Starting Out

First, some concerns about blogging:

1. I'm a quiet person who thinks Americans talk too much.
2. Lots of bloggers assume an in-your-face, know-it-all tone that makes me wince.
3. At the end of any given day, my head is spinning from the onslaught of online information.

Why add to that?

Well, because I got a spot in Journalism E-138 ("Blogging") at Harvard Extension School, and I have to blog, publicly, to pass the course. So maybe there's a way to do this without adding to the snarkiness of the blogosphere. Plus, it will force me to write regularly, and I need the practice.

Worst case scenario, I can do what NYT reporter Douglas Quenqua says 95% of bloggers do: just call the whole thing off after a couple of months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

Our course instructor, Elizabeth Soutter, blogs about motherhood at http://damomma.com/. She scored a book deal, and hey, I'm a mom, too. eMarketer says there are 32 million moms online and the demographic is exploding!

When I mention this to my tech-savvy 17-year old, he glances up lethargically from his Blackberry and says, “Mom, that’s not interesting.”

In the meantime I have purchased one of the few remaining domain names containing any iteration of the word mother – www.themothery.com. This amuses me because Webster’s definition of “mothery” (pronunciation muth´ er ee) is “consisting of, containing, or resembling mother (in vinegar).” That feels right. I contain mother, but also other things. Over the next 12 months as my son prepares to leave home and I begin to rearrange my adult life, “mother” will become a lesser part of my identity. I’ll become mother-y.

If you drink red wine, you’ve probably noticed the grainy sediment that collects on the bottom of the bottle. Over time, oxygen converts the sugar in alcoholic beverages into this sediment, called “the mother,” which eventually becomes a gelatinous blob of bacteria like the one pictured on the left side of my masthead (credit to Christine Nguyen's awesome cooking blog http://holybasil.wordpress.com/un-petit-peu/ for this image). The mother is what turns wine into vinegar.

That feels appropriate, too. This year could go well, like aged wine gracefully fermenting into fine vinegar. Or it could go poorly, like the microbial slime that didn’t “take” and got chucked into the garbage.

Please keep your fingers crossed.

This morning my own mother phoned to ask why she couldn’t find my blog, “the mothery” (pronunciation mŏth´ er ee, as in winged insects). I imagined myself over the next 12 months, sweeping out the moths, dog hair and detritus that have accumulated in my life for the past 18 years. That also seemed fitting.

Don’t misunderstand me. I love my son, who has incidentally turned out to be one of the coolest human beings on the planet. He is easy, and impressive, and my main source of deep laughter. Other parents with surly, demanding teenagers are envious. But single motherhood has also meant endless explaining, juggling, nail-biting, number-crunching and running, running, running. I occupy a job that has zero relation to my skills or interests, one that I could probably do without a college degree, because it pays the bills. So it wouldn’t be honest to pretend that motherhood hasn’t often left me wondering what it all means.

At the same time, single parenthood has left me relatively unburdened. I own very little save a reliable car, bicycle, a cool camera, two dogs and a large snake. No mortgage to get out from under during a recession, no husband to persuade, no lucrative career path that I’m afraid to ditch, and I am nearly debt-free. Not so different, really, from a new college graduate except for the cynicism and having to finance another four years of tuition. Starting over is a lot less daunting when your circumstances have prevented sinking deep roots.

So for now, my blog will be themothery.com (pronounce as you wish), and it will be less about motherhood per se and more about the transition to a mother-y existence as my son and I embark on the journey to independent adult lives.