What to Write About?

I have a long list of things I don't want my blog to be.

For starters, I don't want it to be a mommy blog.

I have nothing against mommy blogs. Indeed, there is something admirable about taking the time to document the life of the family in the midst of the raising of said family. And some of them make for enjoyable reading. I think I don't want to write one for the same reason that I don't send a holiday letter. Because while I love getting other people's letters, I cannot bring myself to assume that anyone wants to know so much about my family's goings-on. It's certainly not shyness that drives this. It's rooted, rather, in a fundamental distaste for the listing of the accomplishments and the cataloguing of the ailments. So while I may some day envy those mommies who blogged the details of their family lives, I will not do it.

A mommy writer could always engage in the mommy politics. But the meat of the mommy matter -- breast v bottle, work v home, cloth v disposable, jars v ice cube trays full of home-pureed carrots -- doesn't engage the full me. I am a breast, home-except-when-I-was-working, disposable, ice-cube-trays-with-the-first-kid mom by instinct, by choice, by judgment, but I don't want to write about it.

I also don't want to have a casual blog. Posting too frequently, without attention to quality, is not my style. (If you think this reads like the ultimate cardboard justification for my infrequent blogging, feel free to judge me. Really.) I want my posts to be thoughtful, important, and meaningful. I want each to contribute to the whole. And I want to work around a theme.

Could I write about politics? Sure. I certainly have strong opinions, a relatively well-informed set of positions, and plenty of material to work with. Especially now. But I count on Eugene Robinson, Paul Krugman, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ruth Cohen, Maureen Dowd, and the Davids (Brooks, Broder, and Ignatius) for the best of this kind of writing. In short, I want to read it, not write it.

The central struggle of the blog is that I had a theme. I was going to blog about the experience of an American mommy living abroad. My discourse would touch on parenting, but with a turn toward the consequences of the cultural choices we make for our children. My posts would engage in American politics, but from across the sea and with a nod toward the global perspective of one little household. My words would not document the lives of my children. There would be no soccer scores or club initiations or academic honors. But my words would record the nature, the rhythm, the flavor of our international family life.

What to write about now?