Being a stay-at-home-mom, I often turn to social media for advice with various situations that I find myself in. For example, I use the handy woman group to look up how to do simple fixes in the house, a baking page for recipes, and a piano page to share what pieces I am learning and thumbs up other adult learners.

To me these groups are just for reference, or encouragement or even fun, but a lot of them are super intense in a way that is kind of frustrating. For example, I joined a “growing gray gracefully” page to encourage me to embrace my natural hair. It turns out there are now two gray hair groups, because one group splintered off because they believe in only growing out your hair naturally, and the other group sometimes features women who eased the process along by dying their ends to match the new growth. Do we really need to get extra judgey about women’s hair when the the point to be supportive?

Another group I joined was a plants page where people post photos of flora. I took a walk and photographed and posted several blooming flowers, including clovers and foxgloves. Apparently those are both invasive species from Europe, so people on that page were urging me to rip the plants out of the ground. Yeah, I’m not gonna go walking through a city park ripping up flowers. How would I even explain that to someone? I still enjoy these groups, but some of them need to take it down a notch.