Mommy Wars: Working Moms Don’t Have Time To Blog
A couple months ago, Melissa Jordan at Babble asked why working moms don’t blog nearly as often as their stay-at-home counterparts. I really meant to write in a comment, but I simply can’t seem to find time to comment on anything anymore. I don’t have time to respond to all the awesome commenters I get on my own posts! Plus you have to log in everywhere, create passwords that I would just forget later… Well, Melissa, I’m finally getting around to discussing this great topic that you brought up in August. And I think Mommy Wars Week is the perfect time.
I happen to be one of the few and proud working women who also blogs, though mine isn’t in a traditional mommyblog fashion. But, I have a day job where I work at least forty hours a week and then I write in the evenings. Let me be honest, this takes a whole lot of dedication and willpower. When I get home from a long day, then try to spend some quality time with my daughter, the last way that I want to end my day is with more work. I look at that DVR inching towards 90% and I just want to lay down, veg out and take a little time to decompress. It doesn’t matter how much you love writing, if you have to do it everyday, it feels like work.
Stay-at-home moms, while I know that they work very hard to take care of their children and households, I hope they would agree that their day tends to have a little more flexibility. There’s nap time or pre-school or an hour where your child is entertained by an activity. At least I hope there is, for your sanity’s sake! It gives moms time to jump online, check their Facebook and maybe crank out a blog post or peruse Dooce for a while. And if your child wakes up early or gets bored with Play-Doh, you shut the computer down and come back to it later.
An office is normally a lot less blogger-friendly. For one, many companies block non-essential websites. Even if they don’t, surfing the internet is normally frowned upon. And breaks in general are a little harder to come by. Stay-at-home moms could argue that their workday doesn’t end at 5pm, but I think they can agree that the work gets a little more spread out through the day. Most working moms then come home and try to complete some form of household maintenance and family enrichment before they send the kids to bed as well.
Really, I’m not trying to say that one group works harder or that one side made the right choice. I think we all make the decision that best suits our family, just as we should. But working moms simply have less disposable time. And the time that they can give over to the internet is more sporadic.
There’s also an issue of community. Many mommybloggers site part of the appeal is the online support groups that form, when you’re stuck home with the kids all day long. If you’re spending all your time with your children, it’s nice to be able to reach out to other mothers and have a little adult conversation. Most working moms get that opportunity from their office, therefore spending less time in community chats and message boards.
In general, I would agree that the majority of mommyblogs are really geared towards the stay-at-home set, because that’s where the majority of their readership comes from. I know that we try very hard here at Mommyish to look at situations from both sides, which is part of the reason that I think we’re having this themed week. Women today still feel a lot of pressure to defend their choice to work or not. And when it comes to the internet, lots of stay-at-homers are out there, spreading the word on their choices and why they made them. I just hope that working moms are taking the time to join the conversation as well.
