Chapter 32
In the first Zoom meeting, I expected to see a computer screen filled with women like the ones I’d gone to college with, smart and savvy and violently progressive.
Instead, the Zoom opened to reveal a gallery of women who looked like me.
This was the first time I realized that the business of influence was not a secular calling.
Nearly everyone had a little cross necklace glistening on their chest, except for one curly-haired woman from New Jersey, Rachel Weissman, who looked increasingly distressed in the opening minutes of the call until finally she turned her video off.
We prayed at the opening and the closing of each meeting.
In the module, dozens of versions of myself stared back at me, with usernames like JesusMomma and OGOrganic.
I couldn’t tell if the women were older than me or younger, but I could immediately see what kind of communities they came from.
I saw it in their presentation, in the way they laughed and frowned and cried on cue.
I saw it in the way they talked about their families in the sixty-second window when they were meant to offer brief introductory bios about themselves.
Hi, everyone, I’m Natalie Heller Mills. Mother of three, with a fourth on the way!
My husband, Caleb, runs our family farm, which we lovingly call Yesteryear Ranch.
We sell milk, cheeses, and organic exotic vegetables.
But that’s enough about me! What about you?
“I want you all to be so proud of yourselves for signing up today,” Tammy said at the opening of the call. “By showing up for this call today, you’ve taken the biggest step of your journey: the first one.” She paused to let the gravity of the situation really land.
Tammy was the kind of woman who screamed debutante.
She was taking the call from her immaculate kitchen.
Each time she spoke, she shifted the laptop a little bit so that a new part of the room was highlighted.
The eight-burner stovetop; the two stainless-steel dishwashers.
The sparkling countertops, the rows of mason jars containing neat little piles of powder, ranging in color from terra-cotta brown to cocaine white.
At times, she would lean in toward the laptop screen, blocking out the background entirely, her poreless face beaming out at us like a lunar eclipse.
“The hardest thing a mother will ever do is to put herself first. Am I right? Raise your hand, ladies, if you haven’t put yourself first in years. ”
A hundred hands shot into the air. I thought, This is unbearably corny, but I should put my hand up, too, just to play along. Then I realized my hand was already raised. Tammy was good.
According to Tammy, the most powerful force on the planet was the power of the Divine Christian Feminine (trademark pending!).
We were limitless resources; the original Energizer Bunnies.
All we needed to do to achieve our wildest dreams was to channel our own infinite store of energy.
“If you are your true, authentic self, then the sales will happen effortlessly,” she said confidently while she clicked through a clearly homemade PowerPoint presentation.
The slides sped quickly along and seemed only loosely connected to what Tammy was saying.
A stock picture of a blond woman twirling in a field of flowers; a screenshot of a bank account with a balance of $80,000; a cartoon pyramid rendering of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a frowny-faced lady stick figure standing at the bottom.
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,” Tammy continued, her eyes glowing psychotically from the computer light. “Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” She paused here for effect. “Oprah said that.”
Tammy’s talking points flowed zippily along from reassurance to damnation to jubilance.
I could practically feel the collective psychic weight of a hundred relatively gullible women trying to hold so many contradicting truths in their brain at one time: everything they had to succeed was already inside them, but also they needed to pay this woman in order to succeed, and a truly successful social media sales cycle should happen effortlessly, it should happen in our sleep, and yet we needed to start reclaiming some of our own time from our families so that we could commit ourselves to the effort, and the point of this course was to remind women to sink further into their own Divine Christian Feminine, and also, it was time to develop some hard masculine skills, ladies, it was time to learn some math!
I glanced at my computer screen. We were only eight minutes into the session, and already a few women were crying openly.
As Tammy rolled neatly into a thirty-minute monologue about harnessing the power of the Divine Christian Feminine to drive sales online, I tried to mirror the expressions of the other women at all the appropriate times, discomfort and awe and unbridled delight.
I was having a hard time organically intuiting the correct response for any given moment.
I resisted typing my own questions into the chat: When are we going to learn about hashtags?
Can someone explain the analytics dashboard on Instagram to me?
Why do some of my photos get a hundred likes and only one comment?
Why do my cheeks itch when I haven’t checked my phone in the last hour?
Why are you better than me at this, Tammy Lane? Why am I here?
Two years had passed since the disastrous visit with my family.
In the time since, I had given birth to Stetson, our new darling little boy.
The day of his delivery, I actually leaned forward in the hospital bed and caught him myself, guiding the crown of his head out into the world.
With Stetson, there had been no postpartum period, no miserable few months, because I had almost immediately gotten pregnant again.
All praise to the Highest! I’d written in the caption of the pregnancy announcement.
Our fourth, a little girl, was due in a few months.
As for my family: Abigail’s divorce had been finalized a few days after she gave birth to her fifth child: an underweight little girl named Kaitlyn.
I thought the metaphorical significance of ending the B’s was embarrassingly heavy-handed; my mother was openly relieved about it.
Abigail and her four B’s and her one K were living with my mother now.
Two adults, four children, and one infant crammed into a three-bedroom home.
What was my sister doing for money? Well.
I had been right. She couldn’t find a job, and so she was bagging groceries with the teenagers in town.
We weren’t speaking at the moment. Which was fine.
Arguably ideal. Though it did mean I had to drive fifteen minutes farther to the grocery store on the other side of town to avoid seeing her; it also meant I’d been freed from the obligation to witness my sister slowly destroy her own life.
I was too busy for that! Too busy managing Caleb and the children and my burgeoning social media account, which documented the day-to-day events of our sweet little farm.
(Per the emailed paragraph of analysis on my page that I would eventually receive from Tammy Lane as one of the deliverables for paying full price for the course, referencing Yesteryear Ranch as our sweet little farm was a good decision.
Specifically, it was “Approachable, Intimate, and Creative!”)
Now the Instagram account for my sweet little farm had just over a thousand sweet little followers.
Only half of them, it seemed, were actually human—and none of them were interested in telling me what they thought of my sweet little farm.
These followers never commented on my pictures.
They never sent me private messages. Only a small handful of them were even willing to take the meager step of pressing like on the photos.
Sometimes it felt like I was standing on my front porch, staring out at a silent army.
What do you want? I wanted to say. How do I activate you?
I had no clue. Before long, the account felt less like an interesting errand and more like a necessary chore, a constant itch I needed to scratch.
If Tammy’s social media ad had never reached me, I might have given up on the account entirely.
I certainly wouldn’t have realized on my own that the account could become profitable.
But the ad did find me. More importantly, it found me at the perfect time: only an hour or so after I finally had the phone call with Doug that I had been dreading for months.
He was pulling back on funds, he said, in advance of his presidential run.
Our annual disbursement would be cut in half.
“That’s the thing about running for president,” he said amiably.
“It’ll bankrupt you if you’re not careful! ”
WANT TO MAKE SIX FIGURES A MONTH OF PASSIVE INCOME FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNT???
Yes. Yes I did. In fact I needed to.
Hence the class. Hence my willingness to give Tammy Lane $1,500 for a course that could’ve been designed by an eighth grader.
Hence my patience as Tammy launched into her fifth monologue about divine inner light.
No matter how grating or generic she seemed to me, I had to admit: there was something she was doing right.
Something she had figured out that I, for some reason, could not.
After all, no one would have paid $1,500 to get Instagram advice from me.