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Moms find new connections, outlets through blogs
Editor's note: GentleNurturing.com will be launching our own KoffeeKlatch Community in the very, very near future, where readers can connect, email, call, share, and interact with Leslye Adelman, the founder of Gentle Nurturing. Click the "Subscribe to GN News" link on the upper left menu of this page, and we'll let you know the day we launch.
 It used to be that mothers would gather at someone's kitchen table to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and chat while their children raced through the neighborhood playing games until the street lights came on. (See the definition of "coffee klatch.")
Fast forward a couple of decades: Cigarettes can kill. Coffee is available on every corner. And few children have that kind of unscheduled time anymore. But women still gather support from each other even if they never meet face to face.
It's all there on the Internet.
With a quick click to Finslippy.typepad.com, you'll learn that when Alice Bradley's son, Henry, balanced on the cusp of turning 5 this fall, she blogged about the charms a 5-year-old holds. Of course, that blog followed one titled "An open letter to 5-year-olds" that began "Listen up, jerks."
More recently, the New Jersey-based Bradley asked her readers for their bad-parenting stories
"I need to know that you can be a good parent and still deeply, deeply suck at it, at times. Today, for instance. When I yelled so loudly at my son that my throat still hurts. (Did you know that mittens are an instrument of torture? That socks are painful? Neither did I, until I met Henry.)
"Thank God I don't have a deadline tonight, because I need this glass of wine. And I need to go to bed before 8. And wake up in a few years, when he's able to dress himself."
Bradley was rewarded in spades: Some 200 people wrote to share their stories. She heard from one mother who, angry that her daughter didn't seem to take learning how to ride her bike seriously, threw the bike in the garbage on the return trip home - only to find out later that her little girl was blind in one eye.
Bradley also heard from a friend of a mother so frustrated by her 5-year-old son's inability to catch the school bus on time that she threatened to make him take a cab and pay for it out of his meager savings. After she carried out the threat, a custodian called to say her son was there - but there was not school that day.
It seems we can't get enough of other people's lives. Internet search engine Technorati says that 175,000 new blogs are born each day. BlogHer.com, which specializes in women's blogs that run the gamut from politics to parenting, boasts more than 10,000 blogs and 8.3 million female visitors a month. Readers should be aware some bloggers are as blunt in their language as they are talking about their lives.
"I am asked all the time, 'What are women looking for, and why are they going to the blogs?' " said Lisa Stone, CEO and co-founder of BlogHer. "We are looking for a connection and an outlet.
"When my son was little and he did something cute, I had two options. I could pick up the phone and tell five girlfriends or do my laundry and clean up. Today I have a third option on the Internet. I can access news and information, and now I can access community."
Menomonee Falls resident Kimberly Laczniak had the universal blogger excuse when she started her blog, Thoughts Outside My Head, in 2005.
"I had a lot of good stories, and I just wanted to get them down, and I was terrible at the baby book," said Laczniak, 38. "I just needed an outlet to make sure that I was journaling in some way or another what was going on in my life; what was going on in my daughter's life."
Laczniak said her intention was to have it be a mommy blog, but "it didn't really turn out that way. Once I found my own voice in writing . . . it turned out to be more a blog about myself and the really stupid things I do, like walking through Mayfair with toilet paper on my shoe (a recent blog entry)."
National exposure
Skeptics may not believe there's a long shelf life for mommy blogs, but for now, they're turning everyday people into national experts.
Michigan blogger Melissa Summers writes Suburban Bliss using a wry voice to touch on subjects ranging from her two children to her perfect husband - she calls him a "robot" - to her imperfect childhood.
Based on those stories, NBC's "Today Show" brought her to New York to talk to Meredith Vieira last February for a story on moms who have drinks during their kids' play dates. Summers was painted as the expert on relaxing with a drink while the kids play. On the con, the "Today Show" brought in physician Janet Taylor of Columbia University Harlem Hospital.
CNN called in popular mommy blogger Heather Armstrong to participate in a roundtable discussion on Time magazine's person of the year in 2006.
Her blog, Dooce, is in the urban dictionary as the word used when someone loses a job over blogging about work, as Armstrong did before she moved to Salt Lake City and became a stay-at-home mom. More funny than heart wrenching, her stories of being a mom who deals with depression and being a "recovering Mormon" in Utah have placed at No. 31 among all bloggers, according to Technorati, which rates such things.
Laczniak now writes two other blogs. In addition to Thoughts Outside My Head, she has That's My Answer, a question-of-the-day blog; and I'm Just Saying for Menomonee Falls Now, a CNI newspaper that is part of Journal Communications, which publishes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She also links to the blogs she can't live without.
"It makes me feel really normal," Laczniak said. "Before blogs, what did you have? You had television shows where everybody was beautiful and everybody had a perfect life. Reading other people's blogs, I can see my life isn't so different from anyone else's. I wish I had this when I was going through infertility."
Laczniak would be in luck on that count these days. Finslippy links to Here Be Hippogriffs, (julia.typepad.com)a Minnesota-based blog in which a woman named Julia chronicled not only her days as the mother of a young boy but her many infertility treatments. That blog led to a gig writing for the online version of Redbook magazine.
It also led to her current post: photos of her newborn twins.
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