The Mummy Bloggers

by Holly Wainwright

  She pulled on her headphones, gestured for Shannon to do the same, and started the interview, as she always did, by asking about what a ‘typical day’ looked like for a powerhouse like Shannon, and how she balanced her personal wellness with the wellness business.

  ‘I like to start with meditation. It’s crucial to set your intention for every day before it begins.’

  For breakfast: ‘Always, always, water with bee pollen. Then maybe a cheeky chia bowl. Or an activated almond and kale smoothie. Or a turmeric and egg scramble… I’m pretty low maintenance.’

  Work routine: ‘My staff work from everywhere but we all come together on a Hangout at nine to go through some yoga moves and set our group intention. I trust them to be on top of what they need to be on top of, but I’m also a control freak, so I might pop up at any time on their computers to see what they’re up to. Trust issues! Working on that!’

  Shannon took Abi through how she made business trips everywhere in the world with just a tiny Kanken backpack for company. ‘Stuff, Abi. Stuff is the enemy. It weighs you down—spiritually, mentally, environmentally. I used to have a beautiful home, full of shiny things. Now I basically live in a yurt.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quite a yurt…’ Abi couldn’t help herself, thinking of the sprawling estate down the road.

  ‘It’s the same concept, Abi. It’s a simple structure in a beautiful place. And I just have the basics of what I need to get by. Wi-fi…’

  ‘A Thermomix?’

  ‘Oh, exactly.’

  Finally, Abi and her idol were in a rhythm. They were gelling just as Abi had imagined they would.

  ‘So, Shannon. Have you seen the film Spiked? One of my followers has made this documentary that I just think is so fucking important. It’s about medicine, and Big Food—’

  ‘About time,’ snapped Shannon. ‘The biggest challenge facing us today is everyone’s blind allegiance to traditional medicine and Big Pharma. If only they knew the truth! If only they would wake up to the fact that the reason there’s so much cancer in our world is because of the rubbish they’re feeding themselves and their children. Sugar! Sunscreen, fluoride, dairy.’ Shannon leant into the mic and said, ‘If you are feeding your family sugary breakfast cereal, ham sandwiches, chicken nuggets and SlurpShakes, you are neglecting your children. You are signing their early death certificates. Honestly, I think some parents should be arrested for the way they’re feeding their families.’

  ‘Arrested? Well, I agree with you, but that sounds—’

  ‘People are so stupid, Abi. You’re not, of course, you have seen the light, but I swear, the day I started being present to the real dangers that are all around us was the day the scales fell from my eyes. Shoot little children full of poison so they don’t get sick? Douse your home in toxic chemicals so you can call it clean? Put a ready-meal in the microwave to feed your fat kids in front of the TV? Drink milk from a cow, a completely different species from us, and be surprised that it doesn’t work with your gut? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Honestly, some people deserve to die.’

  In person, Shannon’s insane rant was glorious to behold. Her voice didn’t rise an octave or quiver with uncertainty. She never broke eye contact with Abi.

  She drew breath, then dropped a dazzling smile. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  Abi drew her own breath. She thought of her father, the Doctor. She thought of her fully vaccinated daughters’ Twisties at the back of the pantry. She thought of the people mover and the three wide-screen TVs in the house.

  Then she thought of the Blog-ahhs. And that conversation with Adrian.

  ‘Well, yes, Shannon. I guess I do agree. You could call it natural selection.’

  Shannon beamed. ‘That’s right, Abi. Natural selection.’

  • • •

  After their meeting of minds, the two women emerged from the shed, bonded. Shannon’s driver was asleep in the front seat of the Prius, air-con still running. Grace and Sol were in the veggie patch, digging up some dinner.

  Abi felt elated. That podcast was going to be HUGE, she knew it. It would get picked up by everyone. Her engagement scores would go through the roof.

  Shannon hugged her. She smelt of green tea, lavender oil and… cigarettes? ‘I didn’t do the deal with your husband’s wife, by the way,’ she said to Abi. ‘Such a phoney. I have a few products we could push your way, though—I think we could definitely work together. I’ll start talking to some people about you.’

