You are the reason I started #greydays, a campaign sharing our real stories and organizing meetups IRL for us to talk about our battles with the blue-hued moments of motherhood. Not to mention that a portion of the profits from all #greydays merchandise we sell goes toward helping open up the conversation around maternal mental health.
If I were to describe what I do now, would you hate me if I said “multi-hyphen mama”? It’s definitely a job title that confuses poor old Joyce from next door. She understands what Papabare does—he writes novels. But me? Influencer is such an awful word, isn’t it? Cheerleader? Encourager? Impacter? Who knows? And really, who cares? I just go about my business, sharing my unfiltered family life and hopefully starting a more authentic discussion about parenting.
I built this brand on honesty, and I’ll always tell it like it is.
Dan
Bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.
Because I have heard Emmy give this same little talk so many times now, I usually don’t even notice anymore what a weird farrago of inventions and elisions and fabrications and half-truths it is. What a seamless mixture of things that could have happened (but didn’t) and things that did happen (but not like that) and events that she and I remember very differently (to say the least). For some reason, tonight is different. For some reason, tonight, as she is talking, as she is telling the room her story, a story that is also to a considerable extent our story, I find myself trying to keep count of how many of the things Emmy is saying are exaggerated or distorted or completely blown out of proportion.
I give up about three minutes in.
I should probably make one thing clear. I am not calling my wife a liar.
The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt famously differentiates between lies and bullshit. Lies, he claims, are untruths deliberately intended to deceive. Bullshit, on the other hand, comes about when someone has no real interest in whether or not something they are saying is true or false at all. Example: My wife has never fashioned a breast pad from a Happy Meal wrapper. I doubt she has ever been anywhere near a Happy Meal. We don’t live next door to a Joyce. Emmy was, if the photographs at her mum’s house are to be believed, a slim, strikingly attractive teenager.
Perhaps there comes a time in every marriage when you start fact-checking each other’s anecdotes in public.
Perhaps I am just in a funny mood tonight.
There is certainly no denying that my wife is good at what she does. Amazing, actually. Even after all the times I have seen her get up and do her thing—at events like this all over the country, in village halls, in bookshops, in coffee shops and coworking spaces from Wakefield to Westfield—even knowing what I know about the relationship of most of what she is saying to anything that ever actually happened, there is no denying her ability to connect with people. To raise a laugh of recognition. When she gets to the part about the gin in the tin, there is a woman in the back row howling. She is a very relatable individual, my wife. People like her.
Her agent will be glad she got the bit about grey days in. Excuse me. Hashtag grey days. I noticed at least three people wearing the sweatshirt as we were coming in earlier, the blue one with #greydays and a Mamabare logo on the back and the slogan GRIN AND BARE IT on the front. The Mamabare logo, by the way, is a drawing of two breasts with a baby’s head in between them. Personally I would have gone for the other logo, the one of the maternal teddy bear and cub. I was overruled. This is one of the reasons why I have always resisted Emmy’s suggestions that I should wear one of those things myself when I come along to this kind of event, why mine always turns out to have been accidentally left back at the house—in another bag, say, or in the dryer, or on the stairs, where I had put it out so I would definitely not forget it this time. You have to draw the line somewhere. Some fan, some follower, would inevitably ask for a photo with both of us and post it immediately on their Instagram feed, and I have no interest in being captured online forever in a sweatshirt with breasts on it.
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.