Amanda Montei | Vox

The best $210 I ever spent: My sobriety

2023-01-04T18:05:58-05:00

There is footage of me as a middle school girl in Los Angeles that aired nationally in the late ’90s. In the clip, which was part of a Candid Camera gotcha segment, the comedian Richard Lewis and I sit alone at a long rectangular table in an unused room on campus, a map of the solar system hanging behind us. He tells me he has analyzed me and determined I will grow up to work as a manufacturer of waste disposals. While in front of Lewis — a tall self-assured man, telling me who I could be — I shrug, as if to say, “Seems reasonable.” My frame is cowed, hands in lap, lips pursed in consideration of the news, eyes dead, a little sad. I bow to male authority. I look as though I’m folding in on myself.

When Lewis leaves, however, my entire body unlocks. I make an animated face of disbelief, and later tell a friend who visits me in the room where I’ve been cloistered by producers what Lewis said. I do so with an admirable amount of gumption.

In the beginning, that unlocking is what drinking felt like. I took my first tequila shots as a freshman in high school, only a few years after that video was shot, to put myself in that supplicating state around boys, but also to access that salty girl, the one who came out when I could no longer feel the energy of male power in the room, pressing into my throat. I didn’t go into manufacturing, but I did become a writer and an academic, which meant I was always surrounded by those who used substances to find their way in or out of their bodies. By the spring of 2020, now a wine mom, I was eyeing an expensive online program for those who wanted to “rethink” their drinking.

I applied for a scholarship to the program on July 2, just missing the window for Dry July, but it was fine, I had a birthday coming up anyway! I was on unemployment, having lost work in the pandemic, so I requested as much financial assistance as possible. I got word a week later that I would receive a 75 percent scholarship for the program. This meant I would only be responsible for paying $70 three times over the course of one year, instead of the nearly $1,000 annual price tag paid by top-tier members who are unfunded. I planned to stop drinking after that birthday.

I found the progressive, for-profit recovery program after buying a popular book that took a feminist approach to addiction. The book drew on research and work that has been happening in addiction and recovery spaces for years but used jaunty language and a personal story to make brain science and concepts like harm reduction colloquial, accessible, relevant.

I read the book in a matter of days. I could feel the dread that had always circled around the prospect of quitting peeling off me. The program I joined soon after had been founded by the book’s author and had a website that was chic and modern. It did exactly what the book suggested sobriety culture needed to do: It rebranded recovery.

With my membership, I got themed and curated educational content — videos and readings, but also meditations and virtual meeting options organized around various identity groups. The mission eschewed rock-bottom narrative arcs and heavy labels like “alcoholic” in exchange for lemon water, affirmations, and self-care practices. But I was not as reproving as I sound now. I was in need.

Everything about the program had an inclusive, safe-space ambiance, including the community forum, a social platform for members. I found a familiar private succor in the message boards. They reminded me of forums I had prowled in new motherhood. I didn’t have to show up as a whole person there — or maybe I arrived whole, in a way I couldn’t in daily life. I could just slip into the space as an anyone and say what I needed to say. It wasn’t quite the anonymity that I liked or needed, but rather the disembodiment that came with the internet exchanges. I carried guilt about the many years I had spent drinking — I am a woman and a mother, I always feel I am to blame for everything — but also, I didn’t feel that way at all. I could see addiction happening all around me and felt generally unseen by pathology frameworks. Wanting too much of anything just seemed like a logical outgrowth of a culture that preaches overconsumption.

And I had grown up around it: Not long after I started drinking, when I was a teenager, I Mapquested my first Al-Anon meeting, which I walked to using my little printed pages as a guide. The meeting was held in a school down the street from the house I shared with my single mother, who was struggling with addiction. Years later, she got sober by committing to the 12 steps. Before long, her world — and so my world — was ruled by AA chips and moralizing decrees related to powerlessness and disease. Addiction, she told me, ran in our blood; she was asked to repent and began to see the world as bifurcated into normies and drunks. Her abstinence seemed, to me but also often to her, like a kind of damnation. I had helped get her into treatment, so I wanted her to be well, but I also hated seeing her like that, living in shame.

My mother got sober when I was in my 20s, so I had spent a long time turning over my issues with AA by the time I invested in my recovery a decade and a half later. I knew AA had helped many people: It was free and decidedly not-for-profit; meetings provided community and recognition. But its membership seemed to come with a misdirected indignity, especially for those who fell off the wagon or had addictions to other substances.

