The Mummy Bloggers

by Holly Wainwright

  Her perfectionism was paying off, Elle could feel it. She had Abbott’s smoothies. Next she’d win the Blog-ahhs, and Adrian’s money worries would be over for good.

  5. The most important tip, my stylish friends, is not to be self-conscious about taking your gym selfie. If you try to sneak your phone out and snap a pic from a bad angle, you will get a bad picture. Be out, be proud. Mediocre efforts get mediocre results. Wear your tightest and brightest, pop that bum, push those girls out. You only get one chance to show off the best you. Do not apologise. And remember: No Excuses.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LEISEL

  I waited so long to be a mother. And now I’m here, some days I can’t stand it.

  For decades I imagined I had tiny hands in mine as I walked down the street. Now I have that. In fact, I don’t have enough hands to guide all the little people who need me.

  So why do I so often wish my children would get away from me? Stop needing me so much? Why am I so quick to anger at them when they are just loving their mum?

  I spent so long imagining having all these people to love, why do I sit here some days feeling as if I hate what they’ve done to my life?

  Today’s was the kind of post that Leisel’s followers loved the most. It was also the kind of post that really, really pissed off her troll.

  Well, her trolls.

  Her many posts about motherhood angst and regret had ignited a small, committed band of mum-warriors who were triggered into a keyboard-bashing and cupcake-baking rage by any hint of negativity about the holy business of mothering.

  The Contented Mum set the tone:

  Some of us feel blessed every moment that we are lucky enough to spend with our children. And then there’s you, who barely even sees her kids, and when she does, only moans about how demanding they are. It’s women like you, Working Mum, who should never have had kids in the first place. You are a disgrace.

  Grateful for Gifts wrote:

  We have fought so hard to have our babies, given up so much for the privilege of calling ourselves ‘mothers’, it’s very hard to hear someone like you shit all over it.

  Of course, things escalated quickly. This was the internet. Soon almost every post she wrote attracted a smattering of abuse.

  From BlessedMumOfFour:

  I hope something terrible happens to your children, you shitty excuse for a mother. #notsorry

  And from AngelMama76:

  Why women like you have children, I’ll never know, you ungrateful turd. #sewitup

  Women like her.

  Five years ago, Leisel hadn’t had any idea that there were other women like her. She hadn’t seen them anywhere. The women all around her had seemed to be bounding through life, baby on hip, briefcase in hand, handsome husband at the barbecue.

  When Leisel looked back on this now, it seemed so ridiculous, so naive, but she had truly thought that she was the only one wondering why parenthood wasn’t as perfect as it looked in the brochure.

  She’d never been the only one, of course. And she’d learnt that by blogging. The solace she’d found there had been the start of her addiction. It had become the reason why she was searching for stories to share every day.

  • • •

  Leisel was thirty-eight when she and Mark had Maggie. She’d read the magazines. Hell, she’d written some of the magazines. She knew how unlikely it was that she and her middle-aged boyfriend—who had spent a portion of his adulthood filling his body with addictive poison—had successfully created a life. If she’d been a TV star, she would have been wearing white and beaming from a magazine cover with MY MIRACLE BABY across her chest. Instead, she was a tired and bloated daily commuter, secretly delighted that her script had been rewritten.

  Leisel had spent all of her thirties being pitied and patronised. She was one of the many women of her generation who didn’t settle down early that no one seemed to know what to do with. This was the era post-Bridget Jones, mid-RSVP, pre-Tinder. She had travelled. She had a ‘good’ job. She had her own apartment in one of the more desirable parts of Sydney, one of the world’s more desirable cities.

  She was happy, mostly, and known for telling her friends—three wines in—that she’d never been that maternal anyway. Weekends were spin class and brunch and dinners, dinners, dinners. She’d survived that early thirties stage where every Saturday afternoon was spent at someone’s beachside wedding, dodging the singles’ table and the cries of ‘You next!’ She’d got through all those Sunday morning baby showers, with their Bellinis and macarons and humiliating games involving toilet paper and tape measures. She went on improving solo holidays and girls’ weekends to the Hunter, and she wondered what her forties would look like. Some days, she felt hopeful about unchartered waters. Other days, she felt certain she would drown.

