The Mummy Bloggers

by Holly Wainwright

  Leisel now knew that money could buy something that was definitely worth having—time.

  That was something that she didn’t have. As she stared at the cursor blinking on a blank blog page, she wondered what she could write about when life was simultaneously frantic and boring.

  She’d been surprised to make the Blog-ahhs shortlist.

  Compared to the seductive slickness of The Stylish Mumma and Abi’s activism over at The Green Diva, Leisel’s blog was small fry. But the organisers had told her they liked The Working Mum’s authenticity, and that her audience, though smaller, was remarkably engaged. They were keen, their email read, to see what she could do in the next few months with a little more focus.

  A little more focus.

  Leisel had summoned all the confidence she could and filled out their questionnaire.

  DESCRIBE YOUR BLOG IN ONE WORD:

  Relatable.

  WHY DID YOU START BLOGGING?

  I had my first baby at 38. Life just hadn’t got it together for me before then, but once I was pregnant, I had so much to say and I found there were women all around me who were exactly the same—not the youngest parents, maybe with not-great support, who needed a place to share and vent. It’s been an extraordinary experience.

  WHO ARE YOUR READERS?

  Working mothers who aren’t ashamed.

  WHAT ARE YOUR MOST POPULAR POSTS?

  The ones I write at night before I go to sleep about all the things I have to do the next day. I think they alternately freak people out or inspire them. Perhaps both.

  HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH TROLLS?

  I wonder what it would be like to have so much hatred in your heart for someone you’ve never met. I try to have some empathy, and I’m attempting to grow a thick skin.

  WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO ASPIRING BLOGGERS?

  Only consider this a profession if: you have an independent source of income! No, seriously, you need to do it because you love it, not because you think it will set you free.

  IF YOU WIN BLOGGER OF THE YEAR, WHAT’S YOUR BIG IDEA TO DEVELOP WITH ATGT?

  I keep imagining a Work Wife network where women can share nannies, food, recipes, ideas and car pool. Like Uber, but for women with way too much on their plates. And I’ll have a holiday. A long one.

  It was all true. She did blog for the connection. She did blog to help women feel a little less alone. And now, she also blogged because she was addicted.

  The idea of taking a holiday actually made her laugh because, in fact, the last time they’d tried to have a peaceful family break, Leisel had spent much of it infuriating Mark by chasing wi-fi around the campground.

  On the third morning, he emerged from their cabin, rumpled and shirtless, to ask if she wanted to come back to bed—his cousin had taken the big kids to the beach and the baby was asleep. But Leisel had found a spot at the back of the property where, if you sat on the second branch of a tree, you’d get a strong-enough signal to check if your scheduled Facebook posts had gone out, and what mentions had come back in.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mark!’ she called. ‘I’ll be there in a moment. I’m just…’

  ‘This is the moment, Leisel. They’ll all be back soon. Are you kidding me about this? You’d rather be in the tree with your phone, than with me in a bed you didn’t have to make?’

  Leisel considered this question. Immediately, a post came to mind:

  When holiday sex just isn’t sexy anymore

  Before she answered Mark, she quickly tapped the title into her Notes app.

  ‘Fuck you, Leisel. Seriously, fuck you.’ The cabin door slammed as hard as a plywood door could. I’ll deal with that later, thought Leisel, rearranging herself on the branch.

  Leisel was addicted to the Likes, to seeing her modest followers growing, to watching engagement creep up. She was addicted to the emails from other working mums, but also from PRs wanting her to feature their products, to write about their family-fair days and BPA-free lunchboxes. She was beginning to see the potential in all of this.

  But some days, nothing much happened worth mentioning. Like today. It was 10 p.m., the flat was quiet, this was her window. She started typing.

