The OTHER Mother represents my first foray into the world of blogging, and so far it’s been exciting. What’s great about blogging is that you can publish something immediately and get a quick response. No delayed gratification involved. There’s something potentially addictive about the whole endeavor. My friends Heather Bigley and Amy Storrow got me interested in this pastime. Whether I feel that I should thank them or blame them changes from day to day.
The jargon of blogging is pretty irresistible. What’s not to love about words like moblogging and barking moonbats. Sites such as Boing Boing, Feedster, and Blogorama recommend the coolest blogs around. Bloggers refer to the online world as the blogosphere. Like I feel like a dude in a surfer movie!
Our family and friends don’t get to see the baby very often, restricted by geography as we are, but in the blogosphere we’re all together now.
When I was a teenager, one novel that made a huge impact on me was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. In this book, suggestively set in his native Czechoslovakia, he predicts a future global condition he calls graphomania, a world in which we are all writers, and there are no readers.
Imagine how bizarre—a world in which millions of people are writing and posting their ideas and experiences in a public forum as expansive as the world wide web. Could it get to a point at which we were shooting out messages to nobody?
It’s a little scary, but I’m not deterred.
Being a mom is the greatest experience, just like everybody says. There’s something reassuring when conventional wisdom and your own personal experiences align, right? My family and friends want to know about the aquarium bouncer, the white noise machine, and the Bugs Bunny Band-Aids. Besides, it’s the love of such details that made me a writer in the first place.
I’m interested in thinking about the way writing alters our experience of our experience. There’s a great deal of repetition involved in caring for an infant. We feed her, change her diaper, rock her to sleep. X 1,000! But because I’m blogging, I’m alert to the miracle du jour—the wry arching of one eyebrow, the inkling of a smile. I capture them with my words.
Don't worry - you are still in the world of readers and I do so love reading your writings and bloggings! I love hearing about Pearl, Marcia and you and your explorations, feelings and experiences. Don't stop writing!
Posted by: Rachel | 16 May 2004 at 06:26 AM