My mother-in-law cornered me a few months ago and told me she had done a Google search to look for the name of a paper my husband, Gil, had presented: "When I did this Google search, I found this…. I don't know what I found. It talked about Gil, about Emi -- it was some kind of diary, like a journal or something, with all these very, VERY personal stories."
"You found my blog," I said.
"I don't know what I found."
"I'm telling you, you found my BLOG. It's short for 'weblog,' and you're right, it's kind of like a diary. I use it as a sketchpad for essays I'm considering writing, as a place to talk myself through ideas I'm grappling with, as a way to record the kinds of things that happen every day that I know I'm going to forget. And as a way for readers to kind of catch up and keep in touch with me."
"It's very personal," she said. "I kept reading and reading, because I was so worried you were going to write something about ME!"
I have, of course, though I didn't provide her with the archive link to prove it. She continued, "I read what you wrote about Emi going to summer camp and crying, and how she had to come home, and how worried you were about whether you were doing the right thing, and it just broke my heart. I just cried when I read it." Then suddenly she became almost accusatory. "How long have you been doing this? How can you write about such private things?"
She couldn't see it, but her own comments answered the primary question she raised: I write about such private things in a relatively public place because sharing my experience as a mother-in-process, as a mother continually learning and evaluating and questioning and contextualizing and theorizing and evolving, may touch someone. It may touch someone who is in a similar emotional place, or in similar circumstances, such as the readers who write me to tell me that what they read makes them feel less alone. Or it may touch someone like my mother-in-law, who is in a vastly different place, a mother with grown kids, a woman for whom feminism is a non-issue -- in other words, a person with a completely different viewpoint. A person whom I could not reach on a personal, daily level and with whom I could never have the kind of discourse that she and I have now "virtually" had, thanks to her reading of my blog. It may force her to think beyond her own personal experience. It may force her to consider a world view she hadn't imagined. It may even move her to tears.
Blogs in their individuality -- the way they are dominated by a single voice, the way they enforce a lack of community or consensus as they are focused on the experience of one person -- might seem to undermine the work of creating a unified experience of feminism. But in fact, in allowing marginalized voices to have a presence, to be heard -- or, in this case, read -- I believe they function in the exact opposite way. Mothers who go online are finding a multiplicity of viewpoints, a real and humanized investigation of the complex and varied ways in which we mother, and mothers who recognize themselves in the writings of these mother-bloggers feel valid. They feel heard. And they feel empowered.
They know, as readers powerfully and humblingly write to tell me, that they are not alone. That despite what divides us – whether we co-parent or single-parent, whether our children are grown or just being born, whether we micro-manage or mis-manage – we are here, doing the daily work of mothering, together.
The power of blogging to transform, to reach someone with a dramatically opposing point of view and to actually begin to enact a change, was brought home to me recently when I received an e-mail from a reader. I had transcribed in my blog a talk I gave at a local mother's group, a branch of a national mothers' organization. In the talk, I spoke about compassion. I began by saying that being a mother was a little bit like being a magician: everything is supposed to look effortless, all due to the magician's competent, confident expertise -- and of course, no one is ever supposed to know how the tricks are done. I continued on to say that talking about the complexities of motherhood was a little like breaking that magician's code of silence. And yet, if we don't talk about how we cope from day to day, then we never see how we can learn from each other, we never see beyond our apparent differences, we never see that we are not alone. At the end of the talk, I shared a story from a friend of mine who told me about her trip to Kathmandu, and how she was so disappointed when the few Americans she met up with ended up squabbling over who was the most conscientious traveler -- who spent less on a hotel, who used the least resources. She said, "Here we are, on the other side of the world together! And this is what we're talking about?" To me, that was the perfect metaphor for motherhood and the ways in which we divide ourselves. Here we are, on the other side of the world. Shouldn't we be compassionate? Shouldn't we be working together?
A reader wrote to me to tell me that until she read that particular blog entry, she couldn't understand why a friend had been angry with her for bashing a fellow mother. The reader said she had made a comment at a playgroup about a "bad mother" that they both knew, and even made up an exaggerated story about this bad mother to underscore her point. She told me her friend had stopped speaking to her, and that she really hadn't understood why, why it was a big deal to vilify this bad mom. But reading the transcript of my talk, she said, made a lightbulb go off in her head. She had a moment where she was able to realize that her judgments came from a place of insecurity about her own ability as a mother, and that pointing the finger at this supposed bad mom was merely a way to make herself feel better. And she also realized that instead of making herself feel better, all it did was divide her -- from her friend, and from her mothers' group.
This might not seem like much. But to me, it was incredible. It was one of those rare but powerful instances where a mother sharing a story from her own personal narrative was able to make another mother aware of what we are all talking about when we talk about motherhood and feminism -- the ways in which we are divided, the ways in which our culture works to insulate us from those who make different choices, the ways in which we can reach across those divides to work towards a common goal.
I believe that mothers sharing their personal stories -- either through traditional print publishing or through the immediacy of a blog -- are doing the work of feminism by the sheer fact of making their experiences known to other mothers who are able to access their texts. They are, whether they intend to or not, entering into a conversation with women who might be threatened by real-life discussion, with some women who are like-minded, and with other women who could not be more different.
I can't change the world on my own. Some days I can barely change the baby's diaper on my own. But knowing that out there, in cyberspace, in the spate of books being written, are mothers ready even to whisper the secrets of our contemporary lives, I feel empowered. I feel optimistic. And I feel strong.
mmo : february 2006 |
