"We Have No Fucking Clue if She's a Good Mom"

A Conversation with Sara Petersen

I spoke to Sara Petersen about her first book, Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture right before complete chaos was unleashed upon my household. The kids were about to be released from school for two weeks of Spring Break, I was hosting my brother and his family for multiple days of Passover, and then, right before I had to leave to pick our guests up from the airport, the sewer backed up most dramatically, necessitating the eventual remediation and reconstruction of approximately 40% of our basement.

A week later, I found myself hosting a friend from overseas for a quick coffee. The guests had by then departed, the main floor of the house had recently been cleaned (not by me), and my sister-in-law, bless her beautiful soul, had taken the kids out for the afternoon. The house felt calm and peaceful and beautiful and my friend and I had a lovely time catching up…right above a basement that was still mostly unremediated from the free flow of excrement. It was the most on the nose instantiation I’ve yet experienced of the Instagram ethos: that photogenic square with a creeping blob of disorder, sometimes literal poop, just off camera.

In her review of a new production of A Doll’s House, Christine Smallwood cites the Toril Moi idea that we need theater to reveal the games and performances of our everyday lives and I think consuming influencer culture, particularly when it involves the performance of motherhood, can do something similar. In her research, Sara found that different women consume momfluencer culture for different reasons. I think I’m drawn to those accounts because I like to look for the seams, those small moments when the performance slips, just a little bit. And maybe I look for those moments because they, in turn, make me attentive to the degree to which I try to hide my own seams.

Sara is one of my favorite Twitter follows because her critique of momfluencer culture and the performance of motherhood is smart and sharp without being sanctimonious. I love waking up to her newsletter, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, in my inbox and I look forward to hearing her takes on the various personalities of the momfluencer cinematic universe. It is hard for me to resist sending her various posts and saying Are you kidding me?? or I need to know all of your thoughts on this immediately but I try very hard because I know she has three kids and a book to promote. It was a joy to hold her captive on Zoom and we went deep on being late to writing, how to find a literary community, and what certain Instagram tradwives* have in common with medieval mystic Margery Kempe.

*I edited out the part where we debate whether cream cheese is ancient (it isn’t) and whether certain tradkids wear disposable diapers but I’ll send it to anyone who upgrades to a paid subscription.

In the book you talk about how motherhood really brought you to writing.

Yeah, I went to undergrad for acting and then I did that for a few years and just didn't have the drive, essentially. And I was just like, I love reading so I applied to grad school for literature with no clue what I wanted to do other than I'll read some books and see where that takes me.

Sounds familiar.

Oh God. Yeah. It's rough. And I knew nothing about what a life in academia entailed. So I did a master's program. I had intended to do a PhD program but realized pretty quickly that I was not cut out to be an actor and I was also not cut out for academia. So I got the terminal masters and I bring all this up to say that the masters did really set me up in terms of thinking critically about the world in ways that I really hadn't before. And obviously it's a shitload of writing so I had a background in writing, but it was academic writing. And then I got another master's, in education, because I thought I was going to be a teacher. I was doing the master's in education program and also trying to tamp down a fear that I had yet again gone into a career that was not for me so instead of actually grappling with those feelings of doubt, I was like, ‘okay, let's have a baby right now so I can be a MOTHER and put myself all in to motherhood because that is an incontrovertibly good decision.’ Or at least our culture tells us it is if we have a uterus.

And you’re checking something off on your to-do list. It can feel like an accomplishment.

And I was pressing pause on my crisis of professional identity. So then I had a baby and I experienced physiological postpartum depression. I think I would have experienced it regardless of how well I had been emotionally and psychologically prepared for what mothering actually entailed. I'm just prone to that. But I think it was also a really dark time because I had unthinkingly assumed that becoming a mother would transform me overnight into a fully self-actualized person who was completely self-assured in what she was doing. And it really didn't. Instead, I was just like, holy shit, I don't know if I should have done this. This does not feel right, this does not feel natural, this certainly doesn't feel easy. Grappling with what I had been both explicitly and implicitly taught about motherhood versus the reality of mothering was just a real challenge and I started writing largely to unpack that. I didn't start until my second kiddo was born. I probably started thinking about writing in 2014 or 2015.