My drinking felt so clearly contextual, conditioned by the performance of sexuality that was requested of me young, which told me to accommodate and satisfy men’s voices and desires. It had been about not letting the labor of gender show, that work I learned even before I learned to drink, work that had made my body — and the voice that emerged from it — timid, stilted, glitchy, untrustworthy.

Moving within a recovery space online, I didn’t have to worry about how I presented. One of the central tenets of the program was that many of us are led to addiction not simply because we are powerless against one integrally addictive substance (obviously we are), but because our bodies are also shaped by the world we move through. We are often made to feel powerless and get high to help with that feeling. This was an idea I was willing to pay to identify with.

We are often made to feel powerless and get high to help with that feeling. This was an idea I was willing to pay to identify with.

But it was often hard to tease the language of recovery from the language of wellness. Sometimes, all the mantras about staying present and releasing myself from the grip of alcohol felt no different from messages I had placed bets on before, when I had toyed with other forms of temperance. Ever since I was a girl, I had been through many ideological cycles with respect to what I put in my body and what I tried to get out of it. I had tried a variety of restrictive diets, most of which included prohibitions against alcohol (it felt like an impossible ask, but I nevertheless decorated my house with sticky notes and refrigerator reminders). Once, I vowed to do push-ups every day for a month (made it, like, a couple days?). I failed every 30-day challenge to which I dedicated a Pinterest board. Even the three-day cleanses ended in disappointment.

I was searching, even then, through the spectacle of self-optimization, for some balm for my wounds, the discomfort I felt living in my body. I knew what I was taking in. I could see capitalism grabbing me, shaking me as if to say, “You can be well! I swear it! Just try this one more thing!” But what can I say? For those of us who have been made to feel impure or unraveled, the promise that we can be clean is a hard one to snub.

When I joined the recovery program, I didn’t want to get clean. Or maybe I did. Maybe I still thought I could or needed to. Either way, by then, AA had taken a shape of its own in my mind. I wanted alcohol completely out of my life, but I knew the emphasis on submission, and on complete abstinence or bust, was useful for many, not all. I needed something else.

I didn’t want to be that cowed girl, doomed by male authority to forever perform work in which I found no pleasure. I wanted the sheen of an unstructured journey, one in which I could falter and not be made to view it as faltering, others lifting me up with slogans that reminded me I wasn’t forgoing indulgence forever but seeking it in a way I never had before. I liked those perspectives. They felt true. And I was beginning to see that choosing to no longer dissolve one’s body feels like that: like locating what makes you fall apart and what holds you together.

On occasion, I turned to content outside my program to help with the cognitive dissonance of living in a world bathed in booze, but I couldn’t quite make sense of the “new sobriety.” At least what I saw as the depressing disease model of AA had a literary quality to it, a melancholic’s gothic glaze. There was nothing incredibly literary about scrolling through sparkling memes about how fun sobriety is on Instagram. I liked not feeling hungover, truly, but the world I seemed to be entering felt very “living my best life.”

Back inside the warm pocket of my program’s community page, everything felt simpler, and more complicated. No one who shared their stories, their uncertainties, was willing to settle. And though the stories they told were about themselves, they weren’t individualistic. One element of the wellness revolution that was missing from the discourse on the boards was all the talk of willpower. Without bodies, it seemed, everyone showed up shapeless, and there was a lot of encouragement and support between members around simply existing this way, as lumps, flesh and minds trying to live with and among others, amid the grief of living at all right now. We weren’t fitting ourselves into steps or paradigms or even social graces. I cleansed myself with that ordinary language of survival and all the speculative suggestions about how to make a life that felt less like suffering.

I was often preoccupied, though, by the knowledge that I was moving within a virtual community to which only folks of a certain income bracket could belong, while those who couldn’t afford glossy private treatment were regularly turned out on the streets, abandoned, or offered the disease model I had the ability to shirk. This underlined what had led me to the program, and maybe addiction, in the first place: the painful knowledge that everything — including the ease we feel in our bodies — is up for sale. That’s what capitalism does, too: It provides the good life to some, then rewrites our collective failure to care for all as individual shortcomings.

That’s what capitalism does: It provides the good life to some, then rewrites our collective failure to care for all as individual shortcomings

I could see others in the program were pensive with this awareness, too. There were plenty of folks on the community boards pushing back against the program’s model, especially as the space became, over time, more corporate. As we witnessed high employee turnover and some quieting of dissent in the boards, some left, many stayed, fighting for their lives. I stayed, ambivalently, feeling culpable for not putting my money elsewhere, toward those who might need it more, or toward upending the systems that cast aside those who struggle. I knew I had not yet solved the unsolvable problem of how to live in a body, so I continue to shell out $15 a month to pop in and out of forums and online meetings now and then to remind myself that, yes, it’s a journey, but also one that no one can walk alone.

