Of Moms, Politics, and Blogs

(Skip this one if meta navel gazing turns you off.)

What made me finally decide to blog was Bernard Kerik. I wanted to say to the world, not just to S, K, and my mom, “Finally a man gets nailed on a nanny!” (Of course really I think that immigration and childcare policies need radical reform and nobody should be getting nailed on a nanny--now there’s a sick image--but if they are going to be nailing people on nannies, they damn well should be nailing men as well as women.) (And, yes, I know the nanny thing was probably just a cover-up for all the other stuff, and, no, I’d rather not get into the gender implications of all that.)

So I wanted to blog about Kerik, but then Ayelet and Laura did it for me, and by the time I actually got the blog going, the Kerik thing was too over. So I started with Carly Simon instead.

Which raises the question of what sort of blog I should like mine to be (Virginia Woolf allusion there, but I can’t find a good link, so you’ll have to take my word for it).

It’s not going to be one of those blogs that records every event and feeling as the day goes by, not because I don’t like reading some of those blogs, but because I don’t have the time and I’m a little too jealous of my privacy.

It’s not going to be a professional blog. There are a lot of people in my profession who blog, but I’m not ready to reveal my profession, and while I could probably come up with some amusing professional anecdotes, and I’m sure I could perpetrate some not-very-amusing professional whines, the issues in my profession don’t really interest me, or at least, the issues that the bloggers tend to gravitate to don’t really interest me.

It is inevitably going to be something of a mom blog. I’ve spent a lot of time reading mom blogs over the last few years (I was going to link to a whole bunch of them, including Dooce, who for some reason I never heard of until about a week ago, but apparently is the mom blog ne plus ultra, or perhaps just the mom blog du jour, but I decided not to, as I didn’t want to offend anyone, either by including them or by leaving them out). The thing is, I like the mom blogs of my friends, and I like some of the moms I’ve been reading for a long time and feel like I know, at least in that blog kind of way (ok, I couldn’t resist a tiny bit of linking), and of course there’s Ayelet, but lately, I don’t know, other people’s children and other people’s feelings about their children just aren’t that compelling to me, which certainly leaves me wondering why my children and my feelings about them might be compelling to anyone else, but I’m assuming that they will at least be compelling to my mother and my mother-in-law (well, at least my mother-in-law), and I do like to write about them, so there you have it.

What I really want to write are thoughtful and compelling disquisitions on politics and culture. Pithy observations and astute commentary would be nice too. The thing about that is, I’m not quite sure what the value of my blog contributions would be. I love a good rant as much as the next political junkie, and certainly blogs were important players in the election on the right and the left, blah blah blah, you’ve heard all this, which is exactly my point.

I was definitely wrong about the tsunami being unbloggable. Of course blogs have played an important role in disseminating information about the catastrophe and the relief efforts. But all I could have blogged was liberal guilt: how terrible it is that all those Sri Lankan and Indonesian moms have lost their children and here I am in my nice warm American house with my dry warm children and all I can do is feel terrible about it (and give money to Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders).

But hey, maybe it’s worth pointing out the irrelevance of liberal guilt, and maybe some other time my response will be more original. Or maybe I’ll find a more original way to express it. Or maybe originality isn’t even the point and what matters is that lots of people care, or even just notice.

The only way to find out the value of my contributions is to make them. And if I don’t have anything thoughtful, compelling, pithy, or astute to say, I can always update you on the flaccid pumpkins (they got even more flaccid, and then M kicked one, which was really scary, but, thanks to the fearless S, they are finally gone).