I don’t have kids, but I do have a fascination with sassy mom merch. This may date back to the many post-church Sunday afternoons I spent in my childhood, in Texas, hanging around the Cracker Barrel store, perusing wooden placards about how “if mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy,” or how coffee is actually salad—bean salad. Before social media, these cheerfully harried memes offered a collective construction of maternal identity; now, thanks to Pinterest and Instagram and Etsy, they populate countless online shops, where, in simple block letters or in the flouncy faux-handwriting script that Vox termed “bridesmaid font,” you can find the old quips—and a seemingly infinite number of variations—on mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, and other items. There are gender-specific quasi-laments, like “Support Wildlife, Raise Boys” and “Mama of Drama #GirlMom.” One popular slogan proclaims, “Just a regular mama trying not to raise assholes.” The “Thou Shall Not Try Me: Mood 24:7” shirt uses both block lettering and bridesmaid font. Sometimes, bridesmaid font is combined with rap vernacular to indicate that the mother is busy and capable, as with the tees that say “Domestic Gangsta” or “Mother Hustler.” (Sassy mom merch of this sort seems to be a mostly white phenomenon; its wearers generally lean conservative, at least in their instincts about the centrality of caregiving to female identity.)
My favorite genre of mom merch broadcasts desire and dependence: “Mamacita Needs a Margarita,” for instance. There’s an entire subcategory that specifies what “mama runs on”: caffeine, chaos, and cuss words, or Jesus and Chick-fil-A, or Starbucks and pixie dust. Lately, as best I can tell, the most common set of helpmeets are the slant-rhyming trio of coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime. The origins of this meme are murky—it evokes Dunkin’s wildly successful “America Runs on Dunkin” ad campaign, which was launched in 2006, though the meme doesn’t appear to date back much earlier than 2017. Amazon Prime was launched in 2005; in exchange for an annual fee, the service gave members free two-day shipping on a vast array of items. Since it was first offered, the company has periodically sweetened the deal, adding perks like free video streaming, which, judging from Google Trends, may have caused a spike in interest, in 2011. By 2016, nearly half of U.S. households reportedly had Prime subscriptions. As health care, child care, housing, and education got more expensive and harder to manage, Amazon got easier to use, and its discounts remained steep—it could minimize errand-running hours, giving people more time to do various forms of paid and unpaid work. For people with chronic illnesses or disabilities, in particular, Prime can feel like a dedicated helper. And for mothers, who are still expected to perform the bulk of domestic labor whether or not they work outside the home, Prime—or, more specifically, Amazon’s hidden chain of underpaid warehouse workers and delivery drivers, who often endure dangerous conditions to keep up with the company’s demands—can function almost as a second self, or a sister wife: saving money, remembering toilet paper, getting birthday presents just in time.
On Etsy, as of this writing, there are more than five hundred listings that mention Amazon Prime. A few are starter kits for people who’ve signed up as delivery drivers with Amazon Flex, an Uber-esque contract gig that promises a minimum of eighteen dollars per hour but often nets its workers less than minimum wage. But most are mom merch, and most of these items directly allude to survival. Prayer, dry shampoo, Amazon Prime; caffeine, Target, Amazon Prime: this, the shirts and doormats and wall hangings say, is how moms get it done. Kristia Rumbley, a mother of three in Alabama who runs an online store called the Tiger’s Trunk, told me that “This mom runs on coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime” was the first mom-themed T-shirt that she designed and sold, in 2017. At the time, she was new to the Etsy world—she’d worked for a long time as a school counsellor, but had quit to take care of her newborn twins. She’d seen the Amazon Prime meme on Facebook and liked it. “I had no idea that smartass mom shirts were really a thing,” she told me. “I sort of thought I was inventing it.” The shirt sold “really, really well,” she said, as did all the other sassy mom merch.
Rumbley recently pulled the shirt from her store, fearing that Amazon would see it as a trademark violation—she’d written to the company to see if she could get permission to use the wording, but it never replied. (Amazon does not seem terribly concerned about such products, judging from how widely available they are.) Rumbley told me that she often has online conversations with her customers, who are mostly other mothers. “We’ll talk for a bit, we’ll find that we’re like-minded,” she said. “There’s so much Pinterest-y mom stuff out here. Everyone’s trying to put on a show. When you put out a little signal on a shirt, like, ‘I’m struggling too,’ it starts a conversation. Anytime I wear something like that, I always have people comment, or I get those random smiles. It’s sort of like when you’re nursing in public: someone gives you a smile and a thumbs-up, and you know you’re O.K.”
Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, where the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure—in encouraging women to balance atop pedestals in part because it is satisfying to watch them fall off—is codified in the form of public comments and likes. My colleague Carrie Battan recently wrote about the rise of the “getting real” moment for Instagram influencers, in which women who have built their public identities around meeting an ideal version of womanhood offer a moment of catharsis to their audience: all of this is constructed, they say, and it’s anxiety-inducing, and there’s so much that you don’t see. But this form of expression doesn’t seem to cut back on aspiration so much as complicate it—women are now encouraged to be both very perfect and very honest at once.
