Internet Time Machine

Moms Anonymous

Learning to love 25,000 strangers in an online birth club

Summer Block
Human Parts
Published in
11 min readJun 12, 2019

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Photo: Jasmin Merdan/Getty Imags

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

II took two months off spinning class because of first-trimester nausea, so when I showed up this week at my regular Monday 6 p.m. class at the Y, everyone was very excited to see me. There was a lot of exclaiming over my new bump, and in the first few minutes of warm-up everyone chimed in about how many kids they had, or wanted to have, and when, and how old they were then, and how old they are now.

I mean it perfectly sincerely when I say I love the members of the YMCA Monday 6 p.m. spinning class. The class has around two dozen regular members. Most are middle-aged women, but there are also teenagers and elderly members, as well as half a dozen men. Some appear very fit, from the outside anyway, while others do not. Some wear slick prismatic cycling unitards and others, cotton T-shirts they got for free from fun runs in the early ’90s. About half have those clip-in cycling shoes. They work in a variety of professions, with a tendency toward below-the-line studio workers (I live in Los Angeles). The instructor’s husband is a camera operator; another member is a stunt person.

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Summer Block
Human Parts

Writer for Catapult, Longreads, The Awl, The Toast, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and so on. Owner of After-Party Taxidermy. Working on a book about Halloween.