Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability — together, and with our guests. We like deep dives. So come with us, let’s reframe something.

Rebecca
This week we are talking all things momfluencers with author Sara Petersen, whose new book Momfluenced comes out this month. We reminisce with Sara about some of our favourite momfluencers — and why they also irritate us. We discuss the weight mothers carry to perform a certain kind of motherhood online, and some examples of mom culture getting it really right that you’ll want to check out.

Natalie
Sara has written about motherhood and feminism for The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She also writes the newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, where she explores the cult of ideal motherhood. She lives in New Hampshire.

Rebecca
So here it is: our interview with Sara Petersen.

I really resonated with this book though, Sara, so much — I really did. I was like, “Oh, that’s naming a couple of things for me that I really needed named. I was just saying beforehand that I have always struggled with wanting a third child. When you said it this way, that it’s to secure my place as being youthful, attractive, still able to procreate by solidifying my place in the world still, I was like, “Right — that might be it, oh dear.”

Sara
I know. It’s so fraught and complicated.

Rebecca
Yeah, I think you do a great job of showing how fraught it is, because I would love to just dismiss momfluencer culture as just all bad, because that would just be satisfying — “I hate all of them.” But it’s really much more…

Natalie
Nuanced.

Rebecca
Complicated than that, yeah.

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
I had my first daughter in 2008, so I was kind of blogging around Deuce’s time.

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
But then I stopped, but I stopped because, again, something you say in the book — that I felt like I contained multitudes, and I didn’t have the language for it, and I didn’t want to pin myself right into being a mommy blogger. Although if you wanted to make a business out of it, that was the thing to do, so…

Sara
Right.

Rebecca
Anyway, so also reading it I was like, “Oh, I missed the boat.”

Sara
Oh, totally.

Rebecca
Anyway, so yeah, I’ve resonated with so much, so I’m really excited to talk to you.

Natalie
Well, and Becca’s blog at the time — the title of it, do you want to say it, Bec?

Rebecca
Yeah, it was called The Girl Who Learned to Kneel. And it was based off Etty Hillesum, who’s this Jewish writer — really profound spiritual writer. I felt like I was on this journey of learning to… whatever I meant by ‘learning to kneel’ at the time. But then it also has, like, a sexy meaning.

Sara
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
Yeah — which I didn’t intend, actually, at all. But I got blocked a couple of times from it because it was, like, I don’t know, pornographic or something.

Sara
Oh my gosh.

Natalie
Like, she was trying to write at a coffee shop, and she could never get into her blog because they had, like, shadow banned her.

Sara
That is wild.

Natalie
Which is actually kind of awesome, but hilarious.

Rebecca
So many learnings.

Sara
Oh my gosh.

Natalie
In chapter one of Momfluenced, you write: “The onset of motherhood injected my soul with a love too big to ever really comprehend. But the day-to-day experience of mothering is mostly the mundanity of doing, not really being.” And that line totally resonated — both Bec and I have experienced mothering very differently. I’m the mom of one, she’s the mom of two. I can’t have more kids — it was like a health non-option, so it’s just not even been in my mind. Bec’s just shared, obviously, that she was pondering thirds, right? So this is just a totally different kind of deal, but what’s the difference for you between doing and being as your own mothering experience?

Sara
I mean, I think I had wanted to be a mother — like, even just saying that I wanted to be a mother, like I wanted to inhabit an identity. Like a ready-made identity that was sort of culturally mandated and accepted — like, no one’s going to look at your decision to become a mother and say, like, “I don’t know about that.” You know, like, “That sounds selfish,” or, “That doesn’t sound like a good choice.” If you have been socialized as a girl in this country and you decide to have kids, you’re just universally applauded for that decision. So I think in a way I approached motherhood as a shortcut to knowing myself, or to being a fully self-actualized adult. When we decided to have our first kid I was really floundering in terms of career stuff. So I think I approached motherhood as this identity that would, quote unquote, ‘complete me.’ And then, of course, the labour of mothering has really very little to do with you being sort of the protagonist of your own story. You’re really like a secondary character to this other new person’s story. And so that was just a big shock to my system. I think I thought it would be like climbing a ready-made stage and performing this grand narrative, and it was diaper changes and exhaustion and boredom, and just… yeah, a laundry list of tasks.