  And then, one day, she woke up and everything had changed. Overnight, she had been replaced by a pulsing sack of hormonal longing. She wanted a baby. Her guts wanted a baby. Her hair wanted a baby.

  Before, she had handled her friends’ newborns nervously with a polite disinterest. Now, she had to stop herself from inhaling them.

  Worst of all, Leisel knew she had become a walking cliché. She had spent years arguing over the very existence of the ‘biological clock’. And here it was, clanging so loudly that she couldn’t hear anything else.

  And that was when she looked up Mark on Facebook. It wasn’t—she assured her followers much later—as premeditated as it sounded. She was having a low moment, she was thinking about her past. She was wondering why she had spent so much of her twenties only interested in men with (to use a polite word) ‘issues’. Mark was one of those guys. She was twenty-four when they got together, twenty-six when they broke up, and the things she’d learnt in between were useful in choosing her next boyfriend. She’d learnt that the words ‘drug habit’ were entirely inadequate. Picking your nose was a habit. What Mark was compelled to do on those frequent falls off the wagon was more like the Terminator’s kamikaze mission—pre-programmed, irreversible.

  She’d learnt that drug addicts lie. Even soft-souled, considerate, poetic, beautiful ones. Ones who knew all your secrets, ones whose secrets you knew (or at least thought you knew). They could look you in the eye and say that they hadn’t taken that twenty dollars from your wallet. They could look you in the eye and say that they hadn’t taken that fifty dollars from your mum’s wallet. They could look you in the eye and say that they hadn’t gone around to their ex-girlfriend’s place, slept with her and taken a hundred dollars from her wallet, even though she was now screaming blue murder on your doorstep.

  Leisel had certainly been in love with Mark. But, ultimately, she had never been interested in a life Like That. During their time together, he was always getting clean and holding it together for weeks or days. Then he would disappear. Or reappear, with a certain look in his eye, a certain way of holding his shoulders that signalled he was using.

  They’d been crashing in his travelling friend’s studio in Surry Hills. When Mark had sold his mate’s CDs, TV and even his rag rug, Leisel knew it was time to go. He was demonstratively broken-hearted—for a day. ‘You could be the only one who can save me from myself,’ he actually said, with a straight face. Then, he vanished.

  Leisel moved home to her mum’s on the north shore until she found a share house with a friend and shook off what she quickly came to view as a sordid chapter in her otherwise pretty standard twenty-something story.

  But there she was, ten years later, looking for Mark online. And she was surprised to find him. She’d assumed he was the kind of guy who thought social media was tacky and held himself apart from it.

  But there he was. In photos, a little older, a little softer around the edges. He was living in Milton, a small coastal town a few hours south of Sydney, framing pictures for a living. His posts were sparse. Some political stuff about refugees. Some pictures of his work. Some words about wood and the pleasures of working with recycled native timber.


  She messaged him.

  It’s been a long time. How are you?

  He messaged back.

  I am ashamed of how I treated you. I am ashamed of a lot of things.

  Maybe it was nostalgia, maybe it was the whole pulsing-sack-of-hormonal-longing thing, but Leisel kept writing to Mark. And he kept writing back. He’d been clean for five years. It was still a struggle. He felt like he’d had to rebuild his personality from the ground up. Sometimes days without using still seemed unbearably long, but mostly he was doing well. He was enjoying a quieter life.

  He came to the city to see his new nephew. He and Leisel met up for a coffee—not a drink.

  And it was a revelation. Leisel found herself just saying things that were true. ‘I’m tired of being alone. I’m ready for my life to change. I’m ready to stop messing around.’

  And Mark looked at her, and he said, ‘Me too.’

  The sex had always been great. It still was.

