“I'm not a performer. I wasn't able to do what they were doing.”
“I'm not a performer. I wasn't able to do what they were doing.”
LaTonya Yvette on being an OG mommy blogger, and her new book, ‘Stand In My Window.’
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You might know LaTonya Yvette from one of her many creative outlets. She’s an author, with her third book, Stand In My Window, a collection of essays on the meaning of homemaking, out November 12. She’s the owner of The Mae House, a rental property in upstate New York that’s free to BIPOC families. She’s the author of
on Substack. But I came to Yvette in an entirely different way, at an entirely different time—2012, to be exact, when she was part of the first well-known wave of “mommy bloggers.”
Naomi Davis of Love Taza, Natalie Lovin of Nat The Fat Rat—these are my sleeper activation phrases that could snap me out of a trance at any given moment, so formative were they to my late-internet upbringing. Among them was Yvette, at that time the only Black blogger of the cohort. Unlike her white, brunette peers, Yvette was not Mormon, and also not “performing” motherhood in the same way they were—it was real, and fragile, and unphotoshoppable. Plus, she was just 21.
All eras come to an end, and fifteen years later, both Davis and Lovin have quietly stepped away from the internet. Yvette, however, has grown with it. “It's not the same internet,” she says over coffee—but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t found her place. Now an author and a Substacker, she’s a homemaker in every sense of the word, be it IRL or in online communities. In this conversation, we chatted about her internet evolution, what it meant to be the first well-known Black “mommy blogger,” and our physical—and digital—homes.
I first knew you as part of the mommy blogger boom. Can you tell me how that came about?
First blog entry had to be...so River was born 2011. I was still in college for writing literature. I don't think I ever thought of it as mommy blogging. I was 21, I was writing, I was in school, and it was this moment in time where there were three really, really well known mommy bloggers, but they were all white. And I think for me it's like, I grew up with a bunch of artists and in Brooklyn and I was young and I was like, "Oh wait, what happens when you become a parent?" And I think it was interesting because I kind of fell into a market, but I also think I knew the market existed. But it wasn't the way that things are so contrived now at all.
This is how I found out you were just 21—you were not that much older than me!
Yeah. I know. A lot of the people are just having kids now. And so I feel like there's this resurgence of thinking about me or thinking about the people who existed at that moment when they were in college. And I think that was part of my work, showing that there are multiple alternatives. A lot of us are like only two, three years apart. But I have now a 14-year-old.
I started reading mommy bloggers through Love Taza—this is when I used to navigate being online by bookmarking my favorite bloggers and just checking all of them every single day.
People would pop around to all of ours. We used to have tabs on the side, we would [link] other friends. And then I think the cool thing about New York then, we would all — it was interesting because I wasn't Mormon. Like I definitely had a kid out of wedlock. But I think connecting via the internet was such a unique experience, and being visible when your kids were young, it was such a unique time.
I forget who it was, but there was one blogger who was the same in every way—white, brunette. She had an FAQ and one was like, "Are you Mormon?" And I remember her response was like, "I don't know why people keep asking me!"
I got the same question a lot. The top Google suggestion was "is LaTonya Yvette mormon?" Because I was young and because I had a blog. We totally did not align on religion, but they were cool people. That was it. Like we actually just got along as people. It was really bizarre. And also the thing too that we don't talk enough about is when you have young kids, you end up clicking with people who you are not necessarily alike with at all. And your kids eventually grow up, and you realize those people are not really your people.
I was just watching the Hulu momtok show, and now it's all so normalized. But at the time, it was so interesting how, and this is mostly speculation, but the mothers were becoming breadwinners via performing this domesticity. Do you feel like you were part of that?
No, because I literally was, and that's a lot of the book. Homemaking, especially specifically for Black women, it's actually part of our liberation. It's predicated on the fact that we exist in a space of always constantly living with the duality of not being safe. It was who I really was, and I think that's also what made me not as successful. It made me successful in other ways, where I now I'm on my third book, right? But it made me not successful in the shortness of that internet world, because I'm not a performer. I wasn't able to do what they were doing. We didn't have money. We were broke. And then I got a divorce. It wasn't something I was performing.
It wasn't like, sponsored by whatever.
I think that was the thing too, is it was cool if someone sponsored something. They weren't sponsoring numbers. They were sponsoring the way I was telling a story. And I think that that's the definitive internal line, and also external line. I was in it, but I wasn't part of it at all.
So when it came to moving on from that era, what did you do?
Oh, well, you know, I was a writer always. And I think the thing is, the people who had blogs, like only two of them were actual writers, right? I was one. I was in school for writing literature. That was always the thing. The blog for me was like a practice. And so having Woman of Color really helped, that was published in 2019. But I got that book [deal] in 2017. Those readers, that platform, those friendships did allow me to get into an industry that otherwise is impossible for Black writers. I wasn't calculating the long game, but it did what it was supposed to do, which was now I'm on my third book. And being an author and being a writer is continuous for me. Like, this is my life. People are like, “Are you gonna write another book?” Some people, they have a platform, they write one book. No, no, no. You don't know how my brain works. This is actually my entire life.
