I am a blog-reader, I admit. Most of the blogs in my queue are written by other mothers detailing the lives of their children. Some of these mothers choose to write about the nitty-gritty details of raising children and I simply relish their honesty.  Often I will let out a deep breath (a breath that I did not even know I was holding) when I read about a mother who, like me, adores her children with every cell in her body, but in a moment of weakness, a moment when both kids are yelling or crying and both want her to hold them and the dog is barking and the husband is doing the dishes that she feels like she should be doing, she momentarily freaks out. She yells. Or feels like she has failed. Or thinks about getting in the car and driving away for a little bit. These are the blogs I love to read, because mothering tiny little people is lovely and wonderful and  hard.  

 Then there are the blogs written by the "perfect" mothers. These are the mothers who display gorgeous photographs of their crafts on their blogs, complicated crafts that they do with their children underfoot which still manage to come out perfectly. These are the mothers who don't talk about the laundry that has piled up, or about the shirts they wear that always have food on the shoulder from the baby wiping her mouth in the same spot. But I do love reading these blogs too, because I'm a sucker for the images of the crafty mama knitting by candlelight nearby the woodstove while the baby sleeps on her lap. I love the feeling of coziness I get when I see the photos of these children dressed in mama's handmade sweaters or handsewn pants, feeding the chickens or trekking through the snow on a nature-walk.

I like learning and reading about how other families raise and love their babies (or at least what they want to show us of the lovely but messy process).  I read the blogs and feel like I'm a part of something bigger than myself, part of this deep commitment we all have called mothering, and I feel the connection between us, between the perfect and not-so-perfect mothers. And truly, we're all the same, for it's the love of our children that is the blood that binds us together.