On March 12, Gov. Bill Lee declared a state of emergency in Tennessee in response to the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. Metro Nashville Public Schools closed early for spring break, ultimately remaining closed after that. For Nashvillians still reeling from the March 3 tornado, the already surreal state of the city — shuttered businesses, destroyed homes, the ceaseless need for volunteers — was about to get even weirder.
“Hey,” local author Mary Laura Philpott tweeted that day. “If you have that uneasy ‘I need my mom’ feeling, but don’t have access to your mom for whatever reason, I have Big Mom Energy to spare. (Seriously, my teenagers are over it.) Lemme know here / DM if you need me to tell you it’s OK. Now go wash your hands. — Your Internet Mom.”
Philpott spent the rest of the week replying to people in her mentions, cheerfully encouraging strangers to wash their hands, stay hydrated, put on pajamas and take a break from the internet. At times, she adopted a tough-love tone: “Now you listen up, Millie.” At other times, she made gentle suggestions: “Have you had breakfast? Maybe a banana?” When one young woman shared that she had gotten into Harvard but couldn’t tell her own mother, Philpott replied, “HOT DIGGITY DING DONGS, that’s amazing.”
Like many of us, Philpott is suddenly at home with her entire family, plus their two dogs: Woodstock (“the funniest-looking dog and the sweetest dog we’ve ever had”) and Eleanor Roosevelt (“breathtakingly beautiful and an absolute terrorist.”) The Scene caught up with Philpott to see how her Big Mom Energy was panning out and to chat a bit about her book of essays, I Miss You When I Blink, which was published last year.
What inspired you to offer to be the internet’s mom that day?
It felt here like that was the day the switch was flipped. … It was dawning on me minute by minute and hour by hour that nothing I had bet on for spring was likely going to happen. As that day was going on, I felt the earth shifting under my feet, and I had this elemental, almost instinctive homesick feeling, like, “I want my mom.” I’m lucky to have my mom. I can call my mom anytime. But I thought about how many people don’t have that comfort. I’m old enough that a lot of my friends’ moms have passed on, that a lot of people don’t have close relationships with their moms. There’s not a lot I can do to help solve what’s happening right now, but I can be a mom.
Remember after the tornado how local businesses and people all over Nashville were posting online to share whatever they had extra of? Like, I remember on Instagram that Hey Rooster General Store, which is a tiny little store, was offering shelf space to other retailers that had goods to sell but whose storefronts had been destroyed. Restaurants were offering each other freezer space. People were offering up power tools. And I think I must have had a little bit of that in the back of my mind at the time. That example of, Here’s what I have. Who needs it? That’s kind of where I was.
What surprised you about the response?
I was surprised that people responded at all! I’m a small little fish on Twitter — usually like three people respond if I [tweet]. There were a lot of people who responded and said, “I need reassurance, tell me something to do.” But then a lot of people responded … to say, “Gosh, that’s what I needed to hear right now.” … I was touched by how many people just wanted to hear that they were not alone. I was also really tickled by how many people responded to each other in the comments of the thread. Someone would say, “I lost my mom,” and I would write back to them, and then other people would write back and say, “Me too, I know how it is.” … It’s nice to see humanity being sweet to each other, especially on Twitter, which is not always full of sweetness. … And there were several people who were strangers to me who retweeted it and said: “Hey, me too! My kids are grown up and out of the house, but I still have mom energy if you need it.” Like, yeah, mom army, got it. That was adorable.
In I Miss You When I Blink, you say that you’re addicted to getting things right. But you also seem really good at encouraging others to be gentle and forgiving with themselves.
Oh yeah. I can give pep talks all day long about how you don’t have to be perfect and it’s OK! I can give that pep talk to everybody but myself.
Do you feel like this experience has encouraged you to apply some of your advice to yourself?
Oh certainly. It’s good for all of us who are not actually out on the front lines being the doctors and nurses and scientists and people working 24 hours around the clock, those of us whose job it is to just go home and get out of the way — I’m absolutely having to practice almost a meditative stillness. We can’t go to work. We can’t run all the errands. Even if we’re working from home, we’re not as productive as we normally would be. And we just have to be OK with it, because that’s our job right now. That’s what our fellow humans need us to do. Go home. Get out of the way and wait it out. Do you like how I just turned that around and said, “That’s my job right now — I’m doing a great job not being productive!” I just gave myself an A+ for staying out of the way.
What are some of your favorite self-care activities?
It’s tough because normally reading is my go-to activity, but my focus is really fractured right now. … If I can get outside and walk with my family and my dogs, maybe take a walk by myself and have some solitude, that helps a ton. … Getting off the internet is good. The other day, I had to clean out my office so that one of our family members could use it, and I had my phone in another room for three hours. Even though I was cleaning out an office, which is the world’s most miserable task, I was in such a good mood after three hours of not compulsively refreshing the news.
I have this theory that artists and creative folks can be some of the unsung heroes in dark times. You just keep producing things for us to look at and listen to and read.
Yes! My daughter and I took a tap-dancing class online the other day, with no tap shoes. Wearing socks on a rug, we did silent tap dancing. The way performers are finding innovative ways to set up and go, “Look.” It’s the same thing I was talking about earlier. What did they have extra of? They have this performance energy. If they could find a way to get that out there, that’s a gift. Anything that gets our heads out of the logistical moment-to-moment concerns we’re facing is good. When you think about literature and art, anything that connects us to history and gives us hope for the future and gets us a little bit out of the right-now present tense is good. Science has a big job to do right now. Science has to save our bodies. But art and performance and literature and film, that can take care of our souls while we’re staying out of the way and staying healthy.