Right. Like, this isn't a book that's a companion to the platform.
There's no platform anymore! I'm visible, but there's no platform. Substack is not a platform. It makes writing possible. They're trying, but you don't cultivate what feels like the same...
Cohesive community.
No. It's all disjointed. It's not the same internet.
Homemaking is how you fell into mommy blogging, and now your new book is all about home.
Home in the book, especially, it's not necessarily of the [physical] home, it's the way we embody space, the way we have thought about space over centuries, over time. I wrote it over three years. I have a totally different voice. Blogging was a totally different voice. And writing on Substack is sometimes hard for me because I've been writing like a book for so long. It's actually a different brain. This is not like Woman of Color, either. So it's all weird. It's all wild.
And it's framed as this rediscovery of home. What were you rediscovering?
I just got back to myself. I had moved away from what I grew up with. I had moved away from what I was taught and moved away from the things my grandmother, my mother, embedded in me. Home is literally what we make it, and often home is within our bodies, no matter what happens in the outside world.
Do you feel that this rediscovery channeled anything from your earlier era?
No, isn't it weird? Gone, buried. My son said to me the other night, he was like, ever since you closed your blog, you've been on a downfall.
He said you're in your flop era.
He literally said it was my flop era. That's what happens when you have a 10-year-old boy. And I was so emotional about it. I came back to him and was like a) that hurt my feelings, b) I chose this life. And I don't want to be that person. I'm a writer and I'm an author and it's actually not about being part of an era. I had to explain to him that there's a time, there's a season for everything. That was a season, and this is the new season. I was like, you don't understand that Mommy's been doing this before you. That was actually a short period of time. That was the window, not everything else after it. Does that make sense?
Yeah. And I'm realizing someone who's 10 right now has a lot of literacy in internet creators. So to find out that his mom was an influencer...I'm sure that he’s picturing like, Mr. Beast.
He literally is like, why aren't you doing what they're doing on the internet? And I'm like, because that's a different internet.
When the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement happened, so many people patronized Black-owned bookstores that they got overwhelmed. And then these people who had placed orders were sending nasty emails when the stores were having a hard time keeping up. People put way too much pressure on them because of what they represented. Being one of the few Black mommy bloggers, did you feel any similar pressure?
I just kind of refused. I talked about it once or twice and then I refused. I had kids to raise. I had kids to keep safe. And I was not really interested in being anyone's like...you know, I sold this book before all that happened. That was the other reality is I had to write. And then I had two kids. And I was alone with them and we were in a pandemic. So I actually did what I had learned via blogging: I created a huge boundary. I think I literally can count on one hand how many times via Instagram and maybe on the blog I talked about anything. I would say five. And that was my wall. It was like, don't expect anything of me. I wasn't there. And I think that's what I mean is the reality to live in it is different than to platform it. There are people who really stepped into it and it became their work. That was totally fine. I just turned to the book.
It's a way of processing, writing it out.
And that was it. I was like, “Oh, I have a project. I have art to make. And a house.”
Oh right, we haven't talked about The Mae House.
The book sold in 2020, which also I'm always trying to clarify like it was not a Black Lives Matter book deal, this was being shopped around before this stuff happened. We were in talks, and then it happened. And while the book was not finalized, the contract wasn't signed yet, I started reading Braiding Sweetgrass, and so you'll see a lot of references in there. I read the book twice. My grandmother was part indigenous. And then my dad came to New York when he was 14. My mom grew up here. So I had all these relationships to land and how we get here, how we move here, what's owed to us.
I went upstate that summer, the first vacation, and we went to Hudson, New York. We ran into David Hammons, who is my friend's dad actually. He had a mask on. And he started talking to me about Black people and migration and Hudson and the town. It was this weird moment of connecting the book and him and identity. And we stayed in this nasty apartment and I was like, what the fuck? Like, why don't we have—and so honestly the house, I had this deal then the deal closed. And I was like, well, what if I do this? And do it differently? And can I embody some of the practices that I grew up with about sharing space? And what about the things that I learned in this book? What about the things that David had told me? What about the things that I thought about while being with my kids? And so the house is because of the book. Both of these processes were made and created in tandem with one another.
The idea of home is both physical but also spiritual or digital. What does home in that context mean to you?
A lot of it is your body, your mind. Are you right here? *points to head* Are you right here? *points to heart*. And I think that a lot of the book goes into a swing of depression and a breakup, going to Al-Anon meetings and restoring myself in this way. Because this is all we have. So a lot of it is embodiment and also cultural. Home is what we have inherited from our past, whether we like it or not.
The idea of homemaking, and mommy blogging as well actually, has gotten wrapped up recently in this "tradwife" phenomenon. Have you seen that?
Oh my God, I have no idea. This is also the funny part about me, I don't watch TV—oh, that girl. What's that girl?
Ballerina Farm? She's one of them.
I don't pay attention to her. What's the Black girl's name? With Lucky?
Oh, Nara Smith!
I'm also just like, let Black people make their money. I don't know what to tell y'all.