It started with a scorpion sting. One day in 2015, Maria Hunt, a bubbly, brash mother of two, checked her local Ventura County, California, Facebook moms’ group and saw that a woman had posted a picture of a scorpion that had just stung her child, asking what she should do. “Call 911, duh!” Hunt commented, setting off the kind of quick-fire social media spat familiar to anyone who’s spent time in an online community dedicated to raising children to be considerate, functional human beings—to motherhood, in other words. “I got so much hate for it,” Hunt says on a crystalline day last fall, sitting on the terrace of the Sofitel Los Angeles hotel in Beverly Grove. “They were like, How dare you say ‘duh.’ ”
Hunt was new to the area. She’d recently moved from West Hollywood to the suburban town of Oak Park with her then husband, an entertainment attorney, and their two sons, five and seven, for the schools, and had joined the Facebook group to meet people. So she was disappointed to find the women in it so “judgy and mean,” as she puts it. But she’d long had trouble finding like-minded female friends. In West Hollywood, for example, she and her husband had often socialized with a group of couples, and the wives, Hunt says, criticized her for being overly flirtatious. “I don’t want to take your man,” she says, shrugging. “I’m just an outgoing person.” They also had negative opinions about “the way I look, the way I dress,” she says, gesturing down at her low-cut, flowery Topshop dress, which she’s paired with magenta platforms. “My personality, the way I am as a wife. Just everything.” Which, of course, included her mothering. “I’m Latina, and we parent very differently,” she says. “I’m loving but also very stubborn and very strict. They were like, ‘Your kids will hate you.’ ”
The scorpion incident, though, inspired an idea. “I was like, Let me try to make my own group that’s judgment-free, where there’s no drama, no talk about politics, religion, circumcision, or breastfeeding,” she says. “It would be a little utopia.” The result was a Facebook group, created in September of 2015, for “Unicorn Moms,” as Hunt dubbed them, inspired by the phrase she’d taken as the tagline: “Perfect moms are like unicorns; they don’t exist.” Or at least this is what she usually tells people when they ask. She’d actually come up with the term after a few Ventura County girlfriends had dared her to make another one of her entertainingly shocking comments on the local Facebook group, and she’d jokingly posted that she and her husband were seeking a unicorn, a polyamory term often used to describe a bisexual woman. “They were like, ‘What the fuck—this is a mom group, not a sex-trolling group,’ ” Hunt says, describing the scandalized comment thread that followed. “They were quoting Bible verses.” (A few also privately messaged their interest.) As for the official definition of a Unicorn Mom, which can now be found everywhere from T-shirts on Etsy to UrbanDictionary.com, it is as follows: “A mother who’s not perfect, enjoys alcohol, has a sense of humor, and couldn’t care less what you think. See also: Beautiful; Boss Bitch & Zero F#&ks Given.”
Today, the Facebook group has over 35,000 members, and the Instagram page has over 56,000 followers. The forum has come to mean enough to some members that they have gotten tattoos of the logo, a silhouetted figure with a unicorn horn that slightly resembles the “mud-flap girl” truckers often have on their rigs (and that’s also featured on a line of merchandise that includes wineglasses and hoodies). Hunt has branched out into events, too—in September 2017, she organized the first UniCon, a gathering of a few hundred Unicorn Moms in Los Angeles. A year later, we are speaking at the Sofitel in the midst of the second one.
The particular brand of paradise Hunt has produced, that afternoon at least, is awash in alcohol and filled with hashtag-friendly tableaux. The entrance features a purple carpet and a moss wall with a few iridescent, crystal-like structures, where the Unicorn Moms pose for photos, emitting the anticipatory energy of the early hours of a bachelorette party. From there, they head onto the terrace, which contains pop-up shops for, among other things, CBD oil, dream catchers, sleek Swedish sex toys, and something called Aqua Hydration Services. Many women have hair the color of popped popcorn; many have light pink manicures; many are dressed in candy-colored jumpsuits. There are also two shirtless male models wearing identical ripped black jeans. One of them was at the last UniCon, thanks to that event’s sponsorship by the movie A Bad Moms Christmas. “And guess what, he’s back,” Hunt tells the crowd at the end of the day’s second and final panel. “He’s outside with his hot friend, and they’re here for whatever you want, so go have your way with them. You’re welcome!”
