I began blogging almost accidentally. I had never planned to keep an
online record of life with the baby that I referred to, on the blog, as WonderBaby; in the early weeks of our life
together, I was pretty much entirely preoccupied by the incredible challenge of
pulling that life together. My psychiatrist had suggested keeping a
diary as a way to sort through my thoughts on and experiences of new
motherhood, but I had dismissed this as a fantastic suggestion for a
brand new mother. Keep a diary? When? All of my literary energies were devoted to reading
the same pages of over
and over and over again, hoping for some hidden insight to leap off of
the page at me and reveal the secret of How to Keep Your New Mother
Shiz Together, and to recording the details of every last spit, shit
and nursing session in a little notebook that was dedicated to these
subjects. I did spend a lot of time on-line, but that time was spent
clicking back and forth between kellymom.com (why
is baby spitting up with the force and volume of Linda Blair? why does
breastfeeding hurt so much? is new motherhood going to kill me?) and askdrsears.com (co-sleeping
is okay, right? I’m not messing up baby forever, right? immediate crib
sleeping isn’t necessary to avoiding Electra complexes, right? RIGHT?) and googling “nipples falling off breastfeeding ouch.“

I had never heard of a mommy blog. I did not know who Dooce
was. If you had said to me, ‘go read Dooce,’ I would have boggled at
you and wondered who in their right mind looks for enlightenment on
feminine hygeine product packaging.

(Then again, if someone had told me that reading Dooce would reveal the
secrets of surviving motherhood, the knowledge of which I craved with
the desperation of a dehydrated hippo, I would have been camped out in
the feminine products aisle of the local pharmacy scrutinizing every
last Summer’s Eve box and the Monistat boxes just for good measure.)

(But I digress.)

One day, during a google search on “extreme baby gas help,” I noticed a link to a page that
I hadn’t seen before. Amidst all of the links to pages advertising
Gerber Gas Drops and gripe water, there was a link to something called JezeWhiz, where somebody was saying something about the gas my god the gas what is UP with the baby gas thank god I had the foresight to stock up on gas drops.
Intrigued, I followed that link, and in doing so, tumbled down a
virtual rabbit hole, and arrived in the mommy blogosphere. And my life
changed.

Forever.

Well, for the next three years, and counting.

(Tomorrow I’ll tell you what happened next.)

(SPOILER ALERT: I became a mommy blogger.)

Revised and updated from Her Bad Mother, May 2006. Copyright Catherine Connors 2006 – 2009.