  Things were falling into place. What a day. Shannon climbed into the back of the Prius, waving vaguely towards Grace and Sol and the veggie patch.

  Dust rose from the car’s wheels as it pulled off down the driveway.

  What a day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELLE

  Sports bras are the new ball gowns.

  Elle was working on her ‘Helpful Wednesday’ post:

  How to Take the Best Gym Selfie

  Gals—Not everyone can take a great photo at the gym. But a great workout shot is a must-have for motivation.

  The last thing you want to be putting out there is some bird’s-nest hair, sweaty-pits shocker with a greying bra strap showing. No, no, hell no. Always take your gym selfie BEFORE you start your workout. The only exception to this, ladies, is if you are trying to accentuate your muscle definition—THEN, you need to do an after shot, when you’re nice and pumped. So always have an extra pair of tights and a sports bra in your bag to change into for a post-shower pic.

  Let’s start with some rules:

  1. Always check the mirror. Once, I was busy posting pics of my new Lulu ute belt and I noticed that the guy reflected behind me had something dangling from his shorts. Euuuuuw. NOT the look I was going for, believe me.

  2. Grey marle. Just don’t. Not ever. One word, five letters: S-W-E-A-T.

  3. Butt selfies are always best taken at an angle of about 45 degrees. Pop your hip and arch your back. Remember, hand on hip = skinny arm.

  4. Cool kicks. If you’re posting regularly from the gym—while you’re trying to slay your baby weight, let’s say—don’t always have the same boring trainers. I have 11 pairs on rotation at the moment, and I really let my mood decide the style, but you could have them on a timetable…

  Elle’s people loved her ‘helpful’ posts. She had wanted to call them ‘Be Like Me’, but Cate had suggested, on her second week in, that Elle might want a little more inclusivity in the name. ‘Make it about THEM,’ she’d said.

  Along with her home-tips, the boys’ fashion posts and her weekly marriage hacks—sample: Do not fall into the trap of leaving sex for the weekends. Jump him with a random ‘It’s Tuesday And The Kids Are In Bed’ treat—Elle’s regular weekly posts were building a huge following. And attracting more and more sponsorship dollars.

  Today, Elle had been leaving the gym when she got a text that made her want to pash the screen.

  Abbott’s Farm are in for $150,000.

  It was Adrian. He’d been doing a bit of moonlighting to help boost the blog’s commercial side. Sponsored posts and paid-for mentions had been rolling along on The Stylish Mumma for a year, but this was their first ‘big’ client, and competition had been fierce. Feral Abi missing out just made it all the sweeter.

  Elle’s signature colour was white (‘That’s not even a colour,’ Zoe had told her) and Abbott’s Farm was launching a range of white smoothies for mothers and toddlers to share. Thanks to Elle’s suggestion of turning her blog bright blue for a week to let all the Abbott’s display advertising and product posts stand out, they were about to launch The Stylish Mumma’s first big commercial partnership.

  As part of their bid, Elle and Cate had shot a sample video for Abbott’s—the only problem being that Teddy and Freddie hated the almond-milk-and-chia-seed smoothies they were meant to be sipping, dressed in cobalt blue in Elle’s all-white kitchen.

  ‘Muuuuuum, this is groooooosssss,’ three-year-old Teddy kept saying, every time the iPhone was pointed at him. Two-year-
old Freddie just kept spitting it onto the benchtop.

  Cate had come up with the genius plan of replacing the smoothies with McDonald’s vanilla thick shakes. No one would know. As far as Elle was aware, her boys had never tasted anything from Maccas, but Cate disappeared in the Range Rover and returned to a rapturous reception. ‘I LOVE those!’ exclaimed Freddie. Elle looked sideways at Cate. We’ll be talking about this later, she thought.

  At least Cate’s plan had worked—she’d been so useful that day.

  When Elle got the text message from Adrian, Abbott’s had obviously just said yes, and she was tempted to run all the way home in delight, despite the fact she had just done the kind of butt-workout that makes big men cry.

  • • •

  Back when she was staying at her Auntie Liane’s house in Dandenong, Elle had started doing an online personal training course. She’d also found her first proper job.

