A Question in Chelsea
In 2017, somewhere between gallery openings in Chelsea and a second trimester she hadn’t fully processed yet, a writer and artist asked herself something that had nothing to do with baby names or stroller research: Do I actually want to hang out with me? It was an odd question for a pregnant woman to be sitting with. It was also the only question that mattered.
She was a first-time mother-to-be, the first in her friend group to get there, and the anxiety wasn’t about diapers or daycare. It was about identity – specifically, whether the version of herself she’d spent years building in New York City would survive what was coming. Her entire life had revolved around her. Now, suddenly, it wouldn’t.
So she did what artists do when they can’t find the answer: she went looking for it in other people’s stories.
From Uncertainty, a Show
She started asking women she admired about motherhood – real conversations, not the sanitized advice you find in parenting forums. Those conversations were, by her own description, life-changing. And because she was a millennial with something to say and a microphone she could point at people, she launched a podcast. Cool Moms launched in 2018, built not from expertise but from a very specific fear: that she wouldn’t be okay, and that her son wouldn’t be okay either. Storytelling, she believed, was the pathway to liberation. For a while, the stories were enough.
Cool Moms didn’t stay a podcast. It grew into a live talk show – her deliberate homage to Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Ricki Lake. The Ricki Lake connection eventually became a full-circle moment: she interviewed Lake in front of a live audience in Los Angeles. After each event, her DMs filled up with the kind of messages that tell you something is working. This conversation got me through postpartum. This felt like a friend. The community was real. What she hadn’t figured out was what to do with that energy once the night ended and the lights went down.
What she wasn’t broadcasting was everything running beneath the surface.
The Gap Between the Feed and the Floor
Layoffs. Romantic breakups. Friendship breakups. Upsizing, then downsizing. The grinding pressure to perform a particular version of millennial motherhood – polished, self-aware, aesthetically consistent – while the actual material conditions of her life lurched and shifted underneath. She was posting Erewhon runs. She was also paying for them with an EBT card. She describes sitting with the shame of spending money just to know how it felt, and then feeling ashamed of the shame itself. It’s a specific kind of double bind that rarely makes it onto a lifestyle feed, and she didn’t talk about it online either.
There was also the question of being a single mother – and the determination not to collapse into the tired, flattened tropes that label implies. Single motherhood in popular culture tends to arrive pre-packaged: the martyr, the fighter, the woman who does it all and posts about exhaustion as though exhaustion is a personality. She was navigating something more complicated than that, and doing it without a clean narrative to hand people.
The honesty is what makes Cool Moms worth paying attention to – not because vulnerability is a content strategy, but because the gap between what she was projecting and what she was living through is exactly the gap that most millennial mothers are standing in right now. The performance of okayness. The real cost of it.
What “Cool” Actually Costs
What started as a pregnant woman asking herself an uncomfortable question in a Chelsea gallery became a podcast, then a live show, then a community built around the premise that motherhood doesn’t have to flatten you – but that pretending it doesn’t change you is its own kind of damage. The EBT card and the Erewhon bag existing in the same moment isn’t a contradiction to resolve. It’s just what it looked like.
