People LIke Her(3)

I like to believe I still have some dignity.

I’m here tonight, as always, in a strictly supporting capacity. I’m the one who helps lug the boxes of mama merch in from the cab and helps unpack them and tries not to visibly cringe when people use expressions like “mama merch.” I’m here to lend a hand pouring glasses of fizz and passing around the cupcakes at the start of the evening, and I’m the person who steps in and rescues Emmy when she gets stuck talking to anyone for too long or who is too obviously a weirdo at the end of it. If the baby starts crying, I am primed to step up onstage and lift him carefully out of Emmy’s arms and take charge—although so far this evening he has been as good as gold, little Bear, our baby boy, five weeks old, suckling away quietly, completely oblivious to his surroundings or the fact that he is up onstage or pretty much anything apart from the breast in front of him. Occasionally, in the general Q&A section at the end of the evening, when someone asks Emmy about how having a second child has affected the family dynamic or how we keep the spark in our marriage, Emmy will laughingly point me out in the audience and invite me to help answer that question. Often when someone asks about online safety, I’m the person to whom Emmy defers to explain the three golden rules we always stick to when posting pictures of our kids online. One: we never show anything that could give away where we live. Two: we never show either of the kids in the bath, or naked, or on the potty, and we never, ever show Coco in a swimsuit or any outfit that could be considered sexy on an adult. Three: we keep a close eye on who is following the account and block anyone we’re not sure about. This was the advice we were given, early on, when we consulted with the experts.

I do still have my reservations about all this.

The version of events that Emmy always recounts, the one about starting to blog about motherhood as a way of reaching out and seeing if there was anyone out there who was going through the same stuff as her? Complete bullshit, I’m afraid. If you really think my wife fell into doing this by accident, it just goes to show that you have never met my wife. I sometimes wonder if Emmy ever does anything by accident. I can vividly remember the day she first brought it up, the blogging thing. I knew she was meeting someone for lunch, but it was not until afterward she told me the person she’d met with was an agent. She was three months pregnant. It was only a couple of weeks since we’d broken the news to my mum. “An agent?” I said. I genuinely don’t think it had occurred to me until then that online people had agents. It probably should have done. On a regular basis, back when she was working in magazines, Emmy would come home and tell me how much they were paying some idiot influencer to crap out a hundred words and pose for a picture, or host some event, or burble on their blog. She used to show me the copy they would send in. The kind of prose that makes you wonder if you’ve had a stroke or the person writing it has. Short sentences. Metaphors that don’t make sense. Random weirdly specific details scattered around to lend everything an air of verisimilitude. Oddly precise numbers (482 cups of cold tea, 2,342 hours of lost sleep, 27 misplaced baby socks) shoehorned in for the same purpose. Words that are just not the word they were groping for. You should write this stuff, she used to joke; I don’t know why you bother writing novels. We used to laugh about it. When she got back from lunch that day and told me who she had been talking to, I thought she was still joking. It took me a long time to get my head around what she was suggesting. I thought the end goal was some free footwear. Little did I suspect that Emmy had already paid for the domain name and bagged both the Barefoot and Mamabare Instagram handles before she had even written her first sentence about stilettos. Let alone that within three years she would have a million followers.

The very first piece of advice her agent gave her was that the whole thing should feel organic, as if she’d just fallen into it through sheer chance. I don’t think either of us knew quite how good at that Emmy would be.

Inasmuch as it is based on a complete rejection of the significance of the truth and the moral duty we owe to it, Harry G. Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is actually more corrosive, a more destructive social force, than good old-fashioned lying. Harry G. Frankfurt has considerably fewer followers on Instagram than my wife does.

“I built this brand on honesty,” Emmy is saying, just as she always ends by saying, “and I’ll always tell it like it is.”

She pauses for the applause to die down. She locates the glass of water by her chair and takes a sip.

“Any questions?” she asks.

I have a question.

Was that the night I finally decided how I would hurt you?

I think it was.

Obviously I had thought about it many times before then. I think anyone in my position would. But those were just silly little daydreams, really. TV stuff. Completely unrealistic and impractical.

It works in funny ways, the human mind.

I thought somehow if I saw you, it would help. Help me hate you less. Help me let go of the anger.

It did not help at all.

I have never been a violent person. I am not an angry person, naturally. When somebody stands on my foot in a queue, I am always the one who apologizes.

All I really wanted was to ask you a question. Just one. That’s why I was there. I had my hand up, at the end, for ages. You saw me. You took a question from the woman in front of me instead, the one whose hair you complimented. You took a question from the woman on my right, who you knew by name, the one whose “question” turned out to be more of an aimless anecdote about herself.