It’s pretty clear from the first minute that Haley Pepper and I are on our Zoom call that we’re going to hit it off. She’s warm and funny and — I think at least — seems like a mom I’d like to go out and have a glass of wine or seven with.
Pepper and her husband, former San Francisco 49ers long snapper Taybor Pepper, now live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where both are from — they actually went to high school together, but weren’t yet a couple. The duo spent years on the road, traveling (more on that in a sec) as an expanding family. Now that Taybor is no longer with a team, the pair are getting used to being just that: a parenting pair — they share a 3-year-old daughter and a 9-month-old son.
Haley’s mission on Instagram, in particular, is crystal clear. She tells me: “I saw a huge gap in the social media space of women who are like me, who love being moms and want to be good wives, but also want to make sure everyone continues to have the right to do that if they want to, or if they don’t.” She talked more at length about politics, NFL life, how she got started on social media, and what she’s up to now.
Scary Mommy: Can you talk to me about NFL life? If Tabor gets selected for a team, what happens? Do you go with him?
Haley Pepper: Not necessarily. That’s honestly how I even started a social media following because I was sharing how our life is a little unconventional in the NFL. Most people, they have what we all like to call home base, and then they go away for the season. Their families all live there, and then they go back. But I really like where I live (in Ann Arbor). NFL people like to say it stands for Not For Long, and so I was always really afraid to commit to living somewhere full-time. I also had a full-time job when he was first starting all of this. This was all pre-COVID, so working remotely wasn’t a thing, at least in my industry.
After I quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom, I started posting to social media, basically just being a relatively young mom with the baby, traveling alone a lot. And people were really confused, “Why don’t you just live there with your husband full-time?”
And there were a lot of reasons, but it took me a long time to really get the courage to say, “I just don’t really want to, I just like my house.”
SM: Also, isn’t he working? I mean, he’s not home with you either.
HP: Yes, exactly. There’s this expectation of women to be with their partner all the time, and so that they can see their kids and just be that support system. And for us, that wasn’t making a tangible impact on our relationship at all, because like you just said, they’re not around. They’re at the facility 12 hours a day, and then they’re gone every other weekend, if not multiple weekends in a row for away games. And then also being in California on the West Coast for an East Coast game, that’s a three-day trip because of the time change, and so we weren’t spending that much time together. And to me, again, as really solo parenting most of the time, having this baby when I only had one, I was like, “This is not a sustainable lifestyle for my mental health.”
SM: Makes sense.
HP: I always spent the vast majority of the time in Michigan; I would go to California for maybe six weeks or a month, and then I’d come home for a month and just go back and forth. And it just really worked for us.
SM: How has the transition been not only from football, but also from one to two kids?
HP: We are in the thick of it. When my husband was released from the team, it was very surprising, and it blew up our lives because we were there for five years. And he had one more year left on his contract. Football season is nearly a year-long event, so we had to really get used to him being home and truly learning how to co-parent. But it has really been a silver lining that he’s going to spend so much time with both of our kids because he and my daughter are very, very close.
With my first baby, Tabor wasn’t around for the vast majority of her first two years of life. And so with our son, he has actually been with him every day of his life. There’s been a lot of blessings in disguise of him not playing football right now or not being with the team right now, and that’s definitely one of them. We are doing that thing that I think most people do of trading off who wakes up with the kids in the morning. This morning, he was like, “I don’t want to get up,” and the baby’s crying. I was like, “Well, I got up yesterday, so tough shit.” We’re just not used to doing normal people things like that.
SM: Right, that’s true. So what was the reason to get started on Instagram in the way that you’re doing it now?
HP: I have just always liked social media. Because we have a moderately interesting lifestyle, it’s just been a way to share what we’re doing, whether it’s football or, I was Miss Michigan a really long time ago. It was training me to have it be second nature to advertise what you’re doing. I guess I came at it from that instance of truly just wanting to share what I was doing. Until last year, I still only had a few thousand followers. But during 2020, when shit was hitting the fan, I started posting political content, and I realized that I really liked doing that and I really liked being analytically critical of what was going on around me.
I’m mixed. My dad’s Black. Honestly, I had this big reckoning with my heritage in 2020 of just who am I? What does the world see me as? And so I think talking about that also got people to start paying attention to what I was saying, and I was just able to communicate some of the social discourse in a different way.
When I was a very new mom, I was really bored, honestly. I got on TikTok, and I love other mom bloggers’ day-in-the-life kind of thing, so I just started making these day-in-the-life TikToks that were for nobody. I had no followers. And then one of them went super crazy viral, so then I got a decent following on TikTok and started just documenting my travel, my life as a football wife, but then also sprinkling in political stuff at the same time.
But I was really afraid to put all that on Instagram; I was afraid to be so vulnerable and to take a creative risk because I am a creative. Being a stay-at-home mom for me was really hard. I am completely comfortable saying that being a wife and a mother is not enough for me, and it’s not enough for a lot of women. I finally started posting things on Instagram, and I went from 5,000 followers to 30,000 overnight, basically. And I was like, “OK, so people like hearing about this,” and then I just started getting more comfortable sharing political content.
SM: I feel like everyone found you with the Guess Who? MAGA edition. Also, are you still selling it on Etsy?
