Page 5 of Everyone Is Lying to You

I try to shoot all the things involving the littles as soon as I get them up and fed because they have about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, of performing for the cameras before they get pissy and moody and I can no longer get anything good out of them. Stacy is great with camera angles and blending in with the wallpaper, but it’s still a lot of work for the kids.

Stacy arrives while we eat, and we take a couple of shots of me preparing breakfast. It’s mostly made well before we start shooting, but there is always some dough I can pop in the oven. Yes, I still make my own sourdough. It’s easy and pretty and people love it. And yes, I enjoy doing it. I’m a baker. It’s all I ever wanted to be, and the moments when I get to create food from simple ingredients, the way I used to when I thought that doing that would be my entire life, are some of the happiest moments of my days.

I guzzle coffee and then promote the non-caffeinated coffee alternative we have a low-six-figure brand deal with. I’ll caption it:I am not a coffee drinker, but I crave my morning pick-me-up ritual. I sip my DiRT/Wooter in the mornings. Don’t worry, you fasters. It’s totally compatible with intermittent fasting. It gives me the boost I need, and the benefits from superfood mushrooms deliver immune support and focus. I like to dress it up with vanilla Lively Proteins collagen for my skin.

After all the kids are fed, they crawl back into bed, and we shoot me re-waking them up in their matching pajamas. It’s also #sponsored, of course. One of our first big brands to sign on wasan organic linen sheet company, and the matching pajamas are my own brand that comes in seven different prints and is sold on my website.

Then we take a video of me getting them out the door and into the cabin that we use as a schoolhouse. We have a teacher who comes in to oversee the homeschooling, even though I genuinely try to be as involved as I can, especially with science and math since they were my favorite subjects when I was in school. You’ll never see the teacher though. I let people assume I do it. The audience likes that. They seem to appreciate self-reliance in a mother as much as my husband. Then, with the baby in tow, we shoot some images in the barn with the animals. I strap him to my chest even though he hates it and wants to walk. The carrier is getting tight. For as much as my followers and the brands I work with love babies and big round pregnant bellies, I can’t have another one. I just can’t do it.

We gather eggs from the chickens, pet the lambs, say hello to Tripod (who is honestly a massive dingus of a goat and I would get rid of him if he wasn’t such a fan favorite…if he had four legs he would definitely head-butt me in the ass). We pose for cow-milking pictures, but we have people and machinery to do the actual milking. I’ve attempted to breastfeed six babies (with a 50 percent success rate despite what you may have seen of me feeding the twins, one dangling off each boob) and getting milk out of a nipple is difficult no matter who or what is doing the lactating.

The big kids start school. The baby goes with Kiki. I head back inside and do some reels of me getting my face on for the day with the organic eco-friendly makeup brand that’s a newsponsor, and doing my hair with the Dyson Airwrap and raw sugar multi-miracle hair mist. We do some diaper changes with the baby for the new biodegradable diaper brand that is testing us out. We tried something called elimination training with the twins when they were babies and the engagement was incredibly high on it, but to be honest, the house smelled like shit all the time and I just couldn’t do it again. Gray was constantly complaining about it. We shoot some stills and videos out in the schoolhouse. I change outfits seven times to make sure I have something different on for every video. The kids wear monochromatic linens every single day. We sell them in our online shop so it’s good promo, but also it makes it hard for the audience to tell what they are wearing and whether they have actually changed clothes since it’s impossible to get them to change their outfits seven times on Thursdays.

Some commenters have gotten irritated with the “sad beige” way that I dress my kids, but it’s really about convenience and other people love it. The clothes sell out every time we have a new drop.

For some reason my audience gets jazzed about watching me make beds and hang laundry, so we always shoot a couple of those videos. In reality we have a heavy-duty industrial-sized washer and dryer and I don’t hang the family sheets on a line like Ma Ingalls. They’d get dusty and filthy in five minutes with all the dirt and wind around here, but it works for the socials. We put those videos in slo-mo with a quote over them about loving life and living simply and getting back to our roots. The engagement goes bananas.

We always make sure to shoot Gray off in the fields somewhere, on the tractor, riding his horse. The audience seems toget off on the fact that they don’t know that much about Gray, that he’s a cipher of a cowboy. I think it makes it easier to imprint their own fantasies on my husband, which is fine with me. They don’t need to know the truth about him or about us.

Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning when I can’t sleep, I open my own social media accounts and wonder what I would think of myself if I were an outsider looking in. Would I be intrigued? Angry? Calmed? Irritated? Would I be a fan or a hater, because I have both and they’re equally ravenous for my content. My account has grown exponentially in just a few years. There’s an intense hunger for content like mine, for #Homesteading and #PrairieLife, for #BackToYourRoots and #TraditionalLiving. I’ve leaned into it and there is no going back.

The audience loves looking through the fun-house mirror I have so meticulously created on my social media.

I wonder what people would think of the hashtag #MyPersonalHell.

Here is what we don’t take pictures and videos of:

The kids and I always eating dinner alone because Gray gets triggered by how noisy and chaotic it is at mealtimes.

Me feeding each of the kids a different meal because none of them eat the same thing even though we always photograph one wholesome hearty stew, soup, or hunk of meat.

Our caregivers, house cleaners, or the farm staff. To our audience we do it all ourselves.

We don’t show Gray and me sleeping in separate bedrooms or the knock-down-the-walls fights we’ve been having lately.

You’ll never see my bruises.

No one ever sees me cry or hears me scream.

Chapter Three

Lizzie

Things I Have Seen Bex (um…Rebecca) Sommers do on a small screen in my hand:

Castrate a three-legged goat.

Potty train her twins without diapers.

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