Here is How You Too Can Be Unappreciated!

There are two very different life choices you can make that end up feeling exactly the same. If you want to be unappreciated, become a parent, or a blogger.

Parenting is hard, but blogging sucks ass so bad and I have no idea why anybody does it.

Choosing parenting I can understand. You get baby focused, your heart is all in a twaddle about having the life sucked out of your boobs so you pop one out. I get that.

But let me tell you something. That baby doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you for more than sweet manna from titties. The infant must grow to appreciate the value of Mother over time. As a blogger, readers consume your words in the same way. They want to laugh, cry or be inspired, they suck your life out, but they don’t actually want to love you.  They have to read you regularly to start seeing your value.

Like all parents whose children take them for granted, we bloggers pour our guts out just for the internet to ignore us. They read our stories and move on like toddlers who leave the table dropping their dirty bib on the way out. No respect.

Not so for some internet rock stars I must say. There are some very fine, eloquent and popular bloggers out there. They get adulation while those of  us who remain undiscovered sit by our computers in the shade of their gargantuan presence. They are the blogger overlords and people pay them. I say good for them! They have made it, and for the most part they likely didn’t step on any throats along the way. We writers are kind of nice like that.

There are other similarities between blogging and parenting:

• You know you are screwing up, but you can’t figure out how to fix it.
• You present your best self and you are shunned or worse, not noticed.
• Readers and teen girls make you feel exactly the same way.
• You never know if a new day will bring readers and adulation or just another moldy dish under the bed.
• The strongest reaction you get is when you have offended somehow and your hair is blown back from the force of rage in your face.
• There are moments of pure bliss that you hang on to in the bad times.

I am a nothing blogger, and a Mom of teens. Can you imagine the battering my self esteem takes every day?

You have to know, I think I am hilarious, and deep and insightful. Most of us bloggers think that about ourselves and that we have something of value to say. That is why we are brave and put our shit out on the internet. Sometimes I want to scream at my blog stats “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME??!!” I may have said the same thing to my children on occasion.

There are bright times in parenting, like when my gigantic teen boy spontaneously hugs me. This little cuddle can make my day.

You know what else makes my day? When somebody reads my work and says my word babies touched them in some way. I smile as I hit “publish” and then wait. Will this be well received? Will anybody read it? Will they comment? Is this the post that will finally be the one that gets my sad little blog noticed?

I do love to write, and maybe someday readers will stick around and get to appreciate me. In the meantime, I keep at it, hoping that my legacy is the stories I write, and kids who love me when I am old.

(Thanks to BluntMoms for allowing me to write on a significantly larger platform than my own cob webbed little blog)