  Groundhog Day

  When you’re out of bed on auto-pilot and it’s breakfast and lunchboxes and three-times ‘Brush your teeth!’. When it’s baby-food production and double-drop-off and stumble into the office just in time. When it’s meetings and lunchtime calls to the schoolmums about who’s picking up who for what tomorrow and that doctor’s appointment you should have made last week. Groundhog Day when it’s the bus and car to pick-up and home-time and two kinds of dinner. Homework and books and bath and three-times ‘Brush your teeth!’ and then it’s stories and cuddles and ‘Are they asleep yet?’ And it’s clean-up and washing-folding and talk-to-your-spouse time. Then it’s work emails and ‘are-the-uniforms-clean?’ and washing out the lunchboxes you were going to do three hours ago. Then it’s collapse and considering sex for five seconds before deciding sleep is better than sex, has been for six years, and then it’s down and out before you’re ready to do it all again…

  I’m not going to win the award with this, thought Leisel.

  The only blog-worthy thing to have happened that day was the one thing she didn’t want to write about.

  Leisel had been called over to Zac’s nook for the second time in a week—but this time, it wasn’t about her hours.

  It was about her troll.

  • • •

  When Leisel was a kid, a troll was a monster who lived under a bridge. Her father told her that the one under the Sydney Harbour Bridge was an enormous, many-tentacled sea creature that only came out at night. He convinced her that the New Year’s Eve Harbour fireworks had been invented as a warning ceremony to scare the monster away for another year. She believed him. She believed most things her father told her—he was a serious guy with a powerful imagination. Of course, the true curses of that story were that she’d been deadset terrified of crossing the Bridge for years and now she thought of her father every time she did. The fucker.

  In her adult life, the trolls were real. They lived in her computer, on her phone—and occasionally in her mailbox. That was why Zac had summoned her to his nook.

  ‘So… your blog,’ he said. He wasn’t getting any better at the eye contact. ‘It’s good that you have a hobby, but you’ve received a parcel, Leisel, and it’s… not a good one.’ He pushed a brown cardboard box across the desk.

  Leisel looked at it, her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘Open it, Leisel,’ said Zac.

  It was a cake box, she realised. A plain brown cake box. She lifted the edge with her index finger and peered inside.

  ‘Cupcakes?’ she asked. Sometimes PRs sent them to the magazine staff. Zac had called her in for cupcakes?

  ‘Look at them.’

  She lifted the lid right up. Thirteen cupcakes. And they were iced with letters that spelled out DIE WORKING MUM.

  ‘Oh.’ She’d received death threats before from trolls—but never on baked goods.

  ‘I wouldn’t eat those, if I were you,’ Zac said unnecessarily. ‘They were delivered to the front desk by a woman. All we know about her is that she’s short, around five feet, and was wearing a hooded jacket and sunglasses. She didn’t say anything to the receptionist.’

  Leisel’s stomach lurched. ‘Well, of course… I mean…’

  Zac closed the lid. ‘Now, obviously, Leisel, what you do in your spare time is up to you.’ He said ‘spare time’ with an accusatory edge that wasn’t lost on her, even though she hadn’t actually had any ‘spare time’ for five years. ‘But when the hatred that this little blog inspires spills over into your workplace—again—it becomes our business.’

  Leisel could tell that moments before she’d entered the nook, Zac had been on the phone to HR. There was no way that Millennial Man was prepped to have this kind of adult conversation without a script.

  ‘We will support and back you i
n any way we can, of course—’ definitely HR ‘—but your job here has nothing to do with what you write online, and it’s unfortunate that these… people… have decided that it does. We can defend you from work-related harassment, which we all have to endure in this business to a point—’ Leisel almost rolled her eyes, because Zac, as a man, actually had very little experience of that ‘—but this goes beyond that. And those phone calls were very disruptive to everyone who works here.’

  He was referring to the day a couple of months ago when the receptionist’s phone had rung every five minutes until they blocked the number, a woman’s voice demanding, ‘Where is The Working Mum?’ every time. The calls had come from an old-fashioned pay phone. At the time, Zac had said, ‘Leisel, surely these people shouldn’t know where you work.’

  But it was too late for her to hide her identity: The Working Mum had never been an anonymous blog. Leisel hadn’t considered, when she’d made that decision, that it would have any effect on her job—actually, she’d thought it would be a nice break from what she was used to dealing with. In her work life, she and many of her female colleagues were frequently insulted by angry readers, but back when she’d started blogging, she hadn’t considered her posts controversial or provocative enough to encourage trolls. Oh, to be so innocent.

