OUR POPULAR ESSAY SERIES
We don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Areas of Control: A Coaching Practice (Plus, Something To Look Forward To) — Episode #172
In a year with a pandemic, wildfires, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and more, it can be easy to fall into despair, sadness, or anger. Even if you’re reading this years from now, things can go wrong—and they often do. People pass on, projects go under, businesses are forced to change. Part of the work of being human is reconciling with all that is beyond our control. Here’s a practical exercise to understand what’s within your control, and how to use it.

Navigating Hard Conversations — Episode #159 with Sharon Stolt
Think of a difficult conversation that you are in the middle of, or one that you’ve recently had. Maybe it’s onboarding a new team member, or working with a client. Maybe it’s with your partner or your spouse, and you’re trying to negotiate all those logistics of parenting. Maybe it’s with the grandparents, your kids, your boss, a colleague—whoever it is, I am sure that you have had the experience of how challenging it can be to go through a hard conversation. Today on the podcast, we get to have Sharon Stolt join us to teach us what to do and how to start the art of having challenging and uncomfortable conversations.

Setting Boundaries and Saying No: A Simple Phrase You Can Use Everywhere — Episode #142
What do you do when you’re feeling overwhelmed with invitations and requests? Setting boundaries and saying no can feel impossible and get the best of us stuck. Well, I’ve got five words for you, and you can use them to say no simply, easily, and cleanly in almost any situation. Yup, it’s a script for you to use—steal these words and keep them in your back pocket for the future.

Optimize Your Fertility + Heal Your Body. Episode #108 with Lisa Hendrickson-Jack
Lisa Hendrickson-Jack shares about taking the time to learn about and understand our cycles, optimize our fertility and gain information about our bodies.

Let’s Stop Asking Pregnant Women If They’re Excited About Being Pregnant
The other day, I heard myself say, “Are you so excited?!” to a friend that’s 8 months pregnant. Why are the questions we are asking pregnant women so bad? I HATED getting that question because the answer was always no. Here are a bunch of better questions we can ask each other.

Third Trimester Pregnancy Anxiety—the Good, Bad, and Hard
Sometimes when things get harder, they actually get easier. The third trimester of pregnancy was the hardest for me. I got besieged by an unspeakable anxiety and inability to sleep. I thought I had August and September to work productively. My plans were all lined up,...

Mantras for Birth (and Life)
This year, I’ve been playing around with more mantras and affirmations, or words of encouragement that I repeat to myself. By consciously choosing the words we use, I think we can gently encourage ourselves in new directions. I share some of my more personal mantras I’ve been mulling on as I go into the tender space of welcoming a new person into our lives, on the precipice of giving birth again.

Celebrating Rest, Leisure, and Laziness
This letter is as much a note to myself as to all of you: taking time to nap, to rest, to say no, and to cross things off your to-do list without doing them (or destroying the to-do list altogether!) is about as badass as you can get in a world that glorifies overwork and overdoing.

Turning Inwards: Vulnerability
Two things happened to remind me that my body is changing, yet again, and I’m tilting into the third trimester: First, on an innocuous Thursday, as I was stepping out of the shower, I failed to lift my food up high enough to step over the bath edge. My foot caught in the shower curtain, a tangle of filmy plastic sheeting and soap suds, and I ripped a hole in our shower curtain. Then, on a walk in the woods with a friend, I went down. Pregnancy, for me, has brought with it a heightened sense of vulnerability and fear, especially in the last trimester.

Crossing the Threshold to Motherhood: Ceremony, Ritual, and Healing Rites of Passage — Episode #116 With Kari Azuma
What happens when someone who has always known that they wanted to be a mother—that they were born to be a to mother—has a deeply traumatic birth? How does it impact how she views herself, her child, and processes her new role as mother? For Kari Azuma this led to postpartum depression and “a full blown identity crisis.”

Postpartum, Round Two (What I Didn’t Understand Last Time)
I’m four weeks in to my second time with this newborn phase. Today marks the first day easing back into life’s demands. Here is what surprised me about maternity leave, the second time around.

Prepping for Maternity Leave — Episode #086 With Co-Host Cary Fortin (The Friendship Series)
While maternity leave in the U.S. is already problematic, it is even more challenging for female business owners and entrepreneurs.

Honest Conversations About the Hard Things — Episode #081 With Co-Host Cary Fortin (The Friendship Series)
While on maternity leave, I am sharing some honest conversations with one of my best friends, Cary Fortin, through our new Friendship Series.

Planning Ahead for Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur — Episode #065 With Arianna Taboada
Planning for maternity leave as an entrepreneur means you have to figure out how to keep the business moving, too—how do you decide what to delegate?

Revolutionizing Parental Leave with a Workplace Advocate — Episode #033 With Tracy Candido and Karina Mangu-Ward
Even the best parental leave policies can feel complicated. But what if companies provided an advocate for you during your time away from work?

My First Forty Days Postpartum After Baby Number Two
Over the first forty days, women need to recover and heal. How can we accept the slowness of this process? Here’s one key tool that helped me do that.

Trauma, Sex, and Somatic Experiencing: How to Better Understand Birth and the Postpartum Periods — Episode #094 With Kimberly Ann Johnson
Kimberly Ann joins me to talk about the experience of childbirth and the crucial postpartum period, when time to heal is a necessity, not a luxury.

Top Ten Podcast Episodes of 2018: Pregnancy, Parenting, and Postpartum Health
A lot of milestones for our podcast: we turned one in October, and overall we released 63 new episodes in 2018 (92 episodes overall). As we get closer to our hundredth episode, I wanted to take time to look back and reflect back on the journey we’ve been on. What I gather from the most-listened-to episodes is that people are hungry for the truth. The real stories of parenting, motherhood, and postpartum recovery. These are the episodes that resonated.