So were you writing for yourself? What did that look like?

When I really consider how it all went down, it's shocking that I'm here. I discovered Emily Henderson’s blog. She’s an interior designer but she has a blog that encompasses all sorts of things and and I just loved her whole aesthetic and vibe, and loved her sort of quippy writing style. And I thought to myself, I can do quippy, that's something I can do. So she was hiring at one point, somebody to be a marketer or something, for which I was completely not a fit but I applied and had to write a writing sample for the application. And I just loved the experience of writing the writing sample so much. It was basically about meeting mom friends and going into their homes. And if I saw a Live, Laugh, Love sign, it would be a red flag basically. It was snarky, super judge-y, whatever, but it was super fun to write. And then obviously I never heard from them because it was ridiculous but I liked writing the quippy stuff. And then I applied to the Kenyon conference with a writing sample about postpartum depression, got in, and there sort of learned anything about professional writing. And then I just started haphazardly pitching stuff.

I love this and it all feels very familiar to me. When I had my first baby, I was working on a PhD and I was just like, oh, now I actually have something that I want and need to write about, you know? But I only got around to trying it once I finished my degree a few years later and I felt like I was very late to the game. Did you feel that way?

Oh my God, yes. So late, so late. And when I think about some of the things I was pitching, they were so off base and they were so wrong, they were completely wrong for the publication I was pitching. I didn't know how to write a proper pitch, it was all a mess, but I just was doing it. And the other thing about the burning desire is like, yes, completely relate to that. And also, I awoke to my feminism in a way that I never had before having kids. I probably would have described myself as a feminist but it wasn't until after having kids that I was like, ‘Oh no, my blood and guts are…‘

Oh, same. I went to a proudly feminist women’s college, of course I was a feminist, but wasn’t everyone? I was just like, ‘it's basically fine, we’ve fixed a lot of things. There are more things to work on, but we're going in the right direction.’ And then I had a daughter and I was like, ‘Oh, no. It’s bad. Oh, it's real bad.’ So, anyway, you just kept trying and pitching?

Exactly. I just kept making little baby steps.

And when did you start thinking about a book? Was it after you placed that New York Times essay? Because that's a pretty big accomplishment for someone who didn't know how to pitch.

God, yeah. I probably started thinking about a book a year before that essay. I started writing a feminist essay collection about becoming awakened to my feminist rage because of motherhood in probably, I don't know, 2018 or something, and then signed with my first agent when I was two weeks postpartum with my third kid. So that was in 2019. And then we tried and failed to sell two books before Momfluenced. The first one was the essay collection and the second one was a non-fiction book about how the Angel in the House is still alive and well in contemporary expectations and depictions of motherhood, and certainly seeds of both books ended up in Momfluenced.

That sounds like a great story of perseverance but you must have felt a little demoralized. How did you keep going?

Yeah, totally. And before signing with that agent, I queried almost 50 agents, a huge number of which asked to see the full manuscript. So I was encouraged that there was interest, but it was never quite right. And looking back on it, I know that it was never quite right because it was never remotely sellable. My platform was too small, there wasn't a juicy hook. And I'm really not jaded, I'm just much more realistic about the publishing industry now. And I really wish somebody had sort of been real with me then, just because I can see so clearly why those first two books really had no chance.

You spent all that time on them but it’s never totally wasted.

Right, exactly. But the actual selling of a book is so much a business decision. And I really think the only way I did sell Momfluenced was finding the juicy hook, like, super specific. But the hopeful side of that is that once you find the juicy hook, you can still say everything you want to say. You can still write the book you want to write. If you have this really complicated book that doesn't fit in a genre and you're like, oh no, it'll never sell, you can still write that book. Just find a new topic to pin it to. If you know the rules of the game, you can play the game.

You can manipulate the game. And yes, this is a heavily researched, super smart book and your starting point is the conflicting feelings we experience when we consume these accounts.

I was fascinated with my own conflicting feelings because they were just constantly at war with each other. And I was also, I think, largely driven by hope that I knew consciously was misguided but that subconsciously, I think I still clung to that there was a more joyful, more easy, more solid way to embody motherhood that I had not yet, and really still don't have, figured out. I think there was a clear line between my vulnerabilities as a mother and what I perceived in these momfluencers to be the opposite, to be strengths. I saw strengths in them that I perceived as weaknesses in myself.