  It seemed like only days passed between coffee and Mark moving back to town and in with her, but it must have been months, surely? And then it seemed like only months between that and their wedding—not on a Saturday at a beach, but on a Friday afternoon in a city park they’d always loved. Just a few people. Her mother, glowering. His parents, beaming. Friends and all their babies. Babies everywhere. A quick dinner at the local pub. All over by 9 p.m. The two of them in bed in her little flat, looking at each other, laughing about how such old people could feel so young and hopeful again.

  And so: the ‘miracle’ of Maggie.

  Motherhood, as Leisel would later write in her blog, smacked her across the face with a wet nappy.

  Everything changed. Mark, it seemed, was a natural. He was instinctive in the way he could hold and comfort and cradle his baby girl. But Leisel reverted to being the single girl who held babies at arm’s-length. She adored Maggie instantly in a way she didn’t fully understand, but she had no idea what to do with her.

  Maggie cried a lot. She didn’t feed well. She had reflux, apparently, although no one could really tell Leisel what that was. Nobody slept. The flat felt smaller and smaller.

  Leisel went back to work after six months because her savings ran out and Mark didn’t have any. He took what work he could get as a carpenter for friends, but he didn’t have his papers. So he looked after Maggie, and Leisel headed to the office.

  Those first few months were a brutal blur of stumbling, sleepless days, of pretending she knew what she was doing in meetings, what she was meant to say—when really, her tongue was thick in her mouth and her brain couldn’t hold a thought.

  Everything was changing at work, in magazines. Cuts, everywhere. As the teams shrank, Leisel took on more work.

  In the middle of this craziness, when Maggie was less than one, Leisel got pregnant again. ‘Who knew?’ she said to Mark. ‘Who knew that after all these years of spinsterdom, I’m the most fertile old woman on the planet?’

  At ten weeks, she miscarried. She’d had no idea what that was going to feel like. A baby that wasn’t planned, early in the pregnancy. It felt like the end of the world.

  She wrote about it and had the piece published on a parenting site.

  You don’t have to pay for the ultrasound when your baby is dead. The woman hands you the tissues and says how very sorry she is. She gives you a moment. You look back at the screen, where there’s meant to be a small, white, beating spot. There isn’t. There’s only smudge.

  You pull up your jeans. You find a bin. And you walk out to the waiting room where no one asks you for your credit card. The women who are waiting, who are desperately hoping they are not you, they try not to make eye contact. You try not to make eye contact.

  Because you will cry.

  And when you go outside, you do. And you can’t stop.

  It was Leisel’s first taste of online sharing. And it changed everything. The response from the women who had been through the same thing was enormous. And it helped.

  So much grief and guilt and pain. How were there so many women walking around with all of this? Why was no one talking about it?

  So Leisel started to write about motherhood. It began as a way to make sense of her feelings about where she was: completely overwhelmed by the responsibility of one child but unreasonably desperate to have another.

  And then Rich happened. A beautiful boy.

  This time, while life was every bit as chaotic as before, Leisel had an outlet. She wrote and wrote—late at night, as dawn broke, on the bus, quietly at her desk. Her followers grew, slowly, solidly. Women who also couldn’t understand how there was room in their heads and hearts for all these battling emotions. Or how the hell they got through every day. The feeling of community made the odd negative sledge seem worth it.

  And then, completely unexpectedly, came a pregnancy classified as ‘geriatric’: Harriet. The over-forty pregnancy diary had been good for the blog.

  Now there were five in Leisel’s family. And they still lived in the flat she had bought when there was one of her.

  And here she was, after a difficult day, pouring her last remaining energy into writing about her love and her rage, and attracting the fury of a few angry women.

  Leisel closed her laptop. She tiptoed into the adult bedroom, where Mark was snoring, and lay down next to him, curled into his back. Mark. She hadn’t asked him how he was. She realised that she hadn’t asked him for days. Guilt.

  Her phone chirped quietly. She knew she shouldn’t look. It was late, and Harri would be crying soon. She looked.

