Several people drew my attention this week to a rather bizarre opinion-slash-feature piece in the New York Times in which writer Liesl Schillinger attempts to shoehorn a painfully forced parallel among Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi based solely on the fact that all three of them happen to be mothers to five children….just like me (!!!).

…the three belong to what may be the smallest, most exclusive clique in American politics. The admission requirements are beyond most women, and all men: members must be prominent players in the United States political arena and must have given birth to not one, not two, not three, not even four — but five children, something that presumably gives them more in common than they might like to admit.

What does it say about this country at this moment that, of the small handful of women who have achieved highly visible political roles, three are matriarchs of such very large families? Could it be that the skills of managing sprawling households translate well into holding office? Or that such a remarkable glut of mom cred makes a woman’s bid for external power more palatable to voters? Or are they just related to more voters, which translates into a mysterious edge at the polls?

Whatever forces may be at play, taking a look at present dynamics, any American woman with long-range political ambitions might do well to also look to her nursery.

This story is what I’m blogging about over at Babble today.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about the impact that the very recent mass adoption & use rate of Facebook and Twitter is having – or will have - on “old school” blogs, like this one.

Since I’ve been blogging regularly at the same domain (two, actually, but they both point here) for about seven years now, I think I have a pretty good body of anecdotal data with which to consider the ramifications to traditional blogs and bloggers from the social media tipping point that arrived in the past 18 months, you know, when seemingly EVERYBODY IN AMERICA  suddenly joined Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

Here are my observations, from my own blogging experience, as well of from my actual blog analytics, which I’ve observed over the years:

• Post Facebook/Twitter tipping point, I find that I am more likely to take an interesting idea and use it as a pithy, quick hit on Facebook or Twitter rather than turn it into an actual blog post.  As a result, my blog is now less  “sparkly,” for lack of a better way to put it.  My personality, humor and day-to-day activities now seem to end up in my Facebook and Twitter status udates  (friend me on both!), while my actual blog posts these days tend to be more like short form essays, dealing with more high-concept topics and issues.  And that’s not necessarily a good thing in terms of my blog being the primary platform where people actually get to know me.  However, to be fair, that shift over time in the tone and content of my blogging here isn’t entirely due to Twitter and Facebook.   In my own case, as a very early-adopter “mommyblogger” who has been doing this a long time,  some of that evolution away from so much “here’s the funny thing or the really painful thing that happened with Katie and her kids today” blogging has come as H, J and E – the “blogged about” -  have gotten older.  They now have vetting power over any blogging I ever do that references them in any way.  And although they have generally enjoyed having a mom who is a writer/blogger (or at least they have enjoyed the food and shoes that the writing has paid for over the years), they are no longer okay much/most of the time with me relating some specific, funny thing  that one of them says at the dinner table.   At age 4 or 7, they didn’t care.  As middle schoolers and teenagers, they do.  And I totally understand that.  So as the big kids in the family have gotten older, I have also become more cognizant of the fact that at a certain point, their childhood stories are THEIRS to tell, in whatever way and to whomever THEY choose.  If I am the only one telling these stories – via my blog or through essays published elsewhere – and I do it before they ever get a chance to run their own memories  of our family life through the sepia sieve of hindsight, they will never get a chance to remember things, or tell things in their own way.  I want all four of my children to one day sit around a table together, laughing and sharing memories of their childhoods and our home life,  debating who is remembering this Christmas morning mishap or that day at the beach correctly.  I don’t want my blogging to replace their memories to such a degree that they don’t have those wonderful, “remember when” conversations that adult siblings have together. Of course, C is still young enough that I can exploit her for commercial gain for a good long time yet before she objects (I kid! I kid!) While I do believe that all of the writing I have done (and will still do) about our lives together will one day offer a wonderful adjunct for their own memories – a sort of digital scrapbook or diary – I never want it to replace what they remember and believe and want to talk or write about.  So yeah, Twitter and Facebook HAVE changed my blog’s content, but they aren’t the whole impetus behind those changes over time.

