The Mummy Bloggers

by Holly Wainwright

Shannon wrote a book, Quitting the Toxic World, and espoused her new-found enviro-evangelism everywhere that would have her. The new Shannon didn’t eat gluten, sugar, wheat or dairy and considered coffee and alcohol to be the devil’s work. More shockingly for her daytime TV audience, she also swore off cosmetics, deodorants, perfumes, leather and possessions in general. Oh, and mainstream medicine. The once smooth-faced, painted and primped celebrity now arrived at interviews on a pushbike with a backpack, wearing hemp. And she was forty-seven.

  Abi was in awe of how Shannon had turned all this into a business. You could buy Shannon Smart-branded moon-cups, quilted menstrual pads and ‘family paper’ (toilet ‘un-paper’ to the uninitiated: recycled material to wipe with and wash). You could buy Shannon Smart natural facial oils that doubled as hair oils that doubled as salad dressings. You could buy Shannon Smart charcoal mascara. And yes, you could buy Shannon Smart kombucha, coconut oil and something called ShannonKraut—a mason jar of fermented vegetables that would set you back $28.

  Shannon was a freaking genius and an alt-culture goddess. And she was coming to the farm shed to appear on Abi’s podcast—a coup that would help no end with the Blog-ahhs. This, Abi knew, was going to be a meeting of like minds.

  Arden and Alex had been the ones to tell Abi that she needed a podcast: ‘Everyone’s got one, Mum.’ And so, The Green Diva’s Shed was born. The shed itself was one of the things that had made Abi want to buy the farm. After that family trip to Daylesford, she and Grace had begun to plot. If Adrian was so keen to sell the big Balwyn house, why not take her share somewhere her new family could start a completely different kind of life?

  As soon as she and Grace had seen Halcyon, they’d known it was the right place. It was a fixer-upper with good bones, according to the real estate agent—but, for Abi and Grace, it was perfect as it was. Fifteen minutes’ drive out of Daylesford, the main building was a stone farmhouse with a low, wraparound veranda. It looked out onto fields that were burnt-gold in summer and crisp, frosted white in winter.

  The two of them hadn’t had—and still didn’t have—any fucking idea what to do with a farm. Really, the twelve acres’ productivity was limited to Grace’s ever-growing veggie patch, the fortified chicken coups and, yes, kombucha production. But the farm had also brought forth Abi’s incarnation as The Green Diva.

  She’d spent a fortune getting a router installed to make sure the property had an unshakable internet connection, and then she’d gone about picking and choosing the bits of alt-culture dogma that suited her needs. Grace, as always, was her muse. Artistic Arden was her designer and teenage social media expert. It had been a family project to create a little soundproof podcast cave in the shed—which was really a converted barn—then a sound engineer’s job to hook it up. The girls added fairy lights and cacti, and Abi’s podshed was born. Once a week she dropped a show, usually a rambling affair in which she offloaded her thoughts and lessons from the week. She’d found that the more popular shows were her interviews with prominent people in the ‘crunchy’ world.

  That TV chef who had gone paleo. The mum of five who hadn’t bought anything new in a year. The actress who had Snapchatted her homebirth. The woman who was still breastfeeding her five-year-old.

  And today, Shannon Smart. Abi was running to the people mover, ready to head to the co-op for kale chips and ShannonKraut, when Grace finally appeared.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ She had Sol trailing after her, stick in hand. His halo of wild blond hair was blowing out all around him, and she was wearing a cheesecloth dress that billowed around her legs, clearly visible through the translucent fabric. God, Grace was beautiful—and out here, with the sun on her face and kids trailing and chickens clucking, she was like Mother fucking Earth.

  ‘Babe. Shannon Smart is going to be here in an hour, and we’ve got nothing in the house to offer her. Well, nothing we can offer her.’ Abi thought about the secret packets of Twisties that the girls had stashed at the back of the pantry, behind the zoodle-maker.

  Grace was unfazed, as Abi could have predicted. Very little fazed Grace, and especially not anything to do with websites, podcasts, celebrities and appearances. ‘Sol and I will go pick some pears from next door’s orchard. We have water, don’t we? What does Shannon Smart want?’

  ‘Not fruit. Fruit is NOT approved of. Fructose.’

