Mary Katherine Backstrom is accustomed to sharing the good, the bad and the hilarious with the online community she created on Facebook. So one day last December, when something really funny happened to her, she got in her car right away and told the whole story on Facebook Live, the way some people might call to tell their mother or their best friend.
Between fits of infectious laughter, she told how she had been feeling the Christmas spirit in her local Wawa convenience store and generously paid the tab for the woman behind her in line. As she left the store, she saw a man cleaning off the windshield of her car. She went right over to him and thanked him, told him how much she loved Christmas and gave him a hug.
And that’s when she realized it was. Not. Her. Car. He was cleaning his own windshield.
Embarrassed but tickled by the whole thing, she recorded the experience moments after it happened – then went on to her next stop, picking her son up from school. Unbeknownst to her, the video was being watched and shared like crazy.
With more than 500,000 Facebook and Instagram followers, Mary Katherine has been blogging and sharing videos for years. And she’s had videos go viral before, but not like this. Soon, it had been viewed 80 million times and she got a call (which she thought was fake at first) from “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
On the show, a starstruck Mary Katherine sat next to Ellen DeGeneres, who showed the video and asked her a few questions before presenting her a surprise check for $20,000 from Honey Nut Cheerios as a reward for “paying it forward.” Ellen gave several examples of Mary Katherine’s acts of kindness, including donating a kidney to one of her uncles.
Being invited on Ellen’s show “was the pinnacle of my blogging life,” Mary Katherine said in a phone interview with AL.com. “I’m still not over it.”
The experience still seems surreal to the 36-year-old mother of two who lives in Fort Myers, Florida, with her husband, an emergency medicine physician. Originally from Huntsville, Mary Katherine grew up there and in Dothan. “I feel like I belong to both cities,” she says.
With a messy bun charmingly off-center on top of her head, her easy laugh and her sweet demeanor, Mary Katherine represents the reality of motherhood in all its imperfect glory. In her first book, “Mom Babble: The Messy Truth About Motherhood” – named for the blog she started when her son was born six years ago – she shares 40 short essays about being a mom.
By turns funny and moving, the recently released book is perfect for a mom-to-be, a mom in the trenches or even a mom who wants to look back on her kids’ childhoods with a sigh of relief and a tear. A common thread in the essays is the affirmation that doing the best we can is enough, and our children will turn out fine.
Even though her own children are only four and six, Mary Katherine understands how bittersweet it is to be a mother.
“Parenting is the process,” she writes, “of raising someone just to let them go. And maybe it’s a small grace that it doesn’t happen all at once. I don’t think my heart could take it.”
‘Something bigger than me’
Mary Katherine met her husband, Ian, while both were undergraduate students at UAB. Her first year of college was a “disaster,” she says. By the end of the year, she “became a Christian,” she says, and decided to spend the next year working as a missionary in Thailand “because I don’t do anything halfway.”
While in Thailand, her best friend kept telling her he’d met her future husband. When she returned, she met Ian, but both of them were “100 percent not interested,” she says.
The next time they saw each other was a different story. “It was love at second sight,” she says. “Within a month, we knew we wanted to get married.”
She worked as a waitress at Dreamland on 15th Avenue in Birmingham while putting her new husband through medical school. Then they moved to Florida for his residency and have lived there ever since.
“My career as an author started with my journey as a mother,” Mary Katherine says. Since child care cost as much as she was making at the time in her real estate job, she became a stay-at-home mom when her first son was born. She suffered from postpartum depression to the point that she couldn’t leave her house.
Writing was a way “to stimulate my brain,” she says. Starting her Mom Babble blog was also a way to “drum up community.” For the first couple of years, she had 10,000 or so followers, but the number started growing every time she published a viral article or video.
Eventually, Nashville-based Abingdon Press reached out to her and asked if she wanted to write a book. “I prayed about it and thought this is something God has dropped in my lap,” she says – so she decided to donate proceeds to the Mighty Acorn Foundation, which helps children living in slums in Kitale, Kenya.
“(The book) felt like something bigger than me from day one,” she says.
The short essays in “Mom Babble” are intended to be “digestible,” Mary Katherine says. “I want moms to walk away feeling connected. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to offer solidarity through stories.”
And even though the essays have a universal theme of motherhood, the book reveals the author’s personal struggles that are familiar to her hardcore fans – like battling breast cancer (she was diagnosed in 2018 and had a double mastectomy) and managing mental illness (she has bipolar II disorder).
“Destigmatizing mental illness is so important,” she says. “I’m honest about my struggles.” In that way, social media is “a pretty powerful tool.”
Her followers feel like friends, especially since she has curated the group to maintain a positive atmosphere there. Live videos have become “the bread and butter of the platform,” she says. While the process of making videos felt awkward at first – once, while sitting cross-legged on the floor, she started receiving urgent texts from friends telling her that her underwear was showing – she has become proficient at talking directly to her followers that way, whether she’s in the carpool line, sitting outside “Tarjay” or taking a walk in her neighborhood.
“People love it when you share your messiest moments,” she says. The people who write to tell her she’s as crazy as they are? Those are her people.
Occasionally on her Facebook page, she’ll grab her guitar and treat her followers to a song. Mary Katherine always thought she’d be a rock star – she even had a private audition for The Voice – “but this dream is more sustainable,” she says of her writing career. “Singing is a joy for me, but it’s never going to be a job.”
She doesn’t have time for it, anyway. As of last week, she has a two-book deal with a major publishing house.
Meanwhile, she’s trying to promote “Mom Babble,” which is available at Target and online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Launching a book in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has been a challenge. She has missed out on what she looked forward to most: meeting fans in person and signing their books. Instead of signing them directly, anyone who purchases a book can fill out a form and she’ll sign and mail them a bookplate.
“I love seeing people,” she says. “It’s a big deal to see readers and hug them and stuff.”
Hopefully, she’ll be able to do that with her next book.
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Alabama native, popular blogger writes first book, ‘Mom Babble’ - AL.com
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