• In the past 18 months – since Twitter and Facebook hit the big time – my blog’s traffic (meaning how many visitors I get and how often they visit) has remained steady or grown, but my comments have dropped DRASTICALLY.  This is the biggest impact that Facebook in particular has had on my blog. I used to routinely get dozens of comments on most blog posts.  Lately, I am lucky if I get 5-10.  I can see from my analytics that more people are visiting my blog year over year, and are hanging around and reading multiple posts, and then returning for more on a regular basis. But my blog readers are now much more silent.  Very few comments.  I believe that this is almost entirely due to Facebook. The people who used to chat with others or debate things or talk about what I’d blogged that day in the comments below each of my blog posts now have those conversations on Facebook instead.  In fact, when I publish a new post here at this blog, a link to it automatically goes to my Facebook wall (I use Networked Blogs for this).  I can see from my traffic stats that lots  of people are indeed following the Facebook link and coming here to the blog to read the post.  That’s the good part of Facebook’s impact on my blog; the bad part is that they then wait until they get back to Facebook to talk about the post, and they do it in the comments below the link to my blog post…on Facebook.  I love hearing from people about what I write – whether that’s here on the blog or over at Facebook.  But I do really miss having a volume of comments here that made my blog feel more like a real community than it does currently.  With all of the comments on my content happening over at Facebook,  my blog – which is very dear to me after years of sharing my life here with readers who have held my hand through good times and bad – feels a little dead, a little empty. And that really does bother me.  It’s not that I want more comments for the pageviews they generate – I am getting plenty of pageviews  – but post-Facebook tipping point, my readers are sort of silent here at the blog.  They come and go without saying hello,  sharing their own stories,  or telling me who they are and how they found the blog. I even miss some of the “heated” (that’s one way to put it!) disagreements among readers that were a common occurrence back in the day (the day being all of the years I blogged up until 2009.  And yes, I do blame Facebook  for that. Damn you, Facebook, and your comment-sucking ways!

• Traffic growth for my blog in the past 8 months-12 months in particular has been primarily driven by Twitter and Facebook,  rather than by search engines.  I used to get A WHOLE LOT more blog traffic from search engine queries, some of them very bizarre (You don’t want to know some of them. Ick. So disturbing to look at one’s blog analytics and realize what people are out there searching for.)  In fact, some of my favorite longtime readers/commenters originally found me when they typed something into Google or Yahoo or even AskJeeves (yes, I have been blogging for THAT LONG!)  that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Example: What do I do when my child’s pet Python escapes and is loose in the house?”  But the search query somehow landed them here, at this blog. And then they stayed, and then they came back again and again.  And then many of them started joining in the conversation in the comments below my posts.  But lately, my search engine traffic is down precipitously, while my referrals from Twitter and Facebook status updates and wall posts – my own and those from other people referencing me or my blog – are up to a huge degree.  When I get some free time (ha!), I need to sit down, and with Jon’s help, try to figure out what’s going on with the SEO issue on my blog, because the change has been incredibly dramatic over the past year.  I want to figure out if there is any clear correlation between Facebook’s explosion and the fact that it appears to me that fewer people are searching for topics that used to be the bread and butter of my search engine traffic – things like breastfeeding advice, co-sleeping stories, etc – the kinds of search queries that used to be a huge driver of women and moms to my blog.  My suspicion is that women are now simply asking these sorts of questions in their status updates, and then letting the info come to them via their network of friends and friends-of-friends on Facebook.  Instead of going out to find the info, they are attracting the info they need directly to them from people they already trust and “know,” at least to some degree. That sort of high-influence information carries much more weight with a woman wanting to know what high chair she should buy than some blog post that I – a complete stranger – wrote about my preferred high chair brand, and which she then found with a totally impersonal Google search.

So those are a few of my observations regarding how Facebook and Twitter are impacting my blog and my blogging.  I’d be really interested to hear from other bloggers – particularly those of you who have been at it for more than two or three years.

