Two weeks without the grocery store

Lessons from my mommies.

There was a pregnant pause when my friend Eric asked what I thought of Worry, the debut novel by Alexandra Tanner and my May book club pick, before we both started laughing. 

It’s no secret that I, too, have a questionable preoccupation with my internet  “mommies”—what Jules, the protagonist in Worry, calls the mommy blog Instagram influencers she obsessively follows from a finsta account. 

Jules’ mommies are micro-celebrity conspiracy theorists—hawking essential oils and fear-mongering rhetoric. My mommies are Midwestern homeschooling mothers of eight, nine, 10 kids on Youtube who grow, preserve, and cook most of their family’s food. 

Brought up on Focus on the Family and conservative political radio, I am rather immune to the pseudoscientific and archaic beliefs subliminally espoused on these accounts—the carnivore diets and gender essentialism. (This same personality quirk made me tell my very-not-Christian husband that I thought the 2006 documentary film Jesus Camp was “not that crazy.”) I understand and am equally unfazed by the dog whistles—on paper I should be a Christian homeschooling mother of five-plus “littles.” I was homeschooled and raised Evangelical Christian, but instead, for whatever reason, I ended up agnostic (I guess? I don’t really care enough to describe myself as atheist), vegetarian, a woman with a career, living in the big, scary city, in my 30s without children or a deep freezer full of homegrown beef.