Hot Seat, Part 2

Hooray for Q&A, for providing a blog topic when I was otherwise at a loss, and continuing my NaBloPoMo streak.   Today… blogging about blogging.  How very meta of me.

From LauraC:

You always seem pretty upbeat and find a positive spin to every situation. Do you think you are like this IRL?

Well… yes and no.  On the one hand, I’m perfectly capable of lots of snarkiness and crankiness.  Things piss me off, and I let people know. I have most definitely been known to mope and wallow. I’m far from Pollyanna.

That said, in a lot of situations and with a lot of people, I do tend to put a positive spin on things, or at least deflect the complaining.  Sometimes it’s about finding a silver lining, and sometimes it’s just “yeah, wah wah, quit yer bitchin’.” Like when people used to ask, with pity in their eyes, how I was doing in the newborn days.  I mean, yes, it was super hard. Stressful.  Exhausting.  But I was OK.  I was sleeping sometimes and managing to eat and shower most of the time.  And I could bitch about it, but what’s the point?  Was there really some alternative to what I was going through?  No.  I was putting my head down and getting through as best I could, and that was fine.

My relative lack of complaining (and I do complain, usually to M or maybe one or two other people) again seemed to give off the impression that I was freakishly calm and put-together in those days.  Well, sometimes I was and sometimes I wasn’t.  But I was more or less fine, and it seemed superfluous to me to complain about things like lack of sleep or crying babies.  I mean, that’s just part of the deal, right? Why whine?  I would just shrug, and do my best. And the act of complaining didn’t help the situation.  Frequently, it just made me feel worse. Yes, there were days when all three of us were crying.  There were lots of times when I would end the day with my last nerve totally frayed.  But even I didn’t want to listen to my own complaining for all that long.  Sometimes, you have to laugh so that you don’t cry. And so I try to laugh when I can.  Even when things suck.  Might as well have a laugh about it.

Hrm, that’s a kind of negative-sounding response to a question about being upbeat, isn’t it?  The short answer is, yes, I am a lot like that in real life in a lot of situations.  But, just like what you read on the blog… not always.

Is there anyone IRL who does not know you have a blog?

This is a funny question to me, because I think my blog started the opposite way from a lot of other mommy blogs.  A lot of people start them as a way to keep family and friends updated, and then they branch out past just photos and pediatrician updates.  They pick up other readers, expand their blogroll, and become a part of the larger blogosphere.

I started mine when I got pregnant.  [Truth be told, I created a blogger account and claimed the "Goddess in Progress" bit maybe even a year before I started blogging.  I thought the name was sort of cute.  But, then, I found I had nothing interesting to say.]  When I got pregnant (1st, 2nd, 3rd time’s the charm), I not only had something to say, but it was something I wasn’t ready to tell “real” people.  I was bursting with the news, but couldn’t call my mom or my friends.  So I went public to stay private.  Hence, my real name was never associated with this blog.  It was always somewhat anonymous, and has stayed that way to a certain extent for the last two and a half years.

Over the last year, “real-life” friends have started reading the blog.  I started telling people, mentioning it in passing or posting the link on my Facebook page.  But, strangely enough, I’m still sort of evasive on the topic when it comes to my family.  There’s something about the public/private nature of semi-anonymous blogging that is really helpful to me, that fills a certain need.  If I knew that my mom or my aunts were checking in… it would be different.  (And, given my Sitemeter stats, I don’t think they’ve found me. No hits from my hometown.)

So, the easier question for me to answer is whether anyone IRL does read my blog!  I know there are some (those of you who aren’t commenting… I know you’re there, so speak up!).  But I think the vast majority of my readership is people I’ve never actually met face-to-face.

From Krissy:

Would you write any differently if no one you knew in real life was reading your blog?

Related, obviously, to LauraC’s question. And the answer is, not really.  I started with the assumption that no one I knew was reading my blog.  But I also worked on the assumption that things have a tendency to find a way on the internet, so I’ve always tried to be at least a little careful/considerate, and think of how something might come across if the person I’m talking about actually found the blog.  So there are times when I could tell gossipy stories about family or friends or people I run across.  But if the story is anything in which someone could recognize themselves and wouldn’t be pleased… I just won’t do it.  I’ve heard of too many stories where a bride talked shit about her mother-in-law on a blog, and big shock, the MIL found it.  No thank you.  I do think that I would write differently if I knew my family was reading.  But I also try to keep the tone and content such that no feuds would break out if they stumbled upon it and recognized the photos of the grandkids.

How would your life change if you suddenly stopped blogging?

Well, I’d probably stop taking pictures of my quilts, that’s for sure. And I’d have a lot more time on my hands, and stop having thoughts like “I’m totally blogging this!”  And I’d really have to start keeping some kind of baby book so I don’t completely forget my kids’ first years.  But I’d really miss the outlet.  I’d miss the emotional outlet of having to think things through in a coherent enough way to write it down.  I’d miss the intellectual/creative outlet of the act of writing.  I’d miss the social outlet of giving and taking feedback. I’d miss having the ability to go back in the archives and get a snapshot of my life at a point in time.  Some people think this stuff is trivial, and in some ways it is. It’s “just” a blog. It’s a hobby, after all.  If I stop enjoying it, I should stop doing it.  But it has also become really important to me, and so I keep doing it.