It was a typical Monday evening, sitting down to a swiftly cooked spaghetti dinner that now sat cold, as my toddler, who’d begged for spaghetti, no longer, in fact, wanted spaghetti. I was nursing the baby in one arm and eating with the other, and that?s when we heard the notifications on my phone; one after the other, after the other, like the sudden sound of fireworks.
My first thought was that it was a family emergency since I?ve never received that many notifications at once. But the notifications were from Instagram. It seemed that a “reel” I’d posted a few hours earlier (reels are what Insta calls short videos) was going viral. To my shock, the 10-second clip of my toddler had more than a million views, and over the course of the next few weeks, it would hit 32 million views…while also provoking a surprising amount of hate. I started my Instagram page after becoming a mom in 2019. I loved my new role, but the everyday challenges and mental load of motherhood took their toll on me, and like all other difficult things in my life, I turned to humour as a source of therapy and to connect with other moms. I started making funny videos about my daily ups and downs, finding solace in the camaraderie of fellow moms.
The video I posted that day was no different. I’d been doing a load of the kids? laundry and threw in some items of my own. In a typical morning rush to get our toddler off to daycare, my partner grabbed a few items from the cle...