People LIke Her(23)

“Just a second, I’ve got to WhatsApp my boyfriend and tell him this is the right house and I’ll see him when I get home. Becket is just the best, so protective of me. I keep telling him he would be an amazing influencer, but he’s concentrating on his music right now,” she says earnestly as she types.

I welcome her in just to stop her talking, and ask her to take her shoes off, which she does. Her hat, in contrast, stays on all day.

After a brief tour of the house, I sit Winter down in the kitchen with our spare laptop and my old iPhone along with the relevant passwords she’ll need. Irene calls to remind me what we agreed: Winter will manage my diary and, more important, be Mamabare when I can’t—when I’m on a shoot, or at a lunch, launch, or dinner. I have to admit, I’m not hopeful that Winter’s up to the task. She’s already walked into the closet under the stairs thinking it’s a bathroom.

Luckily, there isn’t anything technical involved in the role, unless you count printing out the labels to mail the odd #greydays sweater or mug to a follower willing to part with forty-five pounds plus shipping and handling, but it is time-consuming. All my posts are photographed and written at least a fortnight in advance. But while she won’t be posting, Winter will be monitoring the influencer gossip forums—it’s all useful feedback, no matter how bitchy or sanctimonious—and answering my DMs, as well as liking and replying to comments. Which means I have to give her a crash course in how to speak Mamabare. Winter takes out her notebook and puts on a serious face. I look winteriscoming up on Instagram. At a tiny eleven thousand followers, presumably at least a few thousand of which are bots Irene has bought, she’s definitely at the micro end of influencer. She’s already posted the shot of her outside the Lord Napier, twirling her dress while looking coquettishly at the ground. It’s captioned: They Call Me Mellow Yellow, with buttercup emojis where the os should be.

“Okay, the first thing to remember is that things work differently for an Instamum. You can get away with a coy look and a five-word caption. Look at your comments—‘Your fringe is on point!’ or ‘Er, hallo SHOES!’ Your followers just want to know where your handbag is from. My followers want to have a good old rummage around inside mine.”

I run through the dos and don’ts. Everyone must have their comment acknowledged; every DM must have a reply. Sometimes you can’t avoid getting into a longer conversation, but it’s best to try and keep it light and leave it there.

You keep doing you, Mama! works well. But anything encouraging, with mama on the end, generally does the trick. And the trolls get as much love as the fans. “More, in fact,” I explain, “because they’re the ones that actually need it.”

I’ve honed my approach over time to make sure I don’t stoke the haters’ rage. I am sure these are often women broken with grief for their old lives, powder kegs packed with fury at the terrible injustice of motherhood. They explode at me—not their husbands, not their health visitors, not the friends who inquire politely how they’re doing with a newborn but don’t really want to know the answer—because it doesn’t matter if I know that they’re not coping.

Another important lesson I’ve learned is that while I tell my followers that we’re the same, I have to remember we’re not, not really, and that I can’t rub their noses in it. They’re not actually friends, because as a rule, in the grand scheme of things, your friends are people pretty much like you: they live in the same sort of house, earn about the same, and their husbands are similar and do the same kinds of things for a living. They have more or less the same number of children, who pretty much all go to the same kind of school. There are small differences, obviously, but for the most part my friends and I and almost everyone I interact with socially in real life enjoy very much the same kind of generally comfortable, mostly contented, broadly financially stable existence. For better or worse, the same is not true of all those people who follow me online.

It’s a simple case of knowing your audience—and it’s astonishing how many aspiring Instamums get it wrong. Do you think an hourly employee with no benefits likes watching a well-off, middle-class white woman whine about the cost of childcare? Does a single mother like seeing you moan about your husband not taking the bins out? Does someone whose weekly grocery shop is a stretch think your complaints about the rumbling tummy that your #gifted green juice cleanse has given you are in any way charming?

Spilling stuff, exploding poos, Peppa Pig–triggered tantrums, tummy bugs. Those are the things I can complain about without alienating anyone. The universal We’ve all been there, Mum stuff. But even then, someone will always heckle and gripe. And when they do, I have to thank them for their valuable feedback and promise I’ll learn and grow as a person.

“It’s only the pervs who want to drink my breast milk and trolls who want my whole family to die in a fire that you can ignore.” I laugh.

Winter looks terrified.

“Oh God, I didn’t know. You never talk about them online!” she gasps.

“Irene says it’s best not to make a thing of it, because they’re harmless. They don’t think we are real people—just avatars who only exist in a grid of tiny pictures on their phone. You couldn’t do this job if you didn’t believe that no matter what the trolls say, they’d never actually do anything—it’s just sad, lonely people lurking on the internet.”