I'm an internet aficionado. Which is really just a nice way of saying "addicted to the internet." I've stumbled across some pretty interesting things in my search for entertainment, some awesome and some I'd like to forget. Sometime last summer while I was going through Hell on Earth, I stumbled across a wesbite called dooce.com. Dooce is actually a woman named Heather Armstrong who got fired from her job in 2001 because of her blog. It chronicles her life from then to now and it's hilarious. She's apparently won a bunch of awards for her blog and is pretty famous in certain circles. She's also a mom, and a lot of what she writes has to do with parenting. Because of that, her site has links to other mommy blogs and websites, which, as a non-mommy, I thought would be totally uninteresting.
Dude, was I ever wrong.
Even though I'm not a mom (and don't think I ever want to be) some of the websites I've come across in the past year are amazing. Women from all walks of life, from all parts of the world, from every culture imaginable, talking about their experiences as mothers, as well as just plain old life experiences. Some of these sites have really opened my eyes to the ins and outs of parenting and I have to say... it's not boring at all! In fact, some of the sites I now visit daily are blogs written my moms. Sometimes they talk about mommy stuff, but more often then not, they talk about every day life and things I can relate to. For instance, there's this one blog I read that's written by a chick named Rebecca Woolf. She's a writer, moved to L.A. at a young age, had the good life: she had tattoos, piercings, gay male roommate and best friend, partied all the time, etc. And then, at 26, she got pregnant and married and her whole life changed. The name of the website is Girls Gone Child and it chronicles her life as young, hip L.A. mom who's trying to balance mommyhood and her writing career.
As a result of reading these websites written by mothers, I've learned a lot about parenting and children... enough to know that I'm pretty sure I want nothing to do with parenthood. I'm not knocking it, there are plenty of people out there who are or would make great parents. I just don't think it's for me. Of course that could change in a few years, but for now, it's the way I feel.
So I have a question: even though I'm not a mom, and don't think I want to be, do I have a right to discuss parenting issues? Do I have a right to voice my opinion on homeschooling or circumcision or disciplining children? Because I do have opinions on all of those topics, opinions that I've gathered from watching other people parent their kids, from my own experiences as a kid, from reading articles and websites about other people's parenting experiences. I'm just not sure that I have a right to voice them, even in this forum, my own blog. I feel like I'd be stepping on toes, like I'd be offending people.
Any moms or dads out there? Any non-moms or dads who want to weigh in? What do you think: do I, a non-parent, have the right to voice my opinions on parenting?
