Jill Smokler, "a mother of three who started the blog Scary Mommy as a diversion from bedtime battles and toddler tantrums, only to build it into a juggernaut that drew millions of readers to its warts-and-all look at what she called 'the imperfect side of parenting,' " died June 22, the New York Times reported. She was 48.
In addition to her blog, which she launched in 2008, Smokler wrote three books, including the bestsellers Confessions of a Scary Mommy (2012) and Motherhood Comes Naturally (And Other Vicious Lies) (2013), along with Scary Mommy's Guide to Surviving the Holidays.
Her brother, Matt Epstein, said Smokler "built her life's work on a single, radical idea. That you could love your children more than anything in the world and still say, out loud, that the job" is grindingly difficult.... "Eighteen years ago, there was almost nowhere a mother could admit this without judgment. So Jill made the place."
She was a 30-year-old graphic designer when she started the Scary Mommy blog, assuming "that her audience would be more or less limited to friends and family; perhaps her children, when they were grown, would look back on it as a record of their upbringing, like a baby book," the Times noted.
Motherhood, Smokler told Time magazine in an interview, "was loud, chaotic, messy, and nothing like the magazine pictures I stared at or the families I saw on TV. I was drowning, while all the other moms I interacted with seemed to be blissfully skipping through motherhood. It must be me, I thought--I'm just not a natural mother."
She realized she was not alone after receiving her "first random comment," she said. "That comment led me to that reader's blog, and from there I discovered a whole world of moms. And these moms, unlike any I'd met before, actually understood me! They struggled and shared the same frustrations."
Three years after the debut of Scary Mommy, the Baltimore Sun reported that Smokler "just might be Baltimore's biggest unknown celebrity," with a Twitter following that was greater than the city's mayor, Maryland's governor, and Baltimore Ravens football star linebacker Ray Lewis combined. "Few recognize her tightly coiled curls, her peanut-butter-eating children, her tired dog. But online, thousands upon thousands of mothers grasp onto her every word."
After seven years running Scary Mommy, the strain of running both a family and a high-profile business became too much. "I was probably sleeping an hour or two a night," she told Time. "I was taking conference calls in the car while I was driving my kids to school. I eventually became so burned out that I knew I needed to either sell the company or try to bring investors on, which is a daunting prospect."
Smokler sold the site in 2015 to digital media company Some Spider Studios, which hired dozens of employees who produced up to 20 posts a day, with Smokler staying on as chief content officer, the Times noted.