Motherhood in the Age of the Crunchy Instagram Mama

A few weeks before I gave birth to my first son, I came across an online quiz entitled “What Percent Crunchy Mama Are You?” Though I was not yet an actual parent, I held some presumptuous ideals about parenting au naturel, much of which I had drawn from the legion of manic-pixie wellness mamas I followed on Instagram. So I was sure I could win this test — and I would make sure I won this test, lest Ricki Lake find me out and feature my sad story in her next alarmist documentary on natural childbirth. Imagine my horror, then, when I failed the test with a deplorable 60 percent crunchy. More than failing a stupid online test, I felt like I was about to fail motherhood.

To me, being a crunchy mama meant a lot of things. It meant living in a midcentury home with unrealistically bright white walls and being slender and owning a 40 percent linen capsule wardrobe. It meant breastfeeding longer than my friends and pureeing my own baby food and never, ever letting my kid cry it out, even at the expense of my own sleep (and sanity). It meant calling my children names derived from obscure Norwegian villages and reading them borderline-creepy fairy tales from vintage, clothbound books. But mostly, natural parenting meant keeping my child safe. It meant loving him. It meant being good. And I, like every other new mom on the planet, wanted nothing more than to be a good…