Rebecca
I in general don’t think it’s talked about enough how boring motherhood can be.

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
Does anyone feel that? I’ve said that constantly — like, why isn’t that examined more?

Sara
Yeah, yeah — no, it is. It really is. I mean, especially those newborn days. Like, you’re living and dying by the clock. You’re constantly timing — like, when was the last time they ate? When was the last time they slept? It can be very stultifying.

Rebecca
Yeah. So one of your first mom influencers was Taza, yes?

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
Oh, Taza — I followed her of course, and was both disappointed when she disappeared, but also kind of celebrating that she went down, or something. Like, it was very rude. There’s all these feelings toward her. But you write, “Taza made me want things: bangs, Anthropologie mirrors, an Upper West Side apartment. Sometimes she even made me want to get pregnant — again. The more I consumed Taza, the more I wanted.” So what do you think about this relationship to Taza, that we could both be fascinated and loathe her? What were we wanting, or what are we wanting with people like Taza?

Sara
Yeah — I mean, I’m curious to know your own perspective on that. But I think when I first discovered her, I had a newborn and a toddler and was very much in that super-structured days — like, going to music together classes, which I found, like, really painful to sit through. Things like that — you know, like ‘mommy and me’ classes, because I didn’t work outside of the home at that point. And so I found this other stay-at-home mom who made motherhood look like an adventure. She made it look so fun, so joyful, so effervescent, so colourful — I mean, like, literally colourful. And if there was one thing I felt, like, insecure about in my own mothering, it was a sense of ease and fun. And I don’t think I consciously thought that if I bought whatever, you know, top she was linking to in her blog that I would be a Taza mom. But I do think that I thought I could tweak my own motherhood to look more like hers if I just kept following along, and kept looking for clues. Sort of like she was a blueprint I could consult, if that makes sense.

Rebecca
Yeah — that’s interesting, the idea of, like, just tweaking our own motherhood. Just a bit, if I could just tweak it a little more. I think for me it was the joy. She just made everything seem so fun.

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
And it would be mystifying, because you’d think, “You’re in this small apartment,” which then she finally revealed, didn’t she? When she exited New York City, she was like, “It was too small,” and we’re all like, “Yeah, it seemed really hard, but you kept saying it was so fun and easy.”

Sara
Totally.

Rebecca
And I think, you know what, also as an artist — the fact that she was an ex-dancer, and she would do her leaps. Like, she could do those…

Sara
Yeah, totally.

Rebecca
She could leap — my daughter still is trying to perfect that leap, but Taza had it, like, full-split… what do you call those, Nat?

Natalie
I don’t even know.

Rebecca
She would just do them in the streets of New York — like, with her kids, with the stroller, and meanwhile…

Natalie
We’re trying to make our way down Dundas. You know, it’s very interesting hearing you two talk about her, because I’m the oldest sister by two years, but Bec had her kids significantly before mine — well, specifically Elsie, right? Like, Els is seven years older than my Frankie. So, Beck’s been my role model in terms of, like, watching a mother mother. So that’s interesting, but a lot of the things that Bec then witnessed like the Tazas — you know what I mean? Like these people that she was observing in the world, they weren’t sort of part of my experience. Nor was I actually terribly interested, which I found interesting about myself — because Bec and I are very different people. That’s what makes us work, I think. But, like, you’d think that there’d be something about the commonality of an observed figure that would draw us in together, and it didn’t. And I’m trying to figure out why that part of momfluencer life didn’t hit for me, but then other components did. You explore that in the book, right — where you sort of navigate all the various different names that show up, and I thought it was interesting. Did you actually talk to Lyz Lenz, or were you pulling from…?

Sara
No, just quoting her piece.

Natalie
So when you were quoting them, and you were saying that like, what she says is a momfluencer can perform motherhood with a hashtag, which I just think is a really great and interesting summary. Whether I totally agree with it or not, I think it’s a really interesting idea. And the word ‘perform’ there is really hard, because for me, there’s definitely a connotation of negativity, even though we just finished talking about artists and performing, and there’s a beauty to that. But for some reason, with motherhood in this context, it’s kind of like… “Ugh, performing motherhood — what does that actually mean if there’s this hashtag attached?” So anyways, I don’t know. You know, the idea that, like, the labour of motherhood is so private and so rarely celebrated, so all of a sudden there is kind of this empowering act done with the curation of everything online — like, what you both seemed to be attracted to with Taza was, like, this curated life.

