I Don't *Really* Want to be a Momfluencer

Words by Elin Strong

Somewhere on the Internet lives an abandoned Instagram grid devoted entirely to sobriety. Scroll by scroll, a rainbow palette of cheerful portraits and opinionated graphics fill the screen. “Hangovers are so 2019,” she wrote in Helvetica Neue and Playlist Caps. 

On March 6, 2022, the account went silent. One last ominous caption reads: “It’s been over three years since I’ve had a sip of alcohol, and yet this is when it gets hard for me.” Did her followers wonder what happened after that? 

It took me four years after a relapse in my twenties to get sober again. I hadn’t planned on creating an entire account around it, but I was a woman possessed by clear-eyed possibility. Exchanging a buzz for self-belief was its own kind of high, one that I couldn’t stop thinking about or talking about. During those first few years, I consumed and created sobriety content as if it were my full-time job.

Sobriety wasn’t just something I practiced one day at a time. It was my identity.

But one of the promises of continuous sobriety is that, eventually, it fades into the background of your life. Like brushing your teeth or breathing air, abstaining from alcohol becomes an ordinary thing you do rather than everything you are.

Looking back, it’s clear the real freedom didn’t come from getting sober. It came when I no longer needed recovery to be the center of my life or my content. I stopped posting on that sober account five years ago. Gradually and then all at once, I traded rock bottom memoirs for rom coms, recovery podcasts for Spotify playlists. It wasn’t that I cared any less about sobriety. My life had simply expanded because of it.

Now, almost on the exact same timeline, I’m starting to recognize the pattern again. This time, with motherhood.

Similar to the day I quit drinking, I gave birth to my first daughter without fully grasping what my life was about to become. I’d read and highlighted every chapter of What to Expect When You’re Expecting like I was studying for the biggest test of my life, but there wasn’t a single chapter that could’ve prepared me for the exam. Note to Heidi Murkoff: consider adding a chapter titled, “P.S. A Book Can’t Actually Prepare You For This (Godspeed).”

From the moment I left the labor and delivery room, a healthy 7.8 pound baby girl in my arms, motherhood became the sun my entire life revolved around. It wasn’t just that I had a new highly dependent roommate to care for. It was that every decision, every worry, every middle of the night Google search led back to her. My brain had literally rewired itself, pruning and building neural pathways in her favor. My body leaked in her presence.

And yet, my imagined future as a new mom looked something like this: return from maternity leave after four months, get promoted, and keep climbing…ideally as if nothing had changed.

Instead, most weekday nights ended with me crying over spilled milk I’d pumped during back-to-back meetings, or venting to my husband because I’d missed another milestone. I was working harder than I’d ever worked in my life but still felt like a terrible employee and a terrible mom. Something had to change.

With the privilege of even having a choice, I made the difficult decision to leave my six-figure salary behind when my first was barely a year old. I told myself it would be a short career pause while I figured out how to create a more sustainable work-life balance. Two and a half years as a stay-at-home mom later, another full-time job never materialized. Something unexpected did.

On the very day I found out I was pregnant with my second daughter, I signed up for a Substack account. With zero strategy or five-year plan, I simply acted on an urgency to start taking my writing seriously before my days got even busier. The voice inside my head that was still mine said it best: It’s now or never.

And so I wrote about the only thing I wanted to write about at the time: Motherhood.

I wrote about leaving a start-up to stay home, about making mom friends at the playground, about the identity shift of becoming someone’s mother. I wrote about breastfeeding-friendly outfits and push presents and how to romanticize days at home.

Having kids didn’t take away my ambition. If anything, it lit a fire underneath it that I hadn’t felt in years. I was finally doing the thing I’d always wanted to do. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the audience that found me once I started sharing more about my life as a new mom. (Publishing an essay on the unique loneliness of being home all day with two kids earned me a top spot on Substack’s parenting leaderboard.) 

Readers seemed to need the messy and raw content as much as I needed to write about it. I know because they tell me in the comments, in DMs, and in the kind of messages that make me tear up before I’ve even had my first sip of coffee. “You made me realize I, too, feel the same way but I was too scared to say it out loud. Today I actually told my husband.” Both at home and online, motherhood has made me feel useful.

When I started showing up on other platforms earlier this year, the growth strategy was obvious. Mom content clearly performs, so keep doing that. Every creator in my FYP says some version of the same thing: Narrow your niche. And I already knew which niche was waiting for me, arms open wide, because I had the archive to back it up.

The more I posted online, the more the pressure to stay in my lane felt like an expectation. When a cousin asked how my “mom blog” was going, I laughed it off in the moment but silently resented how it made my work sound. When another writer suggested I stick to parenting essays rather than diversify with style content, I became defensive. Both comments were meant to be supportive but felt like bolts tightening a box, slowly closing me in.

There’s a word for what I was starting to become, or could still choose to become: “momfluencer,” someone who earns income from her identity as a mom, one sponsored caption at a time.

It’s a label I haven’t wanted to use about myself, but if I’m being honest with what I’ve published online, the mechanics are essentially the same: an audience that’s grown because I became someone’s mother and weekly content that’s influenced by my kids.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the perks. It was a thrill when a stroller brand and a toddler food company both left boxes on my doorstep last week, no contract attached, just for writing about my life with kids. But when I started to record a walk with my 16-month-old in the new stroller, it felt uncomfortable…like I was trying to make a private moment perform. 

I’ve spent the last two years blurring the line between motherhood and work because being a mom has been my full-time job and the primary inspiration behind my weekly newsletter. But I don’t want my most cherished role as a mother to also be the one I’m expected to monetize. 

And yes, I recognize the irony of making this case in an essay about motherhood on a platform for moms. But there’s a difference between writing about being a mom and being branded as one.

When I visualize what I’m reaching for, I find myself drawn to women who’ve managed to build creative identities that aren’t immediately introduced through parenthood. We discover they’re mothers only after getting to know their work.

A friend recently published a story in a major outlet with no mention of having kids at all. Her byline simply reads: a writer in L.A. who covers fashion, lifestyle, and wellness. The fact that she’s a mom of a toddler with a baby on the way is tucked away behind the curtain, reserved for close friends and family rather than being cast in the main show.

I want that kind of separation too.

I’m so aware that choosing not to make motherhood my niche could mean slower growth and fewer people discovering my work because I’m not playing to the algorithm. I’m willing to take that chance. I know it’ll be worth it.

I never announced I was done with that sober account. Instead, I just found other work to focus on instead. I’m hoping for the same thing here. Not a dramatic exit from writing about motherhood, but rather a gradual drift toward everything else I want to say.

Early recovery demands you to think about staying sober with every move you make because your life depends on it, and early motherhood asks you to think about your kids with the same intensity because their lives depend on it. If you’re lucky, both become just one slice of a much bigger life instead of consuming every thought forever.

Motherhood has left an indelible watermark on how I see the world. It will continue to influence the books I read, the friends I make, and it will surely inspire another personal essay I publish online. But I also want to write and create content on style, relationships, ambition, getting older, creativity, and all the other things that make up a life. And one day, if we’re putting it all out there, I’d really like to write fiction.

Like sobriety, motherhood hasn’t become any less important to me. It’s just no longer the only story I want to tell.

Elin Strong is proudly eight years sober and the author of Bang Voyage, a weekly Substack newsletter about personal style and building a creative career alongside stay-at-home motherhood. She lives in Southern California with her husband, two daughters, and an aussiedoodle who behaves like a toddler. You can find her on Instagram at @elinmariestrong.