That makes sense. So what do we feel when we scroll through these accounts, and why do we feel those feelings?

I mean, we feel so many things. I talked to so many moms for the book and I think I did go in assuming, not that there was a universal way to feel about momfluencers, but that most people would feel the same things I was feeling. And I found that really wasn't the case. Depending on personal background and just all the contexts that surround a life, a lot of people were not feeling the same things I was feeling. A lot of people were not triggered by the same things I was triggered by. A lot of people were much more easily able to see scrolling through momfluencers' beautiful homes as entertainment and nothing else. But I do think that, because of the cultural conditions surrounding motherhood in the US specifically, many mothers are in need of hope because we're not meaningfully supported in any systemic ways, and we are left to flounder without meaningful resources. So of course, we are going to A, hope for better and B, take it upon ourselves to seek out whatever that better is. And because we live in the age of social media, momfluencer culture is right there. It's accessible all the time. It feels much more immediate and easier to access than, for example, researching an occupational therapist that deals with kids who have big feelings about zippers, or whatever. It feels like a lower-stakes entry point.

You also talk a lot about the economic aspect of momfluencing and how it collapses the divide between home and work, which sometimes allows women to make a lot of money while doing the unpaid labor of motherhood, theoretically solving the problem of balance that we all work so hard to achieve.

The idea that momfluencers are getting financially compensated for the unpaid labor of motherhood, they're actually not really. They're getting paid for their ability to perform a certain kind of motherhood that's palatable for certain kinds of audiences. And they're getting paid for their marketing skills, their photography skills, their copywriting skills, their storytelling skills. They’re not getting paid for singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat for the seventh time or whatever.

For sure. But it is work that is able to be done adjacent to the work of mothering, which can also be the case for writing. In the book you talk about cobbling together an entire career around writing about feminist motherhood and I kept thinking about my early freelancing work, which of course did not make me much money but it allowed me to have an outlet, to create something, while spending a lot of time with my kids. Do you feel that way about your own work?

Yes, 100%, that's what writing was for me, because for those early years, I was getting paid next to nothing but having that direct access to my creative intellectual side really was soul saving for me, even when it didn't directly correlate to financial gain. It was a way to sketch out my identity in a firmer, clearer way. And I'm sure I would have found another way to do that had I not turned to writing but it was a really, just the nature of writing itself, it's getting to know your thoughts and getting to know your feelings. So yeah, it was the ideal thing for me to turn to when I was going through that existential crisis of who am I? What is motherhood? Who am I as a mother?

I’m thinking about your description of the conversation between two momfluencers, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and Naomi Davis, in which Hannah talks about how she had to sacrifice her personal dreams and ambitions in the dance world when she found out she was pregnant. And it doesn’t actually seem like she’s making money the way other momfluencers do.

She’s not getting brand sponsorships the way many momfluencers do, or affiliate links. I mean, occasionally she'll affiliate link to something, but she is creating a massive, massive audience for the millions of things that Ballerina Farm sells. Yes, their whole thing is they sell meat, but they have a shitload of merch, which I would guess sells way better than the actual meat does. She has over a million followers.

Right, they’re definitely selling stuff but that’s not what’s paying for the farm, which I’ll get to in a minute, but her social media presence seems less a way to sell her wares than an outlet for her to be creative, to perform now that she's not a ballerina. And I think I see this in a lot of other influencers where they're not making the big bucks but they have these large followings and it's doing something for them. The same way that writing when you have a baby lets you feel like you are something more than a mother.

Which is so fraught, because of course, I want to have a huge neon disclaimer that's like, we shouldn't speak about being just a mother pejoratively, right?

But that is the cultural attitude, unfortunately.

Yes, if a mom whose work is solely based in the home goes to a dinner party and she's meeting people she's never met before, and they say, ‘what do you do?’ And she says, ‘I'm a stay-at-home mother.’ They're not going to look at her the same way that they would look at the doctor or the lawyer right next to her.

That's the end of the conversation, right? There's no follow-up question to ‘I stay home with my kids.’