Sara
Yeah. I don’t know, it’s complicated because yes, you could say that some of these accounts are celebrating, you know, the beautiful moments of motherhood that are rarely seen. But Taza would not have the appeal she had and, you know, has, if she didn’t adhere to, you know, so many standards that we celebrate in this culture. If she wasn’t, you know, conventionally attractive by Western beauty standards, if she wasn’t thin, if she had a non photo-worthy home, if she didn’t have the money to support her lifestyle that bought the pretty things that made her house pretty — like, there’s just so many boxes that Taza checked, to make her super-palatable as, like, a model of ideal motherhood. So, yeah, it’s not as though anyone could put their motherhood up on Instagram and have it be celebrated to that extent. So I think it’s interesting, like, who we choose to celebrate as paragons of ideal motherhood, and who we sort of ignore or erase.

Rebecca
I know in the book, I feel like self-esteem came up a couple of times. And you can tell me this is not true, Nat, but I don’t associate myself with having really great self-esteem. I can look at something and then go to a self-deprecating place — I have that tendency with these momfluencers. And Nat, you seem less affected. So Sara, do you have low self-esteem like me?

Sara
Oh my god, yes. One thing that I thought was really interesting about researching the book is we all have such different triggers. And so yeah, I would feel shitty about myself after consuming enough Taza, because I would say to myself, like, “Why can’t you be happier? Like, why don’t your children delight you the way they’re supposed to delight you? Why are you frowning all the time? Why are you stressed all the time? Why are you looking forward to them going to bed? Why are you counting down the minutes to naptime? Taza’s not. She’s having the time of her life.” So yeah — like, I think it depends what your personal vulnerabilities are. And, you know, what you feel like you’re struggling with in terms of your own motherhood and what you perceive that these external figures, these complete strangers, are succeeding in terms of their motherhood.

Rebecca
Nat, do you feel sometimes that having had just one felt more precarious, that you maybe are a bit more immune?

Natalie
Yeah — well, I think because health was part of my story, then maybe it all just honestly felt kind of miraculous. Like, I didn’t die, and I have this kid — like, so that all feels a bit like a win. But then I don’t have any of the hassles of having multiple kids. Like, when there’s only one person to sort of, like, navigate through life — you know, there are challenges that come with not having, like, playmates, and all the various things that everybody could talk about. But definitely, I think my story is a bit simpler on that side of things. And actually, I don’t know. I don’t see too many momfluencers on Instagram with only one kid, right?

Sara
That’s such a good point, yeah.

Natalie
Like, maybe we’re boring, because like… we could too easily pose. You know what I mean? Like, I could snap that decent picture, because it’s one kid to get wrangled.

Sara
I think it’s more to do with sort of the idealization of the nuclear family and the idealization of a fertile mother in the home. And just the fact that, like, pregnancy coverage, newborn coverage — like, these all create upticks in consumer engagement. So, like, just mathematically, you’re going to get more engagement as a momfluencer the more kids you have — just the numbers.

Natalie
So wild — metrics.

Sara
I know, yeah.

Natalie
Oh my gosh, it’s so fascinating.

Sara
Yeah.

Rebecca
You also write that you can be momfluenced into not having a kid.

Sara
Did I write that? I don’t remember that. Did I?

Natalie
Well, you did… you kind of gestured to it, yeah. Like, you talked about (and I’m trying to remember her name now) there was somebody that you interviewed quite specifically who was like, “Yeah, I was sort of seeing these momfluencers, and I was already on the fence, and then I didn’t — like, I didn’t want to.”

Sara
Oh, yeah. I’m trying to remember who that was. Yeah, and I’m trying to remember what the reasoning was. I feel like it was just the hyper-domestic, hyper-feminine, hyper-white presentation of motherhood — and just the sort of, like, professionalization of momming. The way, you know, moms are expected to be experts in everything from, like, psychology, to interior design, to education, you know. We’re just supposed to have all the tools within ourselves, simply by dint of having children — which is ridiculous, of course.