  ‘Alright. I guess I’m getting in the car then. So green. Thanks, Shannon. C’mon, Sol.’

  ‘You’re a lifesaver,’ barked Abi. Then, ‘WAIT!’

  She grabbed her phone and bashed out:

  If Shannon Smart was coming to your house for lunch, what would you serve her? #divaproblems

  Within seconds:

  Cauliflower popcorn. She’s got the recipe #shannonisgod

  Jeeeeeerky, baby! #paleoalltheway

  Kale chips and pumpkin hommus. Homemade, obvs.

  My cock. #dangerouscunt

  ‘Get some kale chips. And some hommus, please, Gracey.’

  Grace, who’d been standing there watching Abi hammer her phone, rolled her eyes and got in the people mover. ‘Good to see you can make your own decisions, babe. C’mon, Sol. Let’s go save Abi’s face. AGAIN.’ And she blew Abi a kiss as they trundled off.

  What had she done to deserve that woman? It was a question that Abi asked herself daily.

  • • •

  Back in her Balwyn days, Abi—like every middle-class parent she knew—had been successfully suckered into an ever-escalating anxiety spiral about her children’s academic performance. She feared that Arden was in serious danger of screwing up NAPLAN, the national schools’ test, and she could not deal with the idea of having to tell her social circle that her daughter was single-handedly responsible for dragging down house prices in the district by getting a less-than-stellar mark.

  It was the talk of the school gate pick-up line: ‘A three per cent drop across Year Five can literally wipe fifty thousand dollars off your resale value,’ one parent would say, then another would add, ‘But if the school lifts just a couple of points, we can justify putting the pressure on for that second Gifted and Talented group. Would be so good for intake.’

  Arden was a great kid. A creative kid. A friendly, happy kid. A kid who had, despite the ever-more exorbitant cost of her education, consistently got Cs on her reports. Lovely platitudes—‘tries hard’, ‘a pleasure to teach’—but Cs all the same.

  ‘We can’t have an average daughter,’ Abi said to Adrian one night, over a giant glass of wine. ‘We just can’t.’

  ‘There’s nothing average about Arden,’ Adrian replied. ‘There are just a lot of smart kids at that school. She’ll be fine. She’s EIGHT.’

  But Abi had still taken the path of many a middle-class parent and found Arden a tutor. Grace came recommended by one of the mum-friends Abi could trust. After all, you didn’t want just anyone knowing you were getting your kids tutored. Some thought it was cheating. Some thought it was a weakness. Everyone was secretly doing it.

  Grace arrived at the Balwyn house with one-year-old Otto swathed in a paisley sling across her body, his chubby legs wrapped around her waist. ‘I’m feeding on demand,’ she explained. And, sure enough, ten minutes into Arden’s finger-walk through the reader she should have cleared the year before, Otto undid Grace’s shirt and started suckling. Grace stroked his little golden head and kept right on reading with Arden.

  From the minute she’d opened the door to Grace, Abi had felt her presence. To put it another way, as she later would, she was ‘profoundly attracted to her energy’. Abi’s life seemed like a chaotic whirl of ‘never doing enough’, and Grace was a calm centre. Abi had embraced parental anxiety so hard, she marvelled at how any mother could focus on an actual, out-of-the-house job and still do it. Grace just seemed to get things done. She didn’t say much to Abi at first, but she always gave off an air of a raised eyebrow. When Abi poured out her concerns about NAPLAN and the house prices and whether average could ever be enough, Grace just sm
iled, put a hand on her arm and said, ‘Arden is fine.’

  Slowly, Abi and Grace became friends, sharing cups of tea after Arden’s sessions since Grace never seemed in a hurry to leave. Soon, Tuesdays at 4 p.m. became Abi’s favourite time of the week. She would leave Grace’s teacup on the bench long after she and Otto had gone, wanting the evidence of her presence to hang in the air a little longer.

  These days, Abi looked back at that time as the calm before the storm. But if she was honest with herself, the storm had already been gathering. There were her longings for women, which could no longer be batted away as fantasy. Adrian’s increasing absence. The girls’ rising anxiety. Pressure was building in the Balwyn house, threatening to blow its tasteful period windows from their frames.

