The Instagram Mothers were disappearing. At first they only disappeared from Instagram, but then they were disappearing for real, from real life. The Instagram Mothers, now in their seventies or eighties, had started their accounts in their teens, and could not fathom a life without Instagram. They had shown their own search for love, their weddings, honeymoons, pregnancies, and their children’s first moments in the world—first steps, first day of each school year, first love. The children were famous among their followers—mostly mothers and childless women who expressed a religious fervor in their devotion—until they weren’t, until everyone deleted the app, then all apps, then returned to landlines. Some of the Instagram Mothers, the more beautiful or entertaining, had become what marketers called back then “influencers.” They influenced other Instagram Mothers and women in the “mother demographic” to buy certain skin products, to wear certain swimsuits and dresses and shoes, to travel to certain hotels, to decorate their homes in certain ways. The aesthetic had become an easily recognizable joke, the laughingstock of neometamodernism.
The less fortunate of the Instagram Mothers lost everything when their children sued. It began in France and spread from there. Mostly daughters and a few sons sued their mothers for mental health damage, the complications of a life lived online before one could consent to such a transgression of privacy. Some children took everything they could get from their mothers, especially those who made their living by profiting off the beauty of their own babies, their little girls, who became their awkward pre-teen daughters, then their languidly beautiful teenage daughters, and, finally, angry eighteen-year-olds. That’s when the children revolted.
The trend for the ones who sued or ran away or, in the shocking case of Yellow Magpie Firth, who, at the age of thirteen, killed her mother on a live Instagram Story, was to find solace in “Privacy-Value Analog Communities,” or PriVals. Yellow’s lawyers successfully argued her act was self-defense in the truest sense of the word, as her identity had been constructed, capitalized upon, and threatened by her mother, before Yellow even had time to create a self of her own. The world watched in awe as Yellow was acquitted. The first PriVals were quickly constructed.
Now that the Instagram Mothers’ children were in their thirties and forties and raising their own offspring, “analog parenting” had become all the rage. The adult children of the Instagram Mothers were horrified that the milestones and ennui of their youth had been framed and shared with the world, and they had overcorrected such that they now led lives in the Luddite vein. No internet, cell phones, or screens. They grew their own food, raised goats, and homeschooled. Everyone withdrew into their own house at night, the shades drawn. Photographs were forbidden. Everyone spoke face to face or not at all.
To the Instagram Mothers it was positively archaic. All the freedom they had achieved in the name of feminism, and this was what their daughters chose to do with it?
PriVals were as small as a few hundred, formed for ideal human interaction, and required a specific structure: an equal percentage of white families, Black families, Latino families, Asian families, and non-declared families. Equal percentage male, female, and nonbinary identities, and equal percentage of families with two moms, two dads, queer-poly parents, het-poly parents, and nuclears. Everyone was extremely tolerant of difference and labels. Unless you tried to even mention the internet.
When the Instagram Mothers called the town center’s landline asking to visit their grandchildren, they received letters in the mail from their own adult children, who gave specific handwritten instructions on how and when to arrive, which train and bus to take. There were no ride-sharing programs to deliver the grandmothers to their grandchildren’s door. Those too, like the home-sharing businesses, had imploded after the Instagram Mothers attempted an unsuccessful human rights influencer campaign that involved Ubering refugee children across borders and photographing them holding hands with their own children in elaborate Airbnbs, the costs sponsored by oil companies.
Undaunted but distanced, the Instagram Mothers—now grandmothers, though they refused the term—arrived for obligatory family visits every few years, their phones tucked away, less out of respect for their children’s lifestyle than for fear of having their devices confiscated. The Instagram Mothers took surreptitious photos of sunlight striping the floorboards of their grandchildren’s bedrooms, or a lone coffee cup on the rail of the front porch, then posted the photos later to their account, the composition hinting metaphorically at their critique, the emojis in the caption strung like an encrypted code beneath the scene.
It’s a pity, the Instagram Mothers think, these analog-raised grandchildren of theirs—they read books for hours at a time. They paint and invent. Journalists say it’s a renaissance, it’s a godsend that analog parenting and PriVals came around when they did. But they don’t travel much, these grandchildren. Not like their grandmothers traveled. The grandchildren aren’t properly prepared for the horrors and beauty of the world, which was always best experienced through the internet first. When the grandchildren visit Niagara Falls on a family vacation at age twelve, it is the first time they have seen it, and they sit for hours, catatonic at the sight of such vast beauty.
But the Instagram Mothers, the places they’ve seen!—both virtually and IRL, they liked to add, even though such archaic phrases are no longer in use. Paris, Venice, Marrakech, Kyoto, Oia. Or did they make it to Oia, in the end? They’ve been everywhere twice, for at least a day, often as quick as a layover, and sometimes they can no longer remember. They’ve seen the whole world, first through images on Instagram and then again in person, and they posted the evidence to prove it—that’s what counts.
They travel now in packs, so they can photograph each other better. Their trips consist mainly of photoshoots, each woman getting her turn in front of the waterfall. She arches and poses, turning her stomach away from the camera, and then says, “Let me look at it.” She looks and critiques and tries again. When the perfect shot is attained, she uses her phone to Photoshop the wrinkles from her face and arms. She digs out chunks of her waist with the knife tool, plumps her lips and lifts her drooping eyelids. When finished, she looks like a visitor in her own face.
The twenty-year-old version of herself hovers, ghostlike, over the reality of her skin.
She feels quite pleased with the digital results. The apps have never let her down.
Although sometimes her grandchildren, when she does see them, say the most horrible things. They ask her why she looks like a Muppet. The grandchildren laugh and laugh. The Muppets are over a hundred years old, a relic of the past. The grandchildren only know about them because of the traveling Muppet puppet show, not from television screens or phone screens, as the grandmothers were raised.
So the Instagram Mothers roamed on, doing what they did best: photographing themselves, editing themselves, sharing their perceptions of themselves and the world with an audience that only included each other.
It was then that the Instagram Mothers began to mysteriously die. Some fell off a cliff. Others walked onto busy roads while attempting to take a photograph, and tripped, and the cars were just coming too fast. The adult children said it was a cancer caused by phone usage, which had long been confirmed, but then why were the bodies never found? But, really, the adult children never went to look for the bodies—that was it. If an Instagram Mother was scootered to death in Bali, none of her offspring cared to make the trip or pay the costs to transport the body. So it was often buried along the road. There were always five or six fellow Instagram Mothers who watched, who Instagrammed the whole process, hoping someone would care. They held hands, touching with hesitancy the others’ shriveled and crepey skin, politely looking away while the others’ faces crumpled into tears, then fixed themselves up and took selfies to edit and post to commemorate their friend Britney, who had been so photogenic. She was truly beautiful, inside and out, they wrote in the caption, sealing it with the prayer hands emoji, which, for them, said it best.
