My presentation on Friday was part of a panel about mommy blogging. There were five of us; the other four covered mommy blogging as a genre, how blogging about mothering publicly can affect your mothering, mommy blogging as folk art, and how advertising is beginning to affect mommy blogging. My topic was the experience of writing about mothering a child who is, in some way, different–whether it be disability or illness or just an undiagnosable genetic syndrome–on the internet.

In one of those moments of serendipity–or perhaps sensitivity after exposing myself to this issue for a few months–yesterday there was a section in the Toronto Star about access to post-secondary education for students with disabilities, and how attitudes are slowly changing. The articles gave me a great deal of hope–perhaps we, as the last generation to expect students with differences or issues or delays to be segregated educationally, are the last of the dinosaurs, the last to feel uncomfortable in the presence of a child not regularly featured in Parents magazine. Perhaps stand-up comics who can’t stand up and PhD students who can’t spell without assistance will simply be accepted, normal parts of advanced education for our children, and workplaces will automatically accomodate them because schools have automatically accomodated them, and they expect the world to work that way.

Perhaps it will be like the second wave of feminism–not perfect, not fixing everything by any stretch, but accomplishing nonetheless such a sea change that the way things used to be, the world of lowered expectations and isolation and segregation, is no longer imaginable.

I hope so. Because when, after finishing that, I find this letter about the death of a man with primordial dwarfism, I dread the world my daughter will live in.

(I’ll come back and write about the actual panel and how it went once my co-presenters have had a chance to decompress and post their own talks, so that I can point to them. And parts of this post will end up on my own blog tomorrow–but I didn’t want anyone to think I’d had that heart attack. It actually all went very well.)

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As most of you know, I only started blogging this past April as our site’s prior focus has always been on the feature essays on the homepage and on our forums. Recently, Prescott and I decided that we did not want to be left behind in the dust of the growing blogoshpere.

Acknowledging that having Prescott and Jessica all day, all the time, would be less than riveting, especially given that we do a weekly podcast as well, I decided to surf the net in search of talented bloggers who would want to share in all the imperfect glory that is The Imperfect Parent, and hopefully add a dimension of varying opinions to our growing site.

My first quest was to find gifted writers with the talent to express themselves in the written word and and to invite those with differing opinions and backgrounds to enhance the diversity of the site and to enlighten moms about various parenting methods, philosophies, and opinions, as well as political and social views as seen by a wide variety of people. If their opinions were polar opposite of mine — great! My wish was (and still is) to have all viewpoints represented, or at least, as many as fit The Imperfect Parent criteria of being a good writer and having something interesting to say.

I found out quite quickly that it wasn’t hard to find good writers with opposing opinions to mine. However, I did notice a common theme amongst these great writers and that was their politcal leanings – which all tended to be towards the left. There’s a subgroup that seems to be poorly represented in the mommy blogging world — the mom that leans towards the political right. You see, I tend to lean right of center on many issues, although I fancy myself a Libertarian. I believe that government should stay out of my private life, while my husband tends to lean left of center on many issues. If it doesn’t create balance, it creates tension, but it is never boring.

Problem is, when I went to look for bloggers like myself, those who might consider themselves Libertarian or Republican (oh, no!), I have fallen short. After hours of searching and thinking of possible ways to find back doors into the psyche of the conservative mom, it became more and more apparent that it was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. Liberal mommy bloggers abound, conservative mommy bloggers, not-so-much.

You see, what was a shortly lived obsession and challenge of mine has given way to acceptance. Acceptance that the internet is ruled by lefty intellectual mommy bloggers. I even found demographic statistics to support this belief. From blogads.com:

According to the blogads 2006 Mom blog survey, 12,320 respondents answered that they are:

Apolitical  8.21%
Democrat 48.34%
Republican 13.87%
Libertarian 5.14%
Independent 18.64%*
Green  5.82%

*My personal belief is that there is really no such thing as an Independent. I think people lean one way or another on most issues.
The percentages explain why then, most of the conservative mommy blogs I do stumble upon have been pretty fucking awful. Percentage-wise, I just have a better chance of finding a wordsmithing lib than I do a neo-con.

This is interesting to me as radio tends to be ruled by conservative hosts and the internet has some hugely popular, conservative blogs (instapundit, The Bleat, Little Green Footballs…just to name a few…), but the ones which are popular are not written by moms. The fact still remains, mom bloggers, in the traditional “mommy blogger” genre, tend to be lefties. Why is this? I scratch my head.

Do more “mainstream” (conservative) moms tend to work outside the home? Do they spend more time at soccer try-outs than online? Do they read more books or are they simply illiterate and turn to speakies rather than torment themselves with phonics? I have no idea.

And don’t get me wrong, I’d rather surround myself with intelligent, left leaning people that are able to communicate and back up their viewpoints, than with judgmental (although that exists on both sides), lock-step, Bush-lovin’ conservatives of the religious-right. (I actually don’t think Bush is a Republican anyway, but that’s a point for another blog.)

I’m just wondering, where are the moms who think that if you make money, you ought to be able to hold onto it, who want the government to butt out of their business and think that we ought to have a strong defense, in order to protect our kids?

Maybe they’re all in the hills of Utah with dial-up. Does anybody know?

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