You can leave your thoughts, ideas and observations in…..the comments below

I wrote earlier this week over at my Home/Work blog about my ongoing struggle to leave work at work when I come home to my family, and now I am working on a somewhat related essay for Babble about former GE CEO Jack Welch’s recent comments on whether women who want to make it to the very top of their careers AND be really invested in their mothering can ever really succeed at both.

Welch basically says no, you have to choose one or the other, and he tells women they need to just accept that if we take time off to be home with our children at any point, or if we work a modified schedule or go part time during our careers, we can’t ever make it to the c-suite.

I’ll share my views on Welch’s comments, and what I think they say about men, women, the feminist movement, and national priorities in my essay, which should run in the next week or two at Babble, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

Is Welch right? Are women who believe they can be really good moms and still reach the highest levels of their professions just deluding themselves? It is my anecdotal observation – and I am looking for research to either support or refute my hypothesis – that a higher-than-average percentage of women in America’s upper echelon of corporate career success have only one child, or no children at all.

Are Welch’s comments specific to only a few types of careers, like investment banking, law and corporate management? Or do they also apply to traditionally “female” careers, like teaching and social work?

If Welch is correct, should American women just accept this as the way of the world, and a price we pay for being female? Or is this a call to action for more women in legislative positions to help workers-who-are-also-mothers succeed in their careers, despite the “handicap” of being responsible for children? (Sort of the way minority legislators have traditionally looked out for their own affinity groups when crafting social policy, or the way Bob Dole helped get the Americans With Disabilities Act passed.)

Fire away on this one in the comments below. How has your own mothering impacted your career choices and opportunities, and vice versa?

I love this post from Meagan Francis about whether it’s ever acceptable to bring a baby into an “adult” venue or event. She lays out the issue exactly as I would, with a nod to both the rights and the responsibilities of parents.

The very first essay I ever sold to a paying publication was a piece I sold to the Chicago Tribune in 1995 in response to an op-ed they had run from some curmudgeonly guy who said that children should basically never be taken into public places, particularly places where he was paying for food. I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but my primary point was that a culture that believes young children should be mostly segregated from the world of adult activity is a culture that is in effect, banishing women to a certain invisibility. Banning babies is a de facto policy that bans women with babies.

This is Jon and me, hittin’ the town with C when she was about 3 weeks old, I think. Yes, we went and had a drink at our favorite brewpub. With the baby in the sling. As you can see from the photo, she was a real rabble rouser that night.

Now, having said that, I do not believe people should allow their babies or young children to actively disrupt other diners at a restaurant or play or neighborhood meeting, etc. There is a balance, and I think that our society tends to have trouble finding it with this issue. We swing wildly from pronouncements that any woman who occasionally wants to bring a child along to an event or job site or activity (generally because she cannot afford or find acceptable childcare) must not want to be taken seriously, to finding ourselves in restaurants where one inconsiderate parent ruins everyone’s meal (including other, less noisy kids who are also trying to eat in peace) by allowing his two year old to scream for 30 minutes without realizing it’s time to get a to-go bag and leave.

But go read Meagan’s blog post. As with everything she writes, it’s just darn good.

I’ve decided today that Sarah Palin is sort of a genius.

Unless the real reason she’s stepping down is that the National Enquirer is about to publish a cover story revealing that she’s actually a man who became a woman to escape his history as a Sandinista guerilla fighter, her resignation is flat-out brilliant. It’s certainly possible that she’s leaving her post in advance of some big, ugly, serious scandal becoming public, but I suspect not. And if not, then she’s made the best political move I can imagine in her plan to run for president in 2012.

Whenever I make a big decision, or help someone else make a decision, I always ask this question first, “what’s the downside?” If we ask that question about Sarah Palin’s decision to resign, there really isn’t one of any consequence. Sure, some (not all) Alaskans will be irritated. And some Americans will consider her a quitter. But as Palin begins to build her national organization in earnest, the pissy Alaskans will be equivalent to a few political gnats, and the folks in the lower 48 who will express their disapproval of her resignation don’t like Palin anyway, no matter what she does.