Sometimes, I suppose, we must move in spaces that are imperfect to save ourselves because all the spaces made available to us, at least at this moment, are imperfect. Obviously, one can’t purchase sobriety or any ongoing relationship with wellness, with the body, even if we are told constantly that we can, and even if one can throw money in that general direction. But paying to rewrite the script I inherited feels so much more sensible than the hundreds of dollars I spent trying to shape my body into what others told me it should be.

Amanda Montei is a writer and educator living in California. She is working on her next book, a memoir about care and consent.

How American parents became obsessed with gender

2024-04-25T12:33:05-04:00

When I was pregnant with my first child, I agonized over my decision to find out the sex. I knew that anatomy does not indicate gender identity, but I was also impatient, ready for some forecast, however unreliable, of what the future might hold for me as a mother. Having grown up as a girl in America, I knew what gendered wars I might be up against if I were to have a daughter. I wanted to prepare myself for the fight. At my second-trimester ultrasound, I decided to find out.

But then things got weird. Nancy, the bubbly sonogram technician, projected the inside of me on a screen that covered an entire wall, dimming the lights, like we were in a movie theater. She kept saying, “That’s a cute baby!” I had no idea what she was looking at as she furiously clicked and numbered and measured different parts of the fuzzy gray blob on the screen. With much excitement, she proclaimed the fetus was a girl. She then printed a three-foot ream of black-and-white pictures, each with an unidentifiable area circled, which she folded and tucked into a white envelope with gold writing that reminded me, again, It’s a Girl!

It felt like I was supposed to do something with this information. I had never entertained the idea of throwing a gender reveal party, but I still surfed ideas on Pinterest. In one image I found, a couple stood, hands interlocked. Their white clothing, faces, and arms were splattered with pink from a staged paint fight, just one shade away from looking like they committed a murder together. But as I shared the news, there was a lot of excitement that did not line up with how I felt: After receiving one too many frilly infant dresses with animal prints, I quickly prohibited family and friends from giving me gendered clothing. I wondered how I had been sucked into such a clear affirmation of the gender binary.

American parents love fetal genitalia. This has become more evident with the number of gender reveal parties increasing steadily over the past decade. Usually, it’s more extreme ones that make the news: Such parties have already caused at least four deaths this year, and one burned over 7,000 acres of my home state of California in 2020. Many more go off with less of a bang, like the couple I found on Pinterest getting silly-stringed by friends as the parents kissed, tangled in their boy kid bliss. There are more than 500,000 videos on YouTube like these. It’s safe to say these parents are a little less conflicted about their sonograms than I was.

Some parents revel in knowing their child’s gender because many still believe prenatal sex is an early indicator of a child’s character. Pregnancy is such a strange state of suspension, any scrutable glimpse of the future is attractive. As Christy Olezeski, director of the Yale Gender Program told me, finding out a child’s prenatal sex can feel like “solving a mystery, a piece of comfort and a way to have an answer about a being [parents] have yet to know and learn about.”

Ultrasounds satiate that parental curiosity, but they also stoke it. Maybe this is why even parents like myself, who don’t identify as the type to photograph themselves on a deserted road consumed by a bubblegum-pink smoke grenade, cannot help but hem and haw over the decision of whether to find out the fetus’s sex before birth. For pregnant people, the politics of navigating the ultrasound, and the insight it promises, has become its own rite of passage, and it comes with some coercion.

“There is so much pressure from society,” Olezeski said, “to know the sex of the fetus.”

I spoke with nearly 30 parents about their choice to learn their baby’s sex in pregnancy or wait. Some simply wanted to know the sex of their child before birth for practical reasons, like Jenny who identifies as an Ashkenazi Jew. She needed time to prepare for circumcision. She also felt waiting would make the final reveal a bigger deal in the minds of family members, something she wanted to avoid.

Those who had previously experienced reproductive losses or complications, meanwhile, thought finding out the sex of their baby could provide something beyond medical data, that knowing might lend some certainty to their budding story. Bronwen, a writer then living in the Bay Area, told me she created a whole “pro-con matrix,” analyzing the benefits and downsides of waiting or not. Ultimately, she found out at her ultrasound, hoping it would relieve some of the anxiety she felt after multiple miscarriages. Learning the sex represented “a kind of investment” rather than the “self-protective ‘this is a science experiment’” approach she had taken previously.

