That time I tried to be a Mommy Blogger
On identity, performance, and self-branding
I’ve been performing various versions of my self since I first recognized my reflection in the mirror as being both me and not me. The idea of performing a self has always seemed like an intrinsic part of the human experience rather than a perversion of true identity. Language is performance. Facial expression is performance. Hair styling is performance. Social media is quite obviously performance.
My performance record is prolific. I’ve been a precocious bookworm who read books she didn’t necessarily understand, a precocious tween actor crushing what was surely a terrible Southern accent as Scout in a community theatre production of To Kill A Mockingbird. I’ve been a too-cool-for-popularity not-like-the-other-girls girl in high school (I did this by asking for an Abercrombie and Fitch rugby shirt for Christmas that wasn’t emblazoned with a huge moose to indicate my superior taste).
I’ve played an Emo Acting Student outfitted in boys’ t-shirts sourced from Goodwill because irony? And then I played a Boho Actor Living The Dream in New York City (I had bangs). I went method for my stint as Chill Pixie Dreamgirl. This was a role I typically performed in limited runs for audiences of one; whichever boy I was trying to understand myself through at the time. I like to think I occasionally glowed in this particular role, but I’m also aware that I broke character far too often to warrant any major accolades or longterm prestige.
I received several Critic’s Choice nominations for my unparalleled performance as Glowing Pregnant Goddess, but was brought rudely back to earth when my performance of Natural Earth Mama was almost universally critically panned. While I beat myself up for years following my dismal showing as everyone’s favorite Mom Next Door, I’ve since come to understand I simply wasn’t right for the role.
Whenever I’m asked about performance in momfluencer culture, I respond that performance is not relegated to social media. We’re all performing various versions of ourselves for various audiences. All the time. I’m a different version of myself at preschool pick-up than I am at brunch with writer friends. I’m a different version of me with my husband than I am with my sister. I don’t believe in one truly authentic self. I believe in lots of different authentic selves.
But when it comes to self-branding and the curation of a lifestyle through which to market goods, services, or cultural capital, performance becomes less a function of being known to and through others, and more of a calculated consideration linked to earning potential. I’ve written before about how I’ve had to navigate selling myself as a writer on social media, and while this performance is undoubtedly a performance, it’s not one that requires a ton of rehearsal, research, or audience testing. It’s the type of performance I can (usually) pretty easily phone in because it’s as close to the “real me” as I’d like to be online without feeling too emotionally naked. Or at least one of my “real mes.” It’s not the “real me” as a mother, the “real me” as a romantic partner, the “real me” as a daughter, or the “real me” as known by my therapist! And this isn’t to say that serving oneself up as a brand online isn’t a fraught pursuit. It definitely is. But the self I’ve chosen to sacrifice to the gods of Silicon Valley is at least a self that (hopefully) is best suited to the task.
Today’s essay isn’t about my many thoughts and feelings about my current public-facing self though. It’s about a role I was never cut out to play in the first place: the role of Mommy Blogger.
I mentioned my failure convincing anyone (least of all myself) that I was fit to play Natural Earth Mama, and prior to that I had also given up on a difficult performance as Tweedy Academic. As a lost 34-year-old with an undergrad degree in acting, an MA in literature, and no job prospects in sight, I was quite desperate to refashion myself as something, anything, more than a changer of diapers and a singer of Itsy Bitsy Spider.
During grad school, I’d done a LOT of writing. A shocking amount of writing for anyone who isn’t familiar with lit grad programs. Throughout the two year program, I had sharpened my verbs, made my sentences more specific, and gained a hard-won level of confidence with first person assertions that my public school training had done its best to undermine. During my last semester, I took a composition course, and wrote creatively for the first time since adolescence. And I kinda loved it.
But this love for creative nonfiction didn’t reemerge until I found myself without a PhD or any bankable skills. I knew I wanted and needed something outside of childcare and domestic labor, and had vague ideas about teaching at a private school, but it was all VERY nebulous.
During this period of uncertainty, I discovered bloggers. I dedicate several pages to my fascination with Naomi Davis (aka Taza) in Momfluenced, and I also read Barefoot Blonde (Amber Fillerup-Clark’s old blog). And of course I read Cup of Jo. But I was also completely and utterly devoted to Emily Henderson.
For those unfamiliar, Emily Henderson is primarily known as a home design blogger, but she’s also written candidly about her experience with religion, motherhood, and being a woman in the world. My parasocial love for her was strong, and her content was aspirational but not toxic (for me at least). I never felt like shit after reading her blog. I felt lighter, creatively inspired, and entertained. I showed photos of Henderson to my hair stylist in pursuit of the same shade of buttery blonde, I combed the internet for a stump coffee table similar to hers, and I pored over her witty, irreverent prose. It was fun, it felt free.
To root us all in time and space, I was an avid reader of Henderson’s blog in 2016, and in January, she announced she was hiring. I’M FAIRLY CERTAIN SHE WAS HIRING A DESIGN WRITER. And friends, I am not, nor have I ever been a design writer. I’m good with throw pillows and I’m passionate about vintage waxed pine, but I have zero training in interior design. Did I apply for this position anyway? I did. Hold onto your hats because I’m about share the breeziest goddamn application email you have EVER SEEN.
