Motherhood on the Internet

Thoughts on the end of an era

Are You Coming Back

This is a photo I took before I went into hospital to get an induction with my second baby. You can tell it was a different era for me because I didn’t have a good phone camera. And, I didn’t have time to clean the toothpaste off the mirror, either, that my four-year-old daughter had splashed everywhere.

But, it was a time in my life that was about to finish, and I wanted to capture it. I would never be pregnant again. This was my second child and I had only planned on two. Besides, my relationship with my partner was falling apart¹.

This magical yet very ordinary experience of motherhood - being hugely pregnant² with a fully formed baby inside me - was happening in that moment! I posted the photo on my motherhood blog.

I was never a passionate fan of Heather Armstrong’s Dooce³, but I did very much enjoy her early motherhood writing and it was finding her blog that finally focused me on my own writing venture. When my blog then grew in popularity Heather eventually came across me, too. She once linked to my blog on hers and for the better part of a year I received wave after wave of visits, numbering in the hundreds of thousands - such was the power of her motherhood community.

Over the years I grew increasingly disgusted with the vitriol she received, and we finally exchanged a couple of emails about the feminist act of motherhood memoir writing.

I never had an agenda for us to be friends. I saw the intensity around her. And, we were very different women. I do not experience depression and for her it was lifelong. My blog was much less polished than her aesthetic, just like the photo of me pregnant. But, we were both fascinated with the raw in motherhood writing. As Heather once said about her motherhood writing - “I didn’t want to decorate the everyday and the ugliness of it. I wanted to celebrate it and I wanted to write it and move you and make you laugh. And I always did it as irreverently as I possibly could”.

It is worth watching this 2015 video of Heather from where that quote comes, talking about the turning of the tide in motherhood blogging. She describes the moment when the Internet moved from unfiltered women’s writing to sponsored content. (Of course, this eventually transitioned into something even more constraining - influencing).

In this clip you will see the sheer misogyny of the moment. The rules of sponsored content arose from the revulsion marketers expressed towards women’s bodies. You will also see in that video a painful example of the abusive comments Heather received, as a blogger.

It’s been a long time since I revisited those kinds of comments. So, it was truly astonishing to recall that as blogging reached its peak women bloggers, me included, were subjected to this hatred simply for writing about mothering, for daring to take our lives seriously⁴. But the scale at which Heather experienced it was something else.

Heather died by suicide this week. It’s a very, very sad end for a woman who contributed significantly to the profile of motherhood writing and who sparked an enthusiasm in so many to document their own motherhood paths. The mixed quality of mummy blog writing was always irrelevant to me, it was an important movement simply because it was a mass act of self-acknowledgement and revelation by women. In its place has come a sustained interest in professional motherhood writing, as well as a more entertainment-focused, heavily artificed documentation of motherhood on Instagram and TikTok.

I cannot help but see this moment with Heather gone as also being a reminder that the era of raw motherhood writing seems over.

Is there a new community of this DIY writing out there for young mothers to read and participate in now? I hope so, but I know recently a new mother told me she was finding motherhood very lonely and very stifling. She said she longed to have with other mothers the kinds of real discussion she saw in my writing.

Which brings me to something else I noticed while watching that video of Heather, and the abuse she received. It is heavy with the commenter’s imagined insights into Heather. I fear blogging, with its window of intimacy and immediacy, also led to a growth in this kind of caustic analysis. Some readers thought themselves experts on the inner world of women writers in a way that had not happened before.

There is an arrogance to their comments. They are witness to a fraction of a woman’s life and yet believe themselves all knowing about her. Worse than that, they regard their reactions to be fresh understandings beyond the comprehension of the storyteller, herself. It is hard to overstate the extent to which this can happen when the storyteller is writing about mothering.

This kind of reader is oblivious to the fact that a clever writer uses disclosure knowingly, as part of telling a bigger story about herself. And, that provoking a particular response in a reader is usually a skill derived from a writer’s self-awareness, not her lack thereof.

Meaning, it is highly unlikely you are experiencing an amazing insight⁵ about another woman from afar, much less her children. It is much more likely that you are having a reaction⁶. And if we paused, as readers, we might then have an amazing insight about ourselves.

If we paused.

Who wants to write into that vulnerability?

Heather’s writing resurfaced for me recently when I learned of the uproar around a blog post she had written debating her child’s gender identity. What kind of self-sabotage was this, I wondered.

When I read the piece, since removed, I saw a howl of pain. It had all the signs of a private diary entry written in a moment of wretchedness - the zigzagging of emotional overwhelm, the flippant dismissal of one's long-held values and beliefs, and the inability to temper fury with one's child. Of course, it was deeply offensive⁷. It should never have been published.

Written in private this could have been an opportunity to face the shadow self and resolve repressed feelings of fear and ugliness. It may have been cathartic. Heather may then have integrated those feelings with her keenly held principles and deep love for her children. Instead, a moment of intense vulnerability was made worse.

Some will see this as a failure of mother-love, some will see it as an opportunity to moralise about mental illness and substance dependence, some will see it as the inevitable conclusion of an experiment in publishing raw writing.

I saw a mother struggling with the work of ‘letting go’ in parenting her teenagers.

But, of course I did. My reading, like yours, is part-projection. I am seeing what I want to see ..in the big mirror of the Internet.

And I can’t tell you how glad I am I took that blurry photo of me pregnant.

Thoughts on Heather and Self-Preservation

There is a time in the life of every woman who becomes Internet-famous where she has to make a choice: do I read the comments?

Heather made the wrong choice 15 years ago and it would come to shape everything she wrote. She was forever in an angry, defensive crouch and I understand exactly why, more than most, and it was upsetting to watch.