  Leisel got to her feet and picked up the cake box. ‘Yes, Zac, I am the subject of harassment. Again. It is not my fault. Nor is it yours, and I know it’s unfortunate that you have to deal with this at all—but, to be perfectly honest, you’ve never experienced what lots of women have to deal with online on a daily basis.’ Sometimes, the best way to handle her young boss was to be very, very grown-up. ‘I’ve faced threats before and I am not going to stop writing because of some pathetic keyboard warriors. Hopefully this is the end of it, but if the harassment escalates, I will report it to the police. And I want to emphasise that the blog does not affect my work here—it’s very much an out-of-hours project.’

  She could see on Zac’s face that he thought she shouldn’t have enough out-of-hours time to work on anything, but he managed something like a smile. ‘Of course, Leisel, I know this must be hard for you. Good luck.’

  Leisel got back to her desk, opened the box and studied the cupcakes. She picked one up and broke off a piece. Inside, they were red. Blood red. Even Leisel, a woman of non-existent baking skills, could see that it would have taken a lot of time, effort and discipline to get all of the cakes the exact same size, not overspilling from their pretty daisy-print cases. The icing was a cheery pink and yellow. The letters that willed her to die were glossy and black. Her troll knew their way around an icing bag, clearly.

  Leisel lifted her phone, took a picture and wrote:

  A monster sent me these today.

  Then she hesitated.

  She was almost sure of the troll’s online identity—her most persistent and vicious abuse came from an account called The Contented Mum.

  This person, who, let’s face it, was probably a woman, had been trolling Leisel’s comments section for about a year, and lately she could be relied upon to provide the first post on anything Leisel wrote. It had begun to feel as if she was lying in wait.

  On a recent status update of Leisel’s about bringing home takeaway after a long day, The Contented Mum had written:

  How lazy do you have to be not to stir a few healthy ingredients together for your own children at the end of the day? You are neglecting those kids and don’t deserve their love.

  On a photo of several overflowing baskets of washing, waiting to be folded on a Sunday night, she’d said:

  Someone should take those kids away from you, give them to a mother who loves them enough not to complain about having to look after them, you ungrateful bitch.

  And on a long post about how increased paid maternity leave might encourage women to stay in the workplace, she’d written:

  You disgust me. You shouldn’t need to be paid to stay at home with your baby. It should be the first and last priority in your life. Your children would be better off without you.

  Leisel pictured The Contented Mum as a crazed 1950s-style housewife, complete with apron and lipstick. Baking her hatred for Leisel and all working mothers into cupcakes way beyond their domestic skill-set seemed perfect for her.

  Whatever Leisel wrote about the cupcakes, this troll and any others would read it and revel in the reaction. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She put her phone away.

  • • •

  That night, the cakes were still on Leisel’s mind. Ordinarily, she didn’t tell Mark about the abuse she copped online—she knew it only irritated him. But tonight, she needed to vent. Leaning against the kitchen bench while he dug around in a drawer for the kids’ dinner forks, she told him, ‘The troll’s back. They sent me some death-wish cupcakes at work today.’

  Mark looked up. ‘They sent you what?’

  ‘A box of cupcakes, telling me to die.’ She decided not to mention the blood-red filling.

  ‘That’s fucked up, Leisel. You’ve got to tell the police.’

  ‘What will they do? I don’t think it’s illegal to send baked goods.’

  ‘It’s illegal to send death threats.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it wasn’t quite a threat, more of a wish…’ Her attempt at humour fell flat, judging by Mark’s expression. ‘Look, this kind of thing comes with the territory. And can you imagine the response I’d get from the police? I’d be laughed out of the station.’

  ‘What if the cakes were full of rat poison?’

  ‘I didn’t eat them, I just chucked them out! No one would have been mad enough to eat them. It would have been pointless to put poison in them. Anyway—’ she smiled, trying to keep it light ‘—the troll’s probably got it out of their system now.’

