Better Than Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel

This post is my entry in the Mabel’s Labels BlogHer ’09 Contest, for which I answer the question “What have been the rewards and benefits of participating in the blogging community?”

I was in my twenties during the “Friends” heyday. I watched it every week just like everyone else. I talked about the characters like they were my friends, the way people talk about Oprah now as if she had come over for coffee this morning to share her wisdom, as Denis Leary complains in his book “Why We Suck.”

But you can’t just fire off an email to Oprah and expect a response, unless you have 8 babies at a time. And if you’re emailing one of the Friends, it’s likely that you need your head checked.

When I found Heather Armstrong’s blog Dooce in 2004, I felt for her the way I felt about Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel, except that with her daily updates full of sarcasm, raw emotion, and brutal honesty, she wasn’t just in my living room on Thursday nights. She was in my office, my workplace, my kitchen. And if I sent her an email…she would respond. Now she’s so famous that she’s more like Oprah in that respect, but I’ll always have that email from her with funny advice about how to cope with hemorrhoids. I haven’t framed it. Yet.

When I started my own little blog, I had no idea what I was getting into. It began like so many other mommy blogs with stories about my pregnancy – blow by blow accounts of childbirth (I know! Because everyone loves those!), pictures of my one-of-a-kind babies, complaints about sore boobs and sore chotch, etc. Of course my family was equally horrified and fascinated but then, I’ve been doing that to them since I was little, so that’s no change.

Eventually I collected a scrappy band of regular readers from around the internet, and the tables were turned. I was Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel – yes, all three of them at once. Aren’t we all? And readers contacted me and I met them in person. It was the Coffee Bean, not Central Perk, and we had babies with us, not smoking hot guys, but you see the similarities. Those women and a handful of men have become my friends and colleagues. Even the readers I have not yet met in real life (IRL) have become my friends. How can you read someone’s regular inner thoughts that they so bravely share with the world and not feel some affection for them?

Over time I wrote about other things and found that exercising my writing muscles and getting pretty consistent feedback through comments was encouraging me to write more. I was composing blog posts in my head as I tried to fall asleep at night, only to have them evaporate once I hit the keyboard the next day, but at least my brain was working. As a TV producer by trade, I was trained to write copy to please the teeming masses. As a blogger, I was writing the way I wanted to write.

For those of us who faithfully scribbled in our journals every day throughout our tortured youths, blogging is a new frontier. It’s not exactly like leaving your precious dog-eared and weather-beaten diary out on the coffee table for someone to read, but it’s similar. We invite readers, we ask them to weigh in and respond to the words we throw out into the ether. We edit out the most cringe-inducing statements…or not. I have respect for the bloggers with balls big enough to share things like their concern about their husband’s broken penis or the raw emotion of suffering a third miscarriage in a row. I blog about whatever I need or want to but there are stories even I cannot tell. After all, there are actual people on the other side of the computer screen. I have learned that my words affect them. Usually I try to make people laugh, because damn, isn’t motherhood funny? Luckily, when I do share tales from the dark underbelly of my life I know people will be worried about me, but they will be there for me, sending out tendrils of concern like a virtual safety net. And as I have learned from reading so many other blogs, every time you open up about a challenge you face, it helps someone out there who’s going through the same thing.

Blogging makes me want to be a nicer person. It definitely makes me a braver person. It makes me more curious about the world and the people in it. For the love of blog, I have attended unusual events, I have dined with strangers, I have opened myself up to unlikely people, and I have even driven down the 405 during rush hour in the rain, for chrissakes. All for the sake of getting a good story to tell you.

So it’s not really all about me. It’s about you, too.

Portrait of a mommy blogger, by her 3.5-year-old son, Kyle.