Erma Bombeck in the Blogosphere

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I’m a survivor of PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just as warriors emerge from the battlefield scarred and permanently altered, so too do mothers who make it to their offsprings’ adulthood.

If I were Erma Bombeck, that’d get a good big belly laugh; you’d think I was joking. Hilarious! Outrageous! Oh, that Erma! Imagine—comparing motherhood to war! Because Erma kept them rolling on the floor, people read her column, chuckled…and believed. Still, they did not quite believe: after all, Erma got paid for writing her column; she had to come up with this stuff. Whereas if someone like me—an angry young woman—publicly ranted, sans humor, about the stress of caring for kids on a daily basis, I’d be branded with epithets. Negative. Bitchy. Disturbed. Nasty. Unfeminine. And, deadliest of all: Bad Mother.

We’d do anything to avoid that last one. We’d knock ourselves out baking and playing and reading out loud not to be stigmatized by that label. You might be weary to the bone when the kid decides to wax the kitchen floor with peanut butter, but you’d damn well better get out the camera. You were allowed to rant as long as you ended on a sentimental note: he looked so adorable covered in peanut butter, I couldn’t help laughing and kissing him. For every angry sentiment you needed two of grateful bliss. If you couldn’t come up with something original, the safest bet was a variation of…but it’s all worth it. Clichéd writing, if positive, was preferable to original negativity, no matter how brilliantly executed.

Which brings me back to Erma Bombeck. Even as I clutched my sides in spasms of hysteria, I knew Erma wasn’t entirely kidding. She was the only mother-writer in the mainstream—and this remains true to this day—who told the truth about raising kids. A few literary authors spilled the beans—most notably Doris Lessing—but they weren’t widely read, at least by young mothers. Feminist authors like Adrienne Rich confessed they didn’t write about their kids because writing was their escape from motherhood. This I could understand; I figured it was a third of the reason for mothers’ historical silence. Another third I chalked up to simple lack of time—mothers have none to spare. The rest of the blame I laid at the feet of Mother Nature and the biological imperative: if mothers told the truth, the human race just might stop propagating.

During my recovery from motherhood—the real empty nest syndrome—I watched and waited: was anyone going to start talking? We’d been through years of consciousness-raising, marched in the streets, and legislated for equality. We went back to school en masse and became lawyers, doctors, even vice-presidential candidates. The Women’s Movement produced more books than the French Revolution and Marxism combined. Still, in the parlance of motherhood, it was all worth it.

In the nineties a spate of advice books for mothers-to-be casually mentioned that motherhood might be hard, wasn’t perfect, might even give rise to anger, resentment, and other “negative” emotions. But first-person accounts were still lacking—until the literature of disability. Suddenly memoirs about kids with autism, developmental delays, cerebral palsy, and all kinds of rare disorders began appearing. These authors did talk struggle, if haltingly. Nobody would dare label them bitches or bad mothers: their problems could not be denied. Besides, they wrote with a hefty dose of inspiration, sometimes, but not necessarily, religious. Parents of “normal” children read these accounts and felt guilty for their own puny complaints. After all, our situations were nothing like theirs.

Actually, mine was. My first child, born when I was chronologically nineteen and emotionally fourteen, came into the world with a chronic medical condition, then charmingly called a birth defect. Caring for him was indeed harder than what I saw of my friends’ experiences. Early on, though, I recognized that my situation wasn’t completely different from theirs—it was just more extreme. Feeding time was exacerbated by projectile vomiting. The jargon of neurologists was more complex than that of pediatricians. Bedtime entailed hours of steady rocking—you don’t leave a baby in real pain to “self-comfort.” Other mothers worried that a fever meant the flu; I worried a fever might mean surgery. I knew it was all part of the same continuum—but when I screamed we have to tell the truth, it was a version of the truth that nobody wanted to hear.

I tried. For nearly twenty-five years I wrote and re-wrote and edited and revised my story. I kept changing the structure. I experimented with fiction and non-fiction, personal memoir and reportage. I sent each new version off to agents, editors and publishers, and got rejection after rejection. One feminist publisher wrote, “You’ve allowed your anger to take precedence over structure.” An agent scrawled across the manuscript, “For personal reasons, I cannot take on this project.” I still didn’t get it. I thought it was my lousy writing.

