What a great article India Knight wrote in the Sunday Times magazine all about Women’s Blogging. I sent her a tweet. It said “Great article. Thanks for explaining why I blog. I shall photocopy and hand to parents when they next ask me wtf I’m doing”.
It really did put my little blog into a greater perspective and it was interesting to read that in her opinion the rise of the “mummy blogger is as epoch-defining as anything that Marilyn French or Betty Freidan every came up with”. Perhaps she’s right and it’s the new modern “sisterhood – or a disparate, chaotic, joke-loving version of it”.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything she wrote. About how the online world has provided a voice to the ordinary woman. About “where there was isolation, there is kinship and solidarity, where there was bleakness there is humour, where there was need, there is help offereed, where there was sadness, there is support”.
Without doubt, my blog has helped me get through my ongoing trauma of divorce. When I started, my blog was a sad little voice in the wilderness. In a tentative and terrified gesture I threw it out there and echoes slowly began to resonate back to me. It took a while, but eventually I found that the blogosphere provided an enormous safety net for me. A place in which I felt able to vent my anger and peel back the layers of my grief without being judged. In the two and a half years I have been blogging I have had one nasty comment and several irrelevant comments – other than that I have had nothing but well considered advice and support. I have made many new friends. I have been to Disneyworld with six other fantastic bloggers. I WILL get to meet my African blog mates one day. It has played a very big part in allowing me to find my sense of self again. As India points out I have felt “supported, befriended and not alone”. For anybody thinking about starting one – just do it. It is not about being able to write. It is about the response you get with the comments. It is about being part of a new modern community.
I too have had my moments with my children. From time to time they think I’m a loser with imaginary friends and when I talked about meeting some blog mates they were horrified. They thought I was going to be kidnapped by a fat pervy old bloke in a bedsit and disappear forever. But isn’t that the point? We as parents are fearful of the web for our children because we don’t understand it. We are worried about their Facebook friends and comments. About who they talk to. But why should it be any different from blogging? Why shouldn’t we embrace the global possiblities our little lives have to offer? As India says “blogging presents very 21st century opportunities for new friendships, both real and online”. My African cyber connections have already allowed me to meet and have dinner with a Doctor when I was in Lusaka (which has resulted in the fact that I am now helping get football kit out to Zambia for several teams) and the safari in the Luangwa Valley I went on with my father this summer was chosen because of my blog friends.
I have made many friends abroad as a result of my blog and I believe there are huge possibilities to do extraordinary things through cyberspace. Sometime soon we will do more than write articles about products and places – the PR companies recognise that collectively we are a force to be reckoned with – we might have little voices, but we can make a bloody big noise if you put us together. According to the marketing world, we are the ones who can make things happen. The ones who book the holidays, buy the products, make the decisions.
Imagine all that power collectively? Imagine organsing whole schools of our children to swap places for a week? Imagine our own area twinned with an African city? Imagine us organsing our friends and family to go and mend walls, dig holes, educate children, teach sewing, reading, dancing, heart surgery and imagine what people in other countries could come and teach us?
We could actually Make A Difference.
I for one am very excited about the possibilities.
Tue, Nov 10, 2009
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