  Liane wasn’t really her aunt, but her mother’s favourite cousin. She had two adult sons by the time Elle turned up on her doorstep—one who’d joined the army and was on tour in Afghanistan, one who was in prison out at Beechworth—and two empty rooms.

  Liane was never going to send her cousin’s tear-streaked seventeen-year-old daughter away, but she was also determined not to let her lie around clogging up her empty nest. ‘You can stay,’ she’d told Elle, ‘but you have to get out of here every day. Get a job. Get busy.’ Lessons had been learnt in Liane’s house.

  At first, Elle would jump on the train to the city, talk her way through the barriers and just walk around Melbourne all day. She had spent her whole childhood imagining this place. She’d been told it was dangerous and soulless, hostile and expensive, but everywhere she looked, she saw possibility. She loved how people marched with pace and purpose.

  Sometimes she’d find a crowd—heading to the footy, or the train station at peak hour—and follow it, just enjoying the sensation of being carried along. She dodged the approaches of the men who hung around stations with an eye for teenage girls with nothing to fill their days.

  After a few weeks, Elle started walking into shops and asking for jobs. What was the worst that could happen? What happened was, eventually, Sportsgirl said yes. And four weeks after getting on a Greyhound out of her hometown, Elle had a bed and a job and an auntie who fed her. And she had started her personal training. She began to see herself as full of possibility, too.

  • • •

  Adrian. I love you, Elle typed back to his Abbott’s text. I love you I love you I love you. Definitely dessert tonight!

  Oh, Abi would be spitting. This was fabulous. And it was bound to help with the Blog-ahhs. Abi could be a threat in the ‘organic space’, as the marketers called it, but seriously, she and her whingeing sister-in-law couldn’t touch Elle and Adrian as a team. She had persuaded Adrian to put the pressure on Abi to bow out, but since it hadn’t worked, beating her was the best revenge.

  Abbott’s wanted the boys to be in the campaign, of course—who wouldn’t? But there was a gap between Teddy and Freddie’s photogenic appeal and their willingness to cooperate. ‘They’re little boys, after all,’ Adrian would often remind Elle. ‘They should be outside, playing with balls,’ he’d say, as Elle and Cate squeezed one of Freddie’s chubby toddler legs into another pair of skinny-rough-hem jeans.

  ‘Come on, Adrian,’ Elle would argue, ‘boys don’t need to be sporty at this age. And don’t be so narrow-minded. Boys can love fashion and photography, you know. Look at Romeo Beckham!’

  ‘Maybe. But not when they’re two.’

  The other sore point was their hair. Elle loved the aesthetic of long, shaggy black curls, but Adrian thought it should be cut.

  ‘I wouldn’t even know who they were with short hair,’ Elle argued.

  ‘Then we have more of a problem than I thought.’

  Elle knew she would win these arguments because, ultimately, Adrian wanted what she wanted: for her to be happy. To have a successful business. And to win. That, Elle was convinced, was what set the two of them apart. Shared goals. Teamwork. Determination.

  • • •

  At Sportsgirl, Elle had made a friend. Tina was trying to get work as a promotional model and through her, Elle came to understand that if you were young and pretty and could string a few sentences together, you could get paid to spend Saturday nights going around bars talking people into trying a burrito or an energy drink. Or you could spend your weekend mornings down at St Kilda giving out samples of a new coffee, cold cans of cola, a gym membership, a phone plan. She and Tina helped each other with headshots, with applications, with fending off the sleazy men who ran the agencies—and, soon enough, Elle was a weekend ‘promo girl’.

  The only drawback was the endless flirting: her with the guys, the guys with her. It involved routine harassment and the occasional groping. The odd idiot who decided that she and him were meant to be and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Some of the other girls wanted to meet a footballer—access to them was a perk of the job. But Elle had grown up with big, brash men who behaved like angry toddlers when they were drunk. She knew exactly what they were capable of. She had no interest in men like that. She liked the Suits. The meek ones, the older ones, the ones who couldn’t quite believe you were talking to them. Those guys were Elle’s sweet spot, even then.

