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Blogging the Baby

Keeping an Online Journal during Pregnancy and Beyond

By Kelly Burgess

, before she became pregnant. She called it "one family's attempt to have it all," and the intent was to chronicle the new life of a couple who found love a little later in life than perhaps is average. In addition to information about her pregnancy, there are sections on her dogs, her garden and on remodeling her house.

A psychology professor, Blanchard has to do a lot of research-based writing for her job and enjoys the freedom of blogging. "I like to write and this is so much more fun than the other forms of writing I do," says Blanchard. "When I started this blog, I knew we wanted to get pregnant within a year, and since we're an older couple I thought it would be interesting to chronicle our attempts and perhaps to help others who are going through the process. Part of my motivation was that there is so much scary information about older mothers out there and much of it misleading statistics, I wanted to debunk some of that with my own reality."

Like McCall, Blanchard also uses her online journal as a way to keep relatives and friends from around the country informed about what's going on in their lives. The Blanchards have lived in a variety of cities, and this makes it much easier to keep in touch.

But there's more to blogging than just letting Grandma see pictures of the latest ultrasound. Gayle Peterson is a family therapist specializing in prenatal and family development, and she says that blogging may be a way of helping the expectant mother cope with anxiety.

"Pregnancy is a huge transformation, especially for a woman becoming a mother for the first time," says Peterson. "Women have more anxiety in pregnancy because they're taking on new tasks, and the best way to handle that is by expressing it. Expressing it to yourself is good, but expressing it to other people and having them say 'I know what you mean' is a very legitimate way of coping with the anxiety of this change."

Peterson calls this a "support group" type of situation and says there's probably a sense of safety in the anonymity of blogging. Blanchard agrees, especially in her case, where she's older than the average pregnant woman in her town. "I hear from both men and women who are older and just having children," says Blanchard. "There's definitely a community of women of a certain age who are getting pregnant and have no one to talk to or to listen to them. If you can't find them in your town, where everyone in your childbirth class is 15 years younger than you, where else do you look? Online, of course."

In addition, as Peterson points out, the cost-benefit analysis of online journaling is heavily weighted toward the benefits. Blogs are generally free, you can make great friends, and, if you have an unusual medical situation, you can get support for that.

"Overall, [blogging] just speaks to the fact that pregnancy and becoming a mother are very unsupported issues in our culture," says Peterson. "The Internet gives you a little wider world."

Want to see more?

• Butterflies and Hiccups: A Guided Pregnancy Journal for the Mom-to-be
• Technology Center
• Write From the Beginning
• Talk about it!

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