Today I want to write about mummy blogs (or mommy blogs, if you’re from t’other side of the Big Pond). Oh, and why they irritate me.
Oh come on, I don’t mean that I’m irritated by people, specifically mothers, who blog about their kids. I read Dooce, and some other blogs by mothers. But, it would seem that mummy blogs are limited to women who are mothers of small children: babies, toddlers and so on. So what about someone, i.e. me, who is the mother of a 23-year-old daughter. Am I not a mummy too?
I’ve not seen any blogs by older women with older children. It’s usually the 20-somethings who are blogging about their own kids. Which begs the question: is blogging confined to young women? Actually it begs for another question: are the thoughts, memories and opinions of mothers of adults not worth tuppence ha’penny?
Being the parent of a child who is an adult has its own problems, worries and amusements. There’s the whole empty nest symdrome for starters. I was fully prepared for the fact that my daughter had more or less home when she went off to university at the age of 18. Then, we were living in Merthyr Tydfil and she went to university in Aberystwyth, which is quite a considerable distance, especially when you’re a family with no car and no one can drive anyway. Then, just before she started her final year, we actually moved to Aberystwyth. She lived in town, in a student flat, but came home on the ‘bus every saturday, with a bag-full of washing. I would also meet her in town on a tuesday, to have lunch and do a little shopping together. We actually became closer, L and I, enjoying some mother and daughter time.
After graduation, she stayed at home and worked in a local pet chain store for a while, then she went away to Anglesey to work for the RSPB for six months. She came home again for a few more months, then in october 2008 she went to New Zealand for seven months. Again, it was back home for four months, then she started an MSc at Manchester Metropolitan university. So again, she has left home. I have no idea what she’s going to do when she graduates this year. She might come home for a while, get a job locally, or she might be off again. I know she’d like to work as a warden on Skoma Island one day, and she’s often talked about working in the South Pole, of all places!
So as you can see, it really is not the same as being the mother of a toddler. When my daughter was very young, there were no blogs. Imagine that! No internet as such either. I know, it’s the stuff of nightmares, but I coped. We all coped, in fact, at that time. But if there were no blogs about it, does that mean that it didn’t exist? Of course not, I’m being absurd. What I am trying to say is that it is the category “mummy blogs” that annoys me. It doesn’t leave any room for blogs that go beyond the early teens, nor does it acknowledge that motherhood is for life: the life of the child and the mother.
The reason why baby/toddler mummy blogs are so popular is because of the commercial potential of them. Advertisers do not want to hear about old people, unless they are in the context of old folk’s homes, provision for the elderly etc. There is no commercial reason for sponsoring parental blogs when the child is an adult. The ‘net is about now, not then; anything that happened yesterday is old and boring.
Well tough. As I wrote in an earlier post, I really don’t care what other people write about. I am a mother, I am the mother of a 23-year-old daughter who might end up working on the moon one day and I’d like to blog about it. In fact, I willblog about it, if that ever happens. (Could you know, she is very interested in exo-biology.) This is a mummy blog; and a cat blog, and a hen blog and a making cards blog and a whatever-I-feel-like-at-the-time blog. Sorry, no pigeonholes here.
No, this is not an actual photograph of my ancestor. This picture was created by Gencraft, the AI gizmo. But it is rather nice, and I thought it would be a good illustration of today’s topic. To wit: genealogy.