HP: Yeah, I make $7 every few days, it’s great. How the Guess Who? thing started is that, again, I had this random mom TikTok following. TikTok to me still is the Wild West. I pretend nobody on TikTok knows me. Anyway, my dear friend, Matt, we’ve been best friends since we were 10, stayed with me for six weeks when Taybor was in California, and I was a year postpartum, but I was just depressed and anxious and didn’t want to be in California.
We were bored and started playing Guess Who? He’s so funny, and so we started just playing it in a really silly subjective way. I was like, “Wait, this is actually good TikTok content,” and it went crazy.
We ended up doing three different videos, and they got 20 million views total. And I got the idea after the debate with Kamala Harris and Trump, I don’t even know how it came to me, but I was like, “This is such a circus. I’m going to make a MAGA Guess Who game board.” I was seven months pregnant out in California.
I’m in the middle of football. I am trying to be careful of what I say. I’m trying to not get in trouble. This was a good creative outlet for me. My husband does not like being in my social media content because it just gives him anxiety.
But then it was the day of the Super Bowl, I had a newborn baby, and we were just bored. When you’re an NFL player but you’re not playing, the Super Bowl is a very bizarre day.
SM: Interesting.
HP: And so I was like, “Will you play my MAGA Guess Who with me?” I think we had just watched Kendrick Lamar’s half-time; we’re really pumped up. We sat down, and I was like, “OK, can I film this?”
And he was like, “Whatever. Sure.” Because I assumed he was going to say no, because usually, again, he does not want to participate. I put it on Instagram, and overnight, there were 12 million views.
SM: Your poor husband was probably like, “What did I sign up for?”
HP: Oh, he was like, “Are you kidding me?” But the lesson here is we need to laugh. We need joy. And this sounds so cheesy and dumb, but joy is resistance. We need to take a breath and be able to make fun of politicians’ hair extensions. We have to because if we don’t…
SM: We’ll lose our minds.
HP: We will absolutely lose our minds. We need to take a break, stop, be able to giggle about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
SM: You’re also a doula. How did that come to be?
HP: My undergrad is in human development and family studies, and I have a master’s in human services counseling, which is basically just an uncredentialed counseling degree. When I had my first baby, I prepared like I was studying for the LSAT. I just wanted to become an expert in being a new mom. I’ve always been interested in pregnancy and childbirth, and because I also was in this kind of crunchy mom space, I knew I wanted a doula. I was flirting with the idea of an unmedicated birth. I got my own doula, and I learned a lot from her, and I learned what the industry was. My birth was excellent. It was textbook everything you want, no issues, no nothing. And a lot of that was just luck of the draw, but a lot of it was because I had incredible advocacy. I had a third party who wasn’t a doctor, who wasn’t my husband, to just guide me through choices to educate me on certain things. And I was like, “This should be standard.”
I don’t want to be a midwife; I don’t want to be a nurse. This is the perfect job for me; I can be there for other women as a support to help them advocate for themselves, because the information overload is so overwhelming, and it can make people just shut down. And so to learn how to communicate these things in a really personal one-on-one tailored way, it’s the perfect job for me, and I love it.
SM: That’s awesome.
HP: I got credentialed as a birth doula and a postpartum doula, so I can also help people when they’re freshly postpartum with newborn care. It’s been really eye-opening that in the doula world, a lot of it leans very MAHA, it leans anti-medicine. With that said, a lot of it is rooted in fear of the medical establishment because there are so many profound issues and flaws in our healthcare system that these fears come from a valid place, but the solutions are often too extreme. I think in the birth world, the pendulum is swinging too far, and we need to find a happy medium between completely unassisted home birth and an overly medicalized cascade of interventions. My goal as a doula is to marry those two sides of the spectrum.
SM: So, who do you follow on Instagram?
HP: I follow a lot of health creators, but a lot of just really funny moms like Anna Connelly. That’s a perfect example of who I’m following. A lot of people who can communicate really well about the crazy shit that’s going on, but also people who make me laugh. At the end of the day, I just want to giggle and I want to make other people giggle, and that is fundamentally my goal … to sprinkle in some education, but just let people laugh at themselves, especially as moms.
I firmly, firmly believe you have to make motherhood what you want it to be or else you will lose yourself to the scheduling, to how you feed them, when they sleep, it just doesn’t have to be this serious. I’ve found a really cool community of people who think like me and who want to, at the end of the day, we just want to make this world a kinder place for women and moms to exist.
That is my goal, full stop, because I feel so strongly that the political climate of the last year, whether it’s with MAHA or women’s rights or just females in society in general, so much of it is predatory and they’re preying on our emotions and our fears as moms.
SM: Last question — what would your last meal be?
HP: My death row meal is a shrimp cocktail, a wedge salad, a good steak. Or a good steak with an outgrown potato and a heavy red wine. Probably a cheesecake.
SM: Yum.
HP: Yeah, with rolls, with bread, a Pinot Noir. Meiomi Pinot Noir is my favorite beverage.
SM: That sounds delightful.
HP: From start to finish, start with a cocktail, and then just end with a raspberry cheesecake, like a fruity cheesecake. You know what? Life’s short. Literally.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
