I Turned to TikTok When Motherhood Felt Out of Reach

In the emergency room waiting for a potential diagnosis, I soothe myself with loops of pudgy toddlers tripping into the antics of babyhood over and over again.

I did not seriously contemplate motherhood until joining TikTok. I avoided the platform when I was in the trenches of quarantine, wary of the way it would surely consume me with its circuitous hacks, unending dance trends, and echo chamber of sounds. But the weekend after submitting my MFA thesis, I gifted myself an account, thirsty for an outlet that would allow me to recede into a mindless state after months leadened by deadlines, revisions, word counts, and creative exhaustion. The drone of everything that made me initially resistant to TikTok was suddenly exactly what I needed post-thesis.

My experience on TikTok has lived almost exclusively in the For You Page—also known as the FYP—the curated homepage with video suggestions unique to each user. I was surprised by both the specificity and accuracy of the communities in my FYP. It took less than a day for me to find the corners of the TikTok universe into which I was ready to burrow: BookTok, bullet journal bloggers, Japanese American cooking tutorials. But soon, I also found myself on the inside of communities I had never imagined.

I’d surprise myself when I hummed along to uncanny mash-ups of The Backyardigans and Britney Spears. On Thursday or Saturday or Tuesday nights, audienceless in my kitchen, I would have to recalibrate my rhythm when I attempted to learn the TikTok choreography that was trending among Gen Z that week, proof that my body was housing the content I gorged myself with on my work commutes and before falling asleep. While scrolling TikTok, I thought about the infinite universes in my hands, and my palms began to tingle with the fuzzy feeling of static electricity.

But of all the cyberpeople I met on my FYP, the ones the algorithm introduced me to who gave me the greatest pause were perhaps the most disarming of all: mothers.

If dance compilations make up a corner of TikTok, then mothers on the app make up a room. The moms on TikTok—also known as #MomTok—are just as wildly young as they are distantly old, as unhinged with their conservative political beliefs as they are rampant with advocacy and radicalism and nuanced, undoubled views of gender. Because of these women, my understanding of motherhood has become undone, and I can’t get enough of this new universe of parentage.

I get to know many of the TikTok moms peripherally; I make assumptions about who they are, how they parent, how they quantify love through their archiving of their children. There is a roster of toddlers whose videos I check in with before going to sleep, and in a quieter way, it feels like checking in with their mothers too. The world in which I’ve always lived—where adults soothe children with bedtime tales of magic and joy—has reversed, and it’s TikTok’s anthology of stories about children, not for them, that helps me untangle my adult brain enough to fall asleep.

The more I reconciled my blatant connection to the culture of motherhood . . . the more the possibility of infertility scared me.

One of the first kids I began checking in with regularly was Grey, a toddler who is known on the platform for his gratitude each time his mom hands him a snack or meal. His voice is the size of a thimble and its cadence is unchanging after every plate, bowl, and bite she offers him: Thank you, Mama. I’ve never seen Grey’s mom on the app, have no evidence of what color hair she has or where her wardrobe is from, but I feel as though I know her, look up to her, for the way she mothers her son.

Though I’ve never seen her, let alone met her, I know that Grey’s mom dotes on him every day by tending to his meals and the food she prepares for him—white sticky rice, Spam musubi, nori crisps, sushi—and, despite not having any children of my own, I feel a deep connection with her. She practices the kind of motherhood that I have always hoped to embody. There is so much that I do not know about being a mom, but some of the few things I am sure of—that food would be a love language I’d share with my child, that my heart would unbuckle at any slivers of gratitude my child might offer me—are proven by Grey’s mom’s TikTok page.

For every mother who has validated my impressions of motherhood, there have been ten more to complicate it. I was still bothering to decode the FYP algorithm and its machinations when I was presented the TikTok account of a woman I went to high school with, who is now a mother of two herself. She and I were never real-life friends, but we shared a hometown so small that the grocery store doubled as a high school hangout, so I had an idea of who she was. Though I haven’t seen her in years, I was immediately invested in her content. She had gone viral on #MomTok after sharing her journey to motherhood, which was so deliciously scandalous—saturated with threesomes and custody battles and suicide—that it was easy to compartmentalize her as an internet celebrity and not a woman I once knew.

I immediately texted the post to my childhood best friend, who was in the process of applying to graduate school to pursue a career as a gynecological nurse, and wrote, have you seen this shit?? i am ROCKED. My friend and I devoured the content, exchanging posts and trying to piece together an explanation for how a girl we knew now encompassed a genre of motherhood that was previously comfortable for me to consume only as a distant means of entertainment, like in what I’ve seen on Maury or The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Whether watching moms I know or moms I don’t, I continue to land in this digital microcosm. #MomTok is part-celebratory, part-nostalgic; it tickles deep, honest laughs out of me as often as it leaves me looking heavenward, begging the tears to reintroduce themselves back into my body. The #MomTok ecosystem seems to offer every possible imagination of what motherhood might look like.

