The Queen of the Mommybloggers
This afternoon my sister sent me a text with a link to a TMZ post saying Heather Armstrong had died of suicide.
Outside of my community, I’m sure most people don’t know Heather in the way that they know Ree or Brene or Jenny or Luvvie — or any of the other women who rose to the national stage beyond the blogosphere. Women whose origin stories to some extent I was privy to and for whom I have that much more respect, having seen them before they got used to the spotlight.
But back then, Heather was an It Girl. She was the queen of the mommybloggers. She was the one woman who was harnessing the dollars, bitch. Out of curiousity, I found this bit about meeting her at a BlogHer conference in the archives of this blog:
She gave a really good talk. Heather is very articulate. At the end of her panel, there was an awkward silence, because we weren't really sure if she was finished talking. She took a deep breath and said, "in the name of Jesus Christ, amen." And that was when I knew I thought she was pretty great.
Afterward, I went up and shyly introduced myself. Heather strikes an intimidating pose. She is 800 feet tall and quite thin, and she dresses in that casually hip way of Bossy that this former-sorority girl finds intimidating. I am not tall and thin, and thus anything I wear comes off looking "perky."
I told Heather the name of my blog, and she smiled and said she remembered it because somebody spray-painted "Surrender Dorothy" on an overpass near the Mormon Temple in Washington, DC.
Funny, this blog name to me means tornadoes and chaos and realizing you're not in charge, but to Heather it meant a connection to a former religion. Funny how titles work.
I didn’t know Heather. I didn’t have a relationship with Heather. We talked, on and off, over the years. When I was working on my first book, I learned that she was coming out with a book, and I emailed her, worried they would be competitive and that I would lose, because I had the writing of 25 other women riding on my book, and I was not her.
She was not me.
She sent me back a nice note telling me not to worry, she was writing something completely different.
As my father would say, “As it turns out,” all that is not important.
What maybe is important is that our firstborn daughters are the same age, Heather’s and mine. And so when I think about Heather, I think about my daughter, Lily, and her eldest, Leta. They have never met and probably never will, but we mothers — WE MOTHERS — we emailed each other about their sleep.
What is also important: There is a whole community of writers for whom Heather served as a figurehead of sorts, whether she wanted to or we wanted her to. The mainstream media crowned Heather “Queen of the Mommybloggers,” and with that title both legitimized us and reduced us, all in a headline.
Hearing today about Heather’s death made me very sad. For her, for her family, for her children, for her community. Her very public struggle with mental health — one waged by so many of my writerly friends and heroes — is a paragraph in a library of human struggles. We are only scratching the surface of how much power our emotions and minds have over our lives. I’m relieved we are openly talking about self-care post -COVID, but we’re not all the way there yet.
And also, I can’t deny that any reminder of the period between 2004-2016 is for me a very bittersweet nudge. I found my voice. I birthed my amazing daughter. I published three books. I met women I never would’ve crossed paths with in my little life. I lived a bigger life, thanks to the Internet. I stumbled and stubbed my toes and learned and became a better human being. I would not trade that era for anything.
And it’s been gone for a while. I don’t think about that time all that much.
So today, when I came home from my corporate job, wearing my patent heels and thinking about KPIs and excited to see my 19-year-old daughter home from her first year of college — the daughter who was three months old when I started this blog — it was indeed a shock to hear we lost Heather Armstrong.
It was like opening the wardrobe and seeing the lamp post with snow blowing past.
I don’t want to reduce Heather Armstrong to a symbol. She was a woman.
But also? She was the queen of the mommybloggers.
And so I came here, to write about it.