Let’s start with the subject line. Ahem. “Sara Petersen’s new and improved resume.”
What’s that you say? There was ANOTHER resume? Sure was! And I THINK it was my fucking theatre resume!!!!!!! I OBVIOUSLY had heard nothing in response to that first resume, so my plucky little ass bought some sort of cutesy resume template from Etsy and APPLIED AGAIN.
The entire resume is a Rich Text, but please please please focus on the “profile” section which reads as follows: “I am a bookworm, a lover of all things beautiful and interesting and fun, and a total perfectionist when it comes to writing clear, relatable, thoughtful prose. I am obsessive about searching the depths of the Internet for the very best of all French butter crocks. Put me to work.”
2016 Sara! You adorable newborn lamb! I love you!
The text from my email (WITH THE “NEW AND IMPROVED RESUME”) is a masterclass for EGOT-worthy thespians. Let’s do a close-read.
Hi guys,
I'm not sure if you're still hiring, but I took Emily's recent blog post to heart and did some revamping of my resume so my attributes are more clearly communicated.
My previous resume probably induced several yawns.
Cheers!
Sara
First of all - the use of “guys” here is inspired. The explicit “I’m a serious reader of Emily’s blog” reference in the first sentence? Beautiful. “MY ATTRIBUTES ARE MORE CLEARLY COMMUNICATED” !!!! Give this girl ALL THE JOBS ANY JOBS. Surely, no one is shocked about my jaunty sign-off, but it’s the “several yawns” that really clinches this performance as Best Actress in a Leading Role material. Have you ever seen a more astute portrayal of Effortlessly Cool? I HAVEN’T!!!!!
I know what you’re all thinking. Why wasn’t I hired immediately upon receipt of this email and offered a signing bonus? Unclear. I can only assume this email was sent on the one day in 2016 that the entire internet was down.
Important to note is that this application required a writing sample, which I completed with enthusiasm and unwarranted bravado. It was a rather bitchy little treatise on how I “choose my friends based on paint colors.” In this essay, I excoriated Rae Dunn Chic like a judgmental asshole but also included some earnest lines about some of my friends’ interiors. I seem to recall a poetic description of one friend’s “glossy chestnut waves” (shout-out to Lucy Maud Montgomery, my OG of hair descriptions) and her cozy living room, painted in a “rich shade of burnished terracotta.” The subtitle of this masterpiece was “I live with, laugh with, and love people who don’t want those same three words stenciled onto driftwood and hung above their kitchen sink.” BITCHY!
Tragically, Emily Henderson declined to take her business to the next level by hiring me, but (for some reason!) I was undeterred. I had so enjoyed writing the essay that I decided to keep trying. To be - a what? A quippy writer? Was that a job? As previously mentioned, in 2016, I was a newborn baby lamb. I was unfamiliar with sites like The Toast, Gawker, The Hairpin, and Jezebel, which were smart, funny, and quippy at least some of the time. The only way forward as a quippy writer of sometimes funny froth, I figured, was as a blogger. As a minutes-old baby sheep, I was also unaware that writers like Heather Armstrong and
had blogs all about creative expression and literary experimentation. So, not understanding that I could carve out a new role for myself as a writer that didn’t explicitly require glossy photos of myself living my best life, I asked my sister to take some pictures. You know, for my blog. It was time to address wardrobe. It was time to take my performance out of rehearsal halls (my email) and onto the stage (a Wordpress site).
Where to begin? WHERE TO BEGIN. I’ve chosen these two photos specifically because they do an excellent job of laying bare how I was thinking of performance of self in 2016.
In photo #1, if you can focus on anything other than the utterly baffling NEON BRA, you’ll see I was checking a variety of boxes in my desire to channel my very best inner Emily Henderson. We’ve got a bold paint color (I take creative risks!) and the Emily Henderson trademark of a neutral white backdrop (albeit a couch in this case) made visually interesting by “pops of color.” Plus the gallery wall. Gallery walls were VERY Emily Henderson. My jeans communicate easiness (you see those rips don’t you?), my bare feet communicate casual comfort. I’m (super naturally) laughing which obviously communicates FUN.
When my sister showed me photo #1 though, I thought more about what sort of stuff I wanted to write on my future blog, and realized my performance needed to illustrate that I was cute (why?) but also that I was IMPERFECT and thus RELATABLE. It’s not lost on me that my knee-jerk instinct at the time was to make myself and my home look pretty in preparation for fashioning myself as someone who should communicate through the strength of her words not her performance of good femininity.
While the person in photo #1 looks like she’s having a great time and knows what she’s doing, I was still very much finding my footing as a new mother and, at the age of 34, still upsettingly unsure about who I wanted to be when I grew up. So if I was going to do the Mommy Blogger thing, I needed room to be profane, to be ugly, to be closer to the “real me” than photo #1 indicated.