So those are the negatives. If there is any other downside, I am not seeing it. And of course, we Americans have a short attention span, and the “quitter” label just won’t carry any weight within a year, particularly since Palin is now an iconic figure who transcends any single action she takes.. Given who she is, and the passions she stirs in people, the relatively dull, bureaucratic fact that she decided to leave office early really won’t factor in the grand scheme of the Palin narrative

So what are the benefits to Palin? They are huge. First of all, her resignation offers the very basic positive of immediately freeing her from the ethical and logistical constraints that come with her office; as givernor, she can’t leave Alaska too often. She can’t raise money as easily. She has to deal with day to day tasks of actually governing, and she has to face the press scrutiny that comes with being a high-profile, sitting public official.

So Palin resigns yesterday, pointing to the truly unprecedented way she continues to be trashed in the media. She frames it as “best for Alaskans,” saying that the press has essentially driven her from office, and noting that she’s doing the honorable thing by walking away so that Alaskan government can regain some sense of peace and normalcy. Plus, even as she claims that her family’s privacy continues to be violated, she explicitly reminds us that her toddler has Down Syndrome, and she gets Good Mother points by saying she needs to spend more time with him.

Both the suggestion that she’s basically been forced out of office by the liberal media, and her stated plan to be some version of the saintly stay-at-home mama galvanize her admittedly limited, but very enthusiastic and cohesive base: the rightest of right wing Republicans, plus Evangelical Christians. They love her already; now she becomes a crusading martyr with a story to tell, and a comeback to plan. While her base doesn’t actually have enough votes on their own to get her elected, she can spend the next 18 months wringing every last penny they have to give out of them, money she can then parlay into a more comprehensive and well-financed campaign organization that will do its job of turning that money into votes outside of her base. For the next year and a half, Palin will be on the road continuously, speaking, rallying and passing the hat at churches, pro-life meetings, and gun advocacy groups. And when she’s not out there rallying her activist footsoldiers, she reinforces her mainstream GOP street cred with occasional Fox News analysis gigs.

It’s brilliant, I tell you.

Don’t underestimate Sarah Palin. Any woman who can calmly stare down David Letterman, without blinking, forcing a humiliating public apology out of a man who routinely makes lesser mortals weep via his withering excoriation is a woman with a plan. A big plan.

You wait and see.

CLARIFICATION: Thanks for all the comments on this post (except the ones I had to delete – the ones threatening violence against other commenters. Sheesh people.) After writing the post yesterday, and seeing the dozens of “Right on, fellow Palin supporter!” comments since that time, I feel the need to clarify for those who are perhaps first time visitors to my blog that I am not a Sarah Palin supporter. (That would, in fact, be a radical understatement.) In saying that I believe Palin’s resignation was a brilliant move for her in terms of pure political strategy, I am not suggesting that I support her policy positions, or that I hope she succeeds in her quest to become president. But yes, I do think that she just checkmated her political enemies in a pretty clever way. And I also think she’s a seriously tough cookie with a Big Plan. But for those of you who read the post offering my recognition of these things, and then got the impression that my compliment for Palin’s political savvy equates to being a fan or supporter, sorry to disappoint. But I hope you’ll consider stopping by my blog again, now that you’ve discovered me. I may be one of “those people” you love to hate, but at least now you know I’m one who is willing to call ‘em like I see ‘em

It has come to my attention that infant formula ads are occasionally showing up in my BlogHer adspace, over there to your left. I’ve never actually seen this, but I am told that it’s happening.

I am working on making sure that it stops happening ASAP. In the meantime, please accept my apologies. As I hope anyone who has followed my writing knows, I am a longtime, vocal supporter of The WHO Code , and I would never willingly have such an ad on any site I own or oversee.