There's no curiosity. People think that they understand the whole of you based on that one sentence, which is so- it's just a form of erasure. I think more of us understand now post-pandemic that we are upholding the entire capitalist system that we live in but in the capitalist structure that we live in, value is equated to money, so we're clearly not valued if we're not getting paid according to the logic of this society. And yet we're given this empty lip service once a year about how our jobs are the hardest in the world, and it's most important job in the world.

But now let's just not talk about it anymore.

Right, and I hope you don't need anything, because we're not-

No, there's nothing there for you. Keep up the good work.

And shut up.

But don't tell me about it.

Right, right. It's a profoundly disempowered position to be in.

The Ballerina Farm account also reminds me that when I was in my 20s and working in my first job and living in New York City, I had this big Pioneer Woman phase where I would go to her website every day and think about how nice it would be to live out in the country, and have a simpler life. And it’s interesting because neither Hannah from Ballerina Farm nor Ree Drummond/Pioneer Woman actually live a simple life. They are both very wealthy women but the internet did not provide them with their initial wealth. They married wealthy men, and that's not discussed at all. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I mean, I think the more privilege we have, the more danger there is to be lured into feeling nostalgic for “simpler times.” I just don't think if you are a single mother of color working three jobs, who's getting up at 4:00 AM every morning, and going to bed at 11:00 PM every night I don’t think you are fantasizing about frolicking with your cherubs in the country, I think you're fantasizing about really concrete things. And I just think that this idealization of a simpler time back when, huge air quotes, is a much more accessible fantasy for those of us who would not have been enslaved back then. And even with Ballerina Farm, it's so interesting because farming is notoriously difficult, not financially lucrative, and super precarious financially.

Right, I understand why they’re not talking about how they’re very wealthy but do we collude in this, we who consume their content?

Yeah, I think we do to an extent. It depends why you're following.

I mean, I mostly follow Ballerina Farm to be like, oh, here's a wealthy woman kind of cosplaying farm life. But I get the sense that many people who follow her do not feel that way.

I also get that sense. I spoke to Koritha Mitchell. She wrote From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture and she was talking about the sort of numbing quality that images that uphold the status quo have over our imagination. And I think Hannah Neeleman from Ballerina Farm is a great example of that. If you look at any posts where her motherhood is evoked, it's just hundreds and thousands of comments celebrating her of being such a good mom. We have no fucking clue if she's a good mom, we have no fucking clue. But because she checks so many visual boxes – she's a pretty, white mom – she's a good mom.

Totally. In addition to Ballerina Farm, you introduced me to Kelly Havens Stickle and, wow, I have lost so much time to that account. I hadn't really dabbled in trad wife Instagram before and wow. First of all, who's taking those pictures? Is it always a tripod?

That's a great question. I've seen the husband, and he doesn't strike me as- I would assume it's her doing it with a tripod.

So I'm just really interested in that dynamic of getting the shots she posts. Her whole thing is ‘traditional,” but she must be taking gear out there with her kids when they go out into the orchards – they always seem to be in an orchard or something – and so she’s lugging a camera and a tripod, and she's setting that up. It’s highly stylized, so that's a lot of work. All the things that have to go into capturing an image of “simplicity,” it just seems like the opposite of that ethos.

Yeah, no, it's wild to sort of trace her presumed actions, lugging all this stuff. Maybe the kids are fighting and then she picks a bouquet of lavender, then she tells the kids to go out of the frame, then she stands and- the orchestration of the image for me almost erases what the image is supposed to convey.

And is she conscious of that and are the people who are really into her account conscious of that, or is it like any kind of art that we love? We don't want to think about it, we just want to consume it happily. It gives us pleasure, so who cares?

I mean, I have no way of knowing but I wouldn't imagine most of her followers are thinking super hard about this. I do feel like it's the type of really easy to consume “good motherhood” imagery, that it just goes down really easily.

Anyway, she’s another good example of someone who’s not really selling much right now.

She has an Etsy shop.

She has an Etsy shop. But again, that's not the same thing as advertiser dollars and affiliate links. But, like Hannah of Ballerina Farm, she’s another person I think of when I consider how the hyper visibility afforded by Instagram can function as a kind of antidote to the invisibility of motherhood. She certainly seems like a creative person who needs an outlet. And I feel like I could write a dissertation on her last post.

