Remembering the Queen of the "Mommy" Bloggers

(...and all the rest of us)

One of the weirdest things about Internet culture — and social media, in particular — is the way that, when someone famous dies, we all somehow feel the need to respond to the news as if we’ve been asked to make an official statement, and we do it using words and phrases we learned from the media, and would never actually use in real life.

So, “My thoughts are with the family at this sad time,” says Brian from down the road, for the benefit of his 15 Facebook friends. Meanwhile, the parents you see at the school gate are all sharing their “deepest condolences” on Twitter, and your great Aunt Agnes releases a carefully worded statement about how the deceased touched all of our lives. She will not be taking questions at this time.

All of which is my slightly awkward way of saying I feel mildly ridiculous for wanting to share my thoughts on the passing of Heather Armstrong — or Dooce, as most of us knew her — in the same way I feel mildly ridiculous when I try to comment on any kind of current event or news story. Because I can absolutely guarantee that exactly no one is sitting there reading about it and thinking, “Yeah, but what does Amber have to say about this, that’s what I want to know?”

You know?

I wanted to briefly talk about Heather’s passing, though, partly because I’ve been thinking about her ever since I heard the news last night, but also because, while I’m not sure Dooce would count as a “celebrity” (I’m pretty sure none of my friends or family members have heard of her, for instance…), if you were part of the blogging scene in the early 2000s, then you knew her better than you knew your own family. She was our celebrity. Our most famous of famous people. Remember the time Heather upset The Blogess at Blogher ‘08? That was our ‘Will Smith slapping Chris Rock’ moment. Blogher was our Oscars. And Dooce, I guess, was our Queen.

And now she’s gone; an event that has a strange kind of “end of an era” feel to it, which has led me to spend the entire morning down an Internet rabbit hole of OG bloggers, wondering where they are now, and what happened to them all. Nat the Fat Rat. Amalah. Young House Love. And, of course, Dooce herself, whose blog was where it all started.

Read: What the Young House Love drama tells us about blogger burnout and reader entitlement

When I first came across Dooce, I was working in a soul-destroying office job that made me cry in the shower every morning, and documenting my hatred of that job in painstaking detail on my Livejournal. When I almost got fired over that Livejournal (a story that, to this day, I’ve never been able to bring myself to tell, not being as brave as Heather was with her writing), I went back through Heather’s archives, attempting to draw some comfort from the idea that I had not almost been fired for my own stupidity — I had almost been Dooced. Which was a different thing altogether.

I kept my job, but the damage was done. I still hated it. But from Heather, and the bloggers that came after her, I slowly came to realize that maybe I didn’t have to keep doing something I hated that much. Maybe I could do what those women were doing — i.e…

• Quit the soul-crushing office job

• Write about the things you love — even if the things you love to write about turn out to be that time you flooded the bathroom or the international man of mystery who lived next door.
  

I would be lying if I said I quit my job because of Dooce. I’d also be lying, however, if I said that her blog, and the others I’d started reading at that point, didn’t have a significant effect on me and my career. Until those OG bloggers came along, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could make a living from writing about the same kinds of things I’d been covering on my Livejournal; which was so incredibly niche at the time that when I almost got fired over mine, I had to explain to my partner and parents what the hell this “online journal”, as we called it at the time, even was.

But Heather and her like normalized writing about our lives — maybe not the flooded bathrooms and the men of mystery exactly, but all of those other things we’d previously assumed were largely unimportant, and that no one would want to hear. Dooce has always been (incorrectly, in my opinion) referred to as a “mommy blogger”, but she was so much more than that — a true pioneer, who changed the face of publishing (particularly for women) in ways that even she couldn’t have imagined. As SBSarah wrote when the news broke: “Every influencer, every family channel, every monetized site trying to maintain an existence as a form of independent media can trace its history back to Dooce.”

And they can.

Like so many other bloggers/influencers out there, I wouldn't be where I am today without Heather B. Armstrong. And while I know there are important conversations to be had about living your life online (I started writing down some of my own thoughts on this just last week), for now I just wanted to quickly, and somewhat awkwardly, pay tribute to the person who started it all, and whose loss is all the more shocking because of the open and honest way Heather wrote about her life, inviting thousands of random strangers to bear witness to her struggles.

To paraphrase someone whose Tweet I scrolled past in a state of shock last night, one of the weirdest things about her death is the knowledge that she’s not going to pop up to give us her take on it at some point, as she did for every other major event in her life. Heather spent most of her career explaining herself, and documenting herself, and it feels all kinds of wrong that she’s not here now to somehow make this make sense for us — probably with a handful of curse words and the same, almost shocking level of honesty she was known for.

The Internet without Dooce is a strange thing to contemplate; and although I hadn’t followed her closely for many years now, I will miss knowing that she’s out there, like an old friend who you don’t always keep in touch with as much as you should, but who nevertheless continues to form part of the backdrop of your life, and your story.

R.I.P Heather. I hope that wherever you are right now, you’re hugging Chuck and thinking about what to write about next…

[Photo by Rikonavt on Unsplash]