Pigeonholing

Talk in the anesthesia resident lounge is random. It varies between griping about our work, talking about our families, debating on which Pandora station to listen to, and arguing about which temperature the thermostat is set at. It's loud, comfortable, and fun.

The talk the other day turned to blogging. One resident mentioned that his wife blogged. I instantly was interested. Another resident asked what his wife's blog was about. This struck me as odd, because I rarely think of blogs being "about" anything. They are about the person who writes them. They are stories, chronicles, and narratives about the life of the writer. There may be the food blog, the book blog, the fashion blog, but in general blogs are life blogs. At least the ones I read.

Anyway, back to the point...

The resident replied that now that they had kids, his wife's blog was just like any mommy blog, a collection of cute pictures and stories about family outings. And then he said, "She used to actually write things. Before we had kids. I liked it when she did that."

Instantly, I got on my high horse. I thought to myself, well, I have kids and I don't have a typical mommy blog. I still write real things. I was feeling slightly smug and superior, thinking of how I hadn't succumbed to being a boring "mommy blog."

Then I looked back over my archive.

And that's when the truth dawned on me.

I'm another mommy blogger. Almost all my posts for the last several months have been about cute pictures of my boys and synopses of our family activities.

Not that there is anything wrong with being a mommy blogger. The majority of blogs that I read are mommy bloggers. We have children, we love them, we want to share. There is nothing wrong with that.

There are many bloggers who describe themselves as aspiring writers. They blog as their creative outlet, as a way to hopefully be discovered. I'm not an aspiring writer, in the sense that I don't have any burning desire to write a novel or publish anything. But I do like to write. I actually completely overhauled my blog at the beginning of the year so that I could stop having just a mommy blog, and start having a "real" blog.

But what do you get? Apple orchards, family vacation, camping trips, and birthday parties. There is nothing wrong with those things, but I had hoped to share so much more.

I did start blogging to chronicle my life, and that is still extremely important to me. I find it is so much easier to capture moments and memories when I'm not limited by the size or number of pages in a photo album. I can narrate to my heart's content. I can involve you in the narrative. Now that I'm blogging less, the time I do have to blog I feel is spent trying to catch up on our activities.

I'm not sure why this bothers me. It's silly really. Mommy blogs are real blogs. Some of the best blogs out there are plain old mommy blogs. Mommy blogs that still manage to have plenty of content and heart and thought. I'm happy to have a mommy blog. But I still feel that too often, I'm leaving things out. Hubster and I have discussions over the dinner table about politics, environmentalism, responsibility, societal pressures on women, health care reform, organized religion, pop culture influences on our children...and none of that ends up here.

I guess the point is that it's hard to face up to your own hypocrisy. I've felt like there was something different about my blogging, but really, I'm a mommy who is frazzled, like most moms, and ridiculously in love with her kids, like most moms. And that's just fine with me.

But this realization does make me what to start writing more and to branch out just a bit. Whether my schedule and my bravery allow for that, well, we'll just have to see.