Co-founder of MotherNation Cait Zogby said she and her wife planned not to find out the sex before birth, but when Zogby learned she was pregnant with twins, she and her partner “very comically regressed to the reptilian part of the brain that needed to be reassured of survival. Knowing everything we could about who was in there gave us a sense of control,” however false, she said. She and her wife knew that sex did not correlate to gender, but Zogby was struggling with perinatal depression and felt naming — using family names that happened to be very gendered — was “an added avenue for connection.”

This idea that the revelation of a baby’s sex can feel like a surprise — welcome or not — is something I heard from many mothers, including those who waited for the big reveal until their baby was born. A Christian mother of four whose husband works in the church told me, “I think it just feels more special waiting longer,” that feeling of “holding your child with the news” is better “than simply being told.”

When I was pregnant, other women who opted to “wait” to find out the “gender” often repeated to me a similar line as a way to encourage me to do the same: “It is one of the last great surprises in life!” I was troubled by this rationale, which implies there are only two choices: early gratification or delayed. And what exactly is the revelation here? This logic seems to assume that to know the biological sex is to crown the baby as a person. But what does it say about our understanding of personhood that we feel the urge to assign a baby a gender before we can imagine them as human? And why are we so desperate for connection this early in the long game of parenting?

Our cultural obsession with attempting to identify sex and gender in pregnancy all goes back to the ultrasound, itself born of the sonar technology used to surveil U-boats in World War I and developed further in the next World War. By the 1980s, the surveillance of pregnant people’s bodies had become routine medical practice, as the technology allowed doctors to check for congenital and placental issues. But it also nurtured another embryonic idea: the new vision of the fetus as child.

The ultrasound eventually commingled with capitalism and mainstream psychology to create the color-coded gendered consumerism that has likewise become routine in America. For centuries, white dresses and long hair were the norm for kids under 6 in most Western countries; white clothes were easy to bleach. In the early 20th century, American clothing companies pushed pastels — debating blue for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed ones, among other arrangements — and by the 1940s, manufacturers and retailers had arbitrarily settled on pink for girls and blue for boys. In the 1980s, clothing corporations saw the information parents gleaned from the sonogram as a chance to expand into a catalog of not just apparel but matching baby gear. Late capitalism took it from there.

The ultrasound also forever transformed the way we think about maternal bonding. In her book The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram, Janelle Taylor says the idea that the sonogram could help pregnant women learn to love their babies was initially based on a 1982 study led by ultrasound advocate Stuart Campbell, even though the word “bonding” never appears in his study. The study instead examined how the sonogram “influences compliance with health-care recommendations” and how it might change women’s “ambivalent attitudes” about pregnancy. (Interestingly, the study excluded women who were considered high risk, which Taylor suggests shows that the medical community had other interests besides improving maternal health.)

The Campbell study came on the heels of a decade of heated abortion debate. A year later, an unsupported opinion letter written to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine — which suggested that ultrasounds might help women bond with their babies and therefore decide not to abort — further shifted the frame of maternal health, inadvertently spoon-feeding anti-abortionists a new tactic. The wider medical community also began referencing the NEJM letter as a “study” that provided proof of the ultrasound’s magic, investigating how women bond with their babies in pregnancy rather than during childbirth or in the postpartum period.

While 1970s theories of maternal-infant bonding were embraced by the natural birthing movement, maternal-fetal bonding theories rested on the assumption that women — in the era of legalized abortion — couldn’t be trusted to love their babies without the assistance of technology and medical professionals. As Taylor writes, the more radical suggestion was “that emotional and social ties between a mother and child might form in an altogether new manner — not through physical and social interaction, but through spectatorship.”

Anti-abortion legislation, like that in effect in Tennessee and Kentucky, which mandate abortion providers both “display” and “describe” fetal imaging, still use the hyperreality of the ultrasound to strong-arm women into reconsidering their medical decisions. As the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argued, the ultrasound elevated the fetus to the level of “supercitizen” — a celebrity whose rights conservatives often argue override the rights of pregnant people.

