ShareThisI hesitate to write this column because of kiddie karma.
If I write this column, I am destined to suffer my cosmic child-rearing comeuppance. I know it as surely as I know that night follows day. But I can't help myself. I have to speak up.
This mommy blogging has got to stop.
I could just quit now and suffer only a slight bit of karmic wrath. My future child or children could simply be boring for their first 18 months of life, making them worthless as weblog fodder.
But no, I've got a point to make, and I'll have to face the celestial music when the time comes. Deep down, I've got a feeling it'll be worth it.
If you have an Internet connection and friends of breeding age, you are aware of the phenomenon that is the mommy blog. In an age where online over sharing is the norm, a generation of new mothers is taking to their computers to update friends, family, acquaintances, and utter strangers with the miracle of their child's every fart.
(I'm really in it now. In a few short years I'll look from my progeny to my processor and feel an unmistakable urge. It's only a matter of time).
The mommy blog is an opportunity for new mothers (and fathers) to express with both wonderment and sage wisdom the tremendous revelations of raising a child. Experiences and exaltations are discussed that those without children cannot possibly comprehend. There is usually at least one entry on breastfeeding.
This is all a part of the mystique of the motherhood, that elite and exclusive guild that has admitted only approximately half of the world's population since the dawn of human existence.
(There's no turning back. I'm ready to accept my karmic fate. I can see my baby-powdered fingers on the keyboard already).
In a simpler age, mothers new and old gathered together where mothers do to share their trials and teethings. Fathers carried a few photographs of their bouncing baby and a few cautionary tales of overflowing diapers.
But now, in our nation's Facebook Period, the trials themselves are tribulations, the photos are albums of interminable length, and the overflowing diaper is in each status update and every twitter and tweet.
The phenomenon reaches its zenith when your friends' smiling faces are replaced, overnight, with those of their giggling children. Their very personalities are subsumed by their offspring. They exist only to chronicle every gurgle and burp.
It has to stop. For the good of online networking, for the good of the child-free innocents, for the good of the children themselves. Nobody asks the baby if he'd like to be online. And no kid I've ever heard of could consent to Internet infamy before he could utter a convincing "Da Da".
But unfortunately, it will not stop with me. In completing this column I have sealed my fate. I am condemned to have the single cutest child, the most interesting, noteworthy and adorable infant ever to be born in the history of human childbirth. This kid will be so fascinating, so deserving of attention that I will not be able to restrain myself.
I will have to share her with the world. And you, my friends, will have to read about it.
(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread@gmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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