On the grid - #121

Remote living, online life.

Before we get into this week, I joined

Tom Kuegler

at

Mind Of A Writer

for a chat to talk writing, newsletters, and life. Give it a listen below.

How Kelton Wright Grew Her Substack Newsletter To 5,000+ Subscribers

Second, this week’s essay is more tirade and good ole fashioned “blog post” than mountain life insight. If that’s not your thing, there’s always next week. Or the 120 essays before this, which I can barely believe is real. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

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We found out I was pregnant in September. And while I announced it in this newsletter in November, I basically yelled it at every human I saw in person from the very first day. I have never been a fan of my own secrets and I wanted everyone in on it: neighbors, readers, waiters, the vet — everyone. 

Except for arguably the largest audience of people who actually know me: the people who follow me on Instagram. (Of course 50,000 people don’t know me — I’m talking about the thousands of people I’d actually met over the course of moving every year or two for over a decade. We can exclude the newcomers who followed me because of one viral reel, never engaged with my account again, and then permanently ruined my engagement.)

I had these little fantasies about simply never sharing — or even implying — that I was pregnant on the platform and then being so buoyed by my own secret that I would carry it on into the child’s life. No one would ever know I had a kid until they saw it in public. It would be years later and people on the other end of the Instagram screen would be like, “kind of weird that she goes to so many elementary school plays, no?” But it would have been years! and there would have been no public digital proof of a child, so the onlookers would merely have accepted the reality because the alternative — that I had one and never shared it — is so unique as to be preposterous. 

Where some parents would post little emojis over their children’s faces to protect their identities or only post photos where the child’s face was hidden, I wouldn’t post the child at all. You would never see a baby bouncer in the background or even a stray toy that couldn’t pass for something for the pets. I would have a small human in my care, yes, but Instagram and its audiences would never know. 

One of the greater complaints of social media and Instagram in particular is that it’s performative, a word that’s come to have a derogatory taint to it because we went in with the bias that social media should be reality, not a performance. Why? Why when humans have been blustering and strutting and sashaying and posing for eternity did we assume the opportunity to do so at a global scale meant that we wouldn’t? I love putting on a performance — not because the reality of who I am is in some way embarrassing or shameful to me, but because I love to perform.

But now, Instagram expects that performance. The app is built in such a way now that the mundanity we were initially delighted by for its oddity has been stamped out entirely for content that forces our hand and our thumbs to engage: grief, violence, birthdays, engagements, weddings, and of course, new life. The app told us to perform, and we as a species are more than up for the challenge. 

I had a fine relationship with Instagram until I had a newsletter. It was like dating someone who was perfectly lovely until you started to grow and change and they didn’t. Every time I shared my writing on Instagram, the platform looked away. I don’t like it, it seemed to say, jealous that I’d developed a relationship with another platform. I assured Instagram that Substack wasn’t a threat, that they might even like each other, but Instagram refused. Either perform like the little street monkey you are, or I’ll banish you from the feed. 

Even at my best, I struggle with receiving advice or constructive criticism, so you might imagine how I respond to threats, which is to say poorly. I knew announcing I was pregnant on Instagram would unleash a swath of engagement on my dying account, and it made me mad. It compounded my own personal grief surrounding the idea that I was living an ordinary and predictable life. I’d already gone to college, gotten married, bought a house — it was only a matter of time before I started piddling about saying a child was the best thing to ever happen to me. I was adamantly against being a part of the Guaranteed Likes Factory yet again.

The only problem was the elaborate fantasy I’d concocted about hiding a kid from Instagram but continuing to post as if that child didn’t exist is that this was still a performance. I was still a monkey, even if I was only performing for myself. It wouldn’t have been about protecting the kid from Big Brother or letting them choose their path. I had no such noble reasons. I had a vendetta, and like most ugly little things you keep around the house, eventually you notice them anew and ask, “wait, why am I keeping this?”

Unfortunately the thing that made me ask that question is arguably worse; it was vanity.

Being pregnant in deep winter in a cabin without a job in a town of 200 people that you rarely see because you are jobless and pregnant in a cabin in deep winter has some perks and it has some cons. The primary perk is that if you can temporarily meditate your way into an abundance mindset and forget that you don’t have a job, which is possible given all the sudden free-time and zero alcohol in your life, then it’s mostly a stressless existence. The con is that while you’re experiencing daily mind-bending changes in your body, no one cares because no one knows. No one can tell you’re pregnant under a puffy until you’re as puffy as said puffy, and I am only just now reaching those proportions.

So when I went to Costa Rica and stripped from the baselayers and sweaters and wool socks and fleece overalls and giant jackets into essentially underwear, everyone around me was like, “oh that girl’s got a baby in her.” I was whisked out of the customs line to the very front, I was catered to like any risk of not catering to me might cause the baby to come out right then and there, and mostly, I was admired. People’s faces lit up when they saw the belly and I kept getting the look, the welcome to the club look of parents who could somehow sniff out it was my first and oh what precious memories were ahead of me. 

The more people looked at me, the more I looked at myself, and as my belly took on a sun-kissed glow along with my cheeks and my now enormous milk machines, the more I liked the way I looked. The more I thought, “I look kind of hot?” and the more I thought that, the more I thought I would like other people to know I look hot. 

Oof. 

