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.
After losing her father at the tender ago of 25, Randi Zinn moved away from a traditional path in media to instead follow in her “fascinating hippie visionary” entrepreneurial dad’s footsteps. She depicts with honesty and vulnerability the struggles she felt leaping into a world she wasn’t prepared for and how her current success is most clearly understood alongside her several years of “non-linear” progress. After the birth of her son, Randi turned her passion for yoga, hosting events, and spirituality into uncommon and highly successful in person events and retreats. It was not until she was part way through throwing one of these mixers that she realized the business she wanted to create was staring right at her: Beyond Mom, a website, book, and community dedicated to exploring and nourishing our non-mother selves.
“Two-career couples have the assumption going into having a family, ‘Of course this is equal co-parenting. It’s 2019. What else would we do?’ But it so rarely plays out that way.” Despite the hope for equal partnership, it’s often mothers who are still doing the lion’s share of the unpaid, invisible labor of managing children and the home. Why is this?
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.”
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.
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.