If you’re reading this, chances are good that you used to read the blog Breed ‘Em and Weep, and I sure thank you for that. I remember yours, too. And of course, we all knew dooce.
I started my blog in 2004 or so, not long after my second daughter was born. I was still married to the nice Jewish-Canadian puppeteer. We were living in Massachusetts, in the dilapidated skinny whitish house that my father had loaned us the down payment for. Because we were broke. Flat broke. Not “no high-octane gas for us” broke, but “boob out, nursing a baby while standing in front of a bankruptcy judge” broke.
I didn’t know anyone in person who would understand this.
I wrote about our life, because I did not know what else to do with the chaotic monologue in my head. I knew of a new breed of moms — “mommy bloggers” — and I decided that world suited me, too. It made sense to write down these days and moments, to try to pull off my own high-wire act, teetering between comedy and despair. I would never be dooce or Finslippy or ben and birdy or Mighty Girl or any of the other extraordinarily gifted and wickedly funny women I followed, but I wasn’t trying to be. They inspired me with their bravado and sass and snark and soul, but not one of them was hoping her words would serve as any kind of treacly inspiration. We all wrote copiously and shockingly freely in those early days, hopping in and out of each other’s accounts of parenting and marriages and jobs gone awry, gone right, gone terrible. We were the un-influencers: Here’s my shit, you don’t want any part of this, trust me.
I had never been in a sorority or had a sister, but this felt like it surely must be close. When Heather Armstrong of dooce left a quippy comment on one of my early posts, I swooned. We weren’t friends, per se, but we were something, and it felt good.
We mommy bloggers got into a pretty swell habit: Each of us was writing from our very own gutsy sweet spot. I liked finding out what I had to say. The words that flowed were messy and meaty. dooce especially wrote savagely, like her life depended on it. Which, of course, it did. I loved her voice, especially when it scared me.
From my own blog posts, I cobbled together my first manuscript. A major publisher reached out, paperwork was dispatched: I was going to be published. A book, a real live book with turnable, dog-earable pages full of creative nonfiction. I thought we might be able to crawl out of the debt abyss. But just a month or two later, the publishing company called to say — “regretfully” — that the marketing department didn’t know how to market me, so they were killing the project. When I got the news, my eyes were on my toddler, in her high chair, smearing chocolate pudding all over her tray and her face. My stomach slid onto the floor and slithered away, ashamed to be associated with me.
Frantic, I tried to get a clearer sense of how I’d failed so colossally. Was there nothing I could do to fix it? Couldn’t I rewrite it? There was not, and no, rewriting would not help. The marketing team had decided my voice was simply “too quirky, too smart,” and I was too hard of a sell.
“What’s wrong with quirky and smart?” I needed to know.
“It’s just not the voice they want for a parenting book,” said the editor who’d signed on, and would now be signing out. “You’re, you know, a mom. They thought you would sound more like a mom.”
“But I am a mom.”
“Of course.”
“And that’s my voice,” I said. “I don’t have another one.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” she said. “Marketing said they’d love to publish your second book.”
“I don’t have a second book.”
“Someday.”
“But…I’ll still be me. Then. With the same voice.”
“Well…you never know,” she said. “Let’s keep in touch.”
We did not keep in touch. I sank into a miserable depression over the next several years. My brain blackened into thick sludge. I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t find work. Our bank account stayed empty. Our house crumbled, then our marriage. I tried to unalive myself in a river and did the requisite time on a psych ward. Released on scores of psych meds, I dissolved into a hot, pulpy stew of shame.
The circle of mama bloggers and my love for my daughters were the two constants in my life. So I kept writing through each blow. And these dear, dear women kept on writing too, through their own setbacks and tragedies and losses. I wasn’t the only one struggling with mental health issues and old trauma. I kept my voice because of these women writers, who made it safe to exist exactly as I was.
There were BlogHer conferences that I was too painfully shy and broken to attend, but I loved seeing photos. Heather was usually at the center of these photos, simultaneously stunning and wary.
It is difficult to explain the friendships that came from that time. Most of these women (including Heather) I have never met in real life, but I know more about their children and their husbands and their wives and their passions and their regrets than I know of many of my in-person friends. We’ve drifted, many of us, from our blogs to orbiting each other on social media, or reaching out to offer a writing gig or inquire about one. “Networking,” as it’s crassly called, doesn’t capture the sisterly “I thought of you the other day,” the relief of knowing you are remembered, that you are still seen.
Heather’s painful struggles with severe depression and alcoholism were not a secret, but still, it feels uncomfortable to reference it here. We had similar awfulness in our skulls, but I didn’t know her well outside of her blog and don’t want to pretend to. I watched from the sidelines, kept reading, observed: It felt like her anxiety only mounted as she garnered more commercial success. And my God, there was a lot of success that came her way. So many hands, clamoring for her, all the time. Her words sometimes angered or alarmed her friends and readers. Her voice was unsettling, defiant at times. There were always haters, plenty of them. They came out in droves especially cruelly when she shared that she and her husband, Jon, were splitting.
She was a gorgeous, golden, spiky, slippery, whip-smart creature and I wish very much she were here to roll her eyes at that description.
But if you’re here, you know she’s gone. She tried very, very hard to stick around, and that’s all I know how to say about that. When I heard dooce was lost to suicide, it seemed both an impossibility and the saddest inevitability. I have no claim to the kind of grief that her babies and lovers and closest friends are feeling. But the news of her death came to me by way of scores of women from our writing circle. I sense we’re all carrying the loss gingerly in our hands, not sure how much or how little we should be grieving. How are you?
Heather’s departure feels like an unfinished conversation. We’re suddenly our younger selves, sharing memories of her and the tangle of dooce-ness that only she had words for. There’s so much love here, I’d almost forgotten how much.
Love to you all xo
Jenn