  By her twenty-first birthday, Sportsgirl was history and so was Auntie Liane’s. Elle was living in a South Yarra apartment with Tina and two other models, and making enough money for rent and her personal training course. The job she really wanted had nothing to do with convincing tipsy meatheads to try an American hotdog. On the back of her bedroom door she had taped a picture of who she wanted to be.

  It was Tracy Anderson, trainer to the stars, self-created goddess, Gwyneth Paltrow’s bestie. The woman whose mantra was ‘No Excuses’.

  Elle’s first real taste of ‘community’ came from the suburban gym she joined when she was training for her PT course. She didn’t count her hometown—there was nothing particularly supportive about that, unless you counted the women who would periodically swarm her father, armed with port and pies. He was a young widow and not a known psychopath, so he was a catch. But five shitbag kids wasn’t a drawcard, it turned out, especially since the women had a few brats of their own trailing behind them.

  But at the gym, Elle found people who wanted to help one another, to make one another stronger, literally. They were obsessive about a common goal—self-improvement—and that was a drive that Elle understood. While at the gym, she started her first-ever blog: a training diary, mostly, a dry repetition of what she’d lifted and squatted and sprinted, with photos documenting her changing body. She liked to lie in bed and feel her stomach, let her fingers walk across her tightening abs, find her hipbones. She was getting harder every day. This proved to her what she genuinely believed to be true—you could change anything if you tried hard enough: what you looked like, how you spoke, how you thought, who you were. What had happened to you.

  You could actually create your own reality.

  Not that snippets of ugly realism didn’t impinge on Elle’s life in those years. One morning, before a pre-dawn PT session, a hulking roid-head tried to rape her in the changing room. She was ‘saved’ from that moment by the arrival of three weight-training sisters. Years later, she still fingered the places on her wrist and neck where the bruises had been.

  She’d had to leave Auntie Liane’s because of her cousin Kane. He got out of prison, found her living in his mum’s house and called her a ‘gold-digging piece of shit’ to her face, sparking an eruption that meant she was no longer welcome with that side of the family. Although the notion there was any gold to be dug was hilarious, it had stung because she knew he must have talked to her brothers before he picked those words.

  There were friendships with women that burned bright and hard for a short time, but always fizzled out. Elle suspected—her self-help books backed her up—that losing her mot
her so young had bruised her ability to trust in other women entirely. There was always something performative in the way she behaved around girlfriends, however much she actively liked them. Elle was not, by nature, a pack animal.

  By the time she had started writing her anonymous blog about falling in love with a married man, she was working at the gym full-time, only doing promo shifts on fitness-related jobs—no more meatheads in bars—and planning the next stage.

  And the next stage was Security.

  • • •

  Adrian, Elle knew, was worried about money. The Brighton house renovation had gone over budget, not least because of her need for the interior to be picture-perfect from every angle. ‘It’s an investment,’ she’d told him. ‘This is our set. Our backdrop.’

  ‘I thought it was our home.’

  ‘Well, that too. But really, it’s win-win. We live somewhere beautiful, and we don’t need to hire location houses or studios. It’s everything.’

  Having two preschoolers in a show home had its drawbacks, of course. Freddie had banged his head on the raised Italian-slate edge of the fireplace more than once. Teddy had drawn on the white silk lounge and then endured three days of mum-silence. Elle had begrudgingly—and expensively—needed to glass off her floating staircase after it became clear that it was a deathtrap for toddlers.

  ‘Not sure that’s the best idea when you’ve got little kids around,’ the architect had told a then-pregnant Elle when they were planning the stairs. ‘You can’t put a safety gate on that.’

  ‘They won’t be little forever,’ Elle had replied. ‘It raises the bar.’

  But after Freddie had almost toppled through them for the second time, she’d realised it might be a bad look. Of course, she’d made sure to let Instagram know how she was sacrificing style for safety.

  Can’t believe my architect didn’t warn me about the dangers of my #floatingstairs My beautiful boys’ safety comes before everything else, and the end result looks pretty special, too. #mummabear