Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Mother uses Internet blog with an unerring sense of humor

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

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She was 29, married, the mother of two toddlers. Between playgroup dynamics, minivan repairs, and trying to reconcile 2 a.m. Internet shopping sprees with a staggering family budget deficit, Melissa Summers was frustrated, if not desperate.

So she did what young, cranky housewives do in 2005 as alternatives to drinking or taking scrap-booking seminars.

She launched a blog.

That was two years ago, before an ad hoc national blogging group named her online diary-like creation "best mommy blog," before the New York Times recognized www.suburbanbliss.net as notable, before New York literary agents called, sniffing out a book.

That was also before her mother-in-law stopped speaking to her.

Now the Royal Oak mother of Madison, 6, and Max, 4, is balancing her burgeoning dreams as a writer against the reality of facing the play group the day after publishing online those dark feelings about the other mommies.

With an offbeat view of the world -- what you might expect from a woman who grew up "really, really poor in Birmingham," Summers is trying to live like a normal Gymboree-going, minivan driving mom. And she's doing that even as she confesses that she loves her kids but fights to power through inevitable toddler tedium with a sense of the absurd.

"It's not as much fun to write about the fun," she blogged the other day, after a family outing to Ann Arbor's Hands-On Museum.

Summers, who married Logan Summers almost eight years ago, never expected to be home with two kids at 31. Her daughter's arrival interrupted her college education -- and jump-started a writing career.

Like other bloggers, Summers downloads her inner life onto the Internet, but her irreverence and candor are winning qualities in the often insipid universe of mommy-blogging.

Willing to delve into the complexities of real life -- everything from bad hair and cocktail play groups (the margaritas are just for the moms) to the suicide of her father -- she's at her best with the oddities of every day at home. Describing her son's pinching attack, she dubs him the "Jesse James of the playdate set," with a hair-trigger temper set off by a toddler who "waved and said hi."

Last year, she impulsively torpedoed the family bank account by charging an Apple iBook.

"It was both my most stupid purchase and my most brilliant one," says Summers, who has chronicled her largely successful struggles with shopaholism.

As her audience has grown -- she gets over 2,000 hits a day from around the country, she says -- she's gotten revenue from advertisers and T-shirt and mug sales featuring her "momtini" logo: a baby pacifier in a martini glass.

She's also a mother who tries to have a "real family dinner" every night, with each family member included in the conversation.

Then she'll let loose on the breast-feeding proselytizer who slipped Diet Coke into her baby's sippy cup.

Melissa Summers is at heart a Midwestern suburban mom -- one who's logged into that wireless frontier only a bit beyond Roseanne, Erma Bombeck and Mrs. Cleaver.

Laura Berman's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Metro. Reach her at (248) 647-7221 or lberman@detnews.com.