  Abi had felt her old self stirring. And despite her fury at Adrian for shattering their family life with his affair, she’d come to realise that his old self had been stirring too. Why? Had they repeated the same tiny rituals—Abi cutting the crusts off sandwiches on the same board with the same knife every morning, Adrian turning his car out of the driveway at 7.20 a.m. every day—one time too many?

  • • •

  Shannon Smart had arrived, and not on a pushbike. She stepped out of her chauffeured Prius and into the glaring sun of spa country in a whirl of colour and movement. Several years into her second act, her eco-epiphany seemed to have melded with her glamorous TV aesthetic, Abi noted. She was a picture of ethical chic, wrapped in African print and wooden beads, and her smile as big as her canvas tote bag—which contained many, many bottles of kombucha. And ShannonKraut.

  ‘Wow, your place is gorgeous!’ Shannon said, thrusting the bag at Abi. ‘A little gift.’

  Abi knew for a fact that Shannon’s place—a purpose-built eco lodge fifty k’s away—was much more gorgeous, but she still appreciated the compliment.

  ‘Where’s your tribe? I’ve heard so much about them.’

  Shannon did follow her, thought Abi smugly, battling an almost overwhelming urge to grab her phone and tell the world.

  ‘Oh, they’re… everywhere.’ She gestured towards the farmhouse, then towards the woods and the creek behind. ‘Running wild, as ever.’

  Actually, the girls were in their room on their computers, probably watching YouTube tutorials on excessive eyeliner application. Grace and Sol were in the kitchen, throwing away the containers that Shannon Smart’s homemade lunch had arrived in.

  ‘Grace is just making us something to eat. I thought that…’

  ‘Oh, darling, I haven’t really got time for that. Crazy schedule. Shall we just get down to it?’ Shannon was already starting towards the podshed. Her driver was climbing back into the Prius.

  ‘You can go and wait in the house,’ Abi said to him, through the wound-up window. ‘Grace will make you some tea…’ But the driver just raised a single hand to silence her, the hum of the air-con audible over her words.

  ‘Tell me, who listens to your show?’ Shannon’s stride was fast. Abi found herself scurrying to keep up. ‘How tuned-in are they? How basic do I have to be? And how far does it go?’

  ‘It’s an intimate audience. But my women are pretty switched on. There are a lot of wannabes, gasping to be inspired. Great audience for you, lots of potential.’

  Shannon nodded. She was looking around the podshed with an expression that Abi couldn’t quite read. Was she impressed? Amused?

  ‘So this is where the magic happens,’ she said, smiling. ‘Bit different from Studio 18.’

  Abi assumed this was a reference to where Shannon had filmed her TV show for years. ‘Yes, it is. I bet you didn’t have a problem with possums chewing through wires there.’

  Shannon’s laugh was high-pitched and tinkly. Her eyes, fixed on Abi, were famously blue, her forehead still suspiciously unlined. I bet she knows the secret to eco-botox, thought Abi, reflexively touching her own wrinkles.

  In actual fact, the shed’s rustic look was deliberate: it had polished made-to-seem-original floorboards and faux-brick walls, a bathroom, a mini-kitchen, and, of course, the soundproof cave. This was hardly roughing it. Although, it was true about the possums.

  Grace appeared with cold water, taking Shannon’s gifts away with a knowing look at Abi and flicking on the recording equipment. ‘Your wife is gorgeous,’ Shannon remarked, as Grace headed back to the house.

  ‘Unfortunately, Grace is not my wife.’ As Shannon knew. ‘One day, when this country gets its fucking act together—’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Shannon said quickly, smile still in place. ‘You know, I met your husband’s new wife. She asked me to do a sponsored content post for her blog. We got chai together. She’s… lovely. How strange, that your ex should marry two bloggers.’

  Abi had the lurching sensation that her dream meeting of minds was going wrong. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I wasn’t a blogger when we were married. You could say I found my voice after we separated.’

  Abi thought about the phone conversation she’d had with Adrian just yesterday. They were meant to be working out where Alex and Arden would spend the July school holidays, when Adrian suddenly started talking about Elle.

