I’ve been having an interesting series of conversations about whether or not there is a unique blogospheric voice of lesbian mommy bloggers, pregnant lesbian bloggers, and lesbian TTC bloggers, or really, whether or not there is a need to develop a central and updated blogroll of us.
The whole thing was sparked by the fabulous S’s recent query to her Babes in Blogland readers, about how they might like to see that site expand. She and I exchanged some email on the pros and cons of creating a "2 moms" tag or category, and/or racial, ethnic, or religious categories. Since her post, I’ve been having that conversation simultaeously on a few other fronts, both in real life and online, and I decided it was time to bring the conversation here.
I’m of two minds.
At least two. Maybe more.
On the one hand, I read lots of awesome blogs by straight mommies, pregnant women, and TTC-ers, and I know that some of you awesome straight people read my blog too. (No examples, because I’d feel terrible when I realized who I forgot.)
All of us go through the same crazy stages (if we’re lucky enough to get pregnant and become mommies): the roller coaster of trying to get pregnant, the physical bizarreness of being pregnant, the high drama of giving birth, the exhaustion of figuring out how to do this mom thing. All of us are plagued by poop and poop management. (Aside: Noah pooped three times yesterday, all at school! Can I tell you how happy his mommies are??? AND he pooped again there today! Four poops and no poopy diapers for us!)
Maybe I read your blog for the first time because you were a pregnant or TTC lesbian, or maybe it was because you’re a mom or were pregnant or TTC when I was pregnant, but I kept reading because you can write, and you’re saying something interesting. Yes, I’m talking about you.
But.
Our families face some unique challenges as families with two moms and (usually) no dad.
I want Noah to grow up knowing other kids with 2 moms and 2 dads, so if he does get teased or feel weird, at least he’ll know he isn’t alone. And I want to hear how other lesbian moms work out legal protection for their families, whether through adoption or otherwise. How do we deal with strange or awkward situations with insurance companies or fertility specialists or hospitals?
Finding other blogs written by lesbian moms, pregnant women, and ttc-ers was hugely important to me when I first got pregnant. Technorati wasn’t very helpful. Surfing your blogrolls was, once I found a couple of your blogs.
On the other hand, S pointed out to me that the homophobic fundie mommy-blogosphere is pretty big and well organized, and they can get pretty vitrolic. Some of the new mommy bloggers on my blogroll got hit by some serious nastygrams from alleged Christians when they had their babies or dealt with difficulties during pregnancy. Maybe making a list for those people to attack is a bad idea.
I was almost persuaded by that argument when ClubMom launched the beta of it’s social networking site, The Mom Network. I had a work excuse to explore some social networking sites, and decided to make that my first one.
It’s pretty much impossible to be out on the Mom Network. And the more I looked for ways to be out or other lesbian moms, the more disappointed I became. Even among their dozen+ Mommy Bloggers, who blog in more than 30 categories, they don’t have any same-sex family bloggers.
Naturally I sent them a very nice note recommending adding "domestic partner" to the relationship status option and changing "husband issues" to "husband/partner issues" for the social networking categories. And I offered myself and you as potential lesbian mommy bloggers.
That was only yesterday, so I’m prepared to wait a little while for a response.
However, the experience made me lean more towards thinking that we could really use an easier way to find other lesbian moms and parents (hopefully) to be. We can be surprisingly hard to find.
What do you think?
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