The Ugly Side of Blogging: A Mom Blogger’s Woes!

Woes of a Stay at Home Mom Blogger!

First off, ‘mommying’ and ‘blogging’ are two full-time jobs in themselves. I hear your applause for stating this fact plainly, dear fellow mommy bloggers 🙂

And we try to do both of these jobs perfectly. Of course, we would fail in doing every single thing PERFECTLY.

Where did our time disappear into?

Okay, let us analyse when we actually get some time to ourselves to do anything.

Being a Stay-at-Home-Mom does not mean that we stay at home, put up our feet on a sofa and keep reading romance novels one after the other while munching on popcorn. (I wish! Sigh!!).

We take care of everything at the house and the kids!

Priorities

Like all loving moms, even I prioritize my kids before my blogging work. Unfortunately, this leaves me very little time for myself as my kids are very young and need my attention almost all the time.

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Finally, about an hour or two per day remain for me, to do anything at will. Ahem, so, may be an hour tops, if the younger one sleeps without me constantly patting him by the side and the elder one goes to preschool. If the kids are not well, this time vanishes too.

Okay, say I get some time for myself and decide to use it for my blog instead of doing some workout to take care of myself. This is because I love writing more than anything else, except the family of course.

Who needs a workout when you have kids to run around, right? 😉

Family who do not think writing is ‘work’

Then I end up with a lot of stress when I really do not have time to do any writing. Maybe even wallow in self-pity at times! Still, I feel that pitying your circumstances is a waste of time too.

If your family and friends are non-bloggers, they won’t even understand why you are so unhappy. They feel that blogging or writing is not “work”, but a luxurious pastime and that we should not be even indulging in at all.

Thank God my husband does not think that way even though everyone else around does. It is definitely not a pastime when you are busting your ass off to finish a single blog post that you actually started about 6 weeks ago.

This literally happens with me so many times. Unless I somehow manage to write the text for my blog post at one go “miraculously”, it takes me nearly a month to finish each post.

For instance, my last post, “10 exotic visa-free countries for Indians to enjoy a vacation” was published just a few days ago, but I started writing it on the 26th of September (thankfully, the current year :D)!!

Blog wins that no one around you understands

Today I saw that my new post is shown as the first snippet in Google search on the first page results for the search of ‘top visa free countries for Indian passport holders’. Totally proud of my efforts and feel that my time is justified.

A blog win for mom bloggers is moments like these. But no one shares or even understands our joy except fellow bloggers!

Constant state of Sleeplessness

Previously, I used to make time for my writing after tucking in the kids for the night. Even then, my little son would somehow know that I am not in the room and start crying after sometime. At least, till the time he sleeps peacefully I could work.

But then I realized that I was always tired because of the lack of sleep and gave up working at nights. Working the whole day is more than enough for us, don’t you agree?

We need not spoil our health by losing the much needed sleep too. We actually deserve all those Zzzzzs!

Expect the unexpected

Sometimes, the kids would be engaged and you have some quality time for your passion. Then what happens?
One of these might happen. Trust me, it always does!

No charge in your device

You forgot to plug in your laptop charger earlier and now you don’t have enough battery to work when your kid is sleeping on your lap!!

Uh. Frustration to the max.

Internet issues

Sometimes, the internet provider just plays with the connection and I randomly lose the signal for a few hours.

Some laptops like my new Lenovo can also act weird and lose the connection automatically for a few minutes for every 15 minutes or so.

Also read: How to transfer your website to Siteground and why you should do it right away!

Host provider

Okay, now everything works and you try access your blog. Now it is the host provider’s turn. The site would be down at random hours everyday and the customer care calls take forever.

I know this is rare in some countries, but this happens too. My website works absolutely fine in every other country other than my home country during that down-time.

Even after spending endless hours on phone with customer care, the issue repeats. Finally, they say the issue is unsolvable (may be it is time to change hosts? But I liked my host till this happened and the last agent I spoke to took an aggressive stance that it is not the host’s problem).

At the end, I switched to Siteground and found peace! Phew!!

Forever on call with customer care

And you decide to cut the chase because at times you do not even have the luxury of time to make the phone call.

Making a phone call involves speaking, and even if you speak softly, your little one wakes up and cries his lungs out! But he happily ignores it even if a road-roller thunders by outside. I am not allowed to move a muscle. Period.

I can’t even type on my laptop for the fear of waking him up because I am yet to learn the magic of soundless typing. I hate hitting the space bar, its tapping sound is the loudest.

Mom bloggers need to plan so much to utilize their time efficiently. Like me keeping a pen and paper handy 😉

Even this post was first written on a paper on 5th November. I finally found some time to type, format and post it now. Phew!!

Look at the state of the papers by the time I got around to typing it. Don’t try to type an article when your infant is around 😉

My smartphone is also a savoir, thanks again to my husband for getting it for me 🙂

Other freak hardware issues

Oh, I recently broke my laptop charger. The kids were playing and all of a sudden the adapter was pulled out of the socket roughly and thrown on the floor accidentally.

I literally had to wait 10 days for a new charger. Zero work for 10 full days.

As I wanted to avoid waiting for Amazon delivery, checking if its right or not and then possibly reordering a new correct charger, I went to a local store. They said that they would get it in two days. But it became ten days.

Lesson: Don’t break a US charger in India. Probably I should have bought a new charger here instead of using an adapter for my US charger. I know, not everyone is as careless as me. But sometimes we just can’t avoid such setbacks.

Conclusion

Finally, what we should be doing (or continuing doing) is to innovate new ways to work like using a pen and paper, notes-making on the smart phone and other techniques to utilize our time.

A blog planner is extremely helpful to stick to a schedule and plan out content efficiently. Try this Badass Blog Planner.

All this hopefully till the little ones are not so little anymore. Life is tough when you have an ambition and no time to pursue it.

Slog on mommy, we will get there soon, hopefully! 🙂

Also read: Blogging tips every blogger should know!