Her blog’s tagline says it all: “I don’t know what I’m doing either.” And it’s exactly this honesty, this willingness to admit that she’s not perfect, that makes Liz so approachable and so easy to read and relate to.
Mom-101 is the exact opposite of what its name would make you think it’s about. It is in no way a stuffy, self-important blog with lots of bulleted articles containing parenting advice. It’s not the type of parenting blog that tells you what to do and how to raise tour kids. If you’re looking for “Top 10 Ways to Get Your Child To Sleep Through The Night” type of posts, you should probably look elsewhere.
And not that there’s anything wrong with “Top Ten” posts! They are often fun, entertaining and filled with useful information. But they do tend to be a little detached. Liz’s writing is never detached.
Mom-101 is about parenthood, but it’s about going through this wild ride together, experiencing the ups and downs, the dilemmas, the tears and the joys. Liz never pretends to have all the answers. On the contrary, just like each and every one of us, she’s constantly asking questions and looking for answers.
My favorite posts by Liz are those that capture the deep pain of being a working mom. I know, we are all working moms, but I mean the type of working mom who works in an office and needs to leave her child with a caretaker every day. I wish it wasn’t so painful for us to leave our children behind. I wish we weren’t getting the subtle messages from the media, those that tell us we’re not good moms, that we should leave our careers and focus on our children 100% of the time. I wish being a working mom was a straightforward, simple choice.
But being a working mom is not a straightforward choice and working moms struggle with guilt every single day. Liz captures this struggle beautifully in many of her posts.
The Constant Battle, for example, brought tears to my eyes, as I’m sure it did to many other moms. That familiar yearning to have a choice, to not be in a place where you HAVE to leave your child at daycare each morning.
And then, in her follow-on post, Being There, she said, “It’s not such a horrible thing, to make our children proud. Through our actions, through our work, through our commitment to them and those in our lives. I have to remind myself that the choices we make now as parents aren’t just to get our children through the days. It’s to get them through their lives.” And I just nodded, again, tears in my eyes.
“I’m starting to feel more and more… that that World’s Greatest Mom Trophy is escaping my reach” Writes Liz in her post Trying to Do Something Right.
Don’t we all.
Tags: mom bloggers, Mommy bloggers