as a mom to two boys

today is my "pub day" for DON'T BE EVIL

what’s up you guys…

in a sense of duty and obligation to promote my book, i’ve flung the doors open on instagram again.

one of the accounts i now follow is a woman whose entire brand is being a mom to five boys. every single video starts exactly the same way:

“as a mom to FIVE boys….” 🖐️ (hand held up as visual reinforcement of just how many boys she is in fact mother to.)

then she’s like: do you have what it takes to have a BIG FAMILY? here’s my day with timestamps. she’s up at 5 a.m. she has systems. she has bins. she homeschools tidily. she’s always, like, mounting monogrammed drop stations for each boy’s hockey gear in the mud room (”quade,” “rhett,” etc.). she has a level of type A overfunctioning funneled into domestic/social media life that i find shocking...unrelateable...irresistible.

i, meanwhile, am a mom to two boys. ✌️(hand gesture included as visual reinforcement of how many boys i am mother to.) i absolutely do not have what it takes to have a big family. i am loose, i’m wild, i'm dropping balls of both the literal and metaphorical variety., i’m using “find my phone” 17 times a day.

yet i am absolutely powerless against this genre of content. i love vlogs. i love little windows into how other people live. and even more than what they do, i want to know why they’re like that. why does one person wake up at 5 a.m. delighted to label hockey cubbies (or perform the shiniest, happiest version of domestic life while clearly also channeling some deep frustated well of overachiever ambition) while another is wandering the house at 8:47 looking for a permission slip that’s somehow in the freezer? how much of us is temperament? family? school? habit? accident?

i’ve digressed—in fact, i’ve begun by digressing—but where i’m heading, if you’ll have it, is the book i ended up writing (out today wherever books are sold).

this book is, as my press tour would indicate, about google. it’s not not about google.

but truly, once i started asking why i reacted to work the way i did—why i cared so much about approval, why i stayed, why i snapped—I ended up tracing the story back much further and deeper. family, school, relationships (randomly relitigating my ENTIRE romatic history which no one asked for…), authority. it’s gossip about a single life. all the things that shape how we move through the world: where we seek meaning, how we evolve (or don’t). at Giggles Inc, i was always fascinated by my coworkers, their motivations, their particular brands of insanity. how do we learn how to be? how should a person be? anyway, that’s the book.

there was a new yorker excerpt a couple weeks ago that distills the whole arc down to the google beats. i’m tremendously proud of it (despite the fact-checking taking probably years off my life in its forensic exposure of my organizational system or lack thereof: “i swear i’ve got the receipts for this scene on a loose-leaf sheaf of paper in a desk somewhere, man!”). if you read that, this is just to say: the full book actually feels quite a bit different—it’s much more personal, messy, much more about all of what makes me Like That™.

as a mom to two boys ✌️, HERE WE GO.