You say, but with no touch of scorn, 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 96”

I’ve never been a huge fan of Mom Blogs. (Yes, I know that they’re usually called “Mommy Blogs.” I’m also not a huge fan of calling fellow adults “Mommy.” It’s just a preference.) Maybe it’s the faded-out photos, all sharing the same pastel filters. Maybe it’s the increasing extent to which they’re becoming the hosts for paid reviews of baby stuff. Maybe it’s a sense of conviction, the shiny perfection that they reveal reminding me just a little bit too much of how I, too, can use words to gloss over the really tough parts of parenting. 

More than any of those, though, I think what I find challenging on these sites is the all-consuming sense of certainty and expertise that many of them convey. For every question of parenting—and the questions are endless—they have an Opinion, nay, an Answer. They have done it this way, and their children are professional ice skaters and aeronautical engineers, so you must do it this way, too.

From the outside of parenting, maybe this is tempting. I remember the excitement that I felt when, eight months pregnant with my first child, I hoisted myself into a hammock and read Dr. Harvey Karp’s Happiest Baby On The Block. “This is it! I found it!” I thought to myself. “I’ve figured out how to keep my daughter happy. She’ll never cry, and this will be great.” Future mothers like to get the sense that there are concrete solutions. We all do.

Except… Luci cried. A lot. Even after we swaddled, shushed, splashed (no, that can’t be right…) and did the other three S’s Karp recommended. Because, it turns out, some babies cry a lot. Others don’t. The ones who don’t sometimes have mothers who write blog posts about What Works. The ones who do have mothers who forget how much their first daughter cried until the second one starts crying and then they’re like, “Oh, yeah. Babies cry.”

Yet while Mom Blogs don’t excite me, I truly enjoy hearing from writers who are also mothers. In other words, women who were writing before they had children and continued writing afterwards, sometimes about children and sometimes about their other passions, which continue to exist. A friend from college, Kelsey Crozier, is one of these women, a dietician who posts recipes and tells stories about feeding her three kids, the paradox of being a nutritionist who loves ice cream, and whose daughters want to eat pasta more than anything in the world. Sarah Bessey is another, an author and mother of four, a preacher and lover of Anne of Green Gables, knitting, and questioning the patriarchy of modern Christian society.

Another of these writer moms was Rachel Held Evans, who died at age 37 this morning. Our children are about the same ages, and though to be honest I haven’t yet read her books, I always loved her blog posts, honest and poetic reflections on this wild journey into new motherhood. In February 2016, our first children were babies, I read her post, “Office of The Night Watch: A Meditation On Nursing”, in the middle of the night, nursing my daughter as she nursed her son, half a continent away. I didn’t know her, but her thoughts on prayer that night, that sleepy season when Luci didn’t sleep, when I spent every few hours with her through a long, snowy winter, stick with me. To her child, she wrote “I love God the way you love me—wholly, but not on purpose, the way you are learning to breathe without being told how to do it, the way you root and claw at my breast until you are filled.”

So I come back to Tennyson’s words today, the crux of his long poem “In Memoriam,” composed when he’d lost a dear friend of his own. Like Job’s friends, a well-meaning acquaintance has cautioned him against doubt, telling him that it is “Devil-born.” Tennyson replies a great treatise on doubt:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,