Big Thanks
Keys and a keychain of Tinker Bell. A tote bag inscribed Let’s Have A Fucking Awesome Day. A face-down phone with sacred geometry on the case. Mandy’s possessions — at this moment spread out on the pavement, which was pleasantly hot like sand — each indicated someone who’d survived various subcultures and was now in her final evolution. Her goth debut in 1998, then the ska punk, the emo, the scene kid with massive pink hair. Today it was ombré blonde with baby bangs, unmistakable from across the swim club as a specific type of post-hip. Even what should have been anonymizing — a plain black bathing suit — just made her “thing” more apparent: now everyone could see the caravan tattooed on her bright white thigh.
Her friend was talking about a home reno. Despite her best efforts Mandy couldn’t connect with the conversation.
Normally the pool was a grounding place for her, church from June to September, but not today. News of her cookbook had broken in all the expected places and so too the expected “feedback”: a rush to be right about her, to shame and accuse.
All the meditation in the world couldn’t help her understand where the hate came from. She only strived to foster a community around her brand (bad word, she knew): photos with long captions about the Good, the Hard, and the Worth It of domestic life. She had grown medium-large on this love, this ongoing conversation between her and her Canola Mamas. But with success came a steady following of detractors whose devotion she earned from being at once enviable and not enviable enough. Plus there was the small matter of when she activated the IBS community by sharing she’d gotten her own into remission via cutting bad people out of her life.
Despite the gaiety of her sunglasses — purple hearts stretched into a cat eye — Mandy’s steeled expression made it look like she was attending a funeral on an unfortunately gorgeous day. It was a look she would’ve recognized as her Papa Tim, a stoic, red-nosed man whose childhood in an apartment lended texture and credibility to her own mythos.
There was a lot on her mind. In addition to the character assassination, she was finding it hard to feel completely blessed due to a perceived rift with Tara Gnichols Gray. Tara was another influencer doing amazing work in the home/family space. They talked every day, but Tara still hadn’t liked her book announcement.
And she was too ashamed to admit this part — even to her partner Robby, who hailed from the planet of loyal, sensitive, skateboarding men. But with everything happening in Gnibov there was now a spotlight on Tara for another reason. And Mandy was…jealous?
It was already enough that Tara had this cool backstory, a post-Soviet refugee who came here at one year old. Her kids had passports and special names for grandma and grandpa. When her motherland became the cause célèbre, the feed turning pink and green in support, her star rose too. One of her posts made it into People(.com). She was interviewed on Jennifer Garner’s IG Live talk show, something Tara didn’t even want (her vibe was more “Drunk Elephant” than “Neutrogena”). Mandy knew the weight of having extended family over there must have been crushing for Tara, but there was something intrepid and romantic about it all.
“We’ll have to throw a book launch party for you!” the friend offered, then cautioned: “When the kitchen’s ready.” She crossed herself and prayed to her contractor. Ugh, my life, right?
Mandy roughed up her bangs. “That’d be amazing!”
“I could make that ambrosia from it!”
“Amazing!”
Billie, the peanut in a rash guard and swim diaper splashing at their feet, wordlessly presented her mother a wet Band-Aid. Busy talking, Mandy accepted the gift with cupped hands before realizing what it was. Further out at the five foot line, their sons stood shoulder to shoulder, breathless from doing this a million times. They plugged their noses and plunged into the turbulent water, emerging a second older and a year more brave.
Silence and the lifeguard’s whistle. No running.
“…And Odin’s not doing camp this summer, so we’re gonna do a cousins thing. We’re just waiting to plan a real vacation until we get the results of Matt’s scans…”
It always surprised Mandy how quickly she and Tara could move in and out of sync. She recalled a brand trip they’d taken to the mountains before she had B, too early in the friendship to comfortably travel together. The Vrbo was drafty and the Ubers into town were long. They had silent fights about what and when to eat. By the end of it Mandy didn’t feel deliciously exhausted like she’d expected, just hungover.
Looking back it was hard to believe they’d weathered that at all — it’d probably be easier to come back from a fistfight than that awkwardness. But the first time they texted again from home it felt so natural, the digital space untainted since none of the conflict had happened there. And of course Tara was so outgoing. Despite being the more “famous” one, bad word she knew, Mandy was actually quite shy.
Tara, though: she had this confrontational streak that made you like her.
It was the way she was always venting. Something about it drew you in. She wasn’t whining per se — Mandy, being of Troeltsch stock, would never put up with a bellyacher. Tara was just fired up about things. It felt good to be who she was mad to rather than at. Really good, actually, almost like an ASMR head-scratcher video. So the women were securely bonded by long and frequent text exchanges and, when Tara was driving to one of her kids’ many activities, a FaceTime Audio.
Mandy checked her phone, set it back down impatiently. 3K likes now. She’d seen better. None of this felt how it was supposed to.
