Many months ago, I agreed in a caffeine-fueled haze to write for an upcoming parenting Web site, Offsprung. Today the site launches. Offsprung isn’t your mother’s parenting Web site, however. Instead, it’s a humor magazine designed to eviscerate the excesses of modern parenting culture. It’s offbeat, in your face, and irreverent. If you don’t like that sort of thing, you may want to avoid it. If, like me, you hide a slightly warped sense of humor under a serious (or not-so-serious) exterior, you might just find it to be your cup of organic apple juice.
Offsprung features a first-rate group of writers, and I’m honored to be in such august company. They include founder Neal Pollack, whose Alternadad memoir inspired his Ask Alternadad column on Offsprung; Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, writing on politics at Unsprung; and James Beard award-winning food writer Dara Grumdahl, who offers her take on kids and food at Defamisher. You’ll also find no-holds-barred columns on kids’ gear, music, television, and books, as well as celebrity-parent gossip—but no fluffy articles on bonding with your infant to the strains of Baby Mozart. Most of the other writers are straight but friendly, so make sure to read their work and let them know there’s a big LGBT-family contingent out there ready to give them some love. Laughing at ourselves as parents is one of the common things we can all share.
I’ll be blogging at Offsprung regularly, in addition to here at Mombian.com. I’ll crosspost some pieces to both sites, keep a few serious ones here, and put a few more edgy ones there. Right now, there’s a lot of overlap, but expect more divergence as time goes on.
There are still a few technical details to work out, though the development team has been working hard. (Either that or they’ve been farming it out to interns and going to play foosball.) They tell me I’ll get a spiffy header image for the top of my page Real Soon Now. Please bear with any startup hitches.
Offsprung’s tag line is “Your life didn’t end when you became a parent.” With luck, your sense of humor didn’t, either. Check it out, and leave some comments to kick off the community there.