As for the panelists, they include DeAnna Pappas (a former Bachelorette), Kim Caldwell (a former American Idol finalist), Gina Kirschenheiter (a Real Housewife of Orange County), and Tori Spelling. Sitting on a dais in a room off the terrace with a bar at the back, they exude the confidence of Tony Robbins and espouse a sisterhood so frothy you could spin it into cotton candy, but they also chat openly about their struggles with relationships and self-esteem, and about what helps resolve postpartum depression. (“Wellbutrin!” Caldwell shouts, to cheers, like she’s called out a sports team.) Pappas tells the audience that after a few years of giving 100 percent to her husband and son, she’s launched a blog and is working on not feeling selfish when she does things for herself. “If I want to get a babysitter at one in the afternoon and go sit at Chili’s by myself and have three glasses of wine, I’m going to do it,” she says. Cayla Craft, a former ER nurse who now runs a coaching business called Mommy Millionaire (and says she makes $800,000 a year selling dietary supplements through a network marketing company called Isagenix), tells the room her husband struggled after her ballooning income prompted him to quit his job in the oil fields to work for her instead. “Have sex every day,” she advises, explaining she achieves this by getting up at five. “As long as they get that, they’re fine.”
I’d woken up that morning in New York at 5:30 a.m. to breastfeed my 11-month-old son before flying to Los Angeles, making it another night of four hours of sleep in a year that had been full of them. As the afternoon wears on, my mind starts to feel like a malfunctioning rocket spinning through space. I follow one of the shirtless guys around as he flirts and grinds and swoops up a middle-aged woman wearing a tank top with the phrase “#flawless” on it. I see not one but two women with small dogs perched on their shoulders, like pet monkeys. Tori Spelling poses for selfie after selfie. The event at the Sofitel, clearly, is geared toward a somewhat niche type of mom empowerment, one that is best suited to women who live in communities that have fairly traditional views about everything from gender roles to jewelry. “I recently got my nose pierced, and people were like, ‘That doesn’t look right,’ ” says Krista Zachary, who flew in from Reno to attend UniCon with two of her cousins. “I’m tired of doing what everyone thinks I should.” But broaden the lens a bit, and what’s also clear is that the Unicorn Moms are a small part of a larger movement: the Mom-Shaming Resistance.
Mom-shaming has been around for decades, if not centuries. “There have been different variations of it at different times,” says Virginia Rutter, a sociology professor at Framingham State University. “In the 1970s, when I went to kindergarten, my mother went to work, and her mother-in-law, my grandmother, went nuts about how delinquent her children were going to be,” she says. Rutter, referencing the work of historian Stephanie Coontz, traces the issue back to the Industrial Revolution, when shifting family structures left women responsible for “the unpaid work of economic reproduction,” by which she means having children and creating a home, not to mention “making capitalism look sweet, look comfy, look intimate.” Whenever this wasn’t possible, she continues, the response was to shame women rather than critique the system.
“Blaming the mother has long historical roots,” says Linda Fentiman, a law professor at Pace University. “Even in [court] cases about [a child’s] lead poisoning, where it’s clear it’s the landlords and manufacturers of lead paint who are responsible, a defense strategy is to trash the mother—to say she has a poor IQ and she isn’t a good parent. And often the jury will accept that.”
Lately, attacking women for their mothering has become ubiquitous. A national poll conducted in 2017 by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, found that 6 in 10 mothers have been judged for their parenting, most often by family members. Another poll that year, sponsored by the baby food company Beech-Nut, found that 80 percent of millennial moms said they’ve been criticized by someone they know. “Guilt and shame are the watchwords of today’s mothering,” says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and a senior fellow on the Council on Contemporary Families. “It used to be the goal was just to successfully launch your children. Today’s parents often hope and even expect to be best friends with their children for life. They also worry that if they do anything wrong, their kid will hate them. In my practice, I commonly see both parents—but more moms than fathers—ruminating about very small errors.”
Despite recent research that suggests that parenting, while important, is a relatively small part of how a child turns out, raising children has become a high-stakes endeavor with an ever-growing array of theories about how to do it right. "All these different ideas create anxiety and guilt, which are really key to the mommy wars," Coleman says. "People are trying to establish they're on the winning side to feel more secure." Compounding the problem, many modern-day moms are hypercritical of themselves, says Alexandra Sacks, a reproductive psychiatrist and coauthor, with psychiatrist Catherine Birndorf, of the upcoming book What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions From Pregnancy to Motherhood. This means shaming, when it does occur, cuts even deeper. It also leaves women more likely to take an innocuous remark as a critique. "I think a lot of this is how moms receive it, you know?" says Sarah Clark, codirector of the Mott poll.