Today, the 18- to 20-week anatomy scan is recommended for most pregnant people, but all the gender talk is optional. For those with cash to burn (advanced ultrasounds are generally not covered by insurance and can cost up to several hundred dollars), 3D and 4D ultrasound packages promise keepsake images of your fetus in what is obviously pretty dismal lighting. These advanced ultrasounds are considered unsafe by the Food and Drug Administration but are still paired with in-office or out-of-office purchases like DVDs set to music, plush toys that play the fetal heartbeat, custom photo albums, and “sneak peek” blood tests that determine sex as early as nine weeks.

Conversely, there has been some resistance to ultrasounds within the natural birthing movement, primarily framed as a response to unnecessary medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth. Others just cannot be bothered with the gender spectacle: A woman who asked to be called Anne, a researcher on military and security issues, said she waited to know the sex, hoping to avoid being inundated with pink or blue stuff. She had complications in pregnancy and “had to work hard to remain ignorant.” When her daughter was born, the pink stuff came rolling in anyway.

For Dani McClain — who in her book We Live for the We writes about her experience navigating racial disparities in health care — decisions like whether to trust the white doctor who told her she needed a Caesarean were complex. But the choice to find out her baby’s sex before birth was straightforward, she told me: “I asked the doctors and nurses to not tell me what they were seeing on the ultrasound. I didn’t want to know and didn’t want to deal with other people’s projections about what a baby’s sex means.”

Lillian Rivera, director of family programming at Gender Spectrum, told me many of us engage with cultural norms, like finding out the prenatal sex of our baby, unconsciously. It is often easier to just fall in line — buying into the idea of what is “male” or “female” is comfortable for many, even if we understand the world is not black and white and gender is not assigned at birth or during a sonogram. Even when we know we’re playing out roles that don’t fit us, and that may never fit our children, the ultrasound is now so intricately woven into other cultural practices — like baby showers, decorating the nursery, and gender reveals — we feel compelled by these rites of passage.

In his memoir of nonbinary parenthood, The Natural Mother of the Child, Krys Malcolm Belc writes about his “shame of wanting to know the baby’s sex.” Belc documents his experience finding out his child’s sex in a 4D/HD ultrasound facility that carried “pink and blue frames and souvenirs” — a place that did not reflect his and his partner’s beliefs. As he writes, “The machine told us we could know something this way.” In the end, however, Belc found, “The ultrasound pictures didn’t matter, those words — I’M A BOY — didn’t matter. My mother had a single ultrasound when pregnant with me, and she did not find out whether I was a boy or a girl. What difference would it have made if she did? The image would have been as wrong as the doctor who delivered me.”

We are far from living in a “gender neutral” world, and maybe that is why the “to wait or not to wait” decision to find out the baby’s sex is fraught for so many parents: We sense the ongoing struggle on the horizon. Ultimately, though, as parents, it matters less what we do in the ultrasound appointment or with the “surprise” at birth than what we do with the information we are offered there. Technology cannot teach us to love any more than the first meeting with our baby can. Only moving through the world with our child can do that.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I asked for the morphological details, yet again. I had acquiesced to a lot of mainstream aspects of parenting by then, including those gendered gifts, each of which filled my daughter’s world with suppositions about who she could or could not be. Friends and family had also stopped worrying about my approval: They simply mailed pink clothes, pink dolls, pink clothes for the doll, pink strollers for the well-dressed dolls. I was not untroubled by that, but I had thrown up my hands in some ways, especially as my daughter started to express an interest in feminized things, including dolls. She relished the pretend-play work of care, tending to a filthy, never-clothed baby doll. She covered the baby’s little mythical cuts (which were apparently all over her body) with Band-Aids, wearing a Doc McStuffins coat as doctor. But she soothed her baby’s silent cries dressed plainly, lugging bags filled with indiscriminate collections of stuff, as Mom.

As she began the hard work of identifying with the world of gender, my daughter also discounted some gendered norms all on her own. For years, she was totally uninterested in pink. And when, at the grocery store, strangers said, “Hi, princess,” she gripped me. “Mommy,” she would say. “I’m not a princess. Why do they always call me that?”

“I don’t know,” I would say. But I did.

My daughter came with me to my second ultrasound appointment, her body tumbling on my face as the technician studied what she saw. The aesthetics of this ultrasound were more subdued; the room was cold, small, and dimly lit so we could see the television-size screen next to the table. My daughter had brought a dirty, yellow stuffed duck, which she now waved around for her sibling to see. “Look my ducky,” she said, imagining her sibling as baby, as friend. Neither of us knew that child yet, but my daughter was sure that we would.

