People LIke Her(9)
Coco nods. I hear the doorbell go.
“Coming!” I shout, as Coco bounds down the stairs ahead of me.
When my agent agreed to this interview, I was slightly nervous they’d go for the-perils-of-selling-your-family-online angle, as serious newspapers tend to. But the editor agreed to a list of topics they wouldn’t touch on, so here we are, with the staff photographer and a freelance journalist, asking me jolly questions I’ve answered a million times before. She ends with a flourish.
“Why do you think people like you so much?”
“Oh, goodness, do you think that’s true? Well, if it is, I guess they connect with me because I’m just like them, because I allow myself to be vulnerable—I ask for their help, I make it a two-way conversation. You can’t mama alone—it really does take a village. All of us are in it together, all plugging away in our sleep-deprived, peanut butter–smeared, sugar-fueled fogs.”
Actually, do you know why they love me? Because this is my job—a job I happen to be very, very good at. Do you think you get a million followers by accident?
It took a while to get Mamabare just right. To be honest, I thought I’d come up with a killer concept the first time around in Barefoot. That if I was prepared to put in the work, I could eventually earn enough from a shoe blog and social media to replace my magazine salary. I was as obsessed with the big fashion influencers as anyone else, even though I knew rationally that none of it was real. I had wasted plenty of evenings comparing their perfect Prada lives to my own, my bedtime creeping ever later as my eyes glazed over at shots of them crossing roads in Manhattan and posing outside pastel-colored houses in Notting Hill—and now at least I could justify that to Dan as research.
My now-agent, Irene, had just made the shift from representing the actresses we put on the magazine’s pages to the influencers my snobbish editor was doing her best to keep off them, so I approached her with my genius idea. She told me bluntly that I’d missed the boat. Liking shoes was not enough of a thing, apparently, and wouldn’t stand out in an already crowded market. I might have only just got wise to the influencer game, but the big fashion players were already untouchable. Irene was happy to represent me, but mental health and motherhood were the next big untapped markets. “By all means, start your little shoe blog to understand the mechanics of it,” she said, “plus it’s a good backstory to make the whole thing feel more organic, more authentic. Then, once you’ve chosen whether to have a breakdown or a baby, come back to me, and we’ll pivot.”
Four months later, I was in her office, waving my scan.
When my daughter was born, I started off sharing photos of me beaming with new-mum pride and a face full of no-makeup makeup, of sun-dappled afternoons in the park and sprinkle-topped cakes I’d just baked. I talked about how happy I was, my amazing husband, how Coco never cried. Naively, I thought that would instantly win me followers.
I quickly realized, though, that for a British influencer, it really doesn’t work like that. It turns out that each country has its own quirks when it comes to Instagram parenting. I’d been taking my cues from the American moms I admired, who all waft about in cashmere, keep their Carrara marble worktops pristine, dress their kids in plaid shirts and designer denim, and run everything through the Gingham filter to give their photos a subtle vintage effect. A little more googling uncovered that Australia’s lithe, free-spirited mamas all pose against surfboards in crochet bikinis, with their salt-scrunched hair and their tanned blond toddlers. Swedish Instamums wear flower crowns while they coo at babies lying around in grey felt bonnets on pastel washed-linen sheets.
You see, with a bit of research, social media makes understanding what people all over the world connect with very simple indeed. Follower numbers and engagement figures rise and fall depending on how good or bad your hair looks, how funny or heartfelt you are in this caption, how cute or not your kid is in that shot, how consistent and contrived your color palette is. So you can adjust your lipstick, your living room, your family life, your filter accordingly.
And what did my foray into Instagram anthropology uncover? That here in the UK, nobody likes a show-off. We want naturally pretty women, goofy grins, rainbow colors, honest captions, and photogenic disarray. We may wear expensive Tshirts with slogans about being superheroes and bang on about empowerment, but as any UK Instamum worth her six-figure campaign knows, if you admit to so much as being able to boil an egg competently, you’ll lose a thousand followers overnight. You have to be unable to leave the house without at least a splotch of Bolognese or a splatter of baby puke on your shirt. You have to arrive late for nursery at least once a week—just a couple of minutes, mind you; nobody likes a one-pound-per-minute fine—and forget World Book Day annually.
I found that the more “authentic” I was, the more followers I won, and the more those followers “liked” me. If that sounds patronizing, I honestly don’t mean it that way. Sorry, the Sisterhood, but when it comes to online life, women just don’t respond well to other women’s success—if comparison is the thief of joy, Instagram is the cat burglar of contentment.
The last thing I want to do is make a woman feel like she’s not living up to some impossible maternal standard, so I invented the perfectly imperfect mama for my followers. Because only when you become a mother do you realize just how much judgment there is lurking around every corner—a bit like betting shops are invisible unless you’re a gambler or you don’t see playgrounds when you’re child-free. Whatever it is you’re doing, there’s someone—husband, mother-in-law, judgy health visitor, unhelpful waitress—who thinks you’re doing it wrong. I never do, though. My whole thing is that I’m just muddling through too. The world is full of people who want to tell mums off, so when they DM me their questions, or put their hands up at my events, I smile and nod and legitimize their life choices. I tell them that’s just what I did, or how I felt too. Cosleeping? They’ve been doing it since caveman times, Mama—just enjoy the snuggles! A beige-food-only diet? Little Noah will grow out of it eventually.