Not to sound like the Ancient Mariner Motherer, but damn I wish we had blogging when I was a young mother. You know, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth yelling "Not the Mama!", i.e. late-80's and 90's. I would have loved to have had an outlet for my frustration and angst other than burning up the wires to my few friends who were home with babies - not that there were any home with babies.
I had my kids in that weird in-between time called the post-hippie/Knot's Landing/power suit with shoulder pads/Thirty-Something era. Coming of maternal age at that time, I had two sets of friends:
1.) college friends
2.) law school friends
What happened is that all the college friends took off for places like India and the Upper West Side (equally foreign to me, a suburban child) and got grunt jobs typing all night for the New York Post so that they could get a better job, i.e. typing all night for the New York Times.
They were writers and artists and poets and I was, uh, a scared writer and artist and poet. I looked at their apartments with the bathtub in the kitchen, the cracks in the walls providing the cockroach highway, the tales of brutal, dismembering editors, and I decided that I needed to postpone entering the work force for as long as possible. I thought about being an au pair in the countryside of England, but my parents dangled the school loan payments in front of my face and reminded me that we were Italian and Italian children never move farther away than a strand of spaghetti can stretch. And I was a chickenshit at heart.
So I went to law school and got a lot of new friends. The kind that organize study groups and assign you a chapter to outline and throw you out of the study group if you forget to do it because you're working your ass off behind the library counter working to pay for law school. . And that my friends, is a true story. Do you watch Gilmore Girls? You know Rory's friend, Paris? She's the softer side of most of the people I met in law school. Thank God I finally made friends with a group of less neurotic people, and they are my friends to this day, but I still felt alienated from them, in that way you think in your head that someday you'll go back to your real self with your real friends but then find out that they all became secretaries with drinking problems instead of journalists with drinking problems. The final bell was tolled on most of those college friendships when I got married and one of them heard me call my husband "honey" and asked to be taken to the train immediately back into the city and away from our weird nouveau Donna Reed existence.
So my good friends became my law school friends and we all sort of had our kids at the same time and we shared power suit maternity clothes. But after the babies were born, they went back to work. I, however, looked at this incredible little pink and white bundle with the clearest blue eyes and decided I was not going to have her in a car seat under my desk while I listened to wiretaps of drug gangs like my boss did. No, I would quit working for the man and start my own practice and instead listen to her cry with the teenage babysitter while I tried to hide behind my "office cum bedroom" and negotiate a real estate contract.
So it was pretty lonely in those days on the Mommy front. I either had the friends who had moved around the country and the world so many times I didn't even know what time zone they were in, or the friends who could pencil me for a phone call a week from Tuesday in between pumping their breasts in the office ladies room before rushing to daycare to pick up the twins.
Eventually I found a fabulous mix of stay at home moms right in my own neighborhood, but before then, boy would I have liked to read and write my own mommy blog.
My question now is: where are all the old older Mommy bloggers? Not everyone who owns a laptop and an email account is under 40 and surely not all Mommy bloggers are having their first and second children. Where are the good old middle aged mothers who have half an empty nest, kids with incredible tuition costs, and one at home wanting to cyberdate? Where are the pictures of the middle school dances and the prom and the frat pictures you found on your son's MySpace site? And where are the Moms wondering whether they'll ever sleep through the night again once the oldest moves back home after college?
So I ask you Older Mommy (and Daddy) Bloggers to log on and start your own blogs, make a webring, and shoulder aside all these young'uns with their month of softies and pictures of stuffed animals. Post those cute pics of the beer bottles you found in your son's closet or the sea of clothes that cover the plush carpet that you put down when you found out you were expecting that last child, and instead of the photos of the beautiful deco books and swap cards you've gotten from your cyber friends, prettily stack the college tuition bills, car insurance dunning notices, and the 18th birthday card from the Selective Service.
Show us your gray hairs! Display your wrinkles. Take photos of the Tylenol PM! Unite!