  This was something he never did—not anymore. Five years ago, they had sprayed the walls of the Balwyn house with insults and blame as they fought their way through the confusion of their split. For a long time after that, communication was limited to logistics: child exchange, legals, finance. Now, they’d grown comfortable enough to be at the same birthday dinners, to be the one the other called when they were worried about their girls. But they never, ever talked about Elle.

  ‘Abi, there’s something Elle and I want to discuss with you.’

  ‘Um. Really?’

  ‘It’s about the award.’ Another surprise. Adrian never mentioned the blog either—too close to home.

  ‘The Blog-ahhs? Are you going to go? Because the girls can stay with my parents.’

  ‘It’s just…’ Adrian almost sounded nervous. ‘Well, look, Elle has really big plans for The Stylish Mumma. Actually, we have really big plans for it. You know, after the awards.’

  The name of Elle’s blog sounded ridiculous coming out of Adrian’s mouth. ‘What kind of plans?’

  ‘Business plans. Big business plans. I’ve been laying the groundwork for it to take us in a really different direction, and the award would be a great springboard for that.’ Adrian was talking quickly, as if he needed to get this over with. Had Elle asked him to have this conversation?

  ‘Okay, Adrian. Well, yes, we’re all hoping that the award’s investment will help us change things…’

  ‘Abi?’

  ‘What? Spit it out, Adrian.’

  ‘Alex and Arden deserve the best education that we can give them. I know right now your thoughts on that are… unusual, but as we head towards university—well, I hope that will change. And when it comes to travel, when it comes to where they’ll live one day… The plans and investments we’re making mean that Elle and I could really set the girls up. The success of her brand could change everything about their future.’

  Suddenly Abi got it. No matter how tolerant Adrian was—had to be, really—about the choices she and the girls were making, he was never going to get over the idea that his job in life was to smooth the path ahead of them with money. The sun would rise, the sun would set, and Adrian would pay for a top-notch university.

  ‘Are you asking me to pull out of the Blog-ahhs, Adrian? For the girls? Because that seems… counterintuitive.’

  ‘I don’t want to fight about it, Abi, so don’t get offended—’

  ‘I’m not fucking offended, Adrian. I’m surprised. I thought you’d want the girls to see their mother do well. You know, see their primary role model achieving her dreams and all that inspirational meme stuff that Elle goes in for—’

  ‘Abi. I get it. I do. But if you were looking at this pragmatically, like I am—’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Elle has really big plans. This
could be the beginning. Apps and licensing and books and… I know you’re imagining the same things, but you just aren’t set up for that, Abi. With all the good will in the world, you’re not. And we are. With this extra kick, we are. And the girls would benefit enormously. I really believe that. I’m just asking you to think about it, realistically. About what it could mean for our family…’

  While Adrian talked and talked, Abi stared out her bedroom window into the veggie garden. Arden was there with Grace. They were picking sprigs of some herb, filling up a cracked enamel bowl with little bits of green, deep in conversation. Could it really be a school lesson? What exactly was her daughter learning out there?

  Adrian’s words were obviously niggling at something. Abi shook her head. ‘Adrian. I understand what you’re trying to tell me—of course I do. But seriously, I am not going to… what? Pull out of the award? Throw the award?’

  ‘Well, “throw” is a strong word…’

  ‘The girls are fine. They will continue to be fine, whatever the outcome of the Blog-ahhs. Their opportunities are not going to be decided by this one award. If you and Elle are enjoying planning your empire, you just keep on doing that. Sounds like you’re looking for an escape plan, am I right? From working with the Partners?’

  Adrian sighed. ‘Abi. I have a lot of responsibilities. I have four children.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that.’

  ‘Well, then, you know I can’t just walk out on the Partners. I don’t want any battles here, especially not with you, but I am under… pressure.’

  ‘These are not my problems, Adrian.’ Abi kept her voice as calm as she could. ‘These are your problems. And maybe your wife’s problems. Look, I appreciate the thought, but we’ll just keep going as we are, thanks.’

  They never did get around to discussing the school holidays.

  The call was still bothering her: she wasn’t used to hearing Adrian unsettled like that. But she just wanted to forget about it and enjoy her Shannon Smart coup. She decided to move on from Shannon’s dig—had it been a dig?—and focus on the interview.