Mrs. Morrissey

I never read Dooce until she and her husband announced their separation (and even now I only do cursory check-ins). While aware of her blog, I knew very little of it. I just thought that she was a “mommy blogger” in that she shared recipes and beautiful pictures of her kids and pets and wrote some posts here and there about parenting. I didn’t realize how open she was about checking into a mental institution and the different issues she has with her father and her husband. Anyway, my interest has suddenly been piqued because this woman is essentially live-blogging the dissolution of the very thing on which her entire blog was based—her family life. I mean, obviously she’s much more than simply a wife, but she and her husband built this empire on their shared life and I think it’s really interesting to see how that wasn’t a sustainable business model. The whole opening-your-marriage-up-for-public-consumption thing is, in my opinion, a foolish game. Even if mental illness or childhood baggage weren’t a component in their troubles, I wonder how any relationship could survive a decade’s worth of internet comments.

I wanted to wax philosophical about mommy blogging, but as I type this my infant is screaming bloody fucking murder because I stopped paying attention to her for like three minutes. But I guess that just exemplifies how things start to fall apart once you start blogging about something more than you’re actually doing it.