A Million Thoughts About Ballerina Farm
By a Mormon writing about Mormons
This essay contains some of my thoughts on The Times profile about Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Going in, I need to tell you that almost everything I know about the Neelemans and Ballerina Farm is directly from the Times article. I’m sure I had heard of Ballerina Farm referenced before, but had never gone to the Instagram profile and knew essentially nothing about this family until a thousand people sent me the article and asked for my thoughts.
My not knowing much about Ballerina Farm may seem strange to you since both Hannah and I are practicing LDS (Mormons). But keep in mind there are something like 16 million Mormons. I don’t know most of them. Even the famous ones. No doubt there are some Mormons who pay attention to this sort of thing, but I am not one of them. In fact, I only learned who Brandon Sanderson is last year. (If you haven’t heard of Sanderson, he’s a record-breaking best-selling author who is also Mormon.) Coincidentally, I learned about Sanderson from a negative profile about him in Wired Magazine that went viral. Maybe I will eventually learn about all the famous Mormons from negative media profiles that go viral.
After reading The Times article and listening to the accompanying audio report, I have gone to the Ballerina Farm Instagram page and read the posts in response to the article. But that’s my sum total knowledge of the Neelemans. I haven’t taken a deep dive and don’t plan to.
But those disclaimers aside, based on The Times profile, I know Hannah and I have quite a few things in common: We’re both lifelong practicing Mormons. We both grew up in big families. We were both drawn to New York and moved there as quickly as possible after growing up in Utah. We both met our husbands at age 20 and got married after a very short engagement. We’re both married to men who grew up in big families. We both finished our final college semesters while pregnant with a first baby. We’ve both had lots of kids. We’ve both experienced childbirth with no pain medication, and childbirth with an epidural. We’ve both lived abroad with very young kids. We’re both entrepreneurs. We’ve both hosted journalists and news teams in our homes who are profiling our families. And there’s probably some other stuff too that we have in common that I’m not thinking of.
Three significant things we don’t have in common that affect my thoughts on this topic: 1) Age. I’m 15 years older than Hannah. That’s not quite a full generation, but it’s a lot of years. I believe our age difference means we experienced a different phase of Mormonism in our twenties and early thirties. From what I understand, Hannah was 18 years old when the LDS church leader called Gordon B. Hinckley died, and in my opinion, that was the last time the church has had strong or effective leadership. [If you’re a Mormon, this statement may stress you out. I’m not trying to say something bold, or oppose leaders since Hinckley, I’m just differentiating how I have experienced their leadership styles and effectiveness for me and the Church. It’s a personal opinion with no research support.] 2) Though I’ve been a blogger/content-creator/influence since 2006 (that’s 18 years), my total following across social media is about 1.2 million. Hannah has over 9 million followers just on Instagram. I don’t pretend to understand what that would be like but I imagine it’s overwhelming. 3) I’m not married to a person who grew up in a billionaire household. Our current household, and the households both Ben Blair and I grew up in are far closer to being homeless and destitute than to being billionaires. (Consider this a reminder that a billion dollars is so much more money than we can comprehend.)