Come with me while I spend the day—JUST KIDDING. That would be an excessively boring activity for you, for I spent my day watching “Come Spend The Day With Me” reels on Facebook, Insta, and TikTok and watching me watch a video—well, that’s a whole different genre of videos that I also don’t have time for.
Why? Why am I doing this? I’m not really sure. It might be because H. Pearl Davis said that women are verifiably stupider than men and I wanted, for some reason, to prove her right. It may have been because I looked at my sons’ room and nearly fainted at the sheer level of unmitigated horror of disorder, detritus, chaos, and foul stench, and so to revive myself I had to go look at other people’s pristine and ordered lives. It is more likely that I’m tired after a long weekend and didn’t feel like reading a book—which was stupid of me…and so we’re back around to H. Pearl Davis.
The brand of “Spend the Day with Me” videos I’ve been watching, I must say, are excessively beautiful. I’ve narrowed it down to three different accounts—two homeschool moms, and someone on TikTok called Sophia the Jew. I can’t embed anything, because I’m not clever enough, so if you’re really curious you’ll have to click the links.
The first homeschool mom is called Melanie Renee. It’s possible to watch her videos on Facebook without them cutting off partway. I think she lives in Alabama and her husband is a pastor, and her first child is in college (College Girl) and the baby was born before Christmas (Charity). Total number of kids clocks in at nine. What is so great about Melanie Renee? Well, her food budget is capacious and satisfying. She has to buy a vast amount of food to feed her family, and for whatever reason, she isn’t worried about it. Seven hundred plus at Sam’s for a regular haul does not appear to phase her. Second, watching her stand in front of her gorgeous griddle (I think available in her Amazon DMs or something) is the most comforting thing ever. She has a built-in Salad Bar. She is completely relaxed, unutterably chill. She is the mother I always wanted to be but wasn’t because I screamed too much. Third, she always says, “Hello Beautiful People” as the greeting for every reel. Also, it’s fantastic watching her get ready for church. Basically, in the most sincere way possible, I am literally here for it, because I click every time she comes into my feed.
The second homeschool mom lives in New York City and is sending her children one by one to Julliard and out into the streets to play their instruments for money (Busking), as well as narrating their long trips to church on the Subway. For her, one can see that the food is really not the point. She throws “what we ate today” details in because that’s part of the deal. If you spend the day with anyone, you have to see their menu and shopping experiences. But for her, it’s the music. Getting those babies to play the violin, viola, bass, and every other manner of stringed instrument is her singular goal. What I like is how happy and slightly embarrassed they all look while they’re doing it. I’d love to be happy like that. I am also, as I said, here for this person because whenever she appears, I watch her videos—although they cut off which must mean she’s posting them somewhere else but I can’t figure out where it is because I’m a Gen Xer and—where I did I see this?—very old and also stuck in the past.
And finally, there’s Sophia the Jew who is 23 and pregnant with her second child. This, I think I might be able to embed. Hang on…
I find Sophia utterly mesmerizing. In the first place, I never once looked like that as a pregnant person. In the second place, I’ve never once put on clothes and then been able to set up a camera so that I could look awesome for the viewer. If anyone was filming me yesterday, they would have preserved the immortal schadenfreude of me smacking my forehead into the self-checkout sensor and then spilling an entire basket of groceries right in front of the sliding glass door. Where was I? Oh yes, in the third place, I love it when Sophia reads the comments of her haters and crushes them under her heel.
In all three cases, what appears to make a good “Spend the Day with Me” moment is the confidence of the content provider. A good social media person exudes ease, spiritual depth, happiness, and enough money to feed a lot of people. I have some of these qualities—though which, at this moment of the day, no one could possibly say.
Of course, the very existence of the genre is what fascinates me. How strange to see happy, comfortable people with lots of children who aren’t pitched over the edge of existential malaise. When all the other corners of the virtual space are melting down, the most settling thing in the world is to watch someone cook pancakes, play music, and light their Sabbath candles. It’s an act of consummate sanity to go online and post videos of how beautifully your clothes fit and what your children are eating and how wonderfully they play their instruments and the joy with which they “get their praise on.”
I only have six children, and they are not young, and they play the piano very badly, if at all. And I don’t want you to spend the day with me. My day is boring. My cooking is mediocre. My thoughts are dim. My house is pretty dirty. And my dog, who is on a diet, is still very fat. But I do think that, in the great darkness that clouds over the West, some women getting on the internet to articulate the peculiar, restful joy of doing the things that hold the world together, that make it beautiful, rational, and habitable, is the best thing ever.
I’m here for it. I’m here in it. And honestly, I hope to meet these women in heaven, that God will bring the Orthodox Jewish community into his Kingdom, and that Melanie Renee will be cooking the food, and Avery’s children will be playing the music.
Have a nice day!
Kinda like an Erma Bombeck article (anyone understanding this comment knows how ancient am I), personally self-effacing yet a celebration of wholesomeness, sanity, service, in short, a joyous look at women embracing a godly and essential vocation.
I have an adult daughter, recently returned home from South Korea, her room is a Horror Monster. I’m so thrilled to see her I really don’t care.