Scary Mommy creator Jill Smokler faces brain cancer with warmth and wit

When Jill Smokler awoke at Johns Hopkins Hospital last year, her skull sealed shut with a jagged seam of staples, her first response was wry laughter.

“I was like, ‘Of course I get brain cancer,‘” recalled Smokler. “That’s so over the top.”

Then reality of the diagnosis sank in.

The tumor that the surgeons had extracted from Smokler’s skull was glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive and lethal brain cancer. The average patient lives just 15 months after being diagnosed.

“It pissed me off, because I sort of felt like I had these bumpy, bumpy years, and I was looking forward to my 50s just being nice and calm,” said Smokler, 47, a Pikesville resident and the founder of the wildly popular Scary Mommy parenting site.

Smokler’s first thought was of her three children, whose baby and toddler days she began chronicling on Scary Mommy in 2008.

But then after a second surgery, chemo and radiation, Smokler, a lifelong pessimist, began to feel an unexpected emotion: hope.

Her latest scans were clear and she is slated to travel to Germany this summer to take part in an experimental vaccine trial that uses mRNA to teach the immune system to destroy glioblastoma cells — the same technology used to deliver COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic.

“There’s a very weird balance of accepting reality and not being so negative,” said Smokler. “It certainly helps me put things in perspective and prioritize things.”

Smokler is navigating this uncertainty with her characteristic wry humor, pessimism and deep empathy. She’s channeling the energy — and earnestness — she once poured into Scary Mommy into the social network Threads.

She sends condolences to those who have lost loved ones. She shares alarm over the actions of the Trump administration. She goes gaga over cute babies. She cheers on others facing cancer treatments — and shares the frustration and sense of injustice and loneliness of dealing with terminal cancer.

“Does anyone, like, want to talk?” she posted recently. “I don’t feel like catching up with irl friends on life and also don’t feel like sitting alone all night scrolling through movies. I was thinking a zoom maybe?”

In her desire to connect with others, Smokler is even kicking around an idea for a podcast, which she wants to call, “It is What it is and it’s Not Great.”

“I need to do something for my sanity,” said Smokler. “Maybe I’ll start to plan ahead, live my life.”

Smokler’s first priority is looking out for her three children: Lily, 21, a junior at Boston University; Ben, 18, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh; and Evan, 17, a junior at the St. Paul’s School for Boys.

Their names are familiar to readers of Scary Mommy, which Smokler launched in 2008 after pausing her career as a graphic designer to stay home with the children. The blog started as a way to share photos and manage the madness of caring for three small people.

“Every little disaster, every mishap, that became a blog post,” said Smokler. “It was better than drinking a bottle of wine.”

Ben, then a toddler, had recently watched a Disney movie with a frightening villain and began labeling everything “scary”— even his own mother. The phrase “Scary Mommy” struck Smokler as the ideal title for a blog about the unglamorous aspects of motherhood.

Smokler wrote about pooping on the delivery table, prying boogers out of a baby’s nose, making small talk with other parents at the playground and disliking (most) other people’s kids.

When the blog developed a following, Smokler was equally startled and delighted. She became a fixture of the mommy blogging community and wrote two books, including a New York Times Bestseller, and before selling the site to a media company in 2015. Two years later, the site had more than 20 million unique visitors per month.

While some bloggers later regretted sharing so much of their children’s private lives online, Smokler is grateful that she preserved family stories. She mostly wrote about her children’s preschool and toddler years, and was careful not to betray the children’s confidences as they grew older.

“I’m grateful in retrospect that I put them out there the way I did because it’s something they can hold onto,” she said. “I’m leaving them with the two books, the audiobooks, where they can listen to me telling their stories, which seems really sweet.”

Lily Smokler said she remembers her mom juggling working on the site while caring for her and her brother.

“At my brothers’ basketball games, she would be on the laptop in the bleachers,” Lily Smokler recalled. “She was so busy, there was always that emotional stability to make up for it.”

Lily Smokler said she had not read her mother’s writing until a few years ago when she picked up her mother’s first book, “Confessions of a Scary Mommy."

“It was super cute but also, ‘Oh, OK, funny to know that that’s how you really felt about giving birth to me,‘” she said.

Longtime friend Julie Bender recalled seeing Smokler working on the blog while they watched their kids on the playground of the Krieger Schechter Day School in Stevenson together.

“We just instantly connected and bonded over realistic parenting,” said Bender, explaining how they both craved connection, but didn’t enjoy making small talk with other moms. “We would sit on the playground after school and hide behind her laptop.”

Smokler eventually hired Bender to run a nonprofit arm of Scary Mommy, which provided Thanksgiving meals for thousands of families.

“It was amazing to see how intuitive she was about how to help people, how hard she worked, how generous she is and also so humble,” said Bender. “She would downplay it: Oh, it’s just a little blog.”

But Scary Mommy soon grew bigger than Smokler and her team could manage. Smokler sold the site to a media startup company in 2015, although she retained a role at Scary Mommy until 2018. It was a frustrating period for Smokler, who did not like the direction in which the new owners wanted to take the site.

“I sold it basically to a man, which is not where a woman’s website belongs,” she said. “I was fighting with men around a boardroom table, saying, ‘You don’t know what women want.” (Bustle Digital Group purchased Scary Mommy’s parent company in 2021 and continues to publish the site.)

It was also a painful time for Smokler personally. Her husband, Jeff, publicly came out as gay in 2017 and the couple’s divorce made the cover of People magazine. She struggled with her mental health and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2019.

Smokler’s life was beginning to return to equilibrium when she started having headaches last spring. One day last April, her youngest, Evan, called her from his dad’s house and noticed she was slurring her words. He and his father hurried over and discovered she was having a seizure.

The next thing Smokler remembers is waking up at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the tumor already removed.

Smokler’s kids, her mother, Bender, and other friends, quickly rallied around her to help.

Lily Smokler moved home for the summer, ferrying her mother to doctor’s appointments between babysitting assignments.

“I was very grateful to have that summer with her regardless of how hard it was,” said Lily Smokler.

Bender, a medical social worker, became Jill Smokler’s strongest advocate, staying with her overnight in the hospital, texting doctors and researching treatments. She comes over every weekend to sort the dozens of pills Smokler takes each week and update a chart with a dosage schedule.

“I really feel like it’s a privilege to be able to stand with her in this journey and to be able to advocate for her,” said Bender.

Between frequent naps to help keep her energy up, Smokler plays with Leo, her rambunctious golden doodle, and plans college campus visits for Evan, her youngest.

She feels her diagnosis has brought her closer than ever to her children. Ben, her middle, spontaneously tells her he loves her more than ever before, she said.

One thing Smokler emphatically does not want to hear is that she should be thankful for the life lessons that come with a cancer diagnosis.

“In all of these support groups I’m in, people are always thanking God and so grateful,” said Smokler. “I’m not grateful for this experience! I’d rather not be having it.”