This is the environment that's given rise to the Mom-Shaming Resistance, hints of which are now everywhere (the title was coined, of all places, by E! News's website.) It can be found in the Twitter feed of Chrissy Teigen, whose honesty about some of the more challenging aspects of motherhood has made her the movement’s patron saint, and in comedian Ali Wong’s raunchy 2016 Netflix special Baby Cobra, recorded when she was seven months pregnant. It’s visible in the public statements of athletes like Serena Williams, who has discussed her own uncertainty as a mother, and Hilary Duff, who recently told InStyle, regarding being shamed for kissing her young son on the lips, “Anyone who doesn’t like it can hit Unfollow."
“I think we’re in a cultural moment when women want to demystify the experience of motherhood,” says Sacks, whose TED talk describing the term matrescence, which refers to the identity confusion many mothers experience after giving birth, has racked up over 1.4 million views (Sacks also has an upcoming podcast with Gimlet Media about motherhood). The hunger to push back against shaming helps explain the viral success of a portrait series produced by photographer Abbie Fox last summer, which featured kids holding signs attesting to choices their parents made that got them judged. “I was born at home,” reads one. “I was breastfed until I was 2,” reads another. Fox’s three kids appeared in some of the photos—she’d decided to work on the project after being criticized for letting her youngest, who was one at the time, watch TV. (“I have a photography business,” she explains. “I have to stick her in front of the TV in the playpen to get stuff done.”) Yet even as the project was picked up by the Washington Post and Good Morning America, it ran into the same problems it was trying to fight against, with parents of the featured kids getting shamed all over again for their decisions. In response to a picture of Fox’s oldest son holding a sign saying Fox had used the cry-it-out method with him, for example, people sent her messages saying he would grow up to be psychologically troubled. One woman went so far as to threaten to call Child Protective Services, “for something I did nine years ago!” Fox says.
Still, the series proved transformative for Fox, in part by connecting her with other parents who’d had a similar experience. (The antidote to shame, Coleman tells me, is empathy.) Something comparable is at work at UniCon, too. “It’s so awesome,” says attendee Chardonnay Rodriguez. “Even these amazing women on the panel struggle with the same shit that you do.” I hear another version of this from Ashley Staples, 31, a stay-at-home mother of two who’s wearing a bustier, her jet-black hair pulled into a tight ponytail. Near the end of the second panel, she stands up, her voice quivering, and asks, “How do you find yourself when you have pushed your husband into his career?” Four different panelists respond, flocking to her like mother hens. “I know how hard it is when you leave a kid and your husband’s, like, napping, and you’re like, ‘Do I go back?’ ” says Diana Madison, a style influencer. “Right before Housewives, I was drowning,” Kirschenheiter says. “I was like you, crying."
The panelists offer specific recommendations as well. Madison suggests that she start a makeup-focused Instagram feed (Staples had said she was passionate about beauty). Spelling tells Staples she could become a brand representative for Beauty With Tori, a new company that, according to its website, offers the opportunity to earn “EXCITING money on social media by sharing AMAZING beauty products.” I wonder what Staples makes of this advice, but as I look for her after the panel ends, I realize that my breasts have become so engorged they are beginning to leak. After rushing to the bathroom with my breast pump, though, I discover there are no outlets, so I head to the hotel’s front desk, where a perplexed male clerk, once I explain the issue three times, lets me into the ladies’ gym locker room. And while I sit there pumping, feeling guilty for not doing my job as a journalist, and guilty for not being with my son—the 36-hour trip to California marks the longest I’ve ever been apart from him—I think about a 2004 Brené Brown interview about motherhood and shame. “There are so many unattainable and conflicting expectations that many of us feel like we’re drowning,” she said.
What none of the panelists mentions to Staples is the larger context, this system in which there’s no way to win, not for any of us. We live in a world in which working mothers today feel compelled to spend as much time with their kids as stay-at-home moms did in the early ’70s, one in which if you don’t work, you feel guilty about not having a career, but if you do work, you feel guilty about the time away from your kid—and even if you don’t feel guilty, you feel guilty about that. (When I speak with Coontz, the historian, also a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College, she sums this up by saying, “There is this American tendency to transform social problems into individual problems and societal failures into personal failures.”)
