Suburban Turmoil
I know what you must imagine—pictures of a tired-looking woman wearing an apron and nothing else, maybe? Grainy video of a bored housewife doing unspeakable things atop kitchen appliances? The truth is even stranger. For the last five years, Elizabeth has simply kept an online journal about her life, whether she’s visiting her son at summer camp or caring for her elderly father, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world have read about it on her blog, Busymom.net. It’s the kind of traffic Internet übergeeks would die for, but ask her for her secret and you’ll get the kind of self-deprecating answer you’d expect from a woman who’s been putting herself last for more than a decade: “I have no real explanation,” she says demurely. “Maybe more people are bored today than they were five years ago?”
The truth is, Elizabeth was one of the first mommy bloggers to gain a significant following, pioneering the way for thousands of other women who would create blogs after her. In fact, mommy blogging is now such a phenomenon that a recent article in the Chicago Tribune attributes the 10 percent decline in morning network viewership in part to women tuning out the Today show and browsing on mommy blogs instead. And Elizabeth is one of the best in the business when it comes to cashing in on the trend. Her advertisers range from HarperCollins to HBO, and she’s regularly showered with gifts like iPods, car loaners and vacations to Florida from companies hoping for a favorable review. Busy Mom is such a heavy hitter that her blog has been mentioned in The New York Times and New York magazine, where ad buyer Brian Clark is quoted as saying, “You want to reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies, you buy on Busy Mom.”
Offline, though, she worries about the conclusions her colleagues might draw if they discover her secret. “People would probably think I was a bigger weirdo than I actually am,” she says. “I think about it every now and then, especially when I want to tell someone in 3-D about something cool that happened to me as a result of my blog, but, there’s no good way to tell them about it.”
That’s probably why we became friends. I contacted Busy Mom after starting my own blog at SuburbanTurmoil.com (a site that, incidentally, convinced Scene editor Liz “Blog Hater” Garrigan to give me this column), and we quickly discovered that our kids played soccer in the same league. Since then, we’ve spent hours in the stands discussing topics like page loads and html code and gossiping about bloggers with online names like Miss Information and Queen Bee. I’ve seen the looks on the faces of other soccer moms eavesdropping on our conversations and it’s as if they’ve taken a sip of lemonade made with salt. Elizabeth, though, takes it all in stride. “It feels kind of like being some sort of minor superhero with a secret identity,” she says, laughing, “working a lowly job by day.”
That identity wasn’t so secret recently when Elizabeth and I went to Chicago for the annual BlogHer weekend. With nearly 1,000 women (and a smattering of men) in attendance, it was the largest conference ever held for bloggers, and mommy bloggers were unquestionably the stars of this year’s show. Watching Elizabeth laugh and chat with her readers, it was nice to see her finally getting the real-life attention she deserves.
“Busy Mom?! Oh my gosh, I don’t believe it!” I heard women squeal over and over again upon meeting her. “I’ve been reading you for ages!” Cameras flashed and nervous hands fluttered. One woman was near tears as she told her, “You’ve helped me through so many hard times just by writing every day. Thank you so much!”
“My first thought was to look behind me and say, ‘Who are you talking to?’ ” Elizabeth told me later. “This whole world exists in my head and to have it come to life was like watching a movie.” And it was difficult to watch this particular movie come to an end. Elizabeth flew back to Nashville at the end of the weekend tired and ready to see her family, but a little wistful about what she’d left behind.
“It was hard to leave a place where you’re praised and people come up to you,” she said when I called her the other day, “and have to return home, where people just want to know what’s for dinner.”
Such is the life of any celebrity, I suppose, who also happens to be a mom.
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