Explaining the Mommy Shorts Cinematic Universe

A post about keeping up with real life and the evolution of social media

Lately on my Instagram stories, I’ve been making a lot of jokes about the Mommy Shorts Universe, which is basically the same universe we are currently living in, except it exists one month in the past. I’m sure many of you are totally fine with my stories being a bit behind, but if you guys exist, you aren’t the ones constantly DMing me saying, “Wait. What day is it? I’m so confused!”

Whether you care or not about me posting in real time, I wanted to take this opportunity to explain. Not because I feel the need to defend myself, but more because I think it’s interesting, it relates heavily to our current social media landscape and perhaps most importantly, it’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer. Presumably, you’ve subscribed to my Substack because you want to know what’s going on in my brain, and this is it— how do I keep my social channels current with what’s happening in my real life, when real life keeps happening???

When I first started Mommy Shorts 13 years ago, I wanted my blog to be an online destination that people would check for daily updates. So, I wrote a blog post every single day, for at least 6-8 years. Sometimes I think back to that time and wonder how I kept it up for so long, but then I remember— the blog post was THE WHOLE THING. I’d write a post, put a picture at the top and share it on facebook to promote it. That was it. Half the time, it wasn’t even a whole written post. It was an intro to a video I found, a picture posted for a caption contest or even just a tweet I found funny.

When Instagram started, I joined and posted filtered pictures of my day, like everybody else. There was no story in the caption. No carousels. No video. Just my lunch with some emojis or my feet on a pretty tiled floor with the hashtag #fromwhereistand. The simplicity was the point. But as time went on, Instagram got more curated and even things that were designed to look effortless and simple involved a lot of strategy and planning.

Then I joined Snapchat and became immediately enamoured with stories. I loved it because it felt really easy to post snippets of my day in real time, as opposed to all the thought I put into what I posted on the blog and Instagram. Since my Snapchat story disappeared and I didn’t really know who was following me on there, I posted whatever, whenever. And I think those of you who followed me on Snapchat back in the day, would say that was your favorite platform of mine. The real time, unfiltered look at my life felt truly personal and had no choice but to be authentic. But as Snapchat expanded their capabilities and more people followed me there, I found myself spending more and more time thinking about what I was posting, spending time to write funny text overlays, integrating music and using filters, all in real time. After about a year, I realized the time I was spending on my phone, during the day, while I was with my kids, interrupting a real time moment to write a caption or make a joke to camera, was not the kind of parent I wanted to be.

I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to be present and post in real time. At least for me. Even the act of just pressing “post” was an act taking you out of the moment and putting the importance more on your online life than your real life. Which might not matter to a 20yo influencer hanging out with her friends, but it definitely mattered as someone trying to be a good mom. And to be honest, real time posting didn’t make me feel like I was being a very good friend or spouse either.

When Instagram stories came along, that seem to solve the issue. Now you could post stories from your camera roll which meant I could record things during the day and post them later after the kids were asleep. Taking photos and videos was something I had done my whole life, even before social media, so I still felt present as long as I wasn’t focusing on what was captured until later. And I actually found that putting the emphasis on video allowed me to be much more present than stopping things to take the perfect photo. I could just live my life, record whatever and figure out later what to include. That’s why you’ve always seen me post everything at once at the end of the day (or more recently, first thing in the morning before the kids are up, because my new premenopausal thing is that I wake up at 5am.) But there was a catch. While Instagram stories allowed me to be present in the moment, it also meant that creating a story took up a significant amount of extra time, outside of what I consider work hours.

Still, I’ve always loved putting together Instagram stories and that became my new favorite way to share my life with you all. I switched to Substack with a new plan of writing a blog post once a week and tried to keep things as real time as possible. Usually I’d post Instagram photos and stories in relatively real time (end of the day or at most, a few days behind) and then for more major events, spend some time writing a blog post that I would post about a week later, after I had time to process and reflect. Which also gave me the excuse to post another photo to promote. Everybody seemed to understand that blog posts didn’t have to be in real time, they were a recap or memory of the event.

During all of this, many of you probably noticed that Mazzy stopped appearing on my Instagram stories. She didn’t mind me filming or taking photos of major events (the kinds of things any parent would photograph), but she didn’t want me filming her random day to day stuff. And it does feel a little strange after awhile to be constantly filming your kids, hoping they do something funny or noteworthy. Harlow has always been more of a ham, and loved performing for the camera, so I kept that going for awhile, but this year, Harlow started rejecting the day to day stuff too. Or she’d tell me that she only wanted me to film very specific things, and sometimes just for us and not for posting.

I always knew this day was coming, but the exact reasons surprised me a little. For instance, there was one time I filmed Harlow imitating what her teacher looks like while she’s eating. I posted it on my story, everyone thought it was hilarious and I asked her if I could post it in-feed. She said no. I insisted that it was so funny and everyone would think so. But she was adamant. I said okay, because I have an agreement with my kids that I have to get their approval before I post things. Then a few weeks later, she told me why. She said that the teacher imitation was something that her and her friends do together, that they all follow me on Instagram and she didn’t want them to think that she was taking credit for a joke they made together. That is a reason I never expected but made perfect sense. It was also a wake-up call that kids Harlow’s age have Instagram when she does not. So a lot of times, they might see something I posted before she does, and she would hear about it at school.