The problem with “mom boss” culture

2021-04-09T09:20:50-04:00

When I became a mother in 2015, my old life no longer felt relevant. I lost friends; I stepped back from work. I was consumed by the labor of taking care, and I found an odd solace online — a form of recognition — hanging out in mommy forums and on social media.

I lurked on TheBump’s breastfeeding boards and the ambivalently political content created by sites like Scary Mommy, which reflected the horror and delight of everything I was experiencing. I was taken by the illusion of sisterhood and commiseration online and, not incidentally, by the mothers who answered problems with product. When I dared leave the house for the park or rare mother’s group meetup, women peddled leggings, makeup, belly wraps, oils. Every mother seemed to be in a whole “find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” mood — a seamless integration between the domestic and the commercial that I found alarming and alluring.

A year later, former Ralph Lauren executive Nicole Feliciano articulated the underlying promise of saleswomanship for new mothers in her book Mom Boss: In the age of social media, she claimed, any woman can “learn how to be a super mom.” In her bio, Feliciano refers to her company Momtrends, which began as a blog in 2007 but now specializes in sponsored content and influencer outreach, as every mom’s business-savvy BFF.

The Momtrends website remains, today, similarly chummy: It’s the self-described “girlfriend you always look forward to bumping into at yoga class” (yes, the website is the girlfriend). By way of curated products and entrepreneurial opportunities, the website-friend provides “solutions for the challenges of modern motherhood” for women who want to “live with purpose and passion.” But what it really offers is something that has become central to the story of American motherhood — personal reinvention.

Every mother seemed to be in a whole “find what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” mood

The website-girlfriend says, “Wasn’t it easy before the kids came along? We all managed to look pulled together, travel, stay fit and even entertain on occasion. Well, we don’t believe motherhood is an ending. We think of it as a beginning. A time to edit what you bring into your life.”

The notion that the ostensibly natural destruction of women under American capitalism is not an ending, but rather just the beginning, is one that has come to dominate the discourse of motherhood.

Late-2000s mommy bloggers brought an overdue, if disorganized, correction of the archive, with women sharing stories of maternal discontent all over the internet. For them, motherhood was often a disaster. They depicted everything from their negative feelings about their children to their discomfort with their postpartum bodies. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a sociologist who has written about the rise of motherhood culture on social media, calls the early years of the mamasphere “the Confessional Age” and an “emancipation.”

As with all internet trends, there were issues. Heather Armstrong of Dooce, once named “queen of the mommy bloggers,” eventually found herself experiencing treatment-resistant depression. And Lacey Spears made the disturbing quest for public power online acute when she poisoned and eventually killed her son with toxic amounts of table salt, the result of what experts have called Munchausen syndrome by proxy (now listed in the DSM-5 as “factitious disorder imposed on another”). She had been chronicling her son’s false illness, and her sacrificial care work, on her blog.

Mothers quickly learned to monetize their stories, transforming their raw and real platforms into lifestyle brands. By 2015, Jezer-Morton says, following the success of bloggers like Ree Drummond, who became a Food Network brand, and Glennon Doyle, who leveraged her blog, Momastery, to publish her first memoir, we had entered the “Influencer Age,” with momfluencers like Oh Joy and Love Taza depicting “the Insta-perfect life that everyone knows is painstakingly staged, but that we love to follow — and critically dismantle — anyway.”

Multilevel marketing corporations, which have since the mid-20th century posed as a solution to the boredom and overwhelm of housewifery, also found new footing online in the 2010s. MLMs built their digital mythos around the prospect of power and community, appealing to ordinary mothers who felt alienated from public life by offering up a ready-made digital commons — online communities where new moms could connect, build a life around products, and feel like they belonged again. By 2017, more than half of Instagram’s 800 million users were women, and mommy publications were teeming with listicles, memes, and tips about moms gettin’ that side hustle, many of which referenced multilevel marketing schemes.

Large corporate MLMs have since faced lawsuits and backlash, making them less popular, though companies like Beachbody — a fitness and nutrition conglomerate that bills a monthly fee to “coaches” who in turn sell Beachbody shakes and workout products — have profited off pandemic life, targeting mothers in particular.

“The content production of motherhood is still a viable MLM”

But moms who build businesses online have diversified. Now they helm bad mom and drunk mom empires on TikTok, create merch lines with cheeky phrases, “help families sleep better,” and become cleaning experts. As Jezer-Morton told me, while the lure of traditional MLMs may be waning, “the content production of motherhood is still a viable MLM” with moms “creating content and teaching each other to create content.” Moms now sell their ability to sell anything, and they adapt, constantly, to social media functionality. “Anytime that there’s a new platform, there’s going to be this little cottage industry of how-to that can also turn into a low-key MLM,” Jezer-Morton told me. It’s a trend that has led some to question whether American motherhood has itself become a multilevel marketing scheme.