Rebecca
I’m trying to remember that section, but that person was just debating if they wanted to sort of enter this arena.

Natalie
And it was actually the influence of the influencers that made them hesitate — which I think is a really interesting statement about power, right? I mean, like, about how much power actually the influencer world has, let alone this momfluencer kind of notion. A while back, I wrote a piece about gaming and parenting and the necessity to co-play, and I interviewed the founder of this thing called The Dad Gaming. And so the dad kind of came to be in the midst of the pandemic, at a time where everybody really needed to be at home, and then, you know, stuck everybody in front of one screen trying to figure out what to do. So it was about kind of gaming in that light. But it was interesting that the dad’s kind of counterpart was Scary Mommy, and that site was, like, massive — and then the dad has grown. It’s quite enormous. But there was just that, you know what I mean, in terms of, like, an enormous disparity between the two. And I remember Joel saying to me, like, it was just such a fascinating reality that, like, dadhood, is a part of the conversation, but the larger co-opting of space, and that’s not done by the moms themselves, but by this cultural sort of expectation of motherhood.

Sara
Totally.

Rebecca
Sara, you talk about who is the most coveted audience — it’s the mom-to-bes, but how do you say it?

Sara
Oh, yeah. What was the acronym for that? Oh, I can’t remember what the acronym is. Yeah, so Faith Fitchon, I write about her in the book, but she sort of works as liaison between brands and influencers. You know, she’s working for, I don’t know, like Stork Baby Carriers or whatever, that are like earthy crunchy and have a California vibe, then she’ll find a momfluencer who matches that aesthetics. But yeah, she was talking about how a) momfluencing is so lucrative because motherhood encompasses so many consumer categories, and b) that the jackpot consumer that they’re trying to get is that pregnant or first time mother, because our culture tells pregnant or first time mothers that they need to buy a shitload of stuff — often which is completely unnecessary. But when you’re, you know, a first timer, it’s really easy to get sucked into that vortex of like, “Shit, shit, shit, I need the, uh… the wipe warmer.” Do you remember the wipe warmer?

Rebecca
That wasn’t around with my first one, and then I don’t think we bothered with the second. But I could still be compelled by the wipe warmer.

Sara
No, totally. I mean, I bought one — but, like, I used it for maybe three weeks, and then it was just this hunk of plastic that I didn’t need anymore. And so we’re really told to buy so many things to sort of prove our, you know, goodness as mothers, I think, in the US.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Natalie
Yeah, we can’t pretend that just because we’re in Toronto that we’re other, because we’re not — it’s the same.

Rebecca
I feel, like, cutting edge on this one because I had one of those huge non-BPA soothers for my oldest and so I have so many hilarious pictures with this huge soother.

Natalie
That covered, like, most of her face.

Rebecca
But then I tried — I tried with my second, because I wanted to have that whole experience again, because I felt so noble. But my other one wouldn’t use it. She just wanted the…

Sara
The ugly one. Yeah, of course.

Rebecca
You know, yeah — the ugly one.

Natalie
The one from Walmart.

Rebecca
And then how could I photograph that?

Sara
Exactly. Oh yeah, all my kids exclusively used the ugly pacifiers as well.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Natalie
And Frankie would never take one, so I never got any good pictures of any of that.

Rebecca
And now, some housekeeping. Hey Reframeables: do you get something from these conversations? Would you consider becoming a supporter on Patreon? For as little as $2 a month, you could help to keep this show going. It’s meaningful financially, and relationally — it feels like a hug. For our Patreon supporters, we do mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. You could also tip us on our Ko-fi account, where Natalie’s recipe book is also for sale. Oh, and tell us what you want to hear more of — listener messages make our week. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Nat and Bec.

