New book by dooce.com blogger chronicles ups, downs of motherhood

By RENE LYNCH

“It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita” by Heather B. Armstrong (Simon Spotlight, $24, 272 pp.)

Heather B. Armstrong is kinda like the Howard Stern of mommy bloggers. Visitors flock to her Web site dooce.com to see the former Mormon turn everyday life in Salt Lake City into an uproarious rant in which few topics are spared — and no one is left unscathed.

Her devoutly Mormon parents are frequent targets. As are Republicans. Potty humor is big, too, whether it’s a pregnant Armstrong trying to empty her bladder in a cramped airplane bathroom or her daughter’s love of the word poop.

But mostly Armstrong invites the world to watch just how much life has changed for a Web site designer, live-music lover and early-adapter-of-all-things-Web who is now a wife to the saintly Jon and stay-at-home mom to daughter Leta.

Armstrong has also used that evolution to cast a spotlight on her years-long bout with crippling depression and how medication made it all better. Her book, “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita,” chronicles her decision to stop taking drugs so that she could become pregnant and her struggles to adapt to motherhood, as well as her subsequent descent into postpartum depression. She held off returning to her pre-pregnancy medications because she wanted to continue breast-feeding her daughter — and did so, until the pangs of anxiety became so disturbing that she feared harming herself, or her family.

Ultimately, Armstrong checks herself into a mental institution and credits it with saving her life, giving her time to focus on herself and allow a doctor to supervise the administration of a powerful drug cocktail that worked almost immediately: “I felt a difference within two hours, and if you ask Jon, he will tell you that when he saw me that afternoon he saw Heather for the first time in seven months, not that awful woman who liked to throw keys at his head.”

In the book, like her blog, Armstrong is remarkably at ease with portraying herself in an unflattering light. Letting it all hang out on dooce.com led to Armstrong’s firing years ago — after she wrote some unflattering things about her workplace and her boss. But that dismissal — which pinged its way around the Web — only helped boost her following when she returned to blogging and never looked back. (No wonder. It is estimated that she makes $40,000 a month from her Web site, enough to allow St. Jon to quit his day job and manage his wife’s empire.)

She uses her blog to fly in the face of convention, empowering women — parents — to raise their families according to their own rules.

She’s increasingly gaining a platform as the media’s go-to quote on “Mommy 2.0,” whether it’s how new moms can use social networking to feel less isolated or the controversy surrounding early childhood vaccinations.

She draws plenty of flak for her outspokenness, and she routinely bars comments on particular blog posts that she knows will bring out the crazies — the folks who harshly criticize her decision to blog so openly about her child, how she treats St. Jon and even how she chose to treat her own depression.

“I Cried” can feel too hesitant when it comes to discussing the depths of Armstrong’s depression, like it had to be dragged out of her. In the acknowledgments, there is a line that suggests what might have been left out: “Thanks to my father … especially for being willing to believe that what I went through was real.”