The mom-centric Internet has been working out this tension for almost two decades: so-called mommy bloggers turned aspirational honesty into a profitable genre long before Instagram existed. (Quite a few of the best-known mommy bloggers have since upended the lives that looked so perfectly-imperfect-but-mostly-really-perfect, getting divorced, or leaving their religion, or both.) Social media and smartphones have brought motherhood real talk to minimally hierarchical online spaces, such as Facebook groups and messaging apps like Marco Polo. “People ask for support, people talk about things that might be embarrassing elsewhere,” Heather Plouff, an Etsy seller in New Hampshire and a mother of three, told me. “The hashtag #momlife is this big community, where we’re all a little sassy, and we love our children, but we also know that children can be a real pain in the ass.”
I’d got in touch with Plouff, whose Instagram bio is “boy mom (x3), wife, living on ? trips & ☕️,” after seeing a mug in her Etsy store that said “I’d love to be a Pinterest type of mom but it turns out I’m more of an Amazon Prime type of mom.” The difference between these two moms, Plouff told me, is the difference between spending a month hand-cutting confetti for your kid’s birthday party and ordering decorations overnight. “We could also just flat-out say, ‘We suck sometimes,’ ” she said. “But these little sayings are a way of addressing the situation with a sense of humor.”
I told Plouff that it seemed to me that what actually sucked was the idea that kids absolutely needed confetti on their birthday and it was a mom’s job to get it. A mom who wore a “coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime” shirt appeared to be signalling her commitment to doing as good of a job of this as anyone possibly could—of saying, essentially, “I’m stressed, and this is ridiculous, but I love my sweet Ava, and I’m going to throw that ‘Frozen’ birthday party in two days, no matter what.”
“It’s true that you’re supposed to act like you’re a stay-at-home mom, but you’re also supposed to have a full-time job,” Plouff said. “It’s expected that your hair and makeup should be done, and that your house is spotless, but also that you can afford child care, and if you work, when do you have time for your child? You really can’t win, so you just have to laugh.” When I asked Plouff if the arguments against Amazon—its labor practices, its nonexistent tax burden, its lack of regulation, its many awful knock-on effects—ever came up in mom conversation, she said, in her experience, no. “When you’ve got three kids at three schools, playing three different sports, it’s just really convenient,” she said. “I rely on Amazon—I don’t look at all that stuff.”
Melanie Steffenhagen, a mother who lives in Oregon, works full-time in health care, and runs an Etsy store on the side, told me the same thing: “I think sometimes you have to turn a blind eye a little, because Amazon is a lifesaver.” Her Etsy store, called CaffeinatedNHomemade, carries a “This mom runs on caffeine, wine, and Amazon Prime” shirt, and it’s “our original shirt, the most popular one—the one that people really flock to. That one, and the one that says ‘Tired as a mother.’ ” I asked Steffenhagen why she thought people were so drawn to the Amazon Prime shirt. “It’s just relatable and raw and truthful,” she said. “It’s sort of saying, screw expectations, this is how we cope now, and it’s fun and exhausting and beautiful all at the same time.”
In March, Molly Langmuir wrote a profile for Elle of the women behind Unicorn Moms, a community of mothers who are attempting to resist judgment in a way that nonetheless seems to be extremely judgment-conscious. The “Unicorn Moms” Instagram page, which has about ninety thousand followers, declares that the Unicorn Mom is “not perfect, enjoys alcohol, has a sense of humor & couldn’t care less what you think. Also, Beautiful; Boss Bitch & Zero F#&Ks Given.” Many of the memes on the Unicorn Mom page are joking complaints about husbands, children, housework, and conventional expectations. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton noted in the Cut, the Unicorn Moms reflected a new phase in the mom-centric Internet: the construction of “the #perfectlyimperfect mom.” This mother “may not be perfect, but she has tried very, very hard to be—and is making peace with her ‘limitations.’ ” Perfection, in other words, still provides the vocabulary and sets the tone. What’s missing from this dialogue, as Langmuir wrote in Elle, “is the larger context, this system in which there’s no way to win, not for any of us.”
Does “coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime” merchandise erase that context, or does it make that context more visible, by spotlighting the fact that conventional expectations of motherhood are untenable even for those who are most eager to embrace them? Rumbley, the mother and Etsy seller from Alabama, said she thought that such shirts, and the conversations that mothers have been having about the impossibility of perfection, are signs that women are “starting to feel obligated, especially in the current political climate, to stand up and say, ‘No more.’ ” I told her that I’d been wondering about that—about whether these shirts served as an acceptable form of protest against gendered expectations and a lack of structural support or they just took the sting out of these burdens so that moms could shrug and laugh and shoulder them for another day. My female friends with kids express the same frustrations, but in different forms, I said—we mostly end up talking about socialism and universal child care. Did Rumbley feel that discontentment swelling where she lived, too?
“Well, it’s interesting,” she said. “And I’ll speak carefully, because Alabama is very conservative. Women have these strong beliefs here: they want maternity leave; they realize that things are unfair. But, at the same time, they’re pro-life, and they don’t support welfare. It doesn’t seem to add up a lot of the time. I’m hoping that eyes are opening, and that moms are seeing that this is my situation and this is your situation, so what are we going to do about it? The shirts are a way of being sarcastic—of saying that it’s funny—but there’s a lot of truth underneath them, and the truth is less funny when you stop and think.”