Natalie
Ok, so TikTok, though, these days really values everything raw, right? Like, God forbid you have lipstick on because you’re not going to get any views. Like, you have to make yourself essentially your most ugly. Which is really interesting — whatever that means, right? I mean, like, I’m being very flippant, obviously. But it’s just such an interesting kind of counterpoint to that very specific momfluencer aesthetic that, you know, we’ve talked about now in the book. But I’m just curious, because there was a quote here that you had in the book. Ok, one of your interviewees said that they talked about the unspoken suspension of disbelief that exists in certain versions of momfluencer worlds between sort of the creators and the consumers. So what do you think — like, the TikTok values of raw, but for some reason, the ruse of what’s presented on the momfluencer side of Instagram or even the momfluencer side of TikTok or Twitter or whatever. Why is that that that remains in control of the mom life narrative? Do you even agree with this guy? Because it was a dude.

Sara
Yeah, I definitely agree that TikTok is more welcoming of sort of unvarnished maternal narratives. And I think I do agree with him, for the most part. I do think that yeah, the average mom following momfluencers is not looking at these beautiful perfect images and thinking to themselves, like, “Oh, that’s how her day really is.” Like, we know — we know her kids have tantrums and we know her house is a mess sometimes. We know her life’s not perfect. So I think I do agree with him in terms of the, you know, willing or unwilling suspension of disbelief. And I think we still gravitate towards those idealized accounts, primarily because they feel simple, whereas most mothers’ lives and days don’t, I would say, feel super simple. Like, we’re navigating various shades of grey, versus these accounts where sort of the rules are already set. You know she’s probably going to be white, she’s probably going to be beautiful, she’s probably going to be thin, non-disabled. You know her countertops are going to be clean. Like, you know what you’re going to get. And I think there’s something… I don’t know if comforting is the right word, but there’s something about receiving messages or ingesting the status quo that feels, I don’t know, grounding, even though that’s a little troubling, because often the status quo is insidiously harmful in ways that we might not realize. But yeah — I don’t know if that answer made any sense.

Natalie
No, it really does. I think it’s a challenge to the self, isn’t it? Which is the whole point of your book. Like, we have to kind of sit, certainly as three moms reading the book, but I would be very curious about my husband, if he read the book and what he would sort of say to it, because he ingests other versions of whatever it is on the internet, and like, what are the things that we go to instinctively, even though we don’t want to or we’re trying to interrupt it, or we’re trying to trouble it, but it still happens?

Sara
Right.

Natalie
Yeah. There’s some serious flaws to navigate here.

Rebecca
What does your husband say about your book? Just interested because, like, I was thinking when you’re saying that, Nat, that if Clifford read it… I feel like Simon, my husband, he just wouldn’t get it. Like, I think he would try. I think he would read it and be like, “Oh, it’s interesting that women mostly experience these things,” but I think he wouldn’t be able to absorb it at a deep level. And I don’t know, is that your experience with your husband? Or is he…?

Sara
Yeah. I mean, I do think it’s hard to access for people who are socialized as boys and men. This, like, foundational myth that we, most of us, grow up with — whether or not it’s, like, delivered explicitly or implicitly, like, motherhood is held up as this just foundational tenet of womanhood in a way that I don’t think fatherhood necessarily is. Yeah, and I think that also plays into why, like, dadfluencer culture is not, you know, a multibillion dollar industry like momfluencer culture is, because it’s not baked into cultural narratives in the same way. I don’t think most little boys grow up thinking about fatherhood in the ways that most little girls do. You know, I don’t think that’s, like, a biological thing. I think that’s mostly cultural constructions of how we raise boys and girls differently. I mean, obviously, biology comes into it at some point. But I do think it’s largely, like, cultural.

Natalie
It’s so interesting to me, because context, obviously, and that’s what you reference from the get-go in terms of your book — like, you’re writing as an American in a very specific sort of place and time. We’re readers here, reading in Toronto, same deal. So we were just shopping around a television show that we’re writing, and it was a very interesting experience speaking with an agent from a television company in Portugal. And their description of their kid’s channels were very explicitly binary. So it was definitively, “We have a girl’s channel and we have a boy’s channel, and this is what appears on our channels.” And this is now me making a wide sweeping generalization about, like, my Portuguese neighbours — no, it’s not about that. But it was so fascinating to me that there was, like, this context-driven understanding of children, right? Of like, who counts as a child, then, in terms of what content is delivered to them. And as you said, like, there’s the explicit — like, perhaps that TV channel thing. But then there’s the implicit — like, what does my Frankie believe about parenting? I think he believes differently than maybe his father would have when he was his age at eight, but it’s still the world.

