A very pregnant friend recently quizzed me on why all her friends who were mums had blogs. Then another friend got pregnant and immediately started blogging. What’s with this?
Is it a journal? It definitely can be for some people. I’ve kept a diary pretty consistently since I was about eight. All the way from conscientiously recording every day minor variations on: “Went to school. Got full marks in a maths test. Came home and played in the garden”, through naive teenager thoughts, to only slightly less embarrassing years of angst about the boy I’m now married to, with barely a mention of events in the outside world. I hardly ever write in it now (I’ve found that my husband rather than the journal gets the joy of knowing my innermost thoughts!) but for really personal and big things I go back to working it through by writing it out on the real heavy paper of my leather-bound journal.
Or is blogging a validation of what we get up to all day at home? 
Perhaps we need great records of what we’ve been cooking or crafting or studying to prove (To other people? To ourselves?) we’ve not just been wasting our time and/or brains on kiddies’ routines, duplo, playdoh, and cooking them elaborate things they then don’t eat. (This memo to all toddlers re. their diet made me laugh a LOT and is a textbook example of a funny parenting blog.)
Do we blog because the anticipation of sharing the highs and the lows makes them more enjoyable or bearable? As we giggle at the hilarious toddler comment we can look forward to others chuckling at it too. And as we persevere through disasters, I’m constantly aware that Today’s Unfortunate Event Is Tomorrow’s Funny Story, and anticipating the comedy spin that could be put on the scale of the exploding nappy amid a pile of other mishaps and awkwardness.
A hard thing about being a mummy is that we are almost never off duty and it’s really challenging to have a decent in-depth conversation. We get really good at pressing pause to break up a toddler fight or deal with a crying baby and then carrying on as if nothing as happened. Like an ad break. Or like almost constant ad breaks. It makes it hard to have a sustained conversation where we express and explore complex ideas.
My favourite thing about blogging has been the space to reflect and articulate more than I can manage in a playdate. And then I love when I see people and they pick up on a blog post, and we just about have time to talk about it because I’ve already said my half of the conversation! If we talk about this one that’ll be a bit meta…
I’ve been a bit silent (and journalling instead!) but this is a warm up and I think I’m getting back in the zone.
Seasoned with Salt 