My John Hughes Moment

So I wrote this post that I worked kind of hard on that was basically a response to some brouhaha that’s been going down in mommy blogger land recently. It was about the sort of group-think mentality that can occur when you get a related bunch of internet users writing similar sentiments. Obviously there’s good (supportive help) & bad (internet trolls) to all of it.

Anyway I’ve decided not to post it mainly because of my chiken-shit-edness & Calvin’s suggestion that it might polarize some readers. Then I also read this & have to say I am glad about my decision. I realized that by writing it I wasn’t writing it for me or Freyja but for what I wanted to be a growing audience. Why the audience? Self-gratification of course. That ever present need to please & be thought well of by friends & strangers alike. To make me feel better about myself because being popular is good right? It was like being in high school again as the geeky weird girl who would’ve liked to be popular but knowing that wasn’t going to happen went with the I am a rebel look & so am too cool for you. I don’t think that even makes any sense but whatever.

So I wanted to see my name in blogger lights (by being added to people’s blogrolls) or to gain some probably ill-fated glory by being linked to for some wondrously fantastic post. I didn’t do too much about it besides listing myself in a couple of webring things but I still had the desire. So I started writing more stuff on the big concerns of women, motherhood & the like under the guise of practicing my craft. Stuff I never did post because as usual someone else seemed to write about it better elsewhere. I began getting discouraged & then pissed off because I’d see other bloggers who’d only just begun have so much more “success” than I. But you see they’d put more effort into it. Or maybe it was effortless for them to come up with great stuff in a short amount of time whereas I was stuck barely literate at my laptop until I’d had my morning coffee & then I was already running out of time because damn it I had to do laundry again.

The last week or so with the insomnia, the teething (please let it be teething) & the stress I was creating for myself over trying to become popular almost did me in. But, I also managed to go on a picnic, visit a new friend with blueberries, exercise a little bit (do not ask me about that 10km thing though ok?) & get this, go scrapbooking (& it was fun!). While I was there on Friday night my friends (real live ones) expressed how much they enjoyed reading what I had to say & it made me feel great. So it’s back to basics for me & writing what I want without trying to become something I’m not. Calvin said most of my audience wants cute & if it comes off too trite & vapid for some people then they can (continue) to ignore it. I don’t have the energy right now to give more to this than I already do & my sweet little baby is growing so fast I need to take more moments throughout the day to soak her all in. I’m doing this for her.