Have you ever scrolled through Instagram, stopped on a post for a second and thought “What an AWFUL person,” then gone about your day?
Most of us have. Two people caught on a kiss cam at a concert get accused of being cheaters. A father runs a marathon a few months after the deaths of his children and the internet later decides it’s proof he killed them. We conclude that a couple is miserable or a mother is negligent or a woman is stupid—and then we scroll on.
But those are real people we’re looking at, all of whom are the main characters of their own stories, which for all we know are as complicated as our own lives. We’re telling one of those stories today.
Last week, during a San Francisco Giants game, the broadcast lingered on a woman in the stands at Oracle Park. She was returning to her seat with a baby strapped to her chest and her hands full of ballpark food. Her husband stood to let her in, then sat back down and started eating as one announcer said, “That’s mom of the year right there.”
The clip only lasted a minute, but when it appeared online, it soon racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Strangers decided that the husband was a deadbeat, and that the wife should leave him. Some commenters went so far as to say he should kill himself.
The “mom of the year” is named Erika Alvarez and, still reeling from the experience, she wrote an essay about what the cameras didn’t catch that day. When team Free Press encountered it, we were so moved, we asked if we could reprint it. (Others reacted with skepticism, doubting that Erika was the woman in the clip, or that her story was true, so she wrote a follow-up.) We’re delighted that Erika said yes.
Erika’s story is a necessary reminder of how much context gets stripped from the clips of strangers you see online, reposted by accounts that know nothing about the people in them. And remember there’s always more to the story. The people on our screens have lives that go on long after we glimpse them for a moment. —Freya Sanders
Millions of people have watched me carry my daughter and food back to my seat at a San Francisco Giants game. They have praised me as “mom of the year” and called my husband too many names to list. Some have sent me DMs or posted TikTok commentary videos about why I need to leave him.
My name is Erika. Our baby is Anastasia. My husband is Ramses. Before you decide what our marriage looks like, I would like you to hear from the woman you’re defending.
Ramses is an amazing husband and an even better father. We’ve been part of each other’s lives for nine years, and today we’re raising two under 2 together. I know how he treats me, how he cares for our kids, and what he does for our family. A conversation the audience couldn’t hear became the basis for millions of judgments about that life.
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