The Fish Egg That Broke My Heart

A Fallen Influencer's Guide to Escaping Your Pilates Reformer and Other Curated Crises

Almost three years ago, my daughters and I moved to the country. It wasn’t particularly strategic. There were reasons, of course — financial ones, boring adult ones. But there was also something else. Let me try to explain.

My two daughters, who were then 7 and 10, had only ever known life inside our big, shiny Brooklyn tower with its golf simulator, pool, bankers with VR glasses, a digital bulletin board with tenants complaining about noise and maid service, and the dated furniture in the lobby. There were influencers with mongooses on leashes and pregnant women in DoorDash vests delivering Shake Shack during blizzards. It was a terrarium of excess.

And I know this is the part where you roll your eyes and write a vitriolic comment about my privilege and myopia — and please go ahead, no one is stopping you. I'm just telling you that it started to feel a little bit sad. Not dramatic sadness — no trauma in the traditional sense. Just a low, slow drip of spiritual rot. Normalization of something quietly grotesque.

My daughters thought it was normal to wait 45 minutes in line for a $36 hamburger, standing behind a shirtless man vaping and stroking his emotional support micro pig. They thought it was normal, in October 2016, to march in a Vogue fashion show fundraiser for Hilary Clinton in a Tribeca loft wearing lipstick and “The Future Is Female” T-shirts (even my baby), and that we paraded past Harvey Weinstein, who was sitting in the front row, also wearing a “The Future Is Female” shirt. (He blew my baby a kiss when we passed).

They thought it was normal that the pool we swam in was at the hotel across the street that I'd brokered through some strange barter system with the concierge. In exchange for letting us swim, I let the hotel take a photo of me and my daughters, tagging their location on Instagram like we were exotic zoo animals whose natural habitat was "aspirational lifestyle content."

They thought it was normal that the pool was filled with influencers on flamingo floats, people in ass-floss bikinis reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert in pastel pool chairs, as if the secret to manifestation was wedging fabric between your buttocks while absorbing self-help wisdom through your hungover, ayahuasca-addled brain. Bitcoin bros in fedoras with waxed chests snapped selfies like they were documenting their own extinction, techno thumping overhead like the soundtrack to late-stage capitalism having an orgasm.

The workers — mostly Black and Brown people in hairnets — hustled iced rosé and avocado foam toast on lacquered trays back and forth to white mom bloggers like me. Our babies and toddlers ate popsicles made from sweet potatoes that Jessica Seinfeld's publicist had sent over on dry ice, as if a grape popsicle from the bodega might give them cancer or worse, make them develop a personality that wasn't compatible with our brand aesthetic, which would completely tank our Q4 sponsorship deals with companies that sell $47 wooden toys designed to "nurture creativity" but mostly just make parents feel superior to other parents whose children play with plastic.

I watched my daughters splash in water that cost more per square foot than most people's rent, thinking about how we'd all agreed to pretend this was normal — that we deserved to float on our backs in luxury while people who'd lived here for generations got priced out to make room for our Instagram stories. Normal that the hotel, of course, had been constructed atop the rubble of someone else's home. Where there had once been rent-stabilized apartments and low-income housing — brick buildings with busted intercoms and narrow hallways that smelled of cumin and gefilte fish and the kind of lived-in humanity that doesn't photograph well.

The message was clear: To those who had lived there all along, you don't belong here anymore. We do. We, with our sweet potato popsicles and our borrowed pool access and our children who would grow up thinking this displacement was just the natural order of things — that some people are meant to serve while others are meant to float.

That was also the summer that Stanford golden boy Brock Turner got sentenced six months for raping Chanel Miller — and leaving her an unconscious behind a dumpster until two graduate students intervened and detained him for police. When I think of that summer, I think about my neighbors with the waxed chests and but floss bikinis reading Big Magic, hellbent on channeling their inner artists at all costs, and I think about Chanel Miller, on the other side of the country, subsumed behind the pseudonym Emily Doe, while her rapist served half a year for trying to erase her forever.

My daughters lived in a curated fantasy that was supposed to signal progress — multiculturalism and girl power. But those glass towers didn’t just reflect the sun — they reflected erasure.

Toward the end of my time in Brooklyn, my office was The Wing. Or, I guess I should say, The Wings. There were many of them by then. Oh, my daughters loved The Wings. Wouldn’t you if you were a little girl? A labial pink cocoon of hair products and kindness and grilled cheeses and big hairy chairs in shades of green and yellow? They’d come visit sometimes and eat a $65 grilled cheese, served by another underpaid woman of color whose labor made the aesthetic possible.

Then we’d go home and they’d march in Black Lives Matter rallies in the same "The Future Is Female" shirts they’d worn to the Vogue thing to try to elect Hillary. Only now Trump was president, and the shirts were too small, and the accessories were now N95 masks.

I’m just being honest — about my complicity, and theirs by proximity. They were born into this Instagrammable Disneyland of affluence, hand sanitizer, curated activism, and cultural appropriation. They didn’t know it was strange. That it wasn’t real. That it couldn’t last. They thought life was just grand.

If I'm being honest about why we moved to the country, it has something to do with what I just said, and also because I was tired of using my pilates reformer as a kitchen table. Also, because on our last New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn, I ordered caviar at a hotel restaurant near our building and I tried to explain to my daughters what it was — fish eggs, luxury, indulgence — and they insisted on bringing one home. A single egg, wrapped lovingly in a napkin, cupped in their tiny hands like something sacred. It was freezing outside, but they cooed to it the entire walk home, whispering promises into the napkin folds. At midnight, they filled a shallow bowl with water and placed the egg inside, then spent the next several afternoons after school staring into it, waiting for it to hatch into a fish. They truly believed it would. That belief broke my heart.

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