By Stacy Stevenson of momlikeaboss
A once physically tangible mom-of-two in Oklahoma recently ceased to exist after discontinuing the use of her social media feeds as a mechanism for establishing her children’s personal brands.
“It was taking up so much of my time and I love them, they are wonderful, beautiful kids, but I was just done,” said Margaret. “I never thought there would be any kind of consequences, especially not that I would simply fade into nothingness.”
Margaret shared that it was on a Monday she had decided to cut the digital marketing operations of cherished family memories and around the clock monitoring of hit counts and shares.
“We had just spent the weekend at a family-friendly bed and breakfast/farm in a very picturesque area of the New York Catskills,” she noted. “And I was scrolling through all the photos I had taken, they were truly wonderful, and just decided I wasn’t going to post ANY of them.”
This bold move, Margaret confided, was tough but there was no going back. She knew those amazing vacation pictures of her family in a variety of candid poses would evoke envy in some of her friends, spur petty jealousy in others and drive an uptick in business for the bed and breakfast owners, but she refrained from posting even a single one.
Margaret, who has become so much of a non-entity that we did not bother to ask for her last name, said it took a couple days before she started to notice her physical being start to fade.
“My kids started to ask what was wrong with me and I just told them I was tired of maintaining the photo albums and checking the Facebook likes,” Margaret relayed. “But they weren’t referring to that. They said I was looking really pale.”
The devoted mother and wife began to notice a rapid decline in the number of likes and Facebook messages she normally received in a given day. She even posted a funny gif that portrayed how she felt about laundry on Wednesday and only received one like from someone who may have actually just been a detergent company spammer.
“I didn’t really feel any different,” Margaret said. “But after a couple days of not posting any pictures of the kids or myself, even my husband walked right past me in the bedroom and then cooked his own dinner even though I was standing at the stove preparing food!”
The startling revelation that confirmed what was happening, was when Margaret decided to snap a quick picture of her funny Star Wars T-shirt. No matter how she held the phone, it kept coming up blank. “I didn’t get it at first,” she said. “But when my son, who was sitting next to me on the couch, asked his father if they’d be getting a new mommy, it was clear. I didn’t exist anymore!”
Margaret said she tried to quickly post an old photo of her daughter on Facebook to see if she could reverse the effects, but it was apparently too little, too late. Upon going to her page to post the image from the first day of school last year, she found only a message from administrators saying that due to lack of activity on the page, it had been terminated.
“Before closing the window, though, I noticed a brief post from someone whose per hour rate of baby photo postings I had always admired,” Margaret said. “She asked if anyone knew if my custom Instagram URL was up for grabs. I felt very touched by this. You know, someone noticed I was gone.”
Margaret now spends her time quietly knitting invisible blankets in the guest room of her home and enjoying the peace and quiet of being completely nonexistent.
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About the Author
Stacy Stevenson is a hard working boss lady with the best name alliteration this side of Toledo. Stacy lives in Ohio and moonlights as a veritable cornucopia of wit and sarcasm to her mildly tolerant family. She can be found on Twitter @TheRealStacyES, on Medium @stacyelizabethstevenson, or momlikeaboss.com.