Page 51 of Filter This
The entire kitchen was in a complete state. Flour and eggs had combined to form a cement-like paste, coating surfaces, door handles and somehow even Shelly’s hair. The fairy cakes were a joke. Shelly took in the carnage and decided to axe the whole post she’d had planned. The segue into food blogger was proving way harder than she’d imagined – especially with her phone endlessly pinging with reminders from Amy about doing posts for #WednesdayWellness and #TanningTuesday. It was less than two weeks since Amy had gone on leave – the admin of the SHELLY Insta was off the charts and unfortunately it was all down to her now to stay on top of it.
She pulled out a soapy sponge and began half-heartedly scrubbing at the polished cement counter-tops. She stole a glance out the large sliding glass doors that ran the full width of the kitchen. Her gaze travelled past Georgie’s toys strewn on the marble patio towards Dan’s man-shed-turned-actual-living-quarters and felt again a rush of disbelief. It had been a number of weeks and still they’d barely spoken to one another.
Their solicitor, Bernard Sullivan, had temporarily sorted the money situation. Now each of them had an agreed allowance each week, in theory preventing them from dipping into the joint account until a formal separation was underway. It was galling. An allowance. She was convinced Dan had eked out some separate funds for himself – he was off in Lisbon with ‘the lads’ at that very moment, and presumably a good time on a lads’ weekend didn’t come cheap. She still couldn’t get over how acrimonious it had become so quickly.
‘How is this my life?’ she’d moaned to Plum on the phone the night before.
‘Darling,’ Plum had paused to drag on her cigarette and Shelly wished she could stress-smoke her way out of the situation – she loved the odd illicit cig when she wasn’t pregnant. ‘It’s an adjustment period,’ Plum continued. ‘Dan is angry – Virginia was the same when Curtis left her. She tortured us for the first couple of years. Always being very controlling about when we could take the house in Antibes.’
Shelly shook her head just thinking of the call. Plum’s definition of hardship was worlds away from the average person’s. Negotiating six-week summer vacations with your husband’s irate ex-wife was a little different to her and Dan’s mangled marriage and her chaotic career. Add a new baby into that mix and, well, it was like pouring gasoline over a dumpster fire. Thank god they had an appointment with a therapist before she headed off to the Mama retreat next week – they badly needed some clarity.
Abandoning the scrubby, she picked up a knife and began chiselling at the baking aftermath. Where was Marni? She should be doing this, thought Shelly irritably and straightaway felt guilty. What would her mam say to such entitled thoughts? A nanny-slash-cleaner would’ve been a completely foreign concept at the O’Briens’ house growing up. Anyway, it was probably better Marni’d taken Georgie to the park to keep her out of the way during the set-up.
She picked up her phone: 11.20, forty minutes to get everything in order and do something about her face – at least she still had Amanda – before the Insta-mums arrived for their #MamaMorning (coffee with a side of Instagramming). They had a tacit agreement to promote each other’s accounts, tagging all their handles in every post so that followers would follow the other accounts. It was good for boosting following and supplied everyone with dreamy content for the grid.
The host was expected to provide supremely ’gram-worthy snacks; luckily she hadn’t been solely relying on the fairy cakes. She’d actually dropped a sizeable portion of that week’s allowance on the #MamaMorning feast in Fallon & Byrne. She’d already laid out the seafood platter; crudités and dips; sugar-free, gluten-free, keto-friendly energy balls; and an enormous fruit platter. She also had smoked salmon blinis for the kids (and frozen pizzas and curly fries to be consumed off-camera).
Shelly trudged upstairs, WhatsApping Marni to finish the kitchen – she could hear them bustling in downstairs but she didn’t turn back. Georgie would be excited to see her and she didn’t have time for a cuddle and a blow-by-blow of the park. She stopped by Georgie’s bedroom and selected an #OOTD for her: a peach pinafore with matching knee-socks and gold glitter high-tops. She was also planning a peach palette for her own outfit for that all-essential #twinning post. How would she fare trying to dress a newborn in keeping with their matchy-matchy vibe? Everything seemed insurmountable this morning, with Amy gone and the perfect Hazel and Polly inbound.
Hazel’s brood (five or six kids at last count) were always working some family-wide tonal palette of tasteful greys with muted pink accents. Hazel seemed to be a kind of motherhood machine, delivering post after beautifully lit post of her children running free in sun-drenched fields, wild flowers in their hair and freckles scattered over their adorable little noses. Or family baking sessions in a kitchen that looked to be lifted straight from a nineteenth-century French farmhouse with hints of a contemporary Scandi finish. ‘Bogus Bohemia’ was what Amy dubbed the Hazel aesthetic.
