Out of sheer boredom, just over a year ago I started a parenting blog and in doing so I started to connect with other bloggers, other mothers. I connected with people I never would have otherwise met “in the real world” and immediately felt welcome and understood.
It can be difficult to claim our motherhood, in a society which wants to reduce women to their reproductive organs. But motherhood is a life changing event and we should be able to claim it as our own; this is the beauty of the ‘mammy blog’ , though the term is often met with derision. Mammy bloggers are a community of women who are claiming back motherhood as their own, telling their story of how it is, rather than the idealised and sanitised versions we see in the media.
“This is how it is for me” they say, and millions of women around the internet chorus, “yes, yes me too,” and breathe a sigh of relief.
The mammy blog gives value to motherhood, both figuratively and literally, with many women taking part in paid work through their blog whilst staying at home with their children. Mammy bloggers are re-writing motherhood in their own terms.
I have often found myself torn between the notion of celebrating motherhood and being honest about its challenges. But the point is we should do both. That is the reality: it is glorious and tedious, it is joy and despair. Motherhood is complex and nuanced. There is no one way to experience motherhood, just as there is no one type of mother and mammy bloggers demonstrate this perfectly. They are stay at home mothers, they are entrepreneurs, they are business women, they are artists, they are activists.
They are mammy bloggers and they are telling their story, they are telling your story.