Jill Smokler, creator of groundbreaking 'Scary Mommy' blog, announces she has brain cancer
Jill Smokler, creator of the website “Scary Mommy,” whose raw and honest writing inspired a generation of mothers to bond over the understanding that parenting isn’t always rainbows and sunshine, has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer at age 46.
“I’m doing pretty much how you’d expect,” Smokler tells TODAY.com in her first interview since receiving her glioblastoma diagnosis. “Not great. I keep alternating between feeling so profoundly sad and so pissed off.”
In 2008, Smokler started a blog called “Scary Mommy” to document her pajama-clad reflections as a stay-at-home mom. The blog wound up attracting millions of readers in search of connection and acknowledgement that motherhood could be wonderful, complicated and a bit scary. Smokler grew it into an empire, becoming the first mom blogger to sell her brand to a media company.
“Jill started a community that gave women a voice and a connection to other women walking the same road,” says Nicole Brown Meyers, a mom in Louisiana who belongs to a Facebook group for fans of the original Scary Mommy. “We were able to say, ‘Hey, somebody understands me and I’m not alone.”
How Scary Mommy started
The origin story of Scary Mommy won't surprise anyone who knows Smokler.
She had just relocated from Tennessee to Maryland with her then-husband Jeff and their three children, Evan, Ben, and Lily, who were all under the age of 4.
One day, a neighbor rang with cookies to welcome the family. When the neighbor asked how Smokler was faring, she answered truthfully: Great, she said, except for her infant, who was acting like an “a------.”
The neighbor recoiled.
Smokler was equally aghast at the reaction.
“I thought, ‘Of course, she’d understand,’” Smokler tells TODAY.com. “How do you have a child and not think at some point that they’re being an a------? They just are.”
She started blogging.
“I realized, ‘If my neighbors and the people here don’t get me, maybe there are people out there who I could connect with,” she says.
Smokler’s transparency was on display this month when she announced her glioblastoma diagnosis. According to Cleveland Clinic, the fast-spreading brain cancer has no cure and life expectancy is 12 to 18 months. Roughly 7% of glioblastoma patients live beyond five years.
Smokler tells TODAY.com that she posted the medical news “in a complete drug-induced state” after waking up from surgery, unable to initially recognize her children, ages 16, 18, 20 — to this day, she cannot recall the conversation in which they learned of her cancer.
“I am definitely grateful that I don’t remember the looks on their faces when I didn’t recognize them,” she says. “That must have been gutting.”
One of the OG mommy bloggers
The name “Scary Mommy” was inspired by Smokler’s son Ben, who watched a children’s movie — “either ‘Snow White’ or ‘The Little Mermaid,’” she says — and declared everything “scary,” including his mommy.
It was 2008 and blogging culture was strong, with moms like Catherine Connors of “Her Bad Mother,” the late Heather Armstrong’s “Dooce” and Joanna Goddard of “Cup of Jo” leading more honest conversations about motherhood.
Mom blogging was different in the early aughts, says Moya Bailey, an associate professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Today, if people share personal or embarrassing stories online, she says, “There’s often a hope that it will lead to money, power or fame.”
Bailey points out that along with Smokler, popular bloggers such as ‘brownfemipower’ Mamita Mala, and ‘guerrilla mama medicine’ were writing about motherhood as part of, not all of, women’s identities.
Smokler says she wanted people to know motherhood wasn’t just idealized images they saw in mainstream women’s magazines.
She blogged about the daily guck — bribing Lily with chocolate to clean her room, discovering Ben playing “elbow deep in the toilet, happy as a clam.”
When Smokler received her first reader comment, she felt both “creeped out” and excited, thinking, “I don’t know this person — why does she care about my kids?”
Smokler says she found herself “obsessed” with blogging,
Scary Mommy “saved me,” says Smokler. “We were in the trenches ... and whenever I needed relief, instead of turning to alcohol or pills, I vented online to my people and got feedback and felt so validated and that made me a better parent.”
