Yes, this will be about Joyce Maynard. I’m going to make a point at the end of this, though, so stay with me.
Maynard was born to be a mother. She thrived on motherhood. Most importantly, she knew this about herself since her teenage years and tried to engineer her life in a way that would let her have many children. I’m even more into mom stuff but I only discovered this at age 40, so that was that for me.
In any case, Maynard managed to wrangle the permission to have three children out of her husband Steve. It took an extraordinary amount of begging, crawling on her knees, all sorts of horrid stuff. After three kids, he adamantly refused to have more.
But then.
Steve waited until his wife got menopausal, found a younger, fresher woman, dumped Maynard (yes, in that order), and…
… yes, he proceeded to have more children with the new wife.
All this drove Maynard to near insanity, and all the crackpot things she did next stemmed from that.
In any case, here’s the point I want to make.
Maynard made a living in the 1980s by being what today we know as a Mommy blogger. There was no Internet, the field wasn’t oversaturated, and you could make a decent wage without doing fake poseurish stuff to exploit your own children by making them into little social media props. Maynard would spend her week with her kids, then write a weekly column about it, and make enough not to live in luxury but to live normally. The point of her columns wasn’t to pretend that she was some paragon of fake motherly perfection but, to the contrary, to talk about the normal, frequent, and inevitable frustrations of being a mother. Her Mommy blogging was not aspirational and competitive but relatable and kind.
This is an area of life where technology didn’t do us any favors. Mommy blogging is oversaturated, and authors have to get increasingly fake and outrageous in their artificial perfection to attract attention. Maynard’s Mommy blogging was sincere, humble and well-written. In the absence of photos, she created imagery with words. Technology is fantastic in many ways but in this one, it impoverished our reality.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is interesting as a phenomenon– the mom-writer thing– that goes back way further, and I wish I knew more about it. It seems to have been an acceptable way for intelligent women with children but no husband, to support themselves and their families. I have one in my family tree: not a mommy blogger, but after they had a few kids, her husband was killed in an industrial accident (crane collapse), and she then supported the family writing a household-hints type advice column: how to get mustard stains out of linen, that sort of thing.
I’m so curious how that worked. Was she a crazy-motivated go-getter type who sold the idea of the column to the newspaper? Was it more of a community-cooperative effort to find or create this sort of job for widows, and the niches for taking in laundry and mending were already filled? Did she know somebody who knew somebody?
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There was always a method for women to communicate their experience of raising a family to other women. I believe that the current method is very inferior to what we had in the past. There’s too much fakery currently in the field. “I’m going to be a trad mom in a cabin in the woods and here’s my baby registry filled with fancy, upper class items at gigantic prices and with zero usefulness.” That kind of stuff.
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“spend her week with her kids, then write a weekly column about it”
There’s a whole history of… I dunno what to call it…. housewife literature in the US.
A big strain of it was exaggerated for humorous effect. One of the first notable books was a book by Shirley Jackson (yeah that one) called “Life Among the Savages” made from piecing together pieces from a number of womens’ magazines. There was also “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (Jean Kerr) Onions in the Stew (Betty MacDonald) and probably lots of others I don’t know about.
Many newspapers used to have women columnists who wrote about family and home life in various ways, both syndicated (Erma Bombeck was the most famous) or local. A friend of my parents had columns i a couple of different newspapers at different times and my mother wrote a few herself (not a regular thing) I remember one was about little league baseball (and how mothers of the boys playing were drafted for all manner of free labor to keep the thing going).
The general tone wasn’t about clout chasing or being too heartwarming but more like “it’s crazy… a lot of work and lots of things go wrong but it’s worth it”
Your right, it’s a field that is frightfully degraded now…
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