Here she was in what should’ve been the most abundant season of her life: smack in the middle of achieving her dreams, her family complete and almost potty-trained. She had such a good message to share about home and style and food as a language of care. There was a part in the book about her Gimme Kay, a severe woman who loved as fiercely as she fought and baked an incredible water pie. On password-protected forums people were sharing pictures of the outside of Mandy’s house.
It wasn’t fair. Mandy had fought hard for this peace, a patch of green lawn in the self-worth desert. Life had not always been easy.
Unlike the scholars on Reddit seemed to believe, she was not rich and out of touch. At the very least she was not out of touch: she knew she was wealthy in the grand scheme and benefited from a number of overlapping privileges. This all made it possible for her to amass a following, and to spend time on it, and to live, which she supposed was already too much for some of these people.
What no one would know looking at her Instagram, though, was that she’d struggled with mental health as far back as ten. She read a longform article once about how this was becoming normal — but in the nineties it most definitely was not. Now she was just grateful that words like normal were almost passé, elated that her own kids would never have to wonder what their intrusive thoughts meant without the life raft of the Internet.
When she’d shared a bit of her story on Stories, talking about how she became vegetarian in middle school only ’cause of OCD about what meat might really be, the response was staggeringly kind. But like clockwork the haters descended on this fresh blood, certain that her suffering was actually some bourgeois writing exercise.
The 2000’s saw Mandy colliding with various expected and unexpected traumas, all set against the step-and-repeat of the early aughts’ prevailing diet culture. In college she worked in a drugstore where at times it felt like she was for sale. Then marriage, which inspired some of her most beautiful and bracingly honest writing. Moving away from her support system to be near his, alone in the house with just her kids and the whole world watching.
These compounding stresses added up to make an image she always feared becoming: a woman with wet hair screaming about towels.
But Mandy understood her now, this woman who had once been her mother and grandmother standing on carpet instead of tile. She’d done everything to excise this demon — cold showers, silent retreats, full-body scans in a place that looked like a vacuum store — to no avail. The daily, hourly experience of being Amanda Mullins was simply one of tension and pressure. That’s why she so fiercely defended her right to rest and boundaries and self-care.
Yes, it sometimes led to behavior other people didn’t understand, like opting her four-person family out of Thanksgiving last year. For the sake of her wellbeing she couldn’t care. Reaching her mid-late thirties shrank her capacity for embarrassment, and she welcomed it.
It was tough at first building up her “No” muscles. She’d had to start with her safest attachments, her small, perfectly imperfect family, drawing invisible lines around her home office and her favorite Adirondack chair. Then her extended family. Then her audience, a gorgeously overflowing pollinator garden which had to be maintained with vigilant blocks and deletes.
This was beautiful work on her part — but it didn’t always feel that way. She was almost constantly conflicted about some aspect of adulting, letting tasks fester for months and take on completely outsized importance by the end. At times the grace she extended herself became too much for even Robby’s limitless patience. She didn’t vote in the last election because it took her too long to re-register at their new house. So we’re doing this? he’d said as the deadline passed, Charlie in his arms in his Boden pajamas, “we” meaning “you, my amazing, impossible wife.” But if that’s how he felt living beside it, just imagine living with it.
Mandy knew it was vital that she cast off the shackles of earthly expectation. As much ambition as she possessed, she agreed with all the posts she came across about money being a fake idea. Yet as she simplified her life more and more, she still found herself getting tangled in the seaweed of the same struggles. When would all The Work finally kick in? In the meantime she microdosed with psilocybin chocolates.
What she needed right now, what would’ve made her feel instantly better, would be the perfect notification. Shallow, she knew. Her inbox was lit up with praise — but it wasn’t from who she wanted.
She knew it was just her shadow talking, but times like this made her wonder if she and Tara were even soul mamas.
The two were confidantes, sharing everything from good news to gross parenting tribulations. Yet Tara had a whole life in Montana that Mandy just got glimpses of, as they’d technically only met twice. She remembered how much she didn’t see whenever Tara posted pictures with @FebruaryHansen or (ugh) @MaryJoJohns.
Everyone in her life was so amazing — her diligence in relationship curation had ensured this. Why, then, did she feel so alone? Was it simply her destiny, written in the stars and the helices that contained her ancestors’ stories and hopes and fears? A curse that had crossed moody seas from Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Cologne to this suburb in Passaic? Was it something she said? Not wanting to be rude, she discreetly thumbed through their most recent texts.
But Mandy knew she had nothing to worry about when, while driving home, she got a notification. It was a DM from Tara by way of @chrissyteigen.
In the photo Chrissy was laying out on a chaise lounge, her tan glowing, across her midriff an advance copy of Mandy’s book. On the cover was Mandy herself, proudly facing a retro Jello mold to the camera. Miss Teigen had coordinated her phenomenal bathing suit with the colors of the aspic.
“FUCK YOU!!!! This is amazing!!!” Tara had written. As the car gobbled up a speed bump and the world sped away behind her, Mandy smiled serenely to herself. Those five words were all she needed to see. It felt so good, somehow better than the sun and the water and the company of her friend. It felt like resolution. It felt like celebration. It felt like home.