Grappling with the very human but culturally unbecoming desire for other people to affirm my hotness, I had to do some real thinking about why I didn’t want to tell Instagram I was pregnant. I had already ruled out the noble causes that would be on the kid’s behalf, and I also knew it wasn’t from fear we’d lose the pregnancy. I knew with utter certainty that if I had a miscarriage, I would be one margarita away from posting a tirade about how women are made to suffer it alone. I wasn’t even afraid of losing the baby, feeling confident in my luck and feeling even more confident in my own resiliency should something go wrong. It turned out what I was actually afraid of losing was myself. 

If I posted I was pregnant with a photo and a caption, everyone who had ever known me would roll me over into the category of mom, with all its cultural baggage. Everyone who’d ever worked with me, dated me, hated me, lusted after me, got shitfaced with me, sailed with me, biked with me, danced with me, or argued with me would now feel like they knew something about me — that I wanted a family. How pedestrian. 

So of course the next thing I grappled with was why did I want people to think I was hot but not want them to think I had a big gushy center ready to love more things. I could feel the patriarchy climbing up my spine, determining my value in the world, whispering the worst of itself: you’re gonna make less money, no one will call you adventurous now, you might get hot mom but you’ll never just get hot ever again, you’ll be a heifer at the pumping station while your husband plans an expedition around the world, you’ll be boring.

And so I posted the hot photo. If I was going to be berating myself for diminishing motherhood and believing the falsehoods about sex appeal after children and reminiscing about an identity I’d never even really had, then I might as well get some compliments while I was doing it.

This, however, backfired. I did get a few compliments. But mostly what I got were felicitations. About the baby. Because that’s what you say to a pregnant woman.

It feels like in the modern era of writing, there’s no way to write about getting pregnant without acknowledging the people who would like to be pregnant and have yet to succeed or may not ever be able to. Expressing reservations of any kind is akin to complaining about a job and then someone being like, “at least you have one.” They’re right! And up until that point, I had made the extremely sensible choice about my pregnancy: just don’t say anything. When the tidal wave of “aren’t you excited!!!” started to roll in, I was taken out at the ankles with my inability to just follow the script and say yes. 

But the reality behind all my squirming face emojis and sweating face emojis is that I am not excited. I am happy, I am curious, I am grateful for my and the baby’s health thus far, but I am more excited about potentially meeting a new dog than I am about having a baby. It’s just not exciting to me. Here is this thing that could cause postpartum psychosis, depression, bleeding, death!, and by many very probable accounts turn you into the kind of person who is always worried, and people are asking if I am excited? I’m just relieved to have one photo of myself where I look like a fertility goddess and not someone who now starts their day with Preparation H and Tums. 

Maybe the reason I didn’t tell Instagram is because I knew, I knew, that deep down those people don’t know me and they wouldn’t get it. For all the memories and eras of who I’d been, they simply can’t. Many years ago when I was single and living in DC just after crash landing there after a wild season of life in the Caribbean, I met a guy at the bar who could not get over how “cool” it was that I’d been sleeping in a sail bag and singing at dive bars. I gave him my number when he asked, but walked away mirthless. I was out with friends from college, and I complained to one of them about the guy. “It’s all he cared about, but that’s not who I am.” My friend looked at me, incredulous. “Kelton, that is who you are. You did do that. What is he supposed to say?”

And what is Instagram supposed to say? Welcome to your new hell? You’re about to get the worst few years of sleep of your life? You’re never going to be able to travel solo again without weeping when you FaceTime your offspring? Say goodbye to your hobbies and body and sex life until at least 2026? The people who do say those things are even worse! Acting like they know something you don’t simply because they’ve done it. I don’t need to see the Earth from space to know it’s round, babe. We’ve all got the message that parenting is the biggest challenge in life. Getting pregnant is now a part of who I am, just like living on a boat was a part, just like writing a newsletter is a part, just like the very few secrets I have left are a part. No one can know you completely, especially when every week I spend thousands of words still getting to know myself.

When I could wrap my head around that, I could release my expectations for people to “get it” from a photo and a caption. That’s what friends are for. That’s why even Instagram has the distinction between Followers and Close Friends. That’s why Substack has allowed me 2000 words of this and Instagram only allows for some 2000 characters. Such few characters only allows for a script and it’s very easy to follow:

1. How exciting!

2. When are you due

3. Do you know what you’re having

Scripts are helpful. They allow us to interact with one another in a predictably safe manner. But scripts don’t allow for reading the room because you are already reading a script. When I find out someone is pregnant I want to know if it was easy, if it was planned, if everyone was on board, if there was disappointment when they found out the sex, if they say gender when they mean sex, I want to know the shit you only say after your second glass of wine in a bar loud enough for secrets but quiet enough to hear them. 

All Instagram could say was if I had good lighting and a good bathing suit. And in the end, that’s all I went to Instagram for (putting aside the deep desire to put my registry on my Instagram stories and just hope some of my previous lives were feeling generous.)

In the end, where I shared and who I shared with was always about my identity, how I defined myself. Here, in writing, I felt comfortable sharing that I was pregnant because I had the space to share everything else: the fears, the wants, the… other fears. And in person, it was the same: I had the physical room to gesticulate and make the faces that could do the heavy lifting when someone said congratulations. I’ve never had a poker face in my life and I certainly don’t now. But I knew on Instagram I could never express myself fully, so in the end, I just stopped trying. I expressed the most base and basic element of pregnancy: look, there’s something growing in my abdomen.

In the meantime, I am trying to respect the script for the script’s intent: to just be nice. To say something instead of nothing. To be there, even if it’s not always in the way we’d imagined. And to remember it could be worse: it could be the missionary in the airport who air-cupped his hands around my belly and said “blessings, blessings, what a gift” while I visibly cringed and said “okay?”

Knowing that is an option, I will gladly take congrats.