Smokler titled one post “F U kids,” about the unapologetic satisfaction of swearing at her children in her head.
She once published a post characterizing motherhood as “a series of unfortunate events that bonds women together in the most thankless and revolting job on earth.”
Smokler’s favorite Scary Mommy post is “The Perfect Picture,” about snapping a frame-worthy photo of her children (you know, where everyone looks normal and at the camera).
“I took a million pictures, bribes included, and in every one, something major was wrong like bad lighting or closed eyes,” Smokler tells TODAY.com.
Smokler took what she believed at the time was an angelic image. “Except that Evan wasn’t wearing pants and his penis somehow turned out to be in the best focus,” she says. “Needless to say, not a frameable pic, but I printed it out and added a smiley face sticker and it always made me laugh.”
The deep, dark secrets of Scary Mommies
Smokler has cited Scary Mommy’s hottest draw as “The Confessional,” where readers could vent anonymously.
To get the ball rolling, Smokler posted: “I fed my kid mac-and-cheese three nights in a row” and “I used the pool as a bath during the whole summer,” she explained on her podcast “She’s Got Issues.”
A perk of the limited technology at the time was that the confessional had only three reaction options (“Hug, “OMG, me too” and “Like”), which inadvertently eliminated mom shaming. Deeper discussions lived on the community boards.
“People could get judgmental, but at its core, the community boards were a fundamentally beautiful space,” Lily Read, a teacher who became a volunteer Scary Mommy moderator in 2010, tells TODAY.com.
No topic was too honest for the confessional:
“Hubby never initiates sex.”
“I love my kids to death, but, man. They suck today!!!”
“I love both my children, but my little one has my heart, and I feel guilty that I don’t feel like that with my older one.”
“I’m the reason my marriage ended — I cheated — and I’m afraid someday my child will find out and hate me for it.”
A spotlight on her marriage
In 2017, Smokler made her own confession on Facebook: She and Jeff were divorcing after 17 years of marriage, because he was gay.
Jeff wrote about the split in a Scary Mommy post titled “When Love Isn't Enough: Divorcing My Soulmate” and the couple gave an interview to People magazine with their photo on the cover and the headline, “My husband is gay.”
Smokler and Jeff remain close — he lives a mile from her home — and her cancer diagnosis brought them together in a “weird way,” she says.
“We talk more and Jeff is very cognizant of what I will be missing out on,” Smokler tells TODAY.com. “He’s helping me make the most of my time with the kids.”
The power (and love) of the Scary Mommies
To Scary Mommies (the collective term for her readers), Smokler is both an “icon” and a "best friend."
“Jill was seen somewhat as a celebrity,” moderator Charisse Oates tells TODAY.com. “We all felt so grateful and appreciative for this place that she had built for us ... Everyone wanted to be seen or heard by Jill.”
Maria Guido, executive editor of Scary Mommy from 2015 to 2021, discovered the site as the mom of a toddler in Brooklyn.
“I felt like I wasn’t doing the mom thing right,” Guido tells TODAY.com. Reading Smokler made her feel seen.
Under Smokler’s leadership, Guido wrote about her miscarriage, her abortion and her experiences raising Black children. She credits Smokler with allowing her that freedom.
“I don't know that I’ve laughed as hard with anyone else,” says Guido. “She’s so real ... you can’t piss her off without her telling you, which is one of my favorite qualities. She’s a difficult woman in the best way.”
Smokler tells TODAY.com that her proudest creation is “The Thanksgiving Project,” a yearly fundraiser for families who couldn’t afford turkey dinners, inspired by a “Confessional” comment that read, “I can barely afford to feed my family. It’s humiliating.”
Scary Mommy’s “Christmas Project” awarded toy shopping trips to children and the non-profit Scary Mommy Nation fed families.
