Momfluenza

The milk is raw and so are the (projected) feelings

The momfluencer trend is one I am expected to care about, as a mother and an internet user. But I can’t seem to care? There are women performing aesthetics-focused versions of their real lives, for an audience, and I am happy for them and so sorry it’s happening to them. There’s enough other nonsense online to entertain me, and this isn’t tapping into anything for me. They’re using only natural fibers and not serving their kids sugar or seed oils or pasteurized milk? Fine. We all have to fill our years on this planet somehow.

I’m not above coveting a stranger’s lifestyle but, to quote Harvey Bains’s Cockney (?) mother from Waiting for God:

Where I live I can walk to vintage clothing, Vietnamese food, and iced cappuccinos where they do the foam. I could see envying someone who had an H-Mart on the corner, who had a subway closer than a streetcar, but that’s about it. I’ve got universal health care and Quebec cheeses, so things need to be very covetable for me to covet them. If you are making it as a writer more than I am and are better-looking and younger than I am and have better clothes and appeared on one of the early Into The Gloss Top Shelves then sure. If you are meat-producing entrepreneur, I don’t care how nice you look in a prairie dress, it’s not my scene, I’m not buying what you’re selling.

But there has been no escaping this Ballerina Farm lady, presumably because she is prettier and wealthier than most people, and that includes most momfluencers. Her husband is an airline nepo baby and the family has 90,000 children and a stove that cost $900,000,000. They live on a farm located somewhere in the United States where she does pirouettes while nursing while baking and also her hair is long and looks that way naturally because they live somewhere too rustic to have hair salons, surely. This is what I had known about her just from the ether, as in from various tangential work-related purposes.

Then Megan Agnew profiled Hannah Neeleman for the British Times which isn’t the one I have a subscription to but the article made the rounds all the same and it is now inescapable to the point that I was on the actual physical subway in Toronto and two young women of extremely not Neeleman’s background (Caribbean if I had to guess) were talking in a very animated way about this woman with her eight kids and how the life was drained from her eyes and so on and I asked just to confirm (further violating Toronto’s law of subway silence) but this was the article they meant.

Did you know that Ballerina Farm lady and her husband used to live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? I did not, but this is a funny backstory and one that really confirms everything one would suspect about “trad” as performance and not as rural people living unselfconsciously rural lives. But now they’re not ramming their supermarket carts into other supermarket carts at the Fairway but rather selling raw milk (the government’s stealing your milk bacteria, didn’t you hear?) and, apparently, branded sweatshirts to people who aspire to have natural Barbie-doll hair and to still look like hot 19-year-olds despite having ten trillion children in a barn out back.

We are meant to feel bad for Neeleman, same as we are meant to feel bad for (I’ve lost count) Emily Ratajkowski, Prince Harry, everyone else rich and beautiful and known to people via the news or, now, the computer/tablet/phone. She is phenomenally wealthy and good-looking so there must be a hidden tragedy, an angle according to which actually we the plebs have it better.

And you know what, we might! As I’ve established, I personally think I’m better suited to my own life than to some version of it where money would never be a concern BUT I had to give birth at a regular clip without an epidural and also not live near a farmer’s market that sells kimchi. But this is a woman whose career (yes, she has one of those) depends on many people thinking her life does look swell, so what a burst bubble if she is miserable.

Should she be miserable, though? A lot depends on how comfortable you are inventing a person you think she is, deep down, and imagining how sad that person would be to wake up with her life. Does she mind not having a nanny (but having however many other servants), or being married to a man who hears she wants to go on vacation in Greece and buys her an egg apron whatever tf that is (are eggs so concerned with getting splattered while they cook)? Does she very possibly like this lifestyle, and this is what she’s into, and she is not about to write a Lyz Lenz-style divorce memoir?

Are we waiting for her to reveal that she wishes she were Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan? Because we’ll be waiting for a while is my sense. She wasn’t abducted into some sort of cult. She and her husband are religious Mormons, they were before they met and this is the life they know and enjoy as much as anyone enjoys theirs. She may have once lived near Zabar’s but she is not crying herself to sleep that she can no longer buy those mini smoked mozzarella balls that come on a styrofoam tray and under Saran wrap. (Like I said, I envy some lifestyles.)

Much is being made of the fact that sometimes she’s so exhausted she spends a week in bed. This is meant to indicate Serious Issues and not that this is a billionaire who can spend a week in bed. Someone is there to look after her eight children when she does this, or there’d be CPS coming by, and not whoever is swinging through to deliver their raw milk to (presumably) fellow Mormons who want to drink something a bit dangerous but options being limited this is what they’ve got.