Rebecca
But you contextualize it, right Sara, by saying that it was… I’m not a history buff, and I’m never good at talking about history. But you say that prior to the industrial revolution (is that what you say in the book?) that there was a more equal division of labour, and then as men went out to work in factories... you explain it.

Sara
Yeah, prior to the industrial revolution, the domestic sphere and the market sphere were not nearly as distinct as they are now. And so both the, you know, man and woman would be working within the home, and they’d be working outside of the home. And then once, you know, factories and the industrial revolution took hold, that’s when, you know, the cult of domesticity sort of became ingrained in family life. That’s when the idealization of self-sacrificial motherhood and like, the white wealthy mother as sort of the moral centre of the home — and again, it was a very specific mother that was lauded as this angel of the house. It wasn’t, you know, the black mother who was working for the wealthy white mother, it wasn’t the poor white women, you know, who’ve always worked outside of the home. So yeah, it’s interesting to see how the angel of the house was sort of ensconced within our cultural imaginations, and how she still lives on — you know, in the ways we think of who is the best mother and who is a good mother. And certainly in the aesthetics of many of these accounts which, you know, some of them you could look at and you wouldn’t know if it was an image from 1883, or, you know, 2023. So I do think it’s interesting to sort of trace the roots of ideal motherhood, and sort of examine, like, who did they uphold and celebrate? Who were they created by? I mean, they weren’t created by mothers — these ideals were explicitly created by white men in power to maintain power.

Rebecca
I think it might be interesting for listeners to hear a little bit about how you perceived your own mother, and then this sort of shattering letter. Your mother called and read you a letter telling you this is actually what motherhood was like for me. I mean, it’s very personal, but because you say it in the book, I feel like I can ask it.

Sara
Yeah — I mean, I think like most kids, I grew up sort of seeing my mother as just somebody who, like, undergirded my own life. Like, I was, you know, primal. So she was a stay-at-home mother, and many of my aunts were also stay-at-home mothers. And the women in my family are just very central. I always thought of the dads and the uncles as sort of like the supporting characters, and the women as like the heroines. And in that way, I never looked at stay-at-home motherhood as sort of… I’m trying to think of, like, a non-pejorative way to put it, but I think I looked at stay-at-home motherhood as having the potential to allow you to live out your creative and intellectual potential in whatever way you wanted. And I still believe that, of course — like, there are plenty of women who choose that who are super-fulfilled.

So all that is to say I just looked at motherhood as an assumed thing — like, I never, never, never once asked myself seriously, like, “Do I want to become a mother?” It was just always like, “Well, of course I’ll be a mother.” Which of course explains some of my shock and, like, disillusionment once I actually became mom. And then when I became a mom who chose to stay home with her kids, it didn’t feel the way I thought it would feel — even though I had never, again, really been super-curious about what it would be like. I’d never asked my mom or my aunts, like, “How was it, you know, for the first few years? Are you happy with your choices?” Like, “Would you have done anything differently?” I never asked any of those questions. So I certainly understood and empathized much more with my mother’s rage that I would see throughout my childhood — the frustration I would see throughout my childhood that I think I just chose not to focus on prior to having kids. But once I did have kids, I was like, “Oh, that’s where that’s coming from, because I feel these things myself now.”

Rebecca
So you can kind of understand how she would decide to take a different stance.

Sara
Oh, totally. Totally.

Rebecca
So now she’s choosing to live… and how did you describe it? Kind of more of a hippie life?

Sara
I mean, she’s always been kind of, like, hippie-adjacent, I guess. But yeah, she’s just not at all like the type of grandmother who is going to offer to pick up the kids from school, or offer to, you know, whatever… change diapers. She lived with us for, like, the first three months of my first kid’s life, and she was like a godsend. But yeah, she’s quite frank about mothering and the labour of caregiving being a drag sometimes. And, like, now that she’s out of it, she’s like, “Yeah, I don’t want to do that.” Which is totally fine — totally fine. Like, I get it.

Rebecca
So you’ll have to warn your own kids — you’re like, “There might be a breaking point.”

