OK, let’s say it: Kveller.com isn’t a parenting site. It’s a mommying site.
We don’t write about our kids. We write about ourselves. I’m not saying this to be offensive, and I’m definitely not complaining: Look, babies sleep 18 hours a day. Most of their waking hours are spent doing slight variations on very simple tasks: feeding, peeing, vomiting, crapping, and crying. Just mention the phrase “the miracle of birth” around a new parent and they’re likely to pelt you with any one of the above-mentioned substances.
Mommy-blogging isn’t about learning how to take care of your child. Despite what diaper companies and daytime TV commercials would like to convince you, you are born knowing how to care for your baby. Neanderthals raised babies successfully. Sloths sleep 18 hours a day, and they raise children successfully. Freaking Libertarians raise babies successfully.
No: Parent blogging is about our primal need to complain to each other about the pee and crap and vomit, about how sex has faded to a fond and distant memory, and about how so little of our lives still belongs to us. And, for some reason or another–being more in touch with your feelings? traditional social models of nurturing? sheer laziness?–mommies have latched onto this new culture of complaining (so to speak) way more naturally than the menfolk. The dudes.
So, welcome to Dude Week. The week when we shove our usual gang of mommies out of the way, climb into the driver’s side of the blog, and attempt to get the hang of this Kveller thing on our own. Some of our regular bloggers will get taken over by their husbands or male partners. We’ll also bring in a bunch of all-new dude bloggers. Working fathers. A male rebbetzin (a rebbitzor? a rabbit?) who’s trying to balance his wife’s career and their newborn child. And some of the silent partners who’ve stood supportively in the background, watching their partners share every private detail of their lives while inwardly cringing or facepalming, thinking silently to themselves I hope our kid never learns how to Google….This week, they won’t be so silent.
Will The Dudes successfully show the ladies how it’s done? Or will it work as well as when I told my endearing and tolerant life partner, “Stand aside! I can figure out this diaper thing on my own”–and learned very quickly, and very wetly, that I could not?
Stay tuned.