  It was a Facebook message.

  It was from The Contented Mum.

  I’m at your front door.

  MAY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ELLE

  To those of you who’ve missed my boys these past few days, thank you for your messages. We’re all just reeling from some family news and need some time to regroup. Stay tuned. I’ll need all your support soon. #loveandlight

  Elle had not posted on social media for two whole days. This was not normal. Not normal at all. At the very least, Elle’s followers expected their morning update on what the boys were wearing.

  Her inbox was full of messages:

  Where are you, girl? #MIA

  Are the boys okay? #missmygorgeousbabies

  Elle was fine. The boys were fine. Right now, Cate was upstairs shooting them in distressed ‘My Dad’s My Hero’ T-shirts for this week’s announcement. They were complaining, loudly.

  Elle was in her kitchen/office, working on the post. Building anticipation was crucial. Her followers would be talking among themselves right now about what that family news could be. Another baby? A divorce?

  ‘Maybe she broke a nail,’ someone would be sniping.

  Adrian was sitting at the kitchen table, spinning his phone in his hands. Every minute or so he nervously poked at the screen to lock and unlock. He was quiet. He’d been looking anxious ever since Elle had convened their war room about the Leisel Situation.

  It was Cate who had first seen the messages about what had happened to Leisel Adams. Two words started spiking all over the Facebook groups that she monitored as a matter of course:

  Troll attack.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ Cate said, taking the unusual step of crossing the kitchen threshold, iPad in hand.

  Elle glanced up from the juicing ingredients she’d been laying out on the wooden benchtop for an Instagram post for PulpPump Juicers. Uneven celery sticks were frustrating her aesthetic.

  ‘What now, Cate?’ she asked, irritated by the intrusion. Then she looked at the iPad. She looked at Cate. ‘Fuck,’ was all she said.

  The Blog-ahhs nominations announcement had made the conditions clear: each blogger had three months to build maximum exposure. And simple numbers of Likes were not enough. How did the audience engage with your brand? How much time did they spend with you daily? What was the number of meaningful interactions? Did you peak and trough? Could you hold their attention? Were your numb
ers growing in a sustainable way? Were your followers commenting and sharing, or just passively reading your posts, bitching to their friends about you and then getting on with their day? Crucially, were you bringing your ‘partners’ a return on their investment?

  All those millions of people—in the coffee queue, on the tram, mindlessly scrolling through their feeds all day, every day—had no idea. They didn’t understand that where they hovered and paused, where they watched and clicked, where they swiped and tapped, where their thumb stopped while they turned to yell at their toddler, all of that had major implications for a brand like Elle’s. It could make or break you.

  Cate understood all of this very well. She had studied digital media at uni. Social media was the primary language she’d spoken since she was twelve. Cate had told Elle that she, like all her friends, spent about ten hours a day on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but hers was a professional passion: she knew how to decode the analytics, how to chase engagement, how to beat the shifts in algorithms that the Californian overlords twisted and tweaked to keep you on your toes. In the battle for the Blog-ahhs, Cate was Elle’s secret weapon.

  But even Cate couldn’t compete with this shit.

  Elle didn’t know Leisel. They had never met, and Elle had never taken her seriously. All she knew was that Leisel’s sister was Feral Abi’s girlfriend, and that Leisel was an amateur, a whiner. The way that the Leisels of the world saw blogging, like some kind of helpline for sad women feeling guilty about their depressing lives? Pathetic.

  But Elle’s instincts were sharp. She knew that two things would follow this news about the troll attack: first, an outpouring of sympathy and support for Leisel as the victim of a terrible crime. And then scrutiny of all three nominated bloggers and their work. A moment in the mainstream spotlight. An opportunity.

  And like a politician gearing up to campaign, Elle knew that what The Stylish Mumma needed to stand out was a talking point. Something to change the conversation.

  Elle looked over at Adrian again. There he was, the man who was going to change the conversation. The man who was going to keep those numbers coming for Abbott’s and the other clients who would follow.