I used to think that blogging was an embarrassing hobby – something that I should hide from others until the very last moment and their opinion of me was already beyond tarnished.
It wasn’t until several years into the process that I started to see genuine usefulness to it. After all, once you wipe away the hipster/hippie vibe and the Google ads running up and down most of them, blogs are really just modern nonfiction essays.
(I’ve been at this blogging thing for a long time, though, so I may be biased.)
Blogging has become a funnel down which I’ve crammed some pretty awful writing and ended up finding my voice, and part of that voice is reflected in the audience it attracts. I must admit that I am far from the fame of some bloggers like Dooce and VodkaMom, though I find a kind of comfort in the relative obscurity of my blogging life. Instead of tens of thousands of readers, I am happy with the several hundred that stop by each day, probably less now that I’m writing less often.
But I’ve always known my writing style is not for everyone.
You might call me a Mommy Blogger, but that’s not very accurate if it causes one to envision a Starbucks-sipping, minivan-driving, PTA-associating egomaniac. No. I drink McDonald’s coffee, drive a gas-guzzling Suburban with a tail light recently attached with blue painter’s tape, and would probably never be invited to join (or stand near) the PTA for fear that I might reference Satan too many times in regards to other people’s small heathens. I’m a skeptic, a mom who wanted a career and got a fleet of small humans to care for instead.And now I fear that that description might throw me into another kind of category that involves rotting teeth and mall bangs, but I’m neither of those extremes.
Nope, I am just the regular kind of egomaniac… who happens to have children and writes online for the amusement of a few – most of whom are admittedly probably weirdos, but I’m not picky. Even though we often hold a one-sided conversation, I’ve grown quite fond of my weirdos.
It’s the perfect relationship: I get to talk about myself a lot, and they listen.
It might not surprise any, then, that I laugh every time I see this quote from E.B. White, imagining, of course, that he’s speaking not of “essayists” but “bloggers” (“The Essay and the Essayist”):
“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest… Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”
Every blogger I’ve ever known and loved has kind of been a selfish jackhole in some regards. We’re opinionated and blunt. It should come as no great shock that every brilliant blog post I’ve ever written has been either a scathing review of my life or a greatly over-celebrated moment of it.
It’s those harsh criticisms of blogging that cause me to wonder many times why I started down that self-centered writing path back in November of 2006.
At first, it was probably because I felt invisible. No one knew me. No one understood the hell I was going through with three infant triplets at home and a husband who was nearly non-existent from working long, exhausting hours of his own. At least: no one in my physical world.
So I reached out to the internet.
I wrote even though I was sure no one was interested in what I had to say. Most of my readers were people who wanted to see pictures of triplets. I look back on some of those early posts and cringe at their inauthenticity. Then I must have snapped. I started writing short diatribes about how awful being a stay-at-home parent could be, and I’d find the humor in it all. I stopped posting pictures and used my words to paint my life for the world to see.
I gained a small following of readers, only visible by the hits marked to my page.
And slowly, they began commenting.
I learned their names.
We became a community of sorts, all connected through the words I wrote.
The responses pushed me, made me laugh, angered me...
I found myself writing for therapy, but I started writing things that I thought might make my readers laugh or make them think. Usually, those posts involved bodily functions, and the funny-factor only increased if it involved feces on some vertical surface of my house. I needed to write most of all when I was struggling because I knew that I would have to force myself to laugh in order to write the humor out of my situation. I even went through a phase when I wrote of nothing but the refrigerator contents that ended up on my living room floor that morning, or which kitchen knife the girls had smuggled out of the butcher block that day.
The writing changed my life. It was a journal that spewed out of me, sometimes uncontrollably.
I was amazed that the more brutally forthcoming I was, the more of a connection I made with the readers. It was as if they craved honesty.
I also noticed that my motivation had significantly shifted – it became equally about my own needs to relate to another adult human as it did my desire to create something from which others could glean entertainment and their own therapy.
It wasn’t until very recently that I realized another motivation, as true as the others but clearly not as obvious: I wanted to be remembered for who I was and how I lived my life through those long days. Two weeks ago, my introduction to Michel Montaigne brought this revelation. In “To the Reader,” he wrote about his drives for writing nonfiction essays. The vocab is a bit lofty, but you can get the gist:
“Reader, thou hast here an honest book; ... I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me… it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections are my natural form…”
In other words: he wanted to leave his family and friends a memory on which to reflect after he’d died.
Like Montaigne, I want all the ugly gore and the beauty of my life here in this world to be remembered, to anyone who may choose to remember me, even as insignificant as I may be in the grand scheme of things. I want my girls to know what kind of woman raised them. I also want others to know that I had good intentions but sometimes failed to live up to my own standards, but it didn’t stop me from trying. And as writing has taught me, the ugly often makes the beauty.
I found solace in the truth. Even my saddest moments and struggles needed to be bared. Our sex life, our fights, our failures as well as our triumphs as parents were fair game. I once wrote about how my uterus built a fence… that one still makes me laugh. More recently, I’ve lost two loved ones to cancer and diabetes, and the pain is almost too much to bear until it is down on paper.
Honesty is often the less glamorous road.
One point E.B. White makes struck me as incredibly timeless, if again, we think of bloggers:
“There is one thing the essayist cannot do, though–he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time.”
There have been more than a few infamous bloggers who have been outed as “fakes” and over-exaggerators, and it’s hard to toe the line of honesty when others have such extravagant stories to tell of travelling to foreign countries or exploitations of their children suffering through horrific illnesses, and I’m trying to find the excitement in artwork being razorbladed into my coffee table with “safety” scissors by a 4-year-old. The temptation to lie is always there.
And then there were the times I had things to say that couldn’t be said.
I felt like a fake if I held back, and there were times I was asked – usually by my husband – to use discretion when speaking about his mother or work-related problems, although never about our personal lives. In those moments that I hit the backspace, I felt like a fraud.
Isn’t nonfiction supposed to be about the truth, if nothing else? Like I always tell my husband, usually after discovering that he had done or said something unsavory and neglected to tell me: Omission is a lie. So what did that make me?
Not that it was always easy to write honestly, knowing that my parents, husband, cousins, sister, neighbors, strangers, teachers all swung through to read on occasion.
My memory isn’t always stunningly accurate, either. It makes a difficult post when I know another person might read my story and think me a liar if I don’t get the details exactly right. I’m probably the harshest critic I have when it comes to writing, and I have – more than once – deleted a post that had too many gaps.
I feel at home in Jocelyn Bartkevicius’s quote (from “The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction”):
“The self – at least my self – is composed of misremembered and unremembered scenes.”
At least I have the blog to help me remember what I may have forgotten since putting the words out into the world wide web.
Thankfully, that is blogging’s last gift. The final reason for being here.
I can travel back in time, back to the days when I thought I couldn’t write the words.
Yet I’m so glad I did.
*This blog was submitted as a creative nonfiction reflection this afternoon for a course I am taking. Yes, it is long. I apologize for causing you to practice your literacy. Love you all!*