Sara
Right, totally.

Rebecca
You do, though, interview a lot of momfluencers who also disrupt the assumption of a monolithic online culture. Can you give an example of some of those? I was thinking of the disabled momfluencer Rebekah Taussig — is that how you say her name?

Sara
Yeah, I think that pronunciation is right.

Rebecca
Or just a couple that stand out for you.

Sara
Yeah. I loved talking to Rebekah. She’s just like a brilliant, brilliant writer, outside of sort of, you know, what she had to say about momfluencing. But yeah, I loved that chapter because I certainly went into researching and writing the bulk with my own conceptions of, like, what made up momfluencer culture. And it’s again that, like, stereotypical white mom we’ve been sort of talking about. And that is just one version of motherhood, and it is the version of motherhood that gets the most airtime in our culture, unfortunately, but it’s just one tiny little version. And talking to these mothers who are using their platforms to create space for different narratives, to raise social awareness about issues they’re passionate about, it was just super-energizing. And yeah, it made me feel like just there’s so much potential to crack through our narrative of the ideal mother.

And one thing I do really appreciate about social media is that it has been sort of a site of democracy — in some ways, obviously the algorithms and the social media companies are, you know, flawed, flawed, flawed. But yeah, anyone can open an Instagram account, and anyone can share their story, and many of these women have created really life-giving communities, really important resources where otherwise there wouldn’t have been. Mia O’Malley, she’s a fat momfluencer, and she’s created this network of fat-positive healthcare providers — which is, you know, a huge, huge, huge service because anti-fat bias in health care is, like, a huge problem. And, you know, many fat moms do not get the care they need. Many of them are denied fertility treatments, many of them are simply told to lose weight before they even come back and talk about, you know, wanting to have families. So yeah, resources like that would not exist without social media, or they wouldn’t exist in the same way and they wouldn’t be as accessible to as many people. So yeah, I think that’s really important to highlight.

Natalie
And so when you end the book, in the final chapter you interview a media studies expert, and you wanted them to explain — you described it as your own perverse attraction to an idealized version of performative motherhood on Instagram, when I felt, like as a very smart, you know, academic-y writer yourself, that you should quote-unquote ‘know better.’ So she then explained your feeling simultaneously revolted and desirous of those pretty moms and pretty homes by connecting it to literary critics, Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism. And this is the part that I was, like, really struck by. So there’s cruel optimism and then Instagram as a quote-unquote ‘intimate’ public space. I just think there’s just so much in there. So I have talked about Berlant on the pod before, but I think people need, like, a bit of a Cole’s Notes — but thoughts on how to kind of, like, help people to understand that little bit of themselves, the intimate public that is a place like Instagram, and then cruel optimism?

Sara
Yeah. Intimate publics are so interesting, because they’re these spaces where we can express our own, you know, emotional lives, and we can create emotional connections, we can feed that part of ourselves. But it’s a public space. So like, for example, just the notion of parasocial relationships — when I feel similar feelings towards a complete stranger that, you know, are similar to the feelings I feel about like a friend I’ve known for ten years. So it’s accessing these sort of emotional synapses in a very public setting, and there is a layer of performance and there is a wall there, because parasocial relationships are only one-sided. And then in terms of cruel optimism, yeah, that really broke open my thinking, because cruel optimism is essentially longing for a dream, when in fact that dream might be counterintuitive to your thriving or your potential to thrive. And so, you know, for me, for example, I longed to inhabit this role of, like, domestic goddesshood. And, you know, I longed for the ideals of motherhood that I had grown up absorbing, to sort of make me into a person — like, so I didn’t have to do that work of, you know, self-identity myself. And really, that’s not a great thing to want. It’s not, like, a great thing to want a ready-made identity. It’s not beneficial to me becoming, like, a happy, healthy, productive person in the long term. I think it’s also really connected to hope. We want to hope for better, particularly as mothers and particularly when we’re in cultures that don’t support our labour. So, yeah — that was a really long-winded way of talking about cruel optimism and intimate publics, but yeah.

Natalie
No, very helpful. And interesting, because I wouldn’t actually have written about Berlant as, like, an inherently hopeful writer. And yet, I have to believe that the purpose for putting out such a message is to sort of, you know, prompt us to thinking in terms of how we can find our way back, maybe.

