Back in April last year I confessed to not being a Daddy Blogger and also not feeling like I was a Mummy Blogger, you can read that little snippet here. I have two problems with the label:

Problem one

This has been dealt with by so many other people so I’ll only touch on it. Mummy Blogger seems to have become a derogatory term as if it’s something people do in their spare time but it doesn’t really mean much. Very interesting as some of these ‘mummy bloggers’ are making a full time living out of their blogs and don’t need to get a so-called ‘proper’ job. They’re making decent money while still having time for their growing families; a dream so many people have had in the past and will continue to do in the future is made possible by the internet. Graeme Base, author of The Eleventh Hour and Animalia has a horror of waking up from his dream lifestyle and being told to get a ‘proper job’, these ladies are doing so well I feel they’re redefining the term ‘proper job’.

There are also some ‘daddy bloggers’ but no-one makes a fuss about that as men are able to do whatever they wish and they’re not derided, unless they’re stay-at-home-dads but even that is becoming more common place.

Problem two

The translation of the term ‘mummy blogger’. People everywhere seem to translate it as a mother who blogs and they can blog about anything, if you use that translation then that means I’m a mummy blogger as I blog and I have children…unless they’re doing the wrong thing in which case they’re monsters. I don’t understand how come ‘people’ (and I use this term loosely as some of them don’t appear to behave like people) insist that every mum who blogs is a mummy blogger. I consider myself a book blogger, the fact that I have kids is irrelevant on most occasions. I do blog about words and publishing and other book related issues, I also blog about the odd other topic, sometimes very odd.

Why can’t a mummy blogger be someone who blogs about being a mum; whether a mother or a father, or a grandparent or a foster parent? To me the words mummy blogger sound as if that’s exactly what they do and that is not a derogatory term but a statement of fact.

I very much wish we could stop taking words and making them derogatory. Let’s have some positiveness rather than negativity for a change.