mommyblogging?

Well, I’m a little late, but I’ll do it anyway. Miss Zoot went to BlogHer 06 and came home with questions that she wished she had asked. So now she did it online. And the masses answered. I have been thinking about being a mommyblogger a lot lately. There is no such thing in German BTW. I would have said that I’m a mommyblogger wholeheartedly. Even ‘though I despise the label “mommy”. I don’t allow my son to call me “mommy” (that would be “Mami” anyway). He may, and should, call me “Mama”, and everybody else on this planet may refer to me as his “mother”. But then I thought about the last time I have written about things motherly on this blog. It has been a long time. I posted on diapers three months ago. I’m not writing letters to my son, recording his milestones here or posting pictures. But on the other hand, even ‘though I’m writing about the things that are foremost on my mind, being a mother is now a part of me that I can’t leave away. It’s like being a woman. Giving birth has changed me. Regardless of what happens or what I will be doing, I’ll be a mother forever. (And I can never forget the fact. Especially now, when I’m typing this while my son is busy making LEGO-food for me. (You’re asking what LEGO-food is? I’ll show you. Musli, an apple, a sandwich in front of a soda pop, a piece of cucumber, and two very hard boiled eggs, hence the blackness.))

But back to my starting point. The questions:

1. Do your kids know about your blog? If they’re too young to know, do you plan to keep it open to them as they get older?
My son is 3.5, so even if he knows that I have a blog, he doesn’t understand it. I’ll keep it open to him.

2a. If so – do you worry they may get embarrassed later? What would you do if they asked you to stop writing about them? What would you do if they wanted you to take it down all together?
I don’t worry about him getting embarrassed. He’ll sure be. I don’t know, if I would stop writing about him, but I only blog about my life anyway. If he objected to a given post, I’ll give him the chance to add to it maybe, or alter it. I don’t know, if I’d take it down. It’s my blog. He’ll be free to make his own, where he can write anything he wants.

3. Do you think our kids will appreciate the archive of their childhood? Do you wish your parents had done the same?
I think he’ll eventually appreciate it. Though it’s not exactly an archive of his childhood, but of my life at this time. I wish, my parents had kept an archive. We have only a few photos, one or two anecdotes, and my mother remembers almost nothing. My father was out working. I’d love to be able to read diaries or to have scrapbooks.

4. Do you go back and re-read your past parenting milestones? Do you realize you forgot a lot?
Since I started the blog only half a year ago … When I’m reading my old journals, I see that I’m forgetting much of the details, but not much of the emotions and main problems at any given time.

5. What about your children’s friends/teachers/moms-of-friends? What if they found your blog? Do you tell your child not to tell anyone about it or are they free to talk about it? Do you worry their teachers or other parents will think it’s weird?
I haven’t told any of those people of my blog yet. But more out of the frustration that almost every person I told about it said, “What is a block?” “Why are you doing this?” “Ha?”. If they found it, I don’t think it’d bother me. I have made the mistake of telling my students that I have a blog, and ‘though I didn’t give them the URL, there were people arriving at this blog by searching for my full name and blog. So I suppose some of my students know, where to find me. I don’t think, they’d be reading this for long. I assume, they’d find it boring. Some of my friends know. No, a lot of my friends know, but only a few are reading this. My parents are the only ones that I didn’t tell. And I asked my sister not to tell them too. She’s reading the blog, BTW, and when I met her and started telling my bra-story, she was the first one ever to say to me, “Oh, yes, that was funny. I read it on your blog.”

I quit worrying if people think that something I do is weird. A lot of people think that I’m weird, no matter what I do. And I have an excuse. I’m an artist.

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