The house was actually a fairly standard semi-D in Knocklyon. The fields had been scouted by her location manager (that’s right) for the express purpose of doing a carefree summer-days shoot – complete with outfit changes – so the shots could be rolled out and give the impression that her free-range kids were off living their best lives on the daily, instead of being locked into an immovable schedule of paid posts, sponcon, forced smiles and gruelling home-school hours with tutors who were paid for their silence as much as their academic expertise.
Hazel had taken the Insta-life toTruman Showlevels. You had to admire the commitment, Shelly supposed – though it was definitely bordering on psychotic. Any time Shelly felt uneasy appearing at the playground where Georgie would’ve spent the morning with Marni to do a ten-minute shoot for a new buggy collab, Shelly just thought of Hazel using a stand-in for breastfeeding shots because ‘Of course I couldn’t feed with a schedule like mine … but I can’t be seen to not be breastfeeding – it’d be totally at odds with my narrative’ and Shelly’s guilt was assuaged.
Hazel was hugely outspoken about her sustainable lifestyle, the home-dyed linen shirts and her Steiner home-schooling, but she had a veritable army working tirelessly to produce the pared-back, simple life she was devoted to projecting. She employed three minders alone to keep the kids at bay while she endlessly trawled the LA Insta-mums to see what next to be stuffing up her vagina – vapours, crystals, positive vibes. There was nothing she wouldn’t shove up there, one of her assistants had once told Amy, who’d gleefully passed it on to Shelly.
Polly, on the other hand, was completely vanilla, striving to be as uncontroversial as possible. Shelly knew that Polly was seen as a kind of budget version of her. She had about half the following and did collaborations with far less salubrious clients – she just didn’t have a very strong brand identity. She wasn’t cut out for the all-out theatrics of Hazel’s Holistic Heaven, and she didn’t have Shelly’s looks or the acting, which Shelly had to admit was certainly a draw for her followers – they loved a bit of a behind-the-scenes action on set. Polly had a spectacularly dull husband (that she didn’t have the good sense to hide from view à la Hazel) and two little boys. She tried to work the #MotherOfSons angle as best she could but there was less to be mined raising boys – even Shelly could see that. It was all about raising girls these days. Every blogger mama with half a brain did at least one ‘I’m raising my daughter to be a strong woman’ post every week. And having a girl meant you could do one of those posts in the voice of your daughter.
I love when my mama takes me shopping to @MarksandSpencersOfficial to look at the new #AW19Collection #Ad #Spon #Shopping #BornShopper
Shelly couldn’t see it landing in quite the same way with a little boy.
‘Polly’s content is too flaccid,’ Hazel had announced at their last meet-up, when Polly had gone to the loo. Shelly winced at the memory.
Hazel was a bitch but she had a point. Ali Jones was already close to overtaking Polly. Maybe even all of us, she sighed, carrying on up the next flight of stairs to her dressing room where Amanda was prepping the perfect, painstaking no-make-up make-up look.
Shelly settled herself on the stool, closed her eyes and Amanda got to work on the primer and base. God, what would Ali make of the #MamaMorning? Last time, Hazel tried to get all the kids to meditate for an Insta-story and Polly’s older boy bit her. Shelly grinned at the memory of Hazel’s face.
‘It’s nice to see you smiling, Shelly.’ Amanda paused in her blending
‘Ah, sorry, Amanda – I know it’s been pretty tense around here. It’s just so hard with Amy gone and Dan … off with his pals.’
She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell anyone except Plum about the separation yet. Saying it aloud would make it real.
Amanda gave her hand a gentle squeeze and Shelly got the feeling she knew there was more going on than Dan going away for a few days – how could she not? She blotted Shelly’s lips and shooed her down off the stool.
She jogged back downstairs, ducking in to Georgie’s room to check that Marni had indeed changed her, and then reached the bottom of the stairs just as the doorbell went.
She opened the door to find Hazel, Polly and Ali, phones held aloft, all facing different directions to get a clear shot and feverishly updating their Stories. Behind them, Shelly counted four bored-looking au pairs just as a swarm of children ran past her into the house.
Marni joined the au pairs in settling the children. They were like car-park attendants, positioning each child near a power point and plugging them into their various devices before settling back to shoot the breeze.
What did the au pairs say about them? Shelly dreaded to think.
‘Tea, coffee, wine, gals?’ she asked Hazel, Polly and Ali, who were all furiously hashtagging their Stories.
‘I brought kombucha,’ Hazel called. ‘Abigail, bring in the kombucha, please.’ One of Hazel’s kids detached from an iPad and carried in a straw shopping basket.