Once I finish pumping, I find Staples in the crowd. “I don’t really have an outlet; I don’t really have friends,” she says. She explains that she is responsible for almost all the parenting in the household, as well as “all the technical, menial tasks” her husband doesn’t feel like doing for his work as a software engineer. “In an ideal world, I would be painting or creating, doing makeup or doing hair, but I lost myself a lot in my marriage and in my kids,” she says. “This [event] is probably the biggest therapy session that I’ve had in my life. I’m going to take everything. I’m going to run with it.”
In August 2016, a photo of a young mom on her phone in an airport, with her two-month-old lying on a blanket at her feet, was so widely shared online—and so heavily criticized—that it made its way back to the woman herself, Molly Lensing. She ended up not only receiving angry Facebook messages from strangers but fearing that she might lose her job as a pediatric nurse. In fact, as Lensing later explained in an interview, on the day the photo was taken, she’d spent the previous 20 hours sitting in airports with her infant, the result of a Delta computer shutdown. “My arms were tired,” she said. “And I had to communicate with all the family members wondering where the heck we were.”
It goes without saying that the internet and social media amplify mom-shaming by offering novel avenues by which it can occur. Lensing’s experience is just one example of a “new mom-shaming trend,” as Parenting.com declared it, involving strangers snapping photos of mothers doing things they disapprove of, then posting them online. But even positive images on social media can be problematic, in that when someone creates a picture-perfect version of motherhood, this often leaves fellow moms feeling like they don’t measure up. Kristen Mittler, for instance, runs the Instagram account oldjoy, which has 157,000 followers and documents a life that includes four lovely children, a handsome husband, and an impeccably beautiful home with chickens in the backyard. But still, she admits, “I see other moms online and I think, ‘Oh my God, their lives are so beautiful.’ If I’m having a bad day, that makes me feel like shit.”
That her feed ends up invoking this sentiment in others could help explain some of the needlessly nasty comments she receives. (“Shaming is like a hot potato,” says Catherine Monk, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University. “What I hear in my practice is that women often have a voice in their heads wondering whether something was the right choice. But such internal struggle is uncomfortable, so there’s a tendency to locate it in someone else.”) Another way of saying this is that it’s hard to push back against any of it—the idealization of motherhood, the judgment of women’s choices, the rigid ideas about what children require—without shaming someone else in the process.
The Mom-Shaming Resistance tries to break this cycle by insisting on a firm broad-mindedness, a value that’s enshrined in one of the Unicorn Mom community guidelines: “If you don’t like a post DON’T comment.... Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.” And this, in turn, has the power to create a kind of force field. Take the community that’s grown online around the YouTube series #imomsohard, in which comedians Jen Smedley and Kristin Hensley offer radically honest riffs about everything from hemorrhoids to body hair—in their first video, Smedley, while introducing herself, forgets her baby daughter’s name. “We now have over 1.5 million viewers on our platforms, and they’re really kind to each other,” Smedley says. “I’d like to think it’s because we set up this space where nobody’s trying to win. We’re all just trying to laugh.” (Their first book, #IMomSoHard, comes out in May; they also have a TV show in the works.)
Their biggest hit so far is a video in which they try on a variety of swimsuits, making fun of their impracticality—“You can’t discipline in this!” Hensley says, pretending to call out to a badly behaving child while wearing a bathing suit consisting mostly of string. They posted it before getting on a plane and, upon landing, realized it had gone viral (it ended up getting over 20 million views). “My face and body went cold,” Hensley says, not only because “I was not happy, in general, with how I looked in a swimsuit,” but because she worried women might embed photos of themselves in the comments and, with that level of visibility, receive cruel comments. Instead, she opened the page, and the first thing she saw was a photo a curvier woman had posted of herself in a bathing suit, writing that the video gave her the confidence to go to the beach for the first time in years. “And I get chills, because there were 300 comments, and every one was ‘You go, girl!’ ” Hensley says. Though she adds a moment later that this didn’t quite sum up every response. The women were moms, after all. “So many were like, ‘Wear sunscreen,’ ” she says.
This article originally appeared in the April 2019 issue of ELLE.
