A Mommy Blogger (Me) Who Can Relate to 'Confessions of a Mommy Blogger' and so on ....

While sitting in the waiting room at the office of my OB/GYN, I picked up a copy of Wondertime Magazine. An article about blogging caught my eye, especially the lead-in ...

"Blogging is narcissistic — and time-consuming. It gives strangers (not to mention the in-laws) ammunition for criticizing our parenting choices. And one day it could really mortify our kids. Here's why we do it anyway."

This article is called "Confessions of a Mommy Blogger" written by Catherine Newman .. and it's right on.

If you still read my blog and still wonder why I do it and why I am so obsessed with it (or if you are as obsessed with it as I am but can't figure out how to explain why to others), read her article here. It says so eloquently why I do what I do, and why millions of other women do it to.

Like when she says this:

"In the scrapbook version of my summer vacation, I would paste together a sunny collage of sea and sand and smiling kids. In the blog version, I might be more inclined to mention the steaming beach Port-A-John, where the final quarter of Birdy's sandwich ended up tumbling into the reeking blackness. If scrapbooking is the urge to put it all together, blogging might be the urge to take it all apart. Blogging might not make life tidier, but it keeps life in your memory, and keeps it real."

And this next statement is oh-so-true:

"I've checked for reader comments as obsessively as I once stuck my eighth grade hand into the echoing hollows of our mailbox. (Anything for me? A letter from Shaun Cassidy detailing his undying love?) Every week for five years, dozens and sometimes hundreds of women have written to me to say, in essence, "I hear you, sister." And I have just loved this — the feeling that I'm not alone, the reassurances that I'm doing my best .. "

And there's always the argument about how our families feel about us blogging about them. What she says next hits home:

"But my children might feel differently. A teenage Ben might one day balk over the fact that tens of thousands of people have chuckled about his pooping in the stairway. I console myself with the idea that, hey, teenagers are going to resent the very way we take air into our lungs, so why not give them something to really resent? (I do picture these kids in college, though, turning their blogged childhoods into a drinking game. "Everyone whose mom wrote about their diaper leaking ... CHUG!") But the truth is that while I may tell funny stories about the children, the only person I reveal over and over again, the person whose neurotic habits and flaws and struggles lurk in everything I write, is me."

And finally, through the words of the anonymous author of the blog Bub and Pie, these sentiments:

"'I go through my day in a kind of 'compose post' mode, where I'm actively selecting words to describe my children — their beauty, their quirkiness, their inner lives — and that process helps me to see them, to be mindful of who they are.' Writing gives me a way to step back from my life and really see it."

So, if you read this and still don't understand why I allow this blogging to be such a huge part of my life, it's obvious that others really get it. And that's exactly why I do it.