It’s easy for me to say ‘don’t read the comments’ because wisdom is simple in hindsight. It’s human nature to want to know what people are saying about you. But the Internet has contorted our instinct to bitch about someone into performance art and virtue signalling in a way that is unspeakably cruel and can irrevocably damage the person who is reading about themselves. In my case, I had people around me to guide me away from reading those forums and I quickly learned not to base my self-worth or my success on what other people thought about me. Because that way lies madness. 

I don’t say that lightly.

- Mia Freedman, How the Internet Made and Then Broke, Heather Armstrong, Queen of Mummy Bloggers

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Thoughts on Heather and Pain

Somewhere along the way I’d learned that I should run towards pain and not away from it. I saw what happened to the girls whose pain was deferred for too long. The plunk into the middle of the ocean of despair when the drugs were suddenly gone.

- Ani’s “Addiction and Pain - Goodnight Heather” at Chapel House

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Thoughts on Heather and Boundaries

[Hoda Kotb]: It seems like a lot of the stuff on these blogs are things I would call my best friend and tell her on the phone, as opposed to put out there for kind of the world to see. Why do you want it all out there for everyone to see?

[Armstrong]: Well, I think it is a new way to reach out to people, and a new way to form communities. And I have formed incredible relationships and have received amazing support from people who read what I write.

[Gifford]: Do you have a line that you've drawn basically about—you will not cross as I know you put your daughter's picture on…on a daily basis, right?

[Armstrong]: Yeah, my boundaries have changed since the beginning of the website, and, and they constantly shift and move and I definitely have you know rigid boundaries about what I will and will not talk about.

From Jo Piazza’s “How will your obituary define you?” in Over the Influence.

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Thoughts on Heather and Legacy

What people keep missing (over and over. and over) when we talk about those early days of blogging is this: no one was there for the fame. Or the attention. We were there because we were writers. And writers fucking write.

I have written about this here before, but it bears repeating: there is a reason young girls are given locked diaries. We have been told our whole lives to keep our truths to ourselves out of SAFETY. Safety for ourselves. For our families. But our secret lives do not keep us safe, they only enable the same lie we have been told for centuries. That our stories are not the ones that matter.

But they do. And because of Heather Armstrong’s willingness to be honest and raw and vulnerable and messy, an entire generation of us believed we could, too.

An entire generation who have now raised an entire generation. A generation unafraid to challenge the bullshit binaries and refuse the same agenda we did when we sat down at our computers to write OUR stories. A generation that claps back in a way WE NEVER DID (or felt we could) at their age.

From Rebecca Woolf’s “Because of her, I was..” on the braid.

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Thoughts on Stillness

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing.. the thing that might be worth saying.

- Gilles Deleuze

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Thoughts on Joy

Many of us are trained to find inspiration in despair, in anguish, in suffering. Told to imagine better. While that’s important, I want to train myself to work from a place of joy, of laughter, warmth, contentment. This world has taught us to view joy with scarcity. We’re silenced by joy. Let’s be loud in our joy instead.

- Sherisa de Groot, founder of Raising Mothers

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Thoughts on Seeing Another’s Perspective

If we are separated I will

try to wait for you

on your side of things

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your side of the wall and water

and of the light moving at its own speed

even on leaves that we have seen

I will wait on one side

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while a side is there

- W.S. Merwin, Travelling Together

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Thoughts on Expression

I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and care silent and then there’s the silence that come back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.

- Ada Limón, The Quiet Machine

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Thoughts on Social Media

Our life is frittered away by detail.. simplify, simplify.

- Henry David Thoreau

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Thoughts on Productivity

I find workaholism really anti-fertile. For example, in my work with Scandinavian schools with biophilia, it is very apparent that short schooldays and a lot of free time inspires the imagination most and not only makes the kids happier but also they make more original things in the end. I’ve seen how the working until midnight in the biggest cities is really destructive… and you aren’t coming up with any new ideas but just repeating old stuff on a loop.

- Björk

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Thoughts on Mothers and Work

This art series “When Mommas At Work” by Natalie Lauren Sims is just so beautiful.

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Thoughts on You

It’s going to be ok.

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Other Times I Have Thought About All This

Here in ‘Unanchored’.

Here in ‘Nostalgia for Families I Never Belonged To’.

Here in ‘Taming of the Shrew’.

Here in ‘Sentimental’.

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Happy Mothers’ Day

I give to you comedian, Toni Nagy and her interpretative dance on parenting teenagers.

Oh, there’s a reason!

1. I realised he wasn’t taking photos of me, and I needed to not miss this time.

2. Look at my bellybutton!

3. No shade on her, because she was very, very good at motherhood writing - but I found a lot of us related more to motherhood blogs written by mothers in our own countries. So, American readers loved American blogs and Australian readers loved Australian blogs. The familiar, was the point. We suddenly got to see ourselves reflected in published writing.

4. Comment filters and moderation as well as an active movement around opposing and controlling the free for all have changed things a little. But, the trolling is one of the reasons why I have moved to Substack where the potential for this is much less.

5. An observation, perhaps an astute observation, sure. But a revelation? Mostly, not.

6. The response to Rachel Cusk’s motherhood writing is a classic example of this.

7. I refuse to guess at how offended her child was about the insensitivity of this post. My experience in parenting teenagers is that you can fight and make-up and fight and make-up again with them, before anyone else has had time to digest the first argument. And also, teenagers are capable of forgiving you your worst trespasses as a parent while also holding deep resentment towards you for the smallest of slights. Their relationship will have been complex. I won’t guess.