A few months ago, a first-time mom in one of the Facebook moms groups posted that she was starting a WhatsApp for Westside moms with babies the same age as hers. Here’s the link, anyone want in?
Everyone wanted in. Because of course they did. Because if you didn’t grow up here, or at the very least live the majority of your adolescence here, motherhood in LA is incredibly fucking lonely. And here was this mom offering what you haven’t had since your sorority days: a community of other people in the same stage as life as you are right now.
Of course I joined. Everyone did.
And then my phone blew up. And not just during normal business hours. Because these are moms. And moms don’t sleep. This group chat went off twenty-four hours a day.
So obviously I muted it. I muted it on “Always,” which is the longest commitment anyone in Los Angeles has ever made to anything that isn’t a mortgage or a Pilates package.
And then I started opening it more than any other app on my phone. In the pickup line. At 2am, feeding, one eye open, scrolling a neighborhood I don’t live in, three days behind on a lost-lovey situation at a park I have never been to, deeply, personally invested.
Which made me think: maybe this was a good idea. It’s like a neighborhood. It’s the only one most of us actually live in.
Because when was the last time your actual street did any of this for you? I’ve lived in my neighborhood for years and I could pick maybe four neighbors out of a lineup. The woman two doors down and I have been waving at each other through car windows for half a decade. We have never had a conversation. Everything I know about her is that her recycling is immaculate and her marriage seems fine from the driveway. My kids’ best friends live twenty-five minutes away, which in LA traffic makes Culver City a long-distance relationship. Nobody’s grandmother lives two blocks over. Nobody sits on a porch.
But then somebody posts a link. It’s always the same kind of somebody: a mom who made a thing, and the thing is actually good, and she’d like to sell it to the few hundred women she’s been up with at 2am. I’ve gone to click one of those links myself. It was gone before my thumb got there. I blinked. Somebody typed “Where’d that link go?”
One of the admins chime in. Because of course by this time there were admins, which I called watchers, and those admins deleted that self promotion faster than you can say delayed vaccines. And then, like you do as you stroll your neighborhood sidewalks with a stroller, you began to see the cracks. Because who are these admins with kids allegedly the same age as mine (but I say allegedly, because these admins are ALWAYS on their phone. To the point where I’m not judging when I ask where is that baby that is the same age as mine?).
The reminder came shortly after: no self promotion.
And listen. I get it. Of course I get it. There are hundreds of women in there. There’s a lost lovey every six hours, a biting tribunal twice a week, somebody’s emergency plumber situation at 1am. Making sure it doesn’t become a living ad board is a worthy cause. But like…also the least of our worries.
But here’s one of the many things I can’t un-think once I thought it: I know a pyramid scheme when I see one. And this is the beginning.
Whoever starts the group is at the top. Obviously. She made it, she holds the list, and if the money ever shows up, it shows up to her. And underneath her there’s a whole layer of women working for free. Not exactly free free, because what they aren’t paid in money they’re paid in authority, and let me tell you, they are spending it. Nobody patrols a baby group chat like airport security unless there’s a hierarchy and they’re climbing it. She doesn’t even have to delete anything herself anymore. The downline handles it. And they take their job very, very seriously.
The sorority at least charged you dues to your face and told you what they were for. This one runs on volunteer labor and community spirit until the compensation plan drops. As a lurker in this chat, I’m very curious to see where the chips will fall.
And look, this is NOT a knock on the group chat. I'm impressed by the founder. I admire the vision. I applaud the courage. I commend the community. But…these are things I think about.
But the second thing I can’t unthink now that I’ve thunk it is this: for all of these watchers patrolling and weeding out the entrepreneurial mother trying to make a living in LA, how are we vetting the people allowed in the chat at all?
Because these moms are sharing personal stories. I know more about their kids than I do some of my own family. They tell this chat their drama. They tell this chat where they’re going to be on a Tuesday afternoon. They send this chat photos of their kids.
But this is not an actual village. It’s a chat room. And if the 90’s taught me anything, it’s that it’s a lot easier to hide your identity behind a screen than in real life. And I don’t know about you, but that freaks me out.
Here’s how lopsided it is. A product link survives in that chat for about nine seconds. A total stranger can live in it forever, as long as she (or he) never tries to sell anything.
We vet everything in this town. The preschool got a spreadsheet. The pediatrician got three referrals and a background vibe check. The babysitter got interviewed like she was applying to the CIA. And then a link got dropped in a Facebook group, and a few hundred of us handed it our real lives — our kids’ faces, our Tuesday afternoons, our 2am worst moments — no questions asked, because the loneliness was louder than the stranger danger ever stood a chance of being.
And I’m not standing outside it pointing. I’m in there. Reading. I know where a dozen babies are going to be on Saturday morning because their mothers announced it like a press release: park, time, stroller. I couldn’t pick those mothers out of a lineup. I could pick out their diaper bags.
Probably — almost certainly — everyone in there is exactly who she says she is: an exhausted woman with a baby and a question about a plumber. That’s what makes it so LA. We extend total trust to a profile photo the size of a postage stamp that we would never extend to a person standing in front of us. In the 90’s they warned us about chat rooms like it was a tornado drill. Then we grew up, had babies, got lonely, and rebuilt the chat room ourselves, put our kids in it, muted it, and called it a village.
And I still haven’t left. Of course I haven’t. Neither has anyone. At 3am the baby won’t sleep, the watchers are awake, the village is open, and it is the only place in this city that is. I just think about the door now. Who’s holding it open. Whether anyone ever once checked who walked through it.
So for moms in LA, the village is a group chat now. It’s a bit unhinged, it’s permanently muted, and it feels like the best neighborhood you can live in. Just, maybe lock the doors.
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