2014 interview<\/a> with Kveller, a Jewish culture site. \u201cEvery word he said had a \u2018scary\u2019 in front of it. \u2018I can\u2019t sleep, my bed is scary.\u2019 \u2018Scary car,\u2019 \u2018scary brother,\u2019 \u2018scary mommy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cThe moment I heard the phrase,\u201d she told Time, \u201cI ran to the computer to see if the URL was taken \u2014 I was in love.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s golden retriever.<\/p>\n
Motherhood, Ms. Smokler told Time, \u201cwas 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 \u2014 I\u2019m just not a natural mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
She realized she was anything but alone after receiving her \u201cfirst random comment,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat comment led me to that reader\u2019s blog,\u201d she added, \u201cand from there I discovered a whole world of moms. And these moms, unlike any I\u2019d met before, actually understood me! They struggled and shared the same frustrations.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to doing her own venting, Ms. Smokler provided those mothers a forum to anonymously confess their taboo thoughts and experiences \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
In one post, Ms. Smokler wrote: \u201cMotherhood 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\u2019t like any of them in the slightest.\u201d<\/p>\n
This candid approach paid dividends. Three years after the debut of Scary Mommy, The Baltimore Sun wrote that Ms. Smokler \u201cjust might be Baltimore\u2019s biggest unknown celebrity,\u201d with a Twitter following that was greater than the city\u2019s mayor, Maryland\u2019s governor and the Baltimore Ravens star linebacker Ray Lewis combined.<\/p>\n
\u201cFew recognize her tightly coiled curls, her peanut-butter-eating children, her tired dog,\u201d The Sun said. \u201cBut online, thousands upon thousands of mothers grasp onto her every word.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s degree in graphic design in 1999.<\/p>\n
She went on to start her own design business, later relying on her professional experience to create Scary Mommy\u2019s logo and layout.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cToday\u201d and \u201cGood Morning America.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was probably sleeping an hour or two a night,\u201d she told Time. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She is survived by her brother, her parents and her children. Her marriage ended in divorce in 2017.<\/p>\n
Ms. Smokler often spoke and wrote about how she considered the so-called work-life balance a sham. \u201cNo, you can\u2019t have it all,\u201d she said in a 2015 interview<\/a> with Entrepreneur magazine.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s a fairy tale,\u201d she added, \u201cthat has led to countless therapy sessions and anxiety-ridden middle-aged crises.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jill Smokler, a mother of three who started the blog Scary Mommy as a diversion from bedtime battles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[270349,49,48,361,33680,152220,75,11261],"class_list":["post-757831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-blogs-and-blogging-internet","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-children-and-childhood","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-entertainment","tag-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}