So, yeah, I am working on this issue. Bear with me. And thanks to those readers who have alerted me to the problem.

And also, for the record, I sure wish that the PR and marketing firms that send me pitches, asking me to review or promote their client’s products on this blog would at least take a quick look-see at the contents and general editorial themes here before hitting send. If they did, they wouldn’t waste their time, their clients’ money or my email inbox space asking me to blog about things like a great new brand of infant formula or their client’s revolutionary, abstinence-based sex-ed program for teenagers…

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FOLLOW KATIE’S BLOGGING ON TWITTER OR FACEBOOK/ READ HOME/WORK, KATIE’S BLOG AT BABBLE.com

I’ve heard the saying that everyone is against abortion or trial lawyers…until someone they love really needs one.

And that’s been my experience; lots of people are “against” gay folks…until someone in their family turns out to be gay, at which point a certain, very specific tolerance blossoms. Or they are opposed to single motherhood…until their own 18 year old daughter turns up pregnant, at which point that daughter is described as “a wonderful mother” (singularly different, I guess, from all the other single mothers in America, who have long been the subject of this grandparent’s scorn and derision).

And now we have Mel Gibson, poster child for this selective intolerance. Gibson famously adheres to the “traditional Catholic” movement, which preaches abstinence outside of marriage, the sin of divorce, etc, etc, etc. Gibson has donated tens of millions of dollars to ultra-conservative Catholic causes and activities, yet he now announces that he’s divorcing his wife of 28 years, even as his girlfriend is already in the second trimester with what will be his 8th child.

As a commenter on my Facebook page noted, at least he didn’t use that evil, evil birth control!

People ask my kids all the time whether they mind having me write about them. I ask them that myself on a regular basis, and over time we have renegotiated what topics are okay for me to write about, and which ones are off limits. But overall, I think they like the fact that their mama is a writer, and that they basically have a narrative history of their lives as children that they can keep forever. And sometimes they like to do things like E did this week – taking two books to school for show and tell – books with essays in them written by me, about him. That’s pretty neat for him.

But anyway, this week, my friend Ayun Halliday’s daughter India had an essay published about what it’s like to be the daughter of a writer who has closely chronicled her kids’ lives in print and online. You should check it out; India is a pretty clever cookie (and super cute, too!).

I plan to blog more about this amazing piece at Babble by Jennifer Block on the backlash against breastfeeding, but you should go read it now. It’s smart and wonderful and spot-on.

So the term “cougar” is everywhere these days, referring to women of a certain age (30s and older, it seems) who date or marry younger men. The media would have us believe that this “cougar” phenomenon is a trend. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but the way the issue is being defined is definitely sexist.

I say this as a woman who is 12 years older than her husband. Yep, I am 41 and my husband is 29. I don’t think either one of us intended to end up married to someone of a very different age, but here we are. We are both adults. We love and are committed to each other. We have created a family together. It is what it is. And except for my occasional concerns that Jon will end up taking care of me if I become feeble in my old age long before he does, we really never even think about our age difference. Like I said, we’re both grownups, which is really all that matters.

But then this “cougar” garbage keeps popping up all over the place, and I find myself increasingly irritated by it. I understand that the label is a bit tongue in cheek – I get that – but even the humor sends a negative message to girls, I think. First of all, the word implies some sort of predator-prey paradigm, conjuring up visions of desperate middle aged women stalking their reluctant targets, a la Mrs. Robinson. It assumes that no man would willingly choose to be in a relationship with a woman older than he is because women are only attractive or valuable when they are young, based on their appearance or perceived sexuality. Media interest in this “trend” also ignores the fact that we all know many, many examples of happy couples in which the man is older – sometimes significantly older – than his girlfriend or wife. No one has ever bothered to give the guys in these relationships any sort of negative label. The sexism here is pretty obvious.

So please don’t call me that. Instead, I humbly propose that I be labeled a Bushbaby, Meerkat…or perhaps a Platypus