This was the point at which I stopped posting Instagram stories as frequently. At the same time, we had a lot going on with Mazzy— the Bat Mitzvah, high school applications, her 8th grade graduation… so it seemed natural to post less as I focused on all this stressful, time consuming real world stuff. I planned to go back to my regular schedule once it was all over.

But I also recognized that life was different now. In addition to my kids wanting to be on camera less, I also had a lot of close friends move away and had to strengthen and build friendships with new people. You know what you don’t do when you are making new friends? Or meeting new parents at new schools? Film everything they are doing. So I was struggling with what to film outside of the kids too.

And then Tiktok happened.

I know a lot of you aren’t on Tiktok and I’m not going to try to convince you to join. At the start, the only reason I joined was because Instagram was floundering and I needed to stay relevant because this is my career. But even if you aren’t on Tiktok and have no plans of ever joining, I want to explain why it solves a lot of the problems I illustrated above.

If you look at any of the videos I did a few years ago, like unboxings or Harlow’s Baking Show, you will see that I used to just let the camera roll and then edit all the funny bits together. All my videos are basically back to back videos of the kids talking. I didn’t go in with a script. I just filmed everything they said and took the funny parts. My stories were similar. Think about all those videos of Harlow talking while we walked to school. I’m not particularly natural talking to camera myself (I’ve always been better at communicating through writing), so I would talk behind the camera and rely on the them to tell the story. “Harlow, what are we doing today?” “Mazzy, did you like the movie?”

This is problematic for two reasons. 1) It’s not sustainable as the kids get older. And 2) As my platform continues to grow, it doesn’t really feel fair to them. I spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about how to evolve my content and make it more about me. What did I bring to the table that was worth watching without the kids? I wasn’t an expert in anything. I’m not a beauty guru. I don’t care about fashion. We all know how my home decor content crashed and burned.

The answer finally came to me: NYC.

What format had I been most successful with? Stories.

How do I tell a story about NYC without the kids and without talking to camera? A scripted voiceover.

I decided to try doing a “day in the life of a nyc mom” (DITL) that was more about my day as a content creator in NYC than about the kids. Mazzy and Harlow do appear in some clips in the video, but for the first time in my entire social media career, I made myself the main character. At the end of the video, I go out with Leah and Cara (my co-workers) instead of my mom friends.

That video got over 3 million views on Tiktok, which was INSANE, and I realized this was the answer to all my content problems. You know how Tiktok’s famous algorithm decides who wants to see your stuff? The algorithm decided to serve my stuff to people interested in NYC instead of people interested in watching videos about parenting, which was PERFECT. I started making more, some of them with almost no footage of the kids at all and they still do really well. The Harlow wave at the beginning? That’s a little agreement we have. I come in, film her waving at the table and then I don’t film her for the rest of the morning. Same goes for Mazzy and I walking past the Bean. But also, now that I’m not filming my kids all the time, both Mazzy and Harlow have started requesting that I film or post certain things. They also don’t mind being in my content, because they know I’ll take out my camera for two seconds at dinner or while we are walking and then I’ll put it away. Or for something like Mazzy’s performance in Bye Bye Birdie, which she would never have let me post on it’s own in a million years, she’s totally okay with a few silent clips strung together. The way I do my DITLs, I just capture all these inconsequential one second videos, which don’t feel disruptive to my real life, and then tell the story after the fact with my voiceover. In other words, the video doesn’t tell the story, I do.

Which brings me back to my timeline issue. You see, the more I’ve been writing the Tiktok voiceovers, the more I realize they are exactly like my old blog posts, which at their best, were always photos with commentary. And so, now I’m trying to post Instagram pics and stories in real(ish) time, and then I’m taking additional time to make the DITLs for Tiktok (which combines the time of making a video and writing a blog post) and then people want me to post the DITLs on Instagram because they are not on Tiktok, but then complaining that stuff feels too delayed or out of order. I get it. It feels out of order to me too. But if I continue to make regular DITLs for Tiktok (which appears to be what I’m doing), my real time and the Mommy Shorts Cinematic Universe are just going to get further and further away from each other.

Unless, we all take a moment to just accept the new order of things. My regular posts are behind because I am trying to live in the moment and be more present for my kids, my friends and my husband. The DITLs are even further behind, because they are like blog posts— they come after I’ve had the chance to process and reflect. They are also a way to immortalize and summarize my stories which disappear unless I make them into a reel. And I can’t tell you how many times people DM me looking for something they saw in my stories months or even years ago.

I know not everybody on Instagram likes the DITLs, and they don’t perform that well there, but they are also the reason my account is starting to grow again and maybe that’s okay. Not everybody has to like everything.

On a more positive note, since I have a backlog of content, and I would really like to catch up before both kids get home from camp, I haven’t been filming anything new for the last few weeks. Imagine me not filming anything??? Just going about my day like a normal person? It’s kinda nice. I know Mike definitely appreciates it.

Oh, and I have another positive development! Since my new friends have started to see my DITLs (you can only keep your secret life as a content creator secret for so long), a few of them have approached me with fun things to do. “You should come with me! It will be awesome content!”

I know that was a lot of words, but hopefully some of you found it interesting! Particularly those of you trying to create content yourself and wondering why it’s so much harder than you thought it would be. As always, I thank you for sticking with me, as both my life and social media evolves.

I’m still the same Mommy Shorts, I love this community, and I’m just trying to make it work so I’ll be sharing my stories well into my 80s.

Even if it’s with a VR headset or via hologram.

Please, please, if you stuck with this until the end, weigh in and tell me all your thoughts in the comments.