The Power of Blogging

Sometime, early November 2005, this scene occurred in our living room. Hannah, then about 2 1/2, was sitting in the armchair, and David was just about to leave for work. It was barely 7am. I had been up since 5:15am with the newborn Lillian, who seemed not too keen on sleeping nor providing me with the time to. We were all reluctant to say goodbye to David, the only other adult human in our lives, whom we wouldn't see again for approximately 11 1/2 hours.

I settled down on the couch to nurse Lillian again; Dave made the rounds, kissing us all farewell. Lily latched just as the door clicked shut, and Hannah -- suddenly aware that she was, unfortunately, stuck home with a baby who was ruining her toddler life and a mother who no longer served any discernible purpose save producing copious amounts of milk from her breasts -- looked at us nestled down on the couch and started to wail, piteously. It was a moment I will never forget.

Dave accuses me of remembering all the bad stuff. Easy to say when you get to drive away in a car and drown in NPR or Johnny Cash or just blessed silence. This string of lousy incidents -- weaved in, inextricably, with the utter joy of parenting two delightful little girls -- is connected by the feeling of powerlessness that underscored each event seared into my brain's hippocampus.

Going from one to two children was more work in all kinds of ways. The chances for feeling powerless, impotent, came more frequently, and I'd stand there or sit there or lay there, surveying whatever scene was unfolding, in a paralyzed fog, hampered by my unfortunate inability to subdivide.

When Her Bad Mother exhorted us, oh faithful legion of blog followers, to craft an essay on how blogging has empowered women, I jumped.

Power....power!

It is something I frequently feel utterly without, unless I am sitting here, my ass firmly glued to a stepstool, my fingers furiously banging away at the laptop while the kiddies sleep or play.

As a mother who is home alone with her children from 6:45am until 5:30pm, the most empowering part of blogging is carving out a little niche for myself in this strange, elaborate place known as the blogosphere. It is finding and developing a voice for myself, and sometimes, I feel a little like the Old Kelly, the one who was once known to stay up past 10:00pm and put on makeup and splashy clothing and meet her friends downtown for dancing and drinks and many cigarettes; the one who used to spend an entire afternoon reading Catcher in the Rye (again!) under my parents' locust tree in the backyard; the one who used to watch movies uninterrupted and not roll her eyes when the phone rang; the one who'd spend all her paycheck on whatever she wanted, being frivolous and unwise; the one who could sit down to a meal and finish it at her own pace; the one who'd enter a coffee shop and go right for the counter, instead of making a beeline for the back to claim a highchair. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the other, an appreciation for the side of me that isn't stained, frumpy and frazzled. Sometimes I get the feeling that I do have something to say, and that perhaps someone might listen.

Life? It's different now. It quite literally revolves around the suns of my children, and yes, they're bright, so very bright and warm and sunny; their warm little arms feeling like a drizzle of sticky syrup against my own; their heads on my shoulder or in the crook of my neck, feeling almost always feverish. I love them, insanely, tremendously, in this over-the-top way that borders on obsession.

But they also drive me batshit crazy, making me question why the heck I ever thought staying at home could work for us.

Hence, the niche. The necessary, radical act of carving out a space that belongs solely to me in the vast sea of other bloggers, where my children can bring the tide in or out, can change the current and generally screw with me and my small craft, but they cannot pull me under. It belongs to me, this spot of ocean, and it's warm and salty, making me buoyant in ways I hadn't expected.

Sink or swim.

I choose to swim. But on the hardest days, the days my canoe has developed a gigantic hole, and I jump in out of necessity, and then I feel a giant cramp in the abdomen, and I couldn't possibly swim another stroke, this place I come to write, and all its myriad inhabitants, keeps me afloat.

We all know the power of the ocean. It is a force to be reckoned with, the water affording us its natural energy. Taking us to places we hadn't thought possible. And that, for me, is the blogosphere, and writing within it. That's the power.


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