The Un-Zen of Blogging

I have a confession to make and I’m going to make it publicly because that’s the kind of fearless, navel-gazing woman I have become.

When I started putting this site together, I made a promise to myself – and to Geoff and to several concerned members of my immediate family – that I would absolutely, definitely keep my head on straight once my writing was RELEASED UPON AN UNSUSPECTING WORLD. The trouble being that the world would also largely be uncaring (except for you, of course; you are clearly one of the best people this planet has yet produced and I applaud you for that). It’s just that there are one or two other people out there who are also doing what I am now doing. Some of these people even put the concepts of Motherhood and Web Log together before I did and came up with the term “Mommyblogger”. I actively dislike this term, by the way, as much as I dislike the word “blog” which makes me feel queasy, like I’m talking about vomit. To admit that you are a blogger currently has all the cachet of admitting you are a bowler, which I have also recently done. I told everyone on my BLOG that I am good at BOWLING. You see?  My standards are currently not that high. I think it has to do with six years of cleaning up various bodily fluids, most of them not mine (is that gross enough for you Andrew?). I also happen to think that “Web Journal” works a little better, as in “Hello, my name is Joanne and I am a Wournaller, would you like to bowl with me?” And, yes, my American friends you must double the L in wournaller.  Did you learn nothing at all in elementary school?

Anyway, I made the following promise to Geoff:

I do solemnly swear that I, as a blogger, will keep my head on straight and not get caught up in concerns about how many people are reading it.

And then I broke my promise within hours of pressing “publish.”

I didn’t mean to.  After all, the straightness of my head was in fact the original reason for the very existence of this site. You know, because my head had occasionally gone just a teensy bit Wonky in the past. That’s “Wonky” with a capital W as in Worry and Wallow and Woebegone and Weepy and Why, Why, WHY?  (Happily, the arrival of my children brought a reprieve from my wrestling matches with W words, mainly because there is no longer enough time for them and diapering posed a challenge, what with the lack of a change table inside my pit of despair). I therefore understand the necessity of keeping my stick on the ice so making time to write seemed like a good idea. I knew writing would give me a sense of balance and balance is good. I knew that it would make me feel present and grateful. Presence and gratitude are also good. And I knew that if the gods are willing to let me grow old, then I want to grow old with my stories intact. I want to sit down one day when my kids are all grown up and read about holding a sleeping Willan and hanging out in a coffee shop with Grayson. I want to clobber Geoff in bowling all over again and laugh at him because he didn’t write his version of the story down. I want to gloat about how much sportier I am than Barb Lane, no matter how many times she tells me about her damn chess trophy.

To be utterly frank, I want to share my writing because doing so reminds me that I am not just Mummy, but also Joanne.

But oh those numbers!

What I didn’t know before I began was just how compelling and addictive those numbers are!  At any given moment – and on my cellphone no less – I can find out just how many hits, referrals, click-throughs and pingbacks I’m getting (though I can’t actually tell you what a pingback is yet). I can tell you how many times a post was shared and what platform was used. I can tell you how many followers are on Facebook, how many are email subscribers, and how many are on Twitter. Twitter, by the way, makes me feel old and curmudgeonly. I like writing “Oh, that makes me laugh out loud!” but writing LOL is as alien to my nature as ignoring a ringing telephone is to my Dad’s (we all have our technological limits). Yet there I am, suddenly happy at the arrival of a new follower and suddenly concerned at her unexplained departure. Who the hell was she and WHY did she leave me? A few more months of this and I will be accosting other mothers on the playground – eyes wild and hair in disarray – shoving my phone in their faces, shouting “Do you want to see my blog stats?” Understandably, they won’t let their kids play at my house and my children will be sad and lonely and I will write about it online and obsessively check the number of hits it gets.

Just when I thought I might be achieving a more zen-like attitude to life – a certain calm that comes from maturity and experience and doing something I love to do – I have gone and found myself a whole new kind of crazy.

At the inevitable intervention you will one day hold for me, you may print out this wandering piece of tangential writing and force me to recall my original promise. You may also want to print out the very calming picture of my turtle and serve me a very, very calming French martini or two. I will listen, and then I will tell you exactly how many times this post was read online and if anyone pressed the damn share button.