Follow up on Mummyblogging

Do you know that I can't help but type Mummy with an 'o' every time I type mummyblogging? Obviously everyone I have read who discusses the notion is from North America. (Just a little aside.)

Bon commented this:
'i know you were never a handbag and makeup girl, nor i, but i wasn't sure where you were positioning yourself in the conversation about community after Euey was born? did you have it? lack it? notice it?'

Her comment just reinforced what I already knew. I tried to cram waaay too much into that post. I have been reading about Mummyblogging and it just brings up so many issues for me. All of which I tried to discuss in a few paragraphs. This time I will stick to the question. Thank you Bon for taking me back to high school English, where essays were easy 'cause the teacher gave you a question to answer! I need to remind myself (when I find time to post) that I cannot try to catch up on the whole conversation in one post. As I don't post every day, or even every week, I will have to content myself with discussing part of each issue.

When Euey was born I was the only one of my group of Uni friends to be married or have children. I got married 2 months before he was born (I'll post a photo later, it's kinda funny!) and it was the first wedding of our group. I had no community of parents. Will joined me up to the ABA (Australian Breastfeeding Association), which was great for parenting tips, but they were a bit 'mumsie'. They had meetings where they made soap and the conversation very rarely strayed from the day-to-day events of parenting. They were a lovely group of women and when I run into them in the supermarket I feel like I'm meeting an old friend, but I didn't have much in common with them.

My community developed from my Mum's group. The Victorian Governement has a great system of 'Maternal and Child Health Centres'. When a new mum leaves hospital the hospital contacts their neares centre and the centre drops in on the new mum within the first 2 or 3 days. After that you take your baby for check-up appoints every week for awhile then every month 'til they're a year. The centre starts Mums Groups every 6 weeks or so, connecting a small group of first time mums with other mums who have a similar aged baby. We met at the centre once a week for the first 6 weeks, then it was up to us. We were lucky. We all clicked and organised to meet at eachother's houses every week. We still meet weekly now, nearly 2 years later. I am the only one to have had another baby, but 2 others are pregnant. It is slowly building into what I think will be a life-long friendship group, but we have yet to make the step to meeting as families. The dads still don't know each other well, if at all. That is the next step, and I'm going to try to take it soon (scary for me, making new friends, there is always the fear of rejection, but that is a post for another day).

So that is the background to my in-the-flesh community. To date only one of my close friends has a baby (now 8 weeks old) and she lives in South Australia, an 8 hour drive away. I am becoming close to mum's group. I still see my non-mum friends, although now that Euey is not content to just sit in a pram while I have coffee it is getting less and less. I hope they start having babies soon before we grow apart. It is one thing to keep living your life with a portable little newborn, but when a toddler is introduced into the mix it's just gets plain hard.

This new online community I have found and am slowly becoming a part of is very different. I am made to think more and feel more involved in this community than with even my oldest friends. I think this comes from two things; shared experience and regularity of contact. My uni friends see each other often. They go swimming together on Saturday mornings, they play netball during the week and they live close to each other. They have evenings free to meet for coffee or go for dinner. When I see them as a group their conversations continue from when they last saw each other a few days ago. They're really interested to hear what I've been up to and I them, but I still feel left out. I leave wishing I could see them more often, be more involved in thier lives, know what they do each day at work, who they talk to, who shits them and whether they have a reasonable boss. Work and friendships are the main issues in their life. Family sometimes seems like the only issue in my life!

I never feel like that in the world of blogging. It is the perfect community for a group of people who need to time their conversations around nap time. I can read half a post, pause to play cars for awhile, come back and the conversation hasn't moved on without me. Then I can finish reading, make lunch, attempt to think and eventually get back a couple of hours later when Euey has been asleep long enough so I have formulated what I want to say. Then I can take my time to say it exactly how I want (well, theoretically, actually I just throw it on the page most of the time cause there are a million other things I need to be doing while Euey is alseep).

Not only can I talk in my time, but the conversations are about things close to my heart. Talking about parenting is different to talking about kids. It is not just 'Johnny is talking now and this is the latest amazing thing he said' but 'wow the development of language is really interesting, isn't it?' Nor is it 'I love being a mum'; rather its 'this is how becoming a mum has shaped me as a person'. Since I was a pre-teen I have been working toward being a good parent. It is what has driven me, what I have been working toward. My career is a secondary thing. I love studying law, and I'm sure I'll enjoy being a lawyer but a mum is what I've always wanted to be. That's what I would have answered in Careers at school if it had been an acceptable answer (women's lib, while I wouldn't change it, has a lot to answer for sometimes). This is the first community I've found where I can discuss such an important part of my 'thinking' (except with my own mum, with whom I've spent countless hours discussing parenting, and of course with Will).

So that, Bon, is what I was trying to say about community, and how it relates to mummyblogging. Mummyblogging is important because it provides that community for mummies. It is not just inane kiddy bragging because the people who are involved are intelligent, conversation-deprived, thinking people.

On the term 'mummyblogging':
I discussed this with my mum, an avid rally-going feminist from the sixties, and she was MAD. She thought the term mummyblog demeaned us and lessened the importance of what we have to say. If mummyblog refers to the fact that part of our blogs are devoted to tracking the development of our children, her line of thought is that the term should be kiddyblog. Without having thought about it before hand I guess this is the separation I made when I first started my blogs. I started two. One for updates on the kids and this one, for me to think and wonder. I made that separation. I consciously sought to give myself an arena where I could talk about things other than the kids. This was not because I think the kiddy stuff is not important but because I wanted to force myself out of my comfort zone. But I am not the one devaluing what mums have to say. If anyone is I'm sure it's not mums. The picture I get of those doing the devaluing is of men, probably traditional, 9-5 men. But that, I think, says more about my own stereotyping than anything else. When all is said and done I think mummyblogging refers to content. Mummybloggers discuss, from what I've read (and that is not much so please feel free to correct me) issues of parenting, education and family values. These are all things that a lot of people in society would agree mums are experts on. I believe that ideas coming out of such blogs on such topics would be taken seriously.

I have always been an optimist though!