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 on Monday at her home in Pikesville, Md., near Baltimore. She was 48.
The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, her brother, Matt Epstein, said. She was diagnosed with the disease in April 2024.
Ms. Smokler “built her life’s work on a single, radical idea,” Mr. Epstein said in a statement. “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,” he added, “there was almost nowhere a mother could admit this without judgment. So Jill made the place.”
In addition to her blog, which she started in 2008, Ms. Smokler wrote three books, including the best sellers “Confessions of a Scary Mommy” (2012) and “Motherhood Comes Naturally (And Other Vicious Lies)” (2013).
She was a 30-year-old graphic designer when she started Scary Mommy “on a whim one afternoon while the kids napped,” she said in a 2017 interview with Time magazine. At the outset, Ms. Smokler assumed 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 name came courtesy of her middle child, Ben, who was two at the time “and mildly terrified of everything,” she said in a 2014 interview with Kveller, a Jewish culture site. “Every word he said had a ‘scary’ in front of it. ‘I can’t sleep, my bed is scary.’ ‘Scary car,’ ‘scary brother,’ ‘scary mommy.’”
“The moment I heard the phrase,” she told Time, “I ran to the computer to see if the URL was taken — I was in love.”
When she started, her co-stars included her husband, Jeff Smokler, who was traveling three days a week for work, and three kids under 4: her daughter, Lily, the plucky firstborn; Ben, obsessed with superheroes; her youngest, Evan; and Penelope, the family’s golden retriever.
Motherhood, Ms. Smokler told Time, “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 anything but alone after receiving her “first random comment,” she said.
“That comment led me to that reader’s blog,” she added, “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.”
In addition to doing her own venting, Ms. Smokler provided those mothers a forum to anonymously confess their taboo thoughts and experiences — like burning dinners without concern, as a surrender to exhaustion, or fantasizing about escaping to a luxury hotel for a few nights to duck their children.
In one post, Ms. Smokler wrote: “Motherhood is siblings bickering over who can look out of which window and who started it and who you love the most even though you love all of them the same but at the moment you don’t like any of them in the slightest.”
This candid approach paid dividends. Three years after the debut of Scary Mommy, The Baltimore Sun wrote that Ms. 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 the Baltimore Ravens star linebacker Ray Lewis combined.
“Few recognize her tightly coiled curls, her peanut-butter-eating children, her tired dog,” The Sun said. “But online, thousands upon thousands of mothers hang onto her every word.”
Jill Renee Epstein was born on July 1, 1977, in Boston, the elder of two children of Andrew Epstein, a lawyer specializing in copyright law, and Kathy (Lechtner) Epstein, an executive search consultant.
After graduating in 1995 from Swampscott High School, in the Boston suburbs, she enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design in 1999.
She went on to start her own design business, later relying on her professional experience to create Scary Mommy’s logo and layout.
After seven years running Scary Mommy, she began to buckle under the strain of running both a family and a high-profile business, in addition to writing books and appearing on talk shows like “Today” and “Good Morning America.”
“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.”
In 2015, Ms. Smokler sold the site to the New York-based digital media company Some Spider Studios in a multimillion-dollar deal. The site hired dozens of employees who produced up to 20 posts a day, with Ms. Smokler staying on as chief content officer.
She is survived by her brother, her parents and her children. Her marriage ended in divorce in 2017.
Ms. Smokler often spoke and wrote about how she considered the so-called work-life balance a sham. “No, you can’t have it all,” she said in a 2015 interview with Entrepreneur magazine.
“It’s a fairy tale,” she added, “that has led to countless therapy sessions and anxiety-ridden middle-aged crises.”
The post Jill Smokler, Who Blogged as Scary Mommy, Dies at 48 appeared first on New York Times.
