by Ellery Lloyd
I used to think it was all quite romantic, to be honest.
The truth is, we were probably both pretty insufferable in those days. I imagine most young lovers are.
I can vividly recall announcing to my mother over the phone (I was wandering around the flat in a towel at the time, wet-haired, holding a cigarette, looking for a lighter) that I had met my soulmate.
Emmy was like no one else I had ever met. She is still unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Not just the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on but the funniest, the cleverest, the sharpest, the most ambitious. One of those people you know you need to be on your best form to keep up with. One of those people you want to impress. One of those people who get every reference before you have even finished making it, who have that magic that makes everyone else in a room recede into the distance. Who have you saying things you’ve never told anyone within two hours of meeting them. Who change the way you look at life. Half the weekend we used to spend in bed, the other half in the pub. We would eat out at least three nights a week, at pop-up restaurants serving Middle Eastern small plates or at modern barbecue joints that don’t take reservations. We went out dancing on Wednesday nights and did karaoke on Sunday afternoons. We went on city breaks—to Amsterdam, to Venice, to Bruges. We dragged our hangovers out for 5K runs, laughing and shoving each other along when one of us started to flag. When we weren’t out in the evening, we used to spend ages together in the bath, with our books and a bottle of red wine, occasionally topping up our glasses or the hot water.
“Things can only go downhill from here,” we used to joke.
It all seems a very long time ago now.
Emmy
You know that thing that middle-class women do the day before their cleaner arrives? Running around the house, picking up the most embarrassing bits off the floor, giving the bathroom a wipe, putting stuff in piles, so the place isn’t quite such a mortifying mess?
I don’t do that. Never have. I mean, obviously, we have a cleaner who comes twice a week, but our house is usually tidy. It was tidy before we had children, and it is tidy now. Toys go away before bedtime. Storybooks are back on the shelf. Piles on the stairs are not allowed. No mugs on the countertop. Socks left on the floor get thrown away.
Which means the hours before a camera crew arrives for a shoot are always spent untidying. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking empty pizza boxes and unwashed pants—just a light dusting of knitted dinosaurs, Lego bricks and talking unicorns, a two-day-old newspaper lying here, a collapsed cushion fort there, and some single shoes in awkward places. It takes effort to calibrate just the right level of chaos, but dirty isn’t aspirational and perfect isn’t relatable. And Mamabare is nothing if not relatable.
I can only tackle the mess making, of course, after I’ve seen to my social media feeds. It’s not a routine Dan’s especially keen on, but Bear is his responsibility for the first hour of each day because I need both hands and my whole brain to catch up on what has happened overnight.
Prime posting time is after the kids go to bed, when my million followers have poured their first glass of wine and dived headfirst into a scroll hole instead of summoning the energy to talk to their husbands. So that’s when I schedule my seemingly off-the-cuff, in-the-moment, but actually prephotographed, already-written posts. Last night’s was a photo of me with a sheepish grin, standing against a yellow wall, pointing at my feet in trainers that were clearly two halves of separate pairs, with a screaming Bear strapped to my front in the sling that, for some reason, he hates with a passion. It was accompanied by a description of being so sleep-deprived I’d left the house that morning with my sweatshirt on backward and one pink Nike and one green New Balance on my feet, and a cool east London kid on the number thirty-eight bus telling me approvingly that I looked fresh.
It certainly could have happened. I write in the style of honesty, so it’s useful if there’s a small grain of truth in my posts. My husband is the novelist, not me—I just can’t seem to manage total fiction. I need a little spark from real life to fire up my imagination to craft an anecdote that sounds plausibly authentic. I also find it’s easier to keep track of my maternal misadventures that way, to avoid contradicting myself, which is important when I need to wheel the same stories out in interviews, panel talks, and personal appearances.
In this case, there was no cool kid, no mismatched trainers, and no public transport. I had just nearly nipped to Tesco with my cardigan on inside out.
I ended the post by asking my followers what their own most sleep-deprived mum moment is—it’s a classic engagement trick, pushing them to post a response. And of course, the higher the engagement, the more brands are prepared to pay you to flog their wares.
Overnight, I’ve got 687 comments and 442 DMs, all of which I need to acknowledge or reply to. Some days this takes longer than others—if there’s a depressed mother who seems dangerously unhappy, or one at her wits’ end with a colicky baby who screams nonstop, I take care to send something personal, something kind. It’s tough to know what to say in a situation like that, having never been through it, but I can’t bring myself to leave these women hanging when it seems like everyone else in their lives has.
Hi, Tanya, I type. I know it’s so hard when they just cry, cry, cry. Is little Kai teething? Coco really suffered when her front two came through. Gnawing on a frozen banana seemed to help, or have you tried those powders? Promise me you’ll look after you too, mama—can you nap when he naps? You will get through it and I’m with you all the way.
My reply is seen instantly, almost like tinytanya_1991 has been staring at her phone ever since she hit send, and I can see that she is already typing her reply as I move on to the next message.
You are NOT a terrible mother, Carly, and you must never doubt that your little one loves you. You really should talk to someone, though: a doctor? Your mum? Maybe take a walk to a café and have a chat with the waitress. I’m sending you a link to a help line too.
The message sends, but is unread. On to the next.
Oh, Elly, you are too kind, and of course I recognize you from last week’s event. My sweatshirt is from Boden—amazing to hear it even looks great the wrong way around.
I’m not quite sure how I manage it, but today I’m done and showered within my allotted hour and can hear Dan loitering at the bedroom door, no doubt counting down the seconds, from 6:58 a.m.
