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Adventures in Homeschooling

Jenny Lind Schmitt writes about her exploits as a homeschooling mother of four. See full bio

October 28, 2009, Parenting

Blogging the Wild Thing

Why Wild Things need stories, and the rest of us need blogs

I've been thinking a lot lately about why we read blogs. And why we write them. I have to admit it, several years ago when I first heard about the concept of blogs and blogging I thought it was terribly narcissistic. Why would someone write something by, to, for, and about themselves? For awhile I persisted in that opinion, but have now been munching on those tart words for quite some time.

While I've been wondering about it, the film version of Where the Wild Things Are has been released, and it brings to mind an incident highlighting one of my favorite themes, that of Life as Story and the need we all have for stories to help us make capital ‘S' Sense out of lower case ‘s' stuff.

One evening last week, when CrazyManBoy Hermes was jumping incessantly off the couch, banging sticks on the coffee table, harassing the dog and Generally Driving Me Nuts, just seconds before I totally lost my cool, his big sister cried in exasperation, "you Wild Thing!" It stopped me in mid pre-yell inhalation. I turned and found Maurice Sendak's classic Where the Wild Things Are on the bookshelf. Plopped on the couch, we read it together, his eyes widening in recognition of his Inner Max. He giggled sheepishly when Max's mother calls him "Wild Thing!" and when the Wild Things in the Place where the Wild Things Are gnash their terrible teeth, we gnashed right along with them. Somewhere in the gnashing my frustration dissipated. Hermes' bouncy attention settled down with the realization that here in the book, someone else had walked in his shoes (or rather his wolf suit); someone else knew what it felt like to be him. At the end of the book, when Max amazingly finds his supper still waiting although he's been sailing for a year and a day, we sighed and snuggled and reflected that sometimes, when you're three and it's late in the day, you are just a Wild Thing, and that's okay.

So I think that's why we read blogs. And why we write them, too. Perhaps understanding this new development in communication has more to do with understanding our intrinsic need for stories. Blogs are about the stories that everybody has to tell, and the stories that we hear with relief, reassuring ourselves that we're not so unlike the rest of the human race after all. Ah! Someone else's kid has eaten the gum off the bottom of the bowling alley chair. Someone else has endured glares as Parent of The Screaming Kid on the airplane. Someone else's life looks a little like mine.

We all have a story to tell. Even the most seriously uptight news blogs tell us a little bit about the author, even if it's only that he sounds like Sam the Eagle on The Muppet Show. And let's face it, often we read for pure entertainment. Perhaps one reason blogs are so popular is because of the current dearth in our culture of harp-playing bards reciting long ballads or blind grandmothers telling fairy tales by the fire. And while those were the entertainment of yesteryear, more contemporary amusements of television and film lack something that blogs have: they are personal. They are the extra line that the bard added himself, the version of the fairy tale that was the blind grandmother's own creation. And that's what life is, right? One personal story at a time. Each a part of the one bigger tale of History.

So we read blogs for the same reasons we read stories. To be informed, to seek help, to find warning and inspiration, or just to find recognition of ourselves in a really good story. And people write...I write, to share my teeny tiny part of the story that is the Story. And just maybe, someone will read and nod with recognition that when you're human, and it's late in the day, someone else was human too, and it was okay.