Post number two for today......a little more targeted.

This time I truly have something to write (read: rant) about.

Before I posted my first two entries I hadn't had very much experience with blogging, and hadn't seen many real blogs. My understanding was that it was your own personal slice of the internet to use in whatever way you wanted...to talk about YOUR day, talk about YOUR thoughts and YOUR experiences.

Then today, while curious to see what other bloggers were doing and writing about, I decided to take the first few tentative clicks of the ">next blog" hyperlink.

The first thing that popped up was the picture of a laughing child. I thought ok, fair enough, someone here has a nice little cutesie page I'll just let them get on with it if that's their thing. Then I kept clicking. Click; Laughing Baby. Click; Professional portrait of an all-smiling family with kids. Click; Two more laughing children. Click; More children and a story about a mom trying to balance raising children with her professional career.

Almost all of these types of Blogs (which seem to be almost all of the blogs) are prefaced with a title of "The (insert generic surname here) Family".......or some of them trying to be individual and saying "The bland family chronicles" or some similar tripe.....so individual that I saw the word "Chronicles" about 10 times....and I only clicked next blog about twenty times.

The point I'm trying to make is why do these people feel the need to parade their family like this in front of the internet. The ones with the professionally taken photos of their immaculate middle class american family while out in a field of golden leaves during the autumn while everyone in the family wears a smile and halos spread out of their heads (edit: may have made that bit up lol) especially pissed me off. It was clearly just people presenting their families and saying "hey, we're perfect! up yours!" thinly veiled by the excuse that they were providing real "insight" and light into people's lives, or trying to show people "Hey, you're not alone in your struggles raising a family....even though we never had any troubles of our own cos we're all absolutely perfect ya know?". In reality these are the families who probably have the most problems but hey.....as long as the family blog still looks immaculate who cares if 14-year-old Susie is up the duff and doesn't know who the father is? Who cares if 8 year old Jimmy beat up 12 consecutive children at break time...who cares if 4 year old annie is saying that uncle robert, the one with the wooden leg, the glass eye and the "sneaky look" touched her in a special place.....as long as the blog looks like there's nothing wrong in our family we can brush everything else under the carpet in that thing called reality. Give me a fucking break.


The whole blog of the "Professional Matriarch" is another cliché.....If you're finding it so hard to cope then haul your ass away from the computer and spend the time actually doing something productive. Don't complain about never having time to do anything if you're gonna sit for hours in front of a computer obssessing over your blog, as you have clearly done due to the sheer number of posts and all the design work that has gone in. Also I seem to remember reading about similar things somewhere around the mid-90s (when I was about 5) and even then I was bored with it. We recognise the fact there are professional mothers who deserve recognition for being able to juggle the two effectively. There are also professional Father counterparts who do the same thing and don't mindlessly blog about it on the internet cos hey guess what- It's called Life.

For me, I just wanted this whole thing to be my personal slice of the internet. It's a forum to present my thoughts, experiences and feelings on things in a way that doesn't really bother the people around me, due to the fact that I haven't identified them. If you want to have a family blog, that's fine. But be real. Remember people don't want to read about how your life is always bliss....write about the hard stuff aswell. And, for the love of fuck, if you're gonna write about being a harrassed and professional Mother, stop, power off your laptop and go feed your screaming, hungry baby.