We're still here

Mother writers never needed a queen.

Is it in poor taste to begin my first Substack post by appearing to be dismissive of the recently deceased? If so, let me start by promising you that’s far from my intent. Heather Armstrong, A.K.A. Dooce, was an incredibly talented person and her passing is tragic and terrible. She was also, by all accounts, a complicated person, but that’s not my story to tell. If anything, as a person who witnessed her rise and fall from a distance - neither as a superfan nor critic, friend nor hater - I have the benefit of being Dooce-neutral, and I’m sure that gives me a slightly different view than many.

So here’s what I’m seeing play out: in the mom-blog community’s collective rush to pay tribute, we’ve let the narrative get away from us a little.

And as someone who’s been a mother for twenty-five years and a writer for more than twenty, I just want to remind everyone of two important things:

First, mothers were writing honestly about motherhood since before Dooce.com existed, and also, before the internet existed.

Second, mothers will continue to share their stories as long as the internet (or paper and pen, or any other means of collecting one’s thoughts into words) exists.

I dabbled in Internetting throughout the mid-90s, but got serious about finding community online in 1997, while pregnant with my first baby. I posted in a variety of online forums - big ones like ParentsPlace (later iVillage Parenting), and countless smaller ones whose names I’ve forgotten. In these communities, mothers braved dial-up internet connections and loading speeds that would make a Gen Z parent cry to share openly and honestly about the raw truths of motherhood.

In the early days many of us had our own Angelfire, Tripod, or Geocities websites, which we’d regularly update with blog-style posts (some of the more technical among us actually hand-coded rudimentary blogs; most of us just added new “posts” on top of the old ones, creating a single, never-ending page of text.) By 2000 or 2001, many of us had moved our posts over to Livejournal or Blogger. Some of those early blogs - written by people who were truly ahead of their time - were incredible, and most seem lost to time. (Does anyone else remember Gwen’s Trailer Trash? It was absolute gold.)

It’s definitely true that Dooce - which started in 2001 but didn’t officially become a “mommy blog” until the birth of her first child in 2003 - was the first mom blog to amass such a large following. And Heather was likely was among the first to garner large brand deals, though I’m not sure if she was actually THE first, as I’ve seen claimed.

But what is definitely untrue is to credit Dooce.com with being the “first” mom blogger, to claim that Heather Armstrong “pioneered” the art of writing honestly about motherhood, or - and this is what’s really sticking in my craw today - to lament that her passing marks the end of an era.

Why is this such a big deal to me? Why can’t I just let people say nice things about a dead person even as I’m inwardly cringing at the hyperbolic use of words like “queen” and “first” and “best”?

Because, friends: to put so much power in the hands of a single human being - no matter how influential - is problematic in several ways.

First, as I’ve illustrated above, it glosses right over the fact that mothers were writing honestly on the Internet before blogs even “officially” started, and elsewhere before the Internet existed. We all are guilty at times of thinking our generation is the “first” to experience certain things, but just to help us all keep a sense of perspective, I will throw out a few mom-writer names as a reminder to us all: Ariel Gore, Erma Bombeck, Shirley Jackson…add your own mother-heroes in the comments, friends.

Second - and this is for all the other “OG bloggers” who were also writing in the early 2000s - please don’t discredit the meaningful work you were also doing to create the landscape that allowed blogging to take off, grow, and thrive.

All writers, including Heather Armstrong, build on the work of other writers - but not just the writers who came before them, right? I’d argue that all bloggers - including Heather Armstrong - were bolstered by the community as a whole.

Dooce.com didn’t - couldn’t have - become an empire of that size without hundreds and thousands of other writers promoting Heather’s writing on their own blogrolls (remember those?). Indeed, the simple act of blogging shared by thousands of people, no matter how infrequently or to how small an audience, helped create an environment that allowed Dooce.com to explode. The rising tide lifts all boats, after all, which allows some boats to get picked up by the waves. And anointing one blogger as “queen of them all” overlooks the fact that it took the entire community to get where we did.

Here’s my third issue with this deification of Dooce: it’s dangerous. Putting personalities up on pedestals encourages seriously deranged behavior - not just from those up on the pedestal, but also from those on the ground, expectantly looking up. Worse, it creates an environment where fledgling personalities also want to be up on the pedestal - hence, the “influencer” culture we love to snark on today.

Those of us who were part of the golden years of early blogging love to wax nostalgic about the good old days, but the truth is, it’s exactly the stratospheric rise of blogs like Dooce - and the brand deals those celebrity bloggers were able to garner - that allowed the influencer industry to emerge. We lament how much things have changed, while also glorifying the big names (and their business moxie) that helped create the sea change.

Truthfully, I’m not sure that I’d change anything about the direction blogging took. I know that I, and many many others, benefitted financially from the industry that grew up around smart, charismatic bloggers like Heather Armstrong. But, yes, something was lost as well in the commercialization of the mom blog, for better or worse.

But friends, one way or the other, we - as a force - would have showed up in this space. Many of us were already doing it and had been for years, many others would have gotten here eventually. And while it’s easy to lament the “old days”, plenty of women are still out there telling our stories today, on Instagram, or podcasts, or Substack. Who knows where we’ll land next?

Heather Armstrong was, indeed, a trailblazer and an incredibly talented person, and none of my comments above should be interpreted as wanting to tear her down or discredit her influence. She deserved her following, no doubt about it.

But bloggers never needed a "queen" to inspire us or lead us. We were there already, doing the work. And we will continue to be, even in the face of losses.

We’re still here. Let’s keep showing up.