But it has not yet offered a single version of motherhood that, as of my latest trip to the emergency room, I can surely, wholly envision myself inhabiting.

*

Three weeks after downloading TikTok, I found myself in the ER. In the month leading up to my hospitalization, I was suspicious of the dense node I’d discovered in my pelvis. Depending on how I lay in bed or if I corkscrewed my body to unknot my back, I could sometimes feel the ghost of a marble resting within me. It was easy to ignore until the splintering pain arrived in January and landed me in the emergency room. The last time I was admitted to a hospital was just over a year earlier, and I didn’t need to confront it alone. But, this time, due to Covid-19 restrictions, I wasn’t allowed any company.

It was the first time I had been in an emergency room without my mom, who I left in New Jersey when I moved to Chicago six months prior. There was no one to brave the long intervals between nurse check-ins with me. My hospital gown curtained open in the back because no one was there to secure it for me and, though I tried to muscle through the pain and do it myself, I couldn’t tie it on my own. The three times I was administered into an ER prior to this night were all for the same reason; the biggest difference, though, was that the pain I endured, though similar in nature, paled in comparison. Being in the emergency room, parentless, I had to try to mother myself through the night, channel my inner mom to help me conquer the pain and anxiety of it all.

I tried to anticipate what Mom would have known to ask when the nurses checked in. Can I have a warm blanket? Socks? A glass of apple juice to cut the sourness of all this medicine? I tried to make the sarcastic jokes to myself that would’ve otherwise been meant for mom, desperate to provide her a moment of levity. When I’d exhausted all of my other options, I turned to the nearest version of motherhood I could access: #MomTok.

While I waited for the painkillers in my IV to kick in, I soothed myself with loops of pudgy toddlers tripping into the antics of babyhood over and over again. It hurt to giggle through yet another video of a baby caught cursing, parroting some phrase her parents grunted under their breaths when they thought she wasn’t listening, but I giggled anyway. Between the #MomTok content, advertisements for BabyBjörn slings and PAW Patrol toys leaked through my feed, signaling that I had tricked the algorithm into believing I was not a childless twenty-five-year-old with womb pains worthy of a trip to the emergency room, but a mother.

Without the cue of my mom, I was unsure if I should sigh with relief or exhaustion when, seven hours after being admitted to the ER, the doctor told me what I already knew: A cyst on my left ovary had burst. Though in the weeks before it felt the size of a marble, the doctor told me it was actually closer to that of a baseball. I’d been in the hospital for this reason before, so this diagnosis was not a novel experience. Though I was relieved, the doctor’s news underwhelmed me. In that moment of diagnosis, my first thought wasn’t of treatment or recovery, but that I’d forgotten to grab my apartment keys before getting in the Uber to the hospital and would need to figure out how to get back into my home.

Though I’d been diagnosed with ovarian cysts before, it never got me any closer to the endometriosis diagnosis I’d begged rounds of gynecologists for. Their rationale was always the same: I didn’t fit the profile for a typical woman with endometriosis, and the diagnostic procedure required anesthesia, so did I really feel like going through the trouble of all that at this age?

But one week after my emergency room visit, a gynecologist would share that she was nearly certain I had endometriosis within fifteen minutes of our first appointment together, though she had to perform the procedure to be sure. She also shared that the average endometriosis patient often suffers through ten years of the disease before receiving a diagnosis. Two weeks before that consultation, I turned twenty-five, exactly ten years older than the age at which I went to my first gynecologist appointment for the scathing, fiery pains I got during my period each month.

After my sure-but-not-yet-confirmed diagnosis, the doctor told me about the long-term consequences of endo, like higher rates for both ovarian cancer and infertility. My immediate anxiety around that news had more to do with cancer than it did with pregnancy. How often should I be screened for ovarian cancer? How old is the average patient with ovarian cancer? What are the warning signs?

Cancer seemed like a threat that could knot itself into my life at any moment, but pregnancy was only ever a condition I thought I had a say in, an identity over which I could either claim yes please or no thank you. Since I had been saying no thank you my whole life, complications with pregnancy seemed like an easy loss to ignore until I was ready to say yes please, whenever that might be. But, throughout the course of scheduling my diagnostic scope and devising a treatment plan, I became increasingly aware of how much content I was consuming from the online motherhood community. Though it wasn’t yet a community I had been initiated into, it was one I felt evident kinship with.

