Look who's talkin' trash ...

Interesting fracas developing, blogosphere vs traditional (male-driven) print media developing since the weekend.  It seems that a mommy blogger attended a conference, named "Bloggy" or something and sold a piece about it to the "Style" section of the New York Times.

Now.  Being an obsessed NYT reader from afar, I had read the piece and felt, well, rather nonplussed about it.  I have noticed a couple of blatantly commercial blogs as I wander through the sphere and read some that are delivered to my email box, they exist out there with the ones that have content and may/may not weave some form of commercialisation in with their commentary.

Being that I am also not a particularly critical reader, the nuances swept past me like a sweeper at a curling rink.  But there are some pretty pissed off mamas out there, blogging away about the big fat slight.  Here's one of the best I've read:  http://www.mom-101.com/  dated 3.13.2010.  As I scribble this missive, the comments number 250!

Okay.  So I haven't been at the blogging post for long and I have no readership,  so granted, I don't have enough invested to feel the impact of this article. 

But for me, here's the thing.  It is like the whole stay-at-home vs working mom thing.  I really believe what I am doing is right for me.  Actually, I know I would be more of a disaster if I were even attempting to work outside of the home right now, I don't do a whole bunch of things at one time particularly well.  Seriously, I would be a wreck, just like my friend found herself a wreck after staying at home on mat leave (a whole year in Canada).  She went so bananas she cut the whole thing short and got her ass back to the office for her bit of sanity.  We're two awesome people who are wired differently, so what's the problem here.

Weren't we all taught the whole "different strokes for different folks" thing?

I know we all, on some level, want to be taken seriously, but doesn't being taken seriously start at home, and really, why do we need to justify ourselves to anybody other than our nearest and dearest.

Yes.  I know about not being paid equally for equal work, and about doing equally as much (and more) for less, and about the women's movement.  I get that the article was crafted, by the writer maybe, but definitely by the editors, the copywriter who titled the article, and the artist, to have a certain disrespectful tone.  But what if we just completely ignored it, and chose to go a different direction?  What if we just know that our work, as mothers, journalists, writers, bloggers, workers, whatever, is valuable.  What if we took ourselves more seriously?

Look.  Some of us are capable of being very, very silly.  Reports have it that the mommy blogger conference goers were drinking their cocktails out of sippy cups.  Really?  I would die!  The drink wouldn't come out fast enough for me!  I would be embarrassed too!

What if we stopped calling ourselves mommies in the blogosphere.  Yummy mommies, Yoyomamas, blogging mommies ... We could be taken more seriously, and removed from the Style section and dropped into the business section.

But why would we?

Even if I can't, for the life of myself, drink any beverage from a sippy cup (my kids didn't prefer them either, by the way), I can laugh at myself for not being loosey-goosey enough and for having a coolness issue as I pour the content of a cup into a proper rocks glass and not apologise.  And I can continue to drink with the gals, so long as they can see that my inability to join in the fun is not a comment on how silly they are, but rather a deficit of mine.

If we lose the Bloggy, mommy silliness, and get ourselves into the business section, what do we have?  We just become like them, those stuffy guys that marginalise everybody that doesn't conform to their standard stick-in-the-mud ways.  Echt.

Oops!  I'd better get me to bed.  I've been a bad mommy lately, too tired to be particularly civil to my offspring in the mornings.

Despite all I've said, I too am anxious.  I am a stay-at-home mom in the new millennium.  Eventually I am expected to pull a wage again and contribute to my household in a monetary way.  I am blogging to myself to make sure that when the time comes, I have something to say, and a style to say it in.  And I don't really care what the NYT has to say about it, or where they say it, because I know who I am and why I am doing what I am doing.

Or so I mutter.