After learning how to edit anthologies by doing several of women’s fiction, I decided to organize one about motherhood. I sent out a call for materials in which I specifically asked for honest stories about hardship. What I got back was it was all worth it.

Finally, when the technology was available and it seemed like the world could stand to hear my story, I published Perfectly Normal, a memoir, on the Internet. It revealed perhaps a tenth of my truth; I’m nowhere near finished.

Over the years an occasional book on motherhood would be touted as “brutally honest.” I ran straight to the bookstore to buy Annie Lamott’s Operating Instructions, only to violently throw it against the wall on page eleven or so. For someone with my experience it was brutal all right—and only very selectively honest.

Then came the zine craze; hipmama was the first publication in the genre that met my criteria for honesty. Its founder and editor, Ariel Gore, was a teenage mom when she began, and her writers were single, married, disabled, on welfare, working mothers, from diverse ethnicities, well-off, living in poverty. They were strong, confused, confident, guilty. They were hungry for company. They talked about mother love—but they also talked about resentment, guilt, anger and fear. Not only were they honest from the get-go—they also ranted at the social forces that mess with mamas and their babies—something I’d done quite a bit, perhaps to excess. (When my daughter had her first baby she accused me of not telling her motherhood was hard. When I just stared at her open-mouthed, she explained, “All you ever talked about was the culture, the culture—you never said it was hard work.” Oops.)

So, now that I’ve breezed through a severely compressed history of writing on motherhood, we come to the Brave New World of the Internet, where almost everyone has equal access. No longer must our writing be commercially viable to get read. On this frontier there’s nowhere to hide. Almost nothing’s forbidden. We don’t even have to worry about damaging the kids—when they’re old enough to read, we can simply shut down the website and wipe the slate clean. I set out to discover if, in this anything-goes environment, mothers were saying anything new.

I heard that the sex site nerve.com was starting up a parenting website. Their staff’s had a baby boom, so naturally…They promise the site will deal with taboos, from the sexual to the sensational–however, nary a word or link appears on nerve.com itself—edgy they might be, but they’re no fools: they know what happens to those who mix dirty talk with dirty diapers. (Update: nerve.com’s parenting site is babble.com.)

You know how it is when you research blogs—it’s an endless chain of information. You begin with the first one on your list, read a few posts, then click on a link, read some more, click on a link from that site, and on and on ad infinitum. I never even made it to the second URL on my list, just kept linking from one mommy blog to another. The sheer number is mind-boggling; I’d venture to say the sociological impact of this phenom won’t be fully understood for a generation. Many mommy blogs are of a practical nature: recommendations for baby products, warnings about toys not to buy, methods of curing eczema. Some start discussions by introducing a topic and asking readers to comment. Others sketch out their days, relate cute kid anecdotes, describe being overwhelmed or ready to throw in the towel. I was interested, amused and entertained. I cannot say I was moved.

Although many mommy bloggers promote their sites with words like “irreverent,” and “edgy,” the tone is determinedly light. There’s a lot of genuinely good humor, but nobody’s as subversively funny as Erma Bombeck. Nor did I find anything as astute as hipmama. Mothers are still skating on the surface—at least publicly.

But perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. The more blogs I read, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Internet is not an optimal venue for baring one’s soul. The audience in cyberspace is even less selective than the print-reading audience. Someone who’d buy an anthology or memoir about motherhood is more likely to have an investment in the subject, while a net surfer who randomly drifts into a blog tagged “humor” or “rants” might know nothing about parenting and care even less. Such an audience is apt to be more judgmental than dead-tree readers—so I don’t fault mommy bloggers for exercising restraint. In fact, given some of my own experiences on the Internet, particularly in the male arena of sports talk, I might even advise it.

I couldn’t possibly cover the entire blogosphere in two days, or even in a month of surfing; since I’m necessarily missing a lot, for all I know there actually is another Erma Bombeck, or even another Doris Lessing, out there. As for me, I’ve graduated into the class of grandma writing. Talk about clichés! At least I won’t risk being called a bitch—or a bad grandma. Is there such a thing?

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Filed under Life, Musings, Personal, Rants, Writing, grandmothers, motherhood