The year was 2015, I was a college senior, and instead of studying for literally any of the exams that would enable me to graduate and stop hemorrhaging my parents’ money on a creative writing degree, I was spending most of my time on my laptop in my dorm bed, clicking incessantly on the updates of a mom I didn’t know. That mom was Love Taza, a Mormon mom of five whose cheery updates about lipstick shades and where to find the best chocolate-chip cookies in New York City entranced me like my textbooks never could. Taza (real name: Naomi Davis) was a Juilliard-trained ex-ballerina turned wife and mom who taught me literally everything I know about the modern-day Mormon Church—and a decent amount of what I know about where to take small children for an Instagram-friendly day out—through her now-dormant website. (It’s been inactive since 2021, shortly after she and her young family took a less-than-COVID-safe road trip through America to relocate to Phoenix.)
I’ve struggled for years to explain the hold that “mommy blogger” culture has on me—though that’s no longer the preferred term. (Yesterday’s mommy bloggers are today’s “family and lifestyle influencers,” in case you haven’t kept up with what we’re calling women who derive the majority of their content—and, in some cases, their income—from their family lives.) On what one might call the high end of my interest level, there were sites like Cup of Jo and Pamie.com, where thoughtful women wrote about the difficulties and joys of parenthood, marriage, friendship, and aging; on the other end, there were Taza and women like Emily Schuman of Cupcakes and Cashmere, who didn’t necessarily espouse any religious philosophy, but whose highest god seemed to be perfection—or the quest for perfection, anyway. (Cynically, I can’t help wondering whether the “Ha ha, we’re so messy and imperfect!” tone of certain posts were calibrated to make an increasingly fancy Los Angeles life feel relatable to readers.)
Much has been written about momfluencer culture, which is linked to (but, crucially, not the same as!) the tradwife culture typified by creators like @BallerinaFarm, and over the years, I’ve been able to consider my own interest in Mormon mom culture—and mom culture more broadly—with some degree of objectivity. As a queer, leftist, liberally raised Jew who’s lived most of my life in major cities, I rarely, if ever, encounter people like Taza in real life, and while I still don’t quite know why my hunger for the often-dull-as-dishwater details of her life persisted for so many years, I can now understand the appeal of following someone who is a) nothing like you and b) seemingly unafraid of being perceived. When you’re feeling adrift in your own life, as I did for most of my early 20s, it’s tempting to lose yourself entirely in someone else’s—but what does it mean to put yourself and your family forward as a kind of modern ideal, and what do we absorb (even subconsciously) from those families’ ways of living?
Taza may not be online anymore, but I still counted down until The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives hit Hulu last weekend. I tuned into the new reality show expecting drama, chaos, backbiting gossip, and a side of Mormon funeral potatoes (Seriously, have you ever had them? They’re delicious), and while the first season certainly delivers on those fronts—we’re talking unplanned pregnancies, swinging, closeted husbands, tearful marital apologies, and a whole lot of Mormon MomTok inside baseball—I couldn’t help feeling a little let down by it. Maybe my disappointment stemmed from the simple fact that I couldn’t tell most of the cast members apart (to quote one of the show’s stars, Mayci: “There’s a lot of blond bitches here”), but I had always loved foreign-to-me Mormon lifestyle influencing before, albeit in a way I was quick to deride as ironic. Why wasn’t this show speaking to me?