The momtrepreneur, or mompreneur, or more all-encompassing momboss, relies on what Jezer-Morton calls the performance of “successful neoliberal selfhood.” These are the obstinate, media-savvy daughters of Lean In. They live by inspirational stories of women finding a community and a calling, of pushing through what’s tough about working motherhood, playing off the vague “moral therapeutic deism” of American capitalism and the larger gospel of Instagram. They also sell the prospect of beginning again by positioning free enterprise as a fantastical path toward femme freedom and promising an escape from the isolation and trauma of motherhood under patriarchal capitalism without ever having to speak its name, much less question it as an economic system.

Lindsay Teague Moreno, one of the essential oil MLM Young Living’s biggest success stories, is now a micro influencer with a book and podcast, both titled Boss Up. Moreno’s profile serves as an inspo hub for women invested in the fantasy of public power that she represents. Her pre-2020 grid is full of glammed-up anti-entitlement rhetoric: All it takes to succeed, she says, is a little bootstrappin’ in the form of putting on your “big girl panties”!

Her neon, rainbow-colored memes bring surveillance culture to motherhood — one post reads, “Your Kids Are Watching” — and they have a dizzying economic logic. She quotes Fight Club but also embraces a merit-based pursuit of the dollar, as in, “Suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret.” In another post, Moreno channels that popular phrase some mothers use with kids — “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit” — when addressing the gendered wage gap. “Throwing a fit,” she writes in her caption, “won’t help.”

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Empowerment imagined as power, in other words, is often disciplinary.

Mom bosses harness their power by bending time or just hiring others to care for their kids. They also, therefore, rely on the assumption that mothers’ lives will be devastated by motherhood, but that women should restructure their social, economic, and financial lives accordingly. The larger premise: We can solve the problems of the sexual division of labor, the unfinished feminist revolution, and the lack of social services in America by turning to individualism, the market, and work.

The problem with this thinking is that antisociality, emotional devastation, job precarity, and the motherhood penalty, each compounded by intersections of class, race, and gender identity, are not inherent conditions of motherhood; they are the conditions of the ongoing disaster of care in capitalist America. The disempowerment of caregivers, and the suffering that lack of power brings with it, is foundational to capitalist economics, which has always relegated women to the home to serve the family, a major economic institution. (For instance, 16th- and 17th-century witch hunts were also disciplinary, targeting women’s contraceptive methods, alternative relations to work, and public power in order to push women into the home — where they could produce laborers.)

The modern-day American devaluation of sectors like health care and education only provides further evidence that, culturally and economically, we value industry, not care. But this all fades from view under the guise of careerist liberation, where work equals freedom. Instead, failures of American economic and political policy, and the poor working conditions they engender for caregivers, are refashioned as market opportunity — a chance to cultivate resilience, better business sense, and new product markets.

During the pandemic, some pastoral mommy influencers are facing an identity crisis, but others have simply mapped the language of the “slay” onto anti-Covid-vax and anti-mask rhetoric, or they are shilling wellness alongside QAnon rhetoric. Momtrepreneurs, on the other hand, claim they are thriving, with some penning enterprising tips for survival. Moreno took some time off to lose weight and travel, and often cites, vaguely, the charged political climate in her Instagram content, including her refusal to “just sit at home and be scared of the world right now” and her belief that mask-wearing is “not good for our health.”

Meanwhile, the often apolitical and always aspirational qualities of the mom boss remain all over the wider mythology of motherhood. As Katherine Goldstein, creator of The Double Shift, a podcast about motherhood, put it in a phone interview, “The baseline narrative about being a mother in America is that every individual mother is fundamentally flawed in some way and the way to get out of it is through life hacks and products.” For this reason, one of Goldstein’s least favorite mom slogans is “You got this, mama!” because it sends the message that “whatever’s difficult about motherhood, you just need to try harder or buy your way out of it.”

Some of this discourse is just blandly encouraging, but other mothers, like those behind Big Little Feelings and Dr. Becky at Home, have monetized the illusion of “winning” at parenting while acknowledging the work is “tough.” They create “sanity-saving” content and courses that are an attractive mix of mental health and parenting philosophy meant to help mothers accept their perceived failings and tap into their inherent “badassery.”