Oh God, I haven't seen it.

She talks about social media specifically and how it's not great, she doesn't love it. It's not the what's real, the goodness of God is real. And she also talks about how she wants to write books and make movies. And then as the post continues, it turns out she has had this epiphany that she is called to show other people that all that matters is the goodness of God. But actually, she's called to show other people the goodness of God through, I guess, instagram and also books and movies, which she will create. And she says all this to her husband and he squeezes her close “in happy agreement.” And it made me, I'm sorry, this is a long, long question, but it made me think-

Artistic missionary.

Artistic missionary. Yes. It made me think of Margery Kempe, who I actually did write a dissertation on. I don't know if you've heard of her.

Yes. Wait, why have I heard of her?

People love writing about her, including me. She's just a really wild character. She had 14 kids, and wrote a book many consider to be the first autobiography in the English language. But she is also a woman who wants to do so much more than her culture will allow her to do. And so she has these visions of Jesus where he’s like, ‘oh, actually, you should be doing these things that you want to be doing that other people don't necessarily expect you to do or want you to do.’ So I see that discontent and that spiritual ambition and plain old regular ambition in Kelly.

You're making me think of so many things. I just did an interview with Jeanna Kadlec, she wrote Heretic. Virginia Sole Smith and I are actually doing a little limited release podcast and she was one of the interviews and I was just like, gobstopped the whole time. But the point that I'm bringing up is she was talking about evangelical Christianity and how it's directly linked to patriarchy, and that, in patriarchy, the man is sort of the stand in for God. And the way Kelly speaks about- she wants to adhere to these very traditional gender roles, but also she doesn't want to adhere to those traditional gender roles because she wants to get the out of the house and express herself. And the way for her to do that is to basically get permission from God, you know, the big man. And Gina was bringing up, you know the show Fixer Upper, Joanna and Chip Gaines?

Yep, I almost bought a rug from her.

Oh.

I know, I can't help it.

We're both very fascinated by the whole empire. And she was saying that Joanna is this immensely successful businesswoman, but if you pay attention, all of her language is coded with ‘Chip made me buy the building, he saw the potential.’ ‘Chip told me to go for my dreams.’ ‘It was Chip's idea.’ So there's all this implicit-

Authorization.

Yes, to be a fully formed human from the man or from God.

It was the same for medieval mystics. If you have a vision, then all of a sudden, men start to take you seriously and then you have authorization to take on a more active religious role.

It's super fascinating.

And a lot of momfluencers are actually very involved in faith communities which, it seems to me, tend toward the patriarchal end of the spectrum. There’s a whole cadre of Orthodox Jewish women who are active on Instagram in that same way. And, actually, last year there was a big event where rabbis asked women to stop using Instagram and some actually did but many, many did not. I'm wondering, to what degree does this give those women some form of power, economic and otherwise? What does it do for them?

I think even outside of the financial imperative, the drive to gain cultural capital undergirds so much of this. It's a way to force yourself to be seen and to force your worth to be recognized, even if it's just thousands of women commenting about what a great mom you are because, you know, you lost baby weight, whatever it is. It's validation where otherwise there would be none or very, very little, and it would not be public facing. It's a way of exiting the domestic sphere and having a voice in the market sphere. Even if you're not being directly financially compensated, you're still participating in the market sphere because you're still participating in the cultural selling of motherhood.

You interviewed so many people for this book. You're doing a podcast with Virginia, which is amazing. You seem to have made some sort of literary community for yourself in spite of your late start. How did you do that? Was it mostly through Twitter? What advice do you have for writers who are starting out and trying to figure out how to do this, maybe alongside small children?

Yeah huge, huge, huge. I went to three writers' conferences early on and I made my best writer friend from one of those conferences, and a ton of Twitter friends, a ton. Even ask for galley copies of books you're interested in and interview authors. I did that about books I was passionate about and that's a really authentic way to build community because you're supporting work that you really believe in and you're helping to lift up voices that you think should be lifted up. I just love the people in my writers community so much and cannot fathom going through publishing a book without them.

Order copies of Momfluenced for the entire group chat here.