Taylor Wolfe is proving that laughter is often the best medicine.
The 33-year-old writer and comedian has been sharing her life on the internet through her popular lifestyle blog, The Daily Tay, since 2009. When Wolfe gave birth to her daughter, Birdie, in November 2020 after suffering a devastating miscarriage in 2019, sharing her experience with motherhood on social media felt natural.
What she wasn't prepared for was unsolicited feedback from people she didn’t know.
“After I shared my troubles with breastfeeding I got a particularly cutting message from someone about how it made sense I couldn't breastfeed because only ‘selfless mothers can do it’ and I was ‘much too selfish,'” the Denver-based mom told TODAY Parents. “And it just knocked the wind out of me. Birdie had trouble gaining weight in her first weeks and it was incredibly stressful and made me feel like a failure, so to hear this from a stranger was just like salt in the wound.”
The new mom said that she was wasting too much mental space dwelling on a stranger’s comment and knew the only way to work through it would be to find humor in the situation.
“I pulled out my favorite wig, wrote some one-liners, and Mom Troll was born,” she shared. “Every video I create is based on real messages I receive. By trolling the trolls it feels like I'm taking their power away.”
“It's been a crazy week. I think I sent like 1100 messages today...that was just to one mom,” Wolfe says in one of her ‘mom troll’ parody videos. “I’m just here to look after the kids on the internet I don’t know and make their moms feel like shit.”
In addition to ‘mom trolls,' Wolfe has tackled other relatable parenting topics, including postpartum hormones.
“Hey girl how ya doing? Just kidding, we don’t care,” she says in her initial video personifying her postpartum hormones while baby Birdie can be heard cooing in the background. “We have a big agenda today. First of all, have you cried about missing pregnancy even though you didn’t really like it while it was happening? Bump pics? Did you take enough? Because we’re going to make you think you didn’t anyway, so we’ll get upset about that for about 10-100 minutes. Night sweats, we’re gonna turn those up a bit, Seems like you were getting a little too comfortable and your hair - has it started falling out yet? It has, you just haven’t noticed yet.”
In another parody, Wolfe shares her hormones’ reaction to breastfeeding and seeing a newborn.
“I quickly learned postpartum hormones are basically the trolls of our body, they're just a little harder to dismiss,” she said. “So by laughing at the absurd things I feel and think postpartum, it helps to lighten a time that could otherwise be really confusing and exhausting. And it feels nice to share with others and know I'm not alone.”
Wolfe’s hope is that her account serves as an outlet for people to laugh and a place where fellow moms can "feel seen" and less alone.
“The messages that really get me are from women much older with adult children who say they wish people talked more about pregnancy and motherhood like we do now, when they were young mothers,” she said. “When I shared my miscarriage in the summer of 2019, I'll never forget the message I received from a woman in her 70s who told me she miscarried three times, but was ‘never allowed to talk about it,’ but always wished she could have.”
With just five months of motherhood under her belt, there is one thing Wolfe wishes she could go back and tell to her pregnant self.
“Take more bump pics - xoxo, your hormones.”
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