Rebecca
And off? Is that what we need to do — is find our way off the internet?

Natalie
Well, maybe.

Sara
Oh my gosh. I mean, it’s such an individual thing, but I don’t know — I think it’s helpful to remember that this is all still so new in terms of, like, human development in human history. Like, this is all so new. We’re, like, living through this grand experiment right now. I guess my point in saying that is, like, it’s helpful to check in on yourself and ask yourself, like, “How is this contributing to my life? How is this maybe taking away from my quality of life? Is this nourishing me? Is it depleting me? Am I using it for entertainment value? Or am I using it as a way to better understand myself?” Like, there’s just so many access points in terms of consuming momfluencer culture and social media in general.

Natalie
Yeah, and reframing how we engage with them is probably just as much a part of the process as the doing of them.

Sara
Totally.

Rebecca
I wanted to add, because I found this really hopeful, was Karni Arieli’s Eye Mama project, and this idea that it’s the male gaze that makes us want to be cute, white, sexy — as opposed to something like their account that features mothers in more raw poses. Can you describe the account?

Sara
Yeah. So it’s all mother artists — mother photographers specifically. So it’s viewing motherhood through a maternal gaze, not a male gaze. So, you know, you’ll see C-section scars, you’ll see soft stomachs, you’ll see milk squirting out of nipples, you’ll see, like, a baby’s drool. A lot of corporeal presentations of motherhood. And what’s cool and, I guess, radical about it is that it’s viewed through that very specific maternal lens. Like, you feel like you’re seeing a real maternal journey when you look at those photographs in a way that you don’t when you’re consuming, like, the super-idealized, super-femme, super shiny images that most of the lucrative momfluencer accounts sort of share.

Rebecca
Yeah. And then I think this is their quote: “There’s actually no way back. I can never ever look at superficial stuff again, because you’ve seen this like you’ve seen the light.” And I really love that.

Sara
Yeah, I know — I loved that. I know.

Rebecca
Yeah, and that resonates for me just that there is perhaps a challenge to, you know, resist the superficiality. I really like that. I mean, obviously, it’s really arty, right — like, those photos.

Sara
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca
Yeah. You don’t just want bad photos, but like, a really interesting presentation from the maternal lens is really interesting to me. Anyway, I found that kind of exciting.

Natalie
Like a reorienting of the eye.

Sara
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
Yeah. Yeah — like, it was a nice way to sort of end my thinking through this book. I was like, “Yes, there’s some really cool stuff happening out there.”

Sara
Yeah. It celebrates the specificity of, like, each person’s maternal experience in a way that I think mainstream momfluencer culture does not — it’s, like, very generalized. Like, every mother knows that, like, becoming a mother is like going to battle. Like, it’s gritty, it’s raw, it’s super body-focused. It’s not at all this, like, sanitized pastel package we’ve been sold as motherhood — like, not at all. So I like how it celebrates the weirdness, and just the power that we really all hold as moms. It’s, like, absolutely mind-boggling when you think about what it is.

Rebecca
Yeah, well even you… I think now I’m getting mixed up between you and sort of the characters you write about, but didn’t you crack your tailbone? Was that you?

Sara
Oh, yeah yeah. During… yeah.

Rebecca
So you’re experiencing this: you have this new beautiful baby, but you’re also… you have a fucking cracked tailbone.

Sara
Right.

Rebecca
So that’s, like, crazy that you’re, as you say, going to battle because you are experiencing both of these things at the same time — which I think in the media, we so often just present the baby.

Sara
Yes.

Rebecca
When the mother has dealing with, like, fucking pain.

Sara
No, totally. Every new mom should just be, like, on a chariot being, like, celebrated. Like, it’s wild. It’s absolutely wild. And I firmly feel like back in the caveman days, I feel like patriarchy was created because men looked at us and were like, “Shit, they’re clearly, like, superhuman. Like, they have magical powers that we do not. We need to, like, you know…” It’s absurd. It’s really absurd.

Natalie
“I gotta one-up this.”

Rebecca
“Shut them down.”

Sara
Yes.

Rebecca
Yeah.