This is a mommy blog.

From a mom, with thoughts!

Blogging may be out, and Substacks may be in, but make no mistake, this is a mommy blog. An homage to the time when “blogosphere” was a term thrown around without irony. When “mommy” was the glib way we referred to the all-encompassing journey of motherhood. Mommy blogs were easy to mock, as they were often oversharing or gossipy accounts of the mundanity of the everyday life that is motherhood. But I, even as a sixteen-year-old single person without any dependents, still a dependent myself, was a voracious reader of them. Maybe it stroked inside me the innate desire I had for motherhood or maybe I just liked reading an intimate account of somebody’s everyday life. And intimate accounts they were. In the same way I hate-follow people who overshare things on their Instagram stories, or gulp down Christmas letters where the author has no sense of what is appropriate to share in a Christmas letter (“Uncle Ronny was back in rehab this year… he seems to be doing better. Addiction is a nasty disease.”??? OK Merry Christmas Cheryl…pop off with that TMI!), I enjoyed reading day-to-day minute-to-minute accounts of people’s lives.

What prompted these moms to share so many details? Do their kids, now grown, find it strange that they can find, in an archived blog post, what they were wearing, eating, drawing, thinking each day of their third year on this planet? Does Ryder enjoy the fact that his birth story was published in detail mere days after he entered the world, that while he was navigating being a brand-new human with all of the sensory delights and nightmares that come with the transition from womb to earth, his mother was typing away on her MacBook about the sheer amount of fluid and blood and screaming that was involved in his arrival?

Now that I’m a mom, I do understand the impulse more, at least somewhat. My son, the sweetest little peach that ever existed, is almost one, and I still have a lot more to learn about what it takes to raise a human being who turns out to be good and kind and not somebody who ghosts girls on dating apps or is an asshole to servers or *gasp* occupies the space of open-mic comedian with a podcast about the craft. Even so, I have a better understanding of the experience of young motherhood. Having a young child is at once sheerly magical and deeply boring. The days are Groundhog Day levels of repetition interspersed with moments of awe, wonder, sheer panic and brain-altering levels of love. Just when it seems that you’ve reached a status quo, first steps are toddled, little arms that you grew wrap around your neck in affection, your baby throws his head back, overtaken by giggles, pure joy and glee pouring out of him at a rate you couldn’t imagine possible.

It's incredible and exhausting, mind-numbing and world-shattering.

The experience is so clearly not unique. So many of us choose (or don’t choose but are anyway) to be parents. The human race soldiers on, and with our procreation comes all sorts of newness: medical advancements and record-breaking levels of pollution and viral TikTok trends. And yet, even though my husband and I choosing to bring a child into this world is nowhere near an exceptional decision in the grand scheme of things, it also happens to be without question the best, most stressful, most amazing decision either of us has ever made. Cataloging the experience, however minute or uninteresting it may be to some, is now an impulse I understand. My confoundment about these mommies blogging in the early aughts and twenty-teens has ebbed, somewhat. After all, there is a part of me that wants to remember every detail, all of his little outfits, the way his eyes gleam when he starts to understand something, his smile, his laugh, his favorite food being bread in all its forms.

So now that I am no longer a sixteen-year-old obsessively scrolling Tumblr and Blogger and I am an actual mom with an actual child I’m in charge of, it should be natural that I would turn to the mommy blogs of my youth. The problem is that now we are no longer mommies, or mothers, but mamas. My feed is a revolving door of Instagram reels and TikToks that start with a cloyingly sweet voice going, “Hey mama…”

Some of these mamas are genuinely kind, relatable, and real. They post with messy hair that realistically hasn’t been washed in days and they are honest about relying too much on screen time so they can retain shreds of their humanity. They are funny, dog-tired, and trying their best. Finding these women on the internet, women I relate to, is like uncovering a sparkly diamond in a mine. They are real so I am real. They exist so I exist. I am not alone.

Unfortunately for me, this type of content does not seem to be the norm. To find these women who make me feel like I belong somewhere, I have to sift through an endless mess of people telling you how to parent. So-called-mamas who throw at you a barrage of questions you never knew would be a part of this.

Do you do baby-led weaning? Co-sleeping? Gentle parenting? Are you an attachment style, or permissive? What are the screen-time rules in your house? Do you buy organic? Can these brownies be made without eggs or dairy or sugar?  Did you sleep train, and if so, are you aware of the sheer amount of therapy bills you’ll be paying for the trauma you caused when you let your child cry it out?

It's a lot of noise. When I engage with it, which is hard to help sometimes, I feel lonely and strange. When faced with this swirling vortex of social media mamas it is hard not to wonder if you are doing enough. Is it wrong that I want to make my son’s first birthday cake from a box mix, that I’m weirded out by the six-year-old kid in music class who is still using a pacifier, that I don’t feel like I belong in this generation of parents? I hope you don’t misunderstand me and think I will be a parent who tells my kid to rub some dirt on it when faced with emotional complexity or favor the boomer mentality that therapy is only for the weak, it’s just that when I hear a story of a group of Park Slope Mom’s asking a hot dog vendor to leave the park so they wouldn’t have to tell their children no, I feel mystified that these people are supposed to be my peers.

I think we have made great strides in the world of parenting. These parents who I often struggle to identify with are definitely more sensitive to the heightened emotional nature of childhood than previous generations were, they allow more nuance in gender, more autonomy in decision-making. A lot of it is really excellent. Even so, I struggle to find spaces on the internet where I feel like my version of motherhood is enough.

Enter my new substack! I have started many newsletters, and many blogs, and almost all of them have petered off because I get bored easily, am inherently lazy, and I do not exactly push myself when it comes to creative commitment. When I got bored of standup, I stopped, even though I was good at it. However, I happen to hold the strong belief that the world does not need more standup comedians, so I don’t really mourn my career on the daily, if you know what I mean. Quitting standup was like a seppuku self-sacrifice, meant to restore honor to my family. But since I’ve quit standup, I have still been writing, and not sharing most of it, because a good dose of shame for one’s work is not a bad thing.

But, because there is something inside me that is desperate to be heard, seen, etc., I have decided to rear my ugly head and begin yet another creative pursuit made available for public consumption. In truth, if this newsletter reaches, I don’t know, seven? moms or dads who feel similarly about the mucky journey that is parenthood, I will feel like a success.

I don’t know what this blog, because I feel that this venture should be called a blog, will be. As much as I love reading about it, I will probably not be sharing the intimate details of my son’s life because I want him to have some scraps of privacy to cling to as he grows up in an ultra-visible world, but that desperate effort of mine to give him a sense of anonymity will probably be the source of a fight later on – “everyone else had videos go viral of them as a baby, mom?? Why am I the only one with such a minimal digital footprint? Honestly, fuck you, mom.”

This blog will be about me, I guess. My days, my failures, my own perceived inadequacies as a mom – doesn’t that sound fun?

There will be more to come, but for now, a picture of my perpetually messy kitchen complete with formula, coffee, Children’s Motrin, and various other things that keep our family going. Tonight, I’m going to make this baked ziti that my sister recommended, which my son will probably dismiss and throw on the floor, where my portly little dog will vacuum it up, and later this week at our vet appointment, I will be reminded that she is still obese.