“The baseline narrative about being a mother in America is that every individual mother is fundamentally flawed in some way”

You-got-this motherhood, in all its iterations, is, at best, a seriously limited rejoinder to the interconnected problems of patriarchy and capitalism and to the mental health struggles that result from their longstanding collusion. The you-got-this mentality also draws on a broader white corporate feminism. As Alice Bolin writes in her analysis of the MLM-turned-sex-cult NXIVM/DOS and the ersatz feminist support of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “The fact that many people cannot differentiate between postfeminist ‘empowerment’ and real feminism is a victory for those forces that have systematically opposed real gender equality.”

At its worst, you-got-this motherhood sounds an awful lot like a primer on both rape culture and capitalist life. A recent viral Nike campaign, for instance, glorifies the mother as “the toughest athlete” and as “someone who deals with the pain, hits her limit, and pushes past it.” Stamping any product with motherhood (and wellness) offers a moral hue that is akin, as Goldstein put it, to greenwashing. Nike has used the tactic before to deflect from its treatment of mothers and, as Sara Berliner of Vote Like a Mother noted, its practice of “making billions off our sisters working for subsistence wages in poor conditions at their factories abroad.” In this light, the ad was generally not well received, but many still rallied behind the imagery in the commercial — and that narrative of women “pushing, pushing, pushing.” But is this, really, the story of motherhood we want to promote?

As Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, capitalism feeds on periods of shock by “exploiting the window of opportunity” created by “a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them.” Motherhood in America has, perhaps, always been a prolonged period of disorientation susceptible to niche forms of disaster capitalism. But over the past year, caregivers have lived acutely within this dark hole — what Klein calls “pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap between reality and understanding.” She writes, “Without a story we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends.”

American mothers are maybe, kind of, moving out of that shapeless lacuna and into some kind of narrative. Policy institutes and reporters are documenting the many crises unfolding at once: Mothers are in crisis, schools are in crisis, child care facilities are in crisis, and, perhaps most importantly and auspiciously, Americans’ relationship to work is in crisis. In response, mothers are gathering online around political action and around the discourse of mental health. But it remains to be seen who will control the next part of the story. There is a lot of mommy internet, and the discourse shifts quickly, but as Jezer-Morton put it, “One thing that doesn’t change in the mamasphere is this constant need to affirm each other.”

Recently, affirmation has gained more urgency. “Right now, it’s very much ‘it’s okay to not be okay,’” Jezer-Morton said, pointing out that moms are crying on social media. “It’s okay to fall apart, it’s okay to cry.” Goldstein feels that what we’re seeing online doesn’t yet capture the full picture. “We have not even begun to deal with it,” she said. “I don’t think we’re actually really seeing, truly, how much moms are suffering online in terms of what people are publicly sharing.”

“I don’t think we’re actually really seeing, truly, how much moms are suffering online in terms of what people are publicly sharing”

This culture of affirmation is less about productivity — or the empowerment alchemy of turning bad times into capital — and more about “feeling seen” and “holding space.” It’s you-got-this, but with a little more awareness that you don’t. In other words, it’s a mental health project that is tangled in grief and mourning, the politics (and aesthetics) of documentation, the larger mom-shaming resistance, and the ubiquity of personal branding. There’s a lot going on.

“It’s coming from a super-real, incredibly desperate place,” Jezer-Morton said of mothers sharing their pain publicly, “but it’s also turning into a form of accepted discourse.”

I have devoured the reporting and posts about moms over the past year, but I worry about the familiar consumption of women’s suffering — and about how others may monetize all this affirmation in equally resonant ways. In some senses, the documentation is working; policy like the direct payments included in the American Rescue Plan Act seemed implausible pre-pandemic. But even left leaners are tsk-tsking that strategy, claiming it will reduce women’s labor force participation; in the process, critics of the tax credit forget the legacy of Black mothers like bell hooks, who pointed out white feminism’s limiting quest for power through public work. Meanwhile, technology, education, and mental health industries are seizing their chance to privatize. And a Scary Mommy-sponsored ad for CBD that recently popped up in my feed reads, “Ain’t no stress like burnt-out-mom-during-a-pandemic-stress!” So it’s hard to say what motherhood will look like on the fabled other side.

What is clear is that mothers will have to continue situating our collective story, online and offline, within a larger economic and political history, rather than in some fuzzy politics of empowerment, if we want this moment to lead toward a radical restructuring of care in America. And we will have to make part of that story the real task of intersectional feminism, which is the task of rethinking power itself.