Cue the laundry basket in the foreground and the additional pops of color by way of kids’ clothes on the couch. I kept the jeans but traded the NEON BRA for a sweater to communicate coziness instead of whatever the hell I was going for with the NEON BRA. And the champagne glass? I cringe to say that it was probably a nod to Mommy Wine Culture because in 2016, Mommy Wine Culture was synonymous with comedy and irreverence and like, broaching motherhood taboos. I wish this were not the case but I can’t tell a lie in an essay about the artistry of self performance!
So what came from my adventures as an aspiring Mommy Blogger? I eventually got a Wordpress situation up and running, and wrote a few pieces about attending my sister-in-law’s bachelorette party as an old married mommy; revisiting childhood experiences; helping one of my oldest friends with her entry into motherhood. I think I wrote about Nutella once. I posted photos like this on Instagram and used hashtags like #mybeautifulordinary. Or something.
At the same time, I started applying to writing workshops and began pitching outlets I had no business pitching. I ABSOLUTELY sent reputable media outlets my Emily Henderson application essay as though that was a rational thing to do, and honestly when I think about professional editors receiving such “pitches,” my level of shame has actually maxed out and I feel only awestruck at my intrepid naïveté. I was clueless. But I tried anyway.
I gradually became less clueless and my pitches began to resemble actual pitches rather than me politely asking Glamour editors to publish a personal essay about fucking paint colors by a nobody without any news hooks or any larger consideration of cultural issues.
My burgeoning career as a writer certainly necessitated performance, but I found I was a lot more comfortable performing dubious levels of authority via email than I was performing self-assurance as a mother, homemaker, and person via photos on my blog. I don’t know what I was trying to do when I posted stuff like this on Instagram and it shows. That I think tea is tasty and looks cozy when paired with sprigs of forget-me-not? So what?
The central issue with my Mommy Blogger performance was that it lacked specificity and my character’s motivations were entirely unclear. I had not done enough research. When my sister showed me some of the shots from our epic photo shoot, I found myself cringing or laughing with dismay. If I couldn’t fully commit to the performance, who would want to watch?
For the lucky few, selfhood might feel rooted in something immutable, something essential. But for the majority of us, particularly those of whose performances of selfhood tangentially or directly impact their livelihoods, selfhood is amorphous, ever-changing, and highly susceptible to external influence. That doesn’t mean we’re not real or authentic or worthy of respect. It just means that we’re still testing the validity of our performances. We’re still trying on various ways of being in the world in order to understand what might be worth keeping and what might be better left on the cutting room floor.
In an interview with Rachel Syme for The New Yorker, actor and comedian (and cohost of one of my favorite podcasts, Poog), Kate Berlant said this about artifice, performance, and selfhood.
I’m very interested in social performance, in performing ourselves and, when that performance fails, what happens? You see that just walking down the street. You see that interacting with anyone, whether they’re a performer or not. You see the performance, you see the cracks in it.
But the artifice stuff, I’m interested in that on a personal level in the way that I assume we all are, which is, like, “Who are we? What are we? What am I?” I took an acting class where this teacher would make you get in front of everyone and just look at everyone and ostensibly feel your defenses drop, or you would just be bare. I was, like, “This is the fakest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I would watch these gorgeous actors get up there and they would start crying and heaving, and everyone was, like, “She’s really going somewhere.” But then I was, like, “This is bullshit. This is crazy. What is this?” This idea of the supine vessel, and the text just washes over you? This idea of a core that we’re going to get to? You’re never going to get there. You’re never going to.
I’ve been in those acting classes! I’ve watched acting teachers praise students for screaming or bawling or contorting their bodies dramatically. And I’ve sat there feeling like there must be something for wrong with me for failing to “break through” to some sort of central core within myself by way of convulsions.
I’m still a girl who reads things I don’t fully understand. I’m still an actor. I’m still looking for reflections of myself through others’ eyes. I’m still a fan of tweed in theory despite my preference for sweatshirts IRL. I love a gallery wall. I am sometimes breezy. And sometimes I’m blank or blue or low or stilted or awkward. But because I’ve got so many selves inside of me, because I’ll never not be differentiating between various performances, I know I’m not cut out for roles that demand a certain level of consistency. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes that “good brands are immune to fundamental transformations.” Explaining her refusal to brand herself a certain way after her hugely popular first book, No Logo, Klein writes, “It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely.”
My doppelganger, Sara the Mommy Blogger, was never the “real me,” nor was she even a good performance of “me.” Instead, she was a mold I’d poured myself into as a way to access something unformed and unknown inside of myself. And when I look at the results of the Mommy Blogger photo shoot, I don’t see the potential for “fundamental transformation,” I just see someone following a script written by someone else. But the lines never sounded right coming from my mouth. And you know what? The “real me” never wear bras inside her own house. Much less neon ones.
In the spirit of Tuesday’s Very Silly Ballerina Farm ranking, here’s a ranking of my top five outtakes from the famed Mommy Blogger photo shoot. Least absurd to most absurd. Upgrade here for a peek into Sara the Mommy Blogger’s shadowy past.