From Doctor to CEO: A New Vision for Healthcare — Episode #091 With Robin Berzin
“I had my son on a Tuesday, and I was on calls on a Friday—but I was home, and I was not in fundraising mode, and I was not out doing meetings, and I was not going into the office. I was both focused on enjoying these first couple incredible weeks of his life and also healing. At the same time, I had this pressure breathing down my neck of completing the raise.” — Dr. Robin Berzin shares her story of becoming a CEO after years in medical practice as a doctor.

Postpartum, Round Two (What I Didn’t Understand Last Time)
I’m four weeks in to my second time with this newborn phase. Today marks the first day easing back into life’s demands. Here is what surprised me about maternity leave, the second time around.

Fostering a Community of Breastfeeding & Pumping Mamas — Episode #079 With Amy VanHaren
Amy VanHaren uncovered a need in her personal life, and a creative idea was born. While she loved breastfeeding, Amy had no choice but to get back to work six weeks after her son was born.

The Myths of Miscarriage, The Lean In Fallacy, and Mothers’ Rage — Episode #115 With Katherine Goldstein
Katherine Goldstein found our she was pregnant as she was trying to launch a podcast about how mothers experience bias and discrimination in the workplace—making the issue front and center in her life. Yet she experienced trauma and blowback despite the knowledge. Today we still force women to wrap their miscarriage and fertility traumas into a bow—“But now I have a baby, so it’s all okay”—to make it palatable to the public. Award-winning journalist and podcast creator Katherine Goldstein goes deep with us on so many of the most pressing topics for working mothers and holds nothing back. Between her research, the data, her own experience, and her reported experience of hundreds of moms, Katherine is waging war against cultural forces holding mothers back from being their fullest, most ambitious, most rage-filled selves.

From Unexplained Infertility to Planning a Small Business Maternity Leave — Episode #114 With Reina Pomeroy
Reina began life as a Social Worker and side hustler with an entrepreneurial spirit. Quickly after giving birth to her first child, she realized that her time and energy were too precious to spend on work that was not aligned with her heart and soul. After founding her thriving business, Reina and her partner decided to have another child only to be diagnosed with unexplained secondary infertility. After years on that journey, we speak to her now, on the precipice of delivering her second child and preparing her business for her maternity leave.

Universal Paid Family Leave By 2020: Meet One of the Women Pushing for Our Rights — Episode #112 With Fabiola Santiago
Why is the United States the only developed nation without any guaranteed family leave? How did we fall so far behind Europe, Canada, and South America? And who is suffering the brunt of the impact from this lack of policy?

How To Hire A Nanny — Episode #103 With Co-Host Anna Frandsen
Childcare can feel really overwhelming, especially when you have little babies and you’re trying to figure out how to go back to work. With my first kid, we used in-home daycares. With my second, we hired a nanny. Here’s everything two mamas learned about how to hire a nanny by doing it ourselves (a lot).

A Case of the Mondays? Or Maybe It’s Motherhood — Episode #102
Does it ever feel like the universe is conspiring against you? Well, maybe it’s just that you’re getting shoved in the direction of learning something new, but you haven’t figured out what it is yet. If you’ve had a case of “The February’s,” listen in, because we have, too.

I Miss Work So Much Right Now
I miss my work. I really do. I get energy from building and strategizing and just generally moving forward, and on the days when I don’t feel satisfied with how much I accomplish, I struggle to stay positive.

Redefining Startup Success: Shutting Down A Lucrative Startup — Episode #121 With Allie Siarto
Allie Siarto built a company that was extremely successful, by all of our current measures of success. She even had an offer in hand to buy the company—and then she hesitated. She decided to walk away, and rebuild her business and life from scratch. Here’s why.

Ambitious Entrepreneurship + Parenthood: When Two Moms Co-Found a Startup — Episode #117 With Sonia Chang
To be a working parent is to constantly feel like you’re missing out on one piece of your life: your work or your family. Or is it? Playfully co-founder Sonia Chang created a company with another mother and intentionally changed their workdays away from the normal 9-5 to be present with her children throughout the week while simultaneously pursuing a highly ambitious business plan for their startup.

Both Co-Founders Pregnant? How Pregnancy Can Move Business Forward — Episode #109 With Elena Rue and Catherine Orr
The two co-founders of StoryMine Media were already parents and they’d done the pregnancy thing before. But then they found out they were both pregnant at the same time. Listen in to this joint conversation as we talk about what to do if both co-founders are pregnant and how this can affect your business planning, strategy, and plays.

Finding Yourself, And Your New Career, After Kids
We know that motherhood will change us, but it’s not always in the way that we expect. Editorial director Liz Kocan shares several women who took pregnancy and motherhood as an opportunity to shake up or switch out of their industries—and why that’s not always a bad thing.

How Motherhood Makes You Better at Work: Episode #101 with Amy Henderson
Parenting changes you, but not in the ways you might expect. Amy Henderson, founder of Tendlab, talks about how motherhood can make you better at your job.
ABOUT THE ESSAY SERIES
What does it mean to get pregnant when you’re also a lead breadwinner, a female founder, or a solo entrepreneur? What are the stories of pregnancy and parenting we’re not yet sharing (at least out loud)? Our popular blog series dives into questions from real parents and women looking at what it means to navigate work, life, and fertility. From leadership questions, to mindset shifts, to strategies and systems for success, to the ultimate challenge that is navigating first-time motherhood and the return (or continuation) of work, here are the stories we’re telling. In real time.
Want to write for us? Email hello(at)startupparent.com.