People LIke Her(42)

“But it mightn’t have been,” she keeps saying. “I mean, thank God Coco is okay. But even so, just think if all those people on the internet got hold of it. The things they’d say. About Emmy, about her parenting. All the terrible, unfair things.”

One of the things my mother worries a lot about is the precarity of what Emmy does for a living. How competitive it all is, the desperate struggle for paid ads and brand partners and all the things you need to turn followers into dollars (as Irene would put it). How long are we going to be able to spin this out for—until both the kids are at school? How will it work once they’re both in lessons all day? What happens when they start reading and understanding what Emmy writes?

I do try—we both try, Emmy and I—to keep Coco’s feet on the ground as much as we can. We’re always reminding her it’s not normal to be given all this free stuff, for people to recognize you wherever you go, to have complete strangers act like they know you. I often tell her stories about what it was like when I was growing up (No iPhones! No iPads! No cartoons on demand!) and remind her what a lucky girl she is when you compare her life to the lives of lots of people around the world—and in this country too, for that matter. Once a week I try to make sure there’s an evening when phones are put away and we talk over dinner and we all read a story together before bed. When she got sent a ridiculous amount of stuff last Christmas (two wooden rocking horses, several plush bears the same size as she was, a playhouse about half the size of my shed), we put some of it in the attic and redistributed or gave away most of the rest. We’re careful how much we spend of it, the money Mamabare makes.

But when Mum worries about how quickly all this could come crumbling down, I have to admit she has a point.

Sure, some of the deals Irene has set Emmy up with have sounded like a lot of money for not very much actual work. If you look at the company accounts (Mamabare is, of course, a limited company), it looks like things are going pretty well for us. Then you hear the stories. Then you read about what’s happened to other people. I saw a piece in the Guardian recently about how an influencer’s entire following got stolen in the space of five minutes. Her Instagram account got hacked, her handle and password changed. That was it. Instagram wouldn’t help. Nobody could ever find it again. Years spent building up a following, and bam, they simply didn’t exist.

When I’m not worrying about Coco’s safety, or what we might be doing to her psychologically, or that some sound I’ve heard downstairs is the burglars back again, what I mostly find myself worrying about in the middle of the night is this: that one false move, one fuckup, one badly judged comment, some cack-handed virtue signaling, could bring the whole thing tumbling down. The paid appearances, the shoots, the campaigns, all of it. It happens to people. It happens overnight. Remember justanothermother? I didn’t think so. Eighteen months ago she was just as big as, say, Suzy Wao or Sara Clarke. Probably bigger. Eighteen months ago she was just as big as Emmy. Probably bigger. She was getting TV adverts, had a big contract lined up with Pampers, had her own (very early) morning show on talk radio. Then in a single evening she blew the whole thing up. Apart from the fact that her twins were quite cute and they all lived in the country, so there was plenty of opportunity for wholesome outdoor shots of them jumping around farmyards in muddy boots and splashing in puddles, the big thing with justanothermother was that she was really nice, really wholesome, really sweet. Then one night, for whatever reason—maybe it had been a long day and the kids had been playing up at bedtime or maybe she’d heard some bad news or maybe there was some particularly nasty trollish comment that had got under her skin—she sat down with a glass of wine (perhaps not the first of the evening) and started responding to her DMs and she just lost it. I mean completely lost it. Started giving the haters a piece of her mind. A dose of their own medicine. Effing and jeffing. Calling people perverts and losers and wankers. Telling people to get a fucking life. Asking them why they were such cunts. I can just imagine the satisfaction it must have given her to click send, to imagine their surprise, to really let them have it with both barrels. We’ve all done that, I think, during arguments, said something, thinking, I am definitely not going to regret saying this in the morning.

Within about fifteen minutes screenshots had started appearing—on Instagram, on Twitter, on Mumsnet. Within three hours it had been picked up as one of those little clickbait stories on BuzzFeed. By the next morning there was an account of her “four-letter fury,” complete with screenshots and pictures of her from her feed, in the Mail Online. By that afternoon the pictures had been supplemented with grainy long-range shots of her getting into a Land Rover and the story was about her losing the Pampers partnership and being in talks with her radio bosses about whether or not they still wanted her to host one of their shows. They did not, as it transpired. Presumably she’s now gone back to doing whatever it was she did with her life before she became an influencer—if that’s still an option for her. The last time I looked on Instagram, she’d deleted her account. Not in the Sorry, guys, I’m stepping away from these little squares for a few days for my mental health way they all seem to do intermittently whenever they are getting criticized for something or want a bit of extra attention and reassurance. The way you would properly delete your account if you’d signed up to retrain as a teacher or lawyer.

And that was someone we used to see at events and say hello to and who once or twice was down to the final two or three in competition for things with Emmy, just a year and a half ago. Someone whose kids I could pick out of a lineup, whose kitchen I could describe.