In addition to all the usual things I need to get up and deal with, today I also have to think about what to wear for the shoot. The Mamabare look is one that my husband once described as “children’s TV presenter minus puppet badger.” A lot of printed dresses, bright slogan T-shirts, jumpsuits. The wardrobe selection process is a bit painful due to the extra weight I put on when I was pregnant with Coco and could never lose because snapping back to a size eight would be so off-brand.
So a jaunty skirt it is; this one is green and covered in tiny lightning bolts. My yellow T-shirt says MY SUPERPOWER IS PARENTING. I know, I know. But what can I do? So many brands send me their matching slogan tees, Coco and I have to wear them occasionally.
I’ve been desperate to get my roots done, but I knew this shoot was coming up, and there was also last night’s talk. Too sleek, and it won’t sit well with my followers, so an inky part and a two-day-old blow-dry it is. I give it a quick brush then tease a lock so it stands out at almost ninety degrees from the side of my head. That rogue strand has been featuring heavily on my Instastories this week (“Argh! I can’t do a thing with it! Anyone else have one stubborn piece of hair with a mind of its own?!”). I now have a spare room full of lotions and potions to help plaster it down—as well as ten thousand pounds from Pantene, whose new product will prove to be the solution to my hair woes.
When you make such a big deal out of only ever flogging products you actually use, you have to create ever more elaborate scenarios in which they’re necessary.
Coco has been sitting quietly in her bedroom throughout,
propped up in front of her iPad watching something involving flowers, castles, and glitter. I pull the T-shirt that matches mine (MY MAMA HAS SPECIAL POWERS!) out of her chest of drawers and hold it up.
“What do you think about wearing this today, Cocopop? It’s the same as Mummy’s one,” I say, tucking a soft blond curl behind her ear and giving her a peck on the forehead as I breathe in her powdery scent.
She takes off her pink headphones, pops the iPad on the bed beside her, and tilts her head.
“What do all the words say, Mummy?”
“Do you want to try reading it, pickle?” I smile.
“M-y . . . m-a-m-a . . . h-a-s . . . ,” she says slowly. “I can’t do the rest, Mama.”
“Well done! So, so clever. It says, ‘My Mama Has a Beautiful Crown.’” I smile, helping her down from the bed. “And you know what that means, Coco? If Mama is a queen with a crown, that makes you . . .”
“A PRINCESS!” she squeals.
To tell the truth, Coco’s princess obsession is a bit inconvenient, content-wise. Obviously, the modern mama party line is that pink stinks. They’re all meant to be rebel girls and little feminists-in-training, but my daughter is firmly in the fairy queen camp—so unless I want a screaming meltdown on my hands, that’s what she gets. Or at least that’s what she thinks she’s got. Luckily, she can’t read that well yet.
“Now, would you like to help me with a very important, secret job?” I ask her, giving her a handful of blueberries, which she absentmindedly starts popping into her mouth.
“What is it, Mama?”
“We are going to make some mess!” I whoop, scooping her up off the bed and carrying her downstairs.
I supervise as she makes, and then kicks down, a tower of velvet scatter cushions. We fling a few teddies at the radiator, send some storybooks skidding across the parquet, and scatter pieces of wooden jigsaw puzzle on the floor. I am laughing so hard at her utter delight in destroying the living room that I only notice just in time that she has my three-wick Diptyque candle in both hands and is about to chuck it at the fireplace.
“Okay, pickle, let’s put that one down, shall we? Job done in here, I think,” I say, putting the candle on a high shelf. “Shall we go and find your tiara upstairs to finish that outfit off?”
Gold plastic tiara located under her bed, I kneel down to Coco’s height, look her in the eyes, and hold both her hands. “Some people are coming to talk to Mummy now, and take some photos. You’re going to be a good girl and smile for them, aren’t you? You can do some magic princess twirls for the camera!”
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 T-shirts 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.
I still find it astonishing how upset some people get about social media and the picture-perfect unattainability they think it promotes; how smugly people point out, as if they’ve cracked the Rosetta stone, that influencers’ lives probably aren’t all that great beneath the filter. Novels are written about it, endless broadsheet opinion pieces, bad movies dedicated to perfect online lives that are actually crumbling behind the scenes, appearances kept up only for the lucrative ads. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that it might happen the other way around.
Even prettier in the flesh than on Instagram, Emmy Jackson hurtles down the stairs of her Georgian town house in an increasingly fashionable area of east London with a flurry of apologies: “Ignore these awful roots; I just haven’t had the time to sort them out since baby Bear arrived. I’m so sorry for the mess—finding a cleaner is on my to-do list! I hope you’ve brought the camera that drops a dress size as I’m ninety-eight percent cake at the minute!”
She curls her bare feet up under her on the mustard velvet sofa as we chat. Her daughter, Coco, a cute three-year-old with a mop of blond curls and a face familiar to aficionados of Emmy’s social media feeds (on which she has been appearing since the day she was born), is happily bouncing on the seat next to her. The new baby, Bear—“We made a list of characteristics we wanted him to have, and then listed animals we associated with those characteristics”—is in Emmy’s arms. She tells me that in the first five weeks of his life, his pictures have already been liked over two million times. Beneath a layer of toys, scattered craft materials, and discarded crayons, the living room is elegantly appointed. Her broodingly handsome husband, Dan, a writer, stands at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, idly turning the pages of his own novel and occasionally chuckling to himself.