While scrolling TikTok, I thought about the infinite universes in my hands.

TikTok has a way of exposing its users to versions of themselves they can’t fully live, whether by circumstance or choice, however silly or serious. When I scroll through my liked TikToks, it quickly becomes clear that my brain and heart are receptive to a future self that occupies the role of a mother. For each #MomLyfe post I swipe away and for each I like, comment on, and forward to my other friends, I’m solidifying my role as the orchestrator of the many directions my life may unfold. There is a cadence to thumbing through TikTok’s For You Page that mutes the caveat I try hardest to forget: This is not an aimless meander through the Internet at all, but a curated tour through an exhibition of my many selves.

The more I reconciled my blatant connection to the culture of motherhood—its inside jokes, its pains, its joys and privileges—the more the possibility of infertility scared me. As the cyber hum of moms grew louder, it also became distant, leaving me roomed in a sound chamber where the women beckoning me to join them were either standing right behind me or calling from a clean, impalpable distance.

*

The hospital TV volleyed between You are not the father! and You are the father! followed by equal roars of cheers and clapping. I had just been told I’d have to wait another two hours in the preoperation room because my doctor was running behind for my diagnostic scope surgery, the procedure that would finally allow a gynecologist to diagnose me with endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. The TV in my room was stuck on Maury, so I watched it for the first time as I waited. I didn’t know the remote was hidden in a shelf behind my bed, so by the time I was rolled into the operating room, I had watched four hours’ worth of episodes.

Before that day, I had a vague understanding of Maury’s premise and was familiar at least with its most notable catchphrases. But while waiting for my gynecologist to straw a small camera through my belly button, I was drawn into the show’s endless dramas of parentage. The show relies on the fact that fatherhood is a status which, if a man truly wants to reject it, can be willed away. There is such a thing as not knowing whether a father is a father, a question that can never apply to mothers, at least not concerning their biological children.

The show’s formula means cutting to a commercial in the final moments before the results of each DNA test are revealed. During some ads, I wondered if there were women who, between filming the backstory and the reveal, quietly regretted being cast on the show. There must have been some who, in those final moments of not knowing, wished to stay in that commercial break forever.

A few hours into my Maury binge, I’d spend commercials imagining a reveal in which it was the mother who learned she was not a mom after all. In this fantasy episode, the crowd cheers when the show returns from its break, just as it always has, and it’s as if the claps have not slowed since we last cut away. From off-screen, a production assistant passes an unbeautiful, unbranded manila envelope to Maury, and he lifts the contents from its mouth. He doesn’t gasp, and the viewer knows that whatever he’s about to say was only a matter of time. You are not a mother. Maury’s voice is cottony, as though he fears to stoke a crowd whose cheers will wake a baby sleeping backstage. You are not a mother.

*

When I joined TikTok in January 2021, I was, arguably, the same person I am now: a woman whose only livelihood she’s responsible for is her own. Similarly, my TikTok feed is still as much a site of motherly celebrations, adversities, and antics as it was the day I created an account. I’m beholding the spectacle of motherhood from the same vantage point I was in January.

But I’m not, not truly. This past year, I became a woman who may never be a mom, which is different from the woman I thought I was before. My starting coordinates are the same—I’m still as childless as I was at the beginning of the year—but my map leading to motherhood has warped; it occupies dimensions and planes that weren’t even imaginable prior to my diagnosis. Before this year, the route I envisioned leading to motherhood was as linear as the FYP’s reel, the only direction to proceed being forward. Now, that route is riddled with dead ends, timelines stretched long like taffy, trick mirrors, consultations in which I beg doctors for responses to questions I have to swear I want the answers to.

A few weeks into joining the app, I bragged to friends and family, I tricked TikTok into believing I’m a mom, as if I had spent years pitching to an audience of #MomTok mothers why they should inaugurate me into their community. In those prediagnosis months, I hadn’t realized that as much as I had duped TikTok, TikTok was actively deceiving me. I was spellbound, as confident as an algorithm in my own capacity for motherhood. My conviction anchored to a future in which my own role as a mom was bound to come true. Might come true.

I don’t think I’ll ever wholly view myself as a woman who is incapable of mothering biological kids of my own, even if that is the hand I’m ultimately dealt. I don’t think it will be, but I do wonder if my hope is colored by the ease with which I’ve settled into this culture of parenthood. While I wait to find out, I lull myself to sleep with the joyful tedium of thumbing through my FYP. Each night, I offer a final goodnight to Grey and all the mothers I have to thank.