One thing I've noticed is that there aren't that many people who blog about their experiences as parents. Lack of time and energy is surely the biggest reason for this. But I also get the sense that there are plenty of parents who opt not to make their domestic life public.
knicolini and I have obviously taken the opposite tack, though we get criticized by some for doing so. The childless in particular -- though not most of our LiveJournal friends, it would seem -- often find entries on the family boring. I doubt whether I would have felt that way if I had been childless when I started reading blogs, because children have always interested me. But I can understand where the antipathy comes from.We continue to plod ahead, though, crafting a narrative of our life with Skylar in this potentially public but still intimate medium.
Most of the entries on Michael Bérubé's blog are of a broadly political nature, though he includes links to family pictures and the like. Yesterday, however, he wrote a great piece about his children's science fair projects.
Will the content detract from his political aims? It depends how you look at things.
Personally, I find myself more drawn to the arguments of "well-rounded characters" than those of the single-minded. If I had a better sense of what Noam Chomsky does when he's not railing against the U.S. government or fine-tuning his theory of generative grammar then I would find it easier to support his arguments. I don't have to know the whole truth about his personal life. And I'm perfectly fine with the fact that self-writing inevitably bleeds into fiction. But I still want a sense of background for the people I read. I want to know how their story connects with the stories they tell. Yes, I want them to be "real", embarrassingly nineteenth-century as that may sound.