When a Florida mom became the victim of domestic violence, the community paid for a safe location where she stayed for two days, according to Mikki Caplan-Zaple, a former Scary Mommy community manager who's now content manager at “She’s Got Issues.” One mom who went into labor at home during a snowstorm found comfort in the boards until emergency services arrived.
Caplan-Zaple remembers the early Scary Mommy as “a magical place on the internet.”
Members of the Scary Mommy “Originals” Facebook group shared with TODAY.com how the website, and Smokler, changed their lives.
“When I had my first baby I was completely alone, I had no family nearby and my husband was deployed. I was feeling lost and dangerously depressed ... I was able to connect with other moms who understood what I was going through and learned about postpartum depression. Without Jill I wouldn’t have had the courage to talk to my doctor and get the help I needed.” — Christina Salas, Texas.
“We were able to say ... things we would never admit out loud to the people in our everyday lives.” — Nicole Brown Meyers, Louisiana.
“(For the first) Thanksgiving Project, I reached out for help for a friend. Jill messaged me to make sure that my family was good too. We weren’t ... She got the community to help the family I nominated and my family as well. I will always be grateful.” — Nikii Burress, Iowa.
“Jill (offered) a place to share the messy, honest, beautiful, f----- up, hilarious reality of being a parent ... Jill truly was a revolutionary.” — Wendy Wisner, New York.
What Smokler did for readers in her community, she also does for her friends.
Allison Slater Tate, a friend and former colleague of Smokler, tells TODAY.com, “Jill wanted women to use their real and unfiltered voices. The platform she built ... changed American motherhood. She does that with her friends, too ... she is blunt, direct, loving, kind, and non-judgmental ... She knows you are a good mom; you don’t have to prove it to her.”
Selling Scary Mommy
In 2015, Smokler sold Scary Mommy, which then averaged about 10 million monthly readers, to a company called Some Spider Studios and became chief content officer; in 2018, Smokler stepped down from the website, which is now owned by Bustle Digital Group.
Smokler has mixed feelings about selling and leaving Scary Mommy, after having published three books connected to the brand.
Her most recent creative baby has been “She’s Got Issues,” a podcast/magazine/multimedia platform aimed at Gen X women.
Before leaving Scary Mommy, Smokler printed her 2008 blog entries, which she likens to a baby book for her children. Now she's thinking about what else to leave.
“It makes me happy to give these things,” she says. “Do I leave them videos? Do I get them cards for events? How far out do I go?”
‘All I want to do is spend time with my kids’
On April 11, Smokler had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital.
“When I woke up, I thought it was 2004,” Smokler recalls. “(Doctors) said, ‘You’re at The Johns Hopkins Hospital ... you had a brain tumor and it’s been removed.’ ... I was like, ‘That’s so me to get a brain tumor.’ I always do things dramatically.”
Two weeks later, Smokler learned her cancer was stage four.
“It’s been described to me as an octopus with tentacles,” she says. “It’s not a one-time thing. It keeps coming back.”
Smokler calls herself a “pessimist,” but says there’s valid reason to be hopeful about beating the statistics.
“I’m on a younger end of the spectrum and I’m otherwise relatively healthy,” she says. “Things look optimistic.”
Smokler says her parents and stepmother have been helping her weigh treatment options: traditional chemo and radiation or alternate trials?
“It’s the biggest decision ever,” she says, adding, “Everyone keeps saying, ‘Go with your gut’ — but I have a terrible gut. It hasn’t treated me well.”
Whatever option she pursues, doctors explained that glioblastoma care is “buying time,” she says. “ There is a looming (feeling of), ‘I’m not going to be around for my grandkids.’”
Smokler says she's incredibly grateful to her own parents for taking care of her, while feeling guilty that she won't be able to care for them.
For now, the mother of Scary Mommy is trying to make the most of her time with her children, in the embrace of the community she nurtured.
"All I want to do is spend time with my kids, ideally on a beach because that’s my happy place,” Smokler adds. “It’s so ridiculously bittersweet — I am trying to focus on the sweet part.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com