  ‘I don’t even understand what you’ve done to upset them. It’s not like you’re vicious online.’

  ‘No, but they think I complain too much. Parenthood’s a breeze, remember?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right.’ Mark smiled back at her, the evidence of a day spent with a non-verbal baby written in the wrinkles around his eyes. ‘Easy-peasy.’

  And they went out to feed the kids together.

  Now, sitting at her laptop, Leisel chose not to write about that part of her day. She’d tried engaging with the people who abused her online. She’d tried blocking and ignoring them. She’d asked other bloggers what they did, and everyone’s answer was a variation on ‘grow a thick skin’. She was working on it.

  So tonight, ‘Groundhog Day’ it was. She pushed publish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ABI

  Abi was deeply shitty about the fact that the kombucha hadn’t brewed in time.

  How hard is it to get your shit together in time for a visit from the neo-peasant high-priestess? #kombuchafail #kids #peasantlife

  As each finger whacked the iPhone screen, there was a tiny, satisfying thud.

  She hadn’t tagged in today’s famous guest—that would just alert her to the mess of disorganisation she was walking into. But Abi was pretty sure that Shannon Smart followed her anyway. Oh well.

  ‘Muuuum! You’re STOMPING,’ yelled Arden from her and Alex’s room. ‘Stop it. I’m trying to read in here.’

  ‘Shannon Smart’s on her way to the farm, Arden,’ Abi yelled back. ‘The kombucha didn’t ferment. And the cupboards are bare. How fucking self-sufficient is that, do you think?’

  ‘Go to the FUCKING shops, Mum,’ came the high-volume reply from her fourteen-year-old. ‘Shannon Smart doesn’t give a SHIT about your kombucha.’

  That was probably true, Abi had to admit. Shannon bottled almost a million-dollars-worth of her own kombucha a year. It might have been more appropriate to have a few bottles of that on hand.

  Where the hell was Grace? Didn’t she know how important today was? Abi leant out of the window, looking around. It was a ‘school’ day, so Grace was probably off somewhere with Sol, lecturing him about bugs or wombats
or some shit.

  Even through her stress, the view from the house never failed to delight Abi. Coming outside every morning and sitting on the deck with a big mug of tea made her feel calm in a way that she didn’t remember from her old life. The tree-change had been, hands-down, the best of all the big decisions made during the great family crash of 2012.

  Such a huge one at the time. And there had been so many questions. Did the girls need any more upheaval? Would changing schools be the worst thing for them? What about their friends in the city?

  But one weekend in the middle of all the drama, Abi and Grace and the kids had driven up to Daylesford (they’d had to take two cars in those days). As they wound their way through the beautiful scenery, it had seemed to Abi that if change was in the air, maybe it was better—as her English grandmother would have said—to be hung for a sheep as a lamb. In other words, if you’re going to change everything, change everything.

  ‘GRAAAACE!’ Abi wailed out of the window. ‘Graaaaaaaaaacey! I need you.’

  ‘This isn’t Little House on the Prairie, Mum,’ Arden yelled. ‘Ring her fucking phone.’

  Too true, you little smart-arse, thought Abi. But Grace’s phone rang out. Abi would just have to deal with the catering issues herself. She had ninety minutes before Shannon Smart was meant to arrive. Town was fifteen minutes away.

  Once upon a time, Shannon had been a TV presenter, working for a national network on one of those inane morning shows. She was on the cover of Woman’s Say every second week: PREGNANT! DIVORCED! ENGAGED! PREGNANT AGAIN! She spent almost twenty years interviewing celebrities and hosting the Logies red carpet and laughing at her co-host’s jokes, wearing unfeasibly tight day dresses while balancing, knees-together, on the edge of a white couch. She never was pregnant.

  And then, one day, Shannon blew it all up. She vanished in a flurry of BREAKDOWN! headlines and rumours of struggles with booze, drugs, even Scientology. But it was much more confusing than that. Shannon, when she reappeared on Sunday Evening two years later, had gone off the grid—she had gone ‘crunchy’.