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‘Mommy blogging’ is a phenomenon of the blog world, attracting vast numbers of authors and readers. This paper grounds an understanding of personal mommy blogs in rhetorical genre theory to account for the opportunities and attractions of writing about mothering online. Analysis will focus on a constellation of texts in orbit around an article about mommy blogging published in the Globe and Mail, a nationally-distributed Canadian newspaper. The article directs mommy bloggers’ attention and critical energy toward explicitly articulating community norms and asserting the values that undergird their own practices in the face of hostile commentary that derides their life writing. The fact of the controversy speaks to the contested nature of mommy blogging—its boundaries, that is, are not fully established, its practices not universally accepted beyond those who practice it, its texts not acknowledged as part of a legitimate parenting or writing discourse. Mommy bloggers, though, have attained working consensus on the boundaries of the genre; a form of autobiography in real time, this writing is purposive and deliberate social engagement, a creative as well as interpersonal practice that mitigates the assorted ills and celebrates the particular joys of contemporary mothering.