixabay

I want mothers who blog to be appreciated for their critical engagement with society and not tell moving birth stories that garner clicks to their page. Birth stories are beautiful, I don’t want to deny space for these sacred moments, but a woman’s body is disproportionately put on display as her only worth. Award winning author known for her feminism, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says it best, “I just feel like we live in an age where women are supposed to perform pregnancy,” pointing out that men aren’t expected to put their fatherhood on display in the same way.

I want mothers who blog to speak with power, without apology. The running joke on twitter is for us ladies to pray, “Dear Lord, give me the confidence of mediocre white men.” That we get to be assertive without being labeled as aggressive, fierce without being told off as hostile, and to point out injustice constantly and consistently and not be deemed “whiny.”

And can we please expand the subject fields available to mothers who blog? Parenting encompasses raising children into citizens of the world. The whole world. It is pathetic how often women who have a public voice receive extra scrutiny when we “get political”. Mothers should be the most politically active demography because we want to help create a just world for our children to grow into. I want mothers who write about gender inequity, like Courtney Martin for On Being,

“I hope, most fundamentally, that power is disentangled from sex in a way that frees you up to see your own gifts, and the gifts of other women, without the scales of sexism that have so long obscured all of our vision.”

and mothers who write for racial justice, like Alexandra Lopez Reitzes,

“As the year went on, Harriet remained a touch-point for our discussions of the news my daughter would overhear: Police who had killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown received non-indictment verdicts. Black Lives Matter grew. Syrians fled their country and were stranded, and saved.”

and mothers like Glennon Melton, who bravely confront the NRA in posts like this,

“I want my kids to know that while their peers were being shot — I wasn’t just bitching and I wasn’t just praying. I was working, too. Because all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for pissed off Americans to do nothing.”

There are mothers who speak softly, with lilting poetry, their voice warm like comfort food. But there are mothers who are rugged and edgy—they are our sharp clarion callers and they are so needed. Let’s project a wide array of mother’s voices through blogs and other mediums which represent more accurately the unique diversity of who we are. So that our parenting is informed by the lesser known voices, and more importantly, so our children can see and hear the message loud and clear: they can live true to who they are.