{"id":3,"date":"2009-05-06T10:44:52","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T10:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/their-bad-mother.html"},"modified":"2009-05-06T10:44:52","modified_gmt":"2009-05-06T10:44:52","slug":"their-bad-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/their-bad-mother.html","title":{"rendered":"Welcome To My Mother ‘Hood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three and a half years ago, I started a mommy-blog. I called it Her Bad Mother<\/i><\/a>. Why<\/i> I called it Her Bad Mother is a long story that I’ll tell you about some other time, but my reasoning more or less came down to this: I had a baby girl – a “her” – and I was pretty convinced that I was going to be a bad mother. And I was going to write about being a bad mother, so. The math was pretty straightforward: Her<\/i> Bad Mother.<\/p>\n

That worked out pretty well for me for about two and half years: I was a bad mother, and I blogged about it. Then I got pregnant again. With – you guessed it – another baby. Another baby who was not necessarily going to be a her. At which point, I asked myself – actually, a whole lot of people asked me – would I still think of myself as Her Bad Mother after my second child was born? Shouldn’t I call myself Their<\/i> Bad Mother? And I kinda thought, well, no: Her Bad Mother isn’t just about me as a mother. It’s about me as a mother and as a writer and as a former academic and as a feminist and as an activist and as a pop-culture aficionado<\/i>. It’s about a whole lot of things, only one of which is the experience of motherhood<\/i>. Her Bad Mother, I realized, had taken on a life and identity of its own, beyond the mommy-blog. It wasn’t bound by the circumstances of my motherhood – I would be Her Bad Mother even if I suddenly became good – and it certainly wasn’t bound, descriptively by the number of children that I had.<\/p>\n

But still: something was changing, something that Her Bad Mother couldn’t quite capture. My identity as a mother was changing, as was my identity as a writer. I was writing about more than just motherhood – to the extent that I recoiled, sometimes, at being called a mommy blogger – but at the same time I was feeling compelled to write more just about motherhood. And there was still that whole issue about another baby coming along. I dithered for, like, a year. Start a new blog? Expand the old one? Change the name?<\/p>\n

Then this opportunity presented itself – to expand my blogging horizons and carve out a new space for myself as a parent blogger – an unabashed mommy<\/i> blogger, even. To create a new blog as an extension and expansion of the old one. To become, in a new space, Their<\/i> Bad Mother, and to write about that – the minuteia and mundanities and exaltations of being a confused and complicated and sometimes competent mother of two – while preserving my other, writerly, Her Bad Motherly identity and all the stories that attach themselves thereon.<\/p>\n

So, welcome! I’m looking forward to this journey, and to sharing it with you.<\/p>\n

\"budgeandbro.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>And them.
  <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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