9

THE MOTHERS OF REINVENTION

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

IT’S NINETY-NINE DEGREES IN SCOTTSDALE, Arizona, and several hundred women toting Dove-branded swag bags stuffed with products ranging from gluten-free granola bars to branded zip drives are meandering around the patio at the Ritz-Carlton. Sprinklers are spritzing water to make the midday desert temperatures slightly more bearable, as a group of women in flip-flops compare notes on the best way to get companies to pay for their video content.

This is the seventh annual Mom 2.0 Summit, a conference that writer Laura Mayes conceived with Carrie Pacini in 2008 as a place to bring moms and marketers together while the blogosphere was maturing and online brand marketing was exploding. “Mom Influencers” were gaining currency with marketers, and companies like Procter & Gamble and Disney wanted to tap into them to leverage their reach. The more than six hundred women attending this year’s conference are mostly “content creators,” social media mavens, entrepreneurs, and marketers. The term “blogger” and its pejorative relative, the “mommy blogger” (a term I was once called when I blogged about work-life balance for several sites), have evolved. The majority of personal blog sites don’t get much direct traffic today because most people find their “content”—the catchall for everything from an article to a video to an Instagram post—directly on social feeds like Facebook. And yet, because of the Facebook amplification effect, the bloggers’ audiences continue to grow and have reach.

When Mom 2.0 first launched there were few true digital natives, women who had been weaned on tech. Instead, the women who initially attended Mom 2.0 and similar conferences like BlogHer were Gen X early adapters who created blogs and their video sisters, vlogs. These women cultivated devoted online audiences as they shared their candid, irreverent, and sometimes snarky tales of motherhood. According to Mashable, in the golden age of blogging around 2012, there were nearly four million “mom blogs,” but only about five hundred women had cut through the online chatter and had large enough followings to be considered influencers—the women with the clout brands coveted.¹

The bloggers spanned the country, and their voices and backgrounds varied. In 2011, the New York Times christened Heather Armstrong, a liberal ex-Mormon who lived in Salt Lake City, as “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers.” Her successful blog Dooce. com, where she originally wrote under the pseudonym Dooce, would become blogger lore—at one point attracting one hundred thousand daily visitors and earning more than a million dollars a year through ads. Armstrong chronicled her pregnancies, postpartum depression, and the banalities of suburban life: the Maytag washer malfunctioning, her high-maintenance dogs, and the kids’ doctor visits. There was also Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer Woman, where the former Los Angeles party girl who married an Oklahoma cowboy and had four kids wrote about life as a ranch wife raising cattle, making gravy, and homeschooling her children. And as far away from a cattle ranch as you could get, there was Alice Bradley of Brooklyn, with her witty and intelligent New York City fiction sensibility, creating the award-winning Finslippy blog. All three women’s blogs still exist but arguably may no longer be the destination sites they once were in their heyday. They have had to change with the times.²

Still, the women at the Mom 2.0 conference love all that’s associated with what attracted the first generation of female bloggers—the community, being on the cusp of something modern, enterprising, empowering, and yes, the potential for attention and dollars from brands. Most don’t expect to turn projects into Dooce-style million-dollar businesses, but all are hoping to create new careers for themselves, often while their kids are napping.

For three days, I meet women who hail from just about everywhere (including Australia and England), and their online savvy runs the gamut. Some women are intrigued by the changing social media space and are trying to figure out if they can carve out a place in it. Many other women have small sites or online businesses they are hoping to expand. A smaller group, higher up on the food chain, has it pretty much figured out. They are the ones with book deals, speaking gigs, and corporate sponsorships. Some do national satellite media tours to promote brands and are paid $5,000 to $10,000 for a few days of work. No doubt, they are the outliers but are aspirational nonetheless.

Dove is sponsoring the event, so it’s all upbeat girl energy. There are yoga classes and morning hikes and meditation. And there are seminars on everything from email marketing to pitching national media. There is also plenty of mingling and Merlot, networking and bonding. Motherhood is the thread that connects almost everyone, and all products entrepreneurs display are kid- or mom-relevant.

FROM MBA TO MOMABLES

At a cocktail party on the opening night of Mom 2.0, I meet Laura Fuentes, thirty-five. The gentle lilt in Laura’s accent gives away her Spanish roots. Born in Madrid, Spain, Laura moved to California when she was twelve years old, not speaking a word of English. After college in California, Laura got her MBA at the University of New Orleans and met and married native Louisianan Eric Schneller. For several, years Laura worked in pharmaceutical sales and marketing, which she says had nothing to do with her degree in international business development. Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans in 2005, devastating businesses and homes—including her husband’s physical therapy business. All of the hospitals where Laura had accounts were flooded. She was the breadwinner and was now making no money. They didn’t flee; they stayed to rebuild, and Laura soon discovered that she was pregnant with her first child.

“‘We can live on beans and rice,’ my husband told me, ‘if you want to stay home,’” Laura says. “I stayed home, but within a few months I really missed what comes with work performance and achievement. I had a hard time accepting the role that I was just a mom. Then I had a second child, and within a few years I knew I had to do something creative to keep my mind occupied.”

She started developing a prototype for a lunch container that would keep fresh food cold. At the same time, Laura was also writing a blog about the food fights in her kitchen as she struggled to get her young kids to eat healthy food. The blog, Supergluemom (now Laurafuentes.com) was Laura’s way to keep in touch with her family in Spain and her mom in California. She would share news when she had a victory in the kitchen, posting recipes and photos of her kids eating the healthy food she prepared. Her blog gained traction. Aside from her family, others were discovering it, finding her recipes and relating to the stories she shared with them. “I was surprised that people found my homemade chicken nugget recipes interesting,” Laura says. “I learned so much from all the struggles with feeding my own kids that I was able to create things that people are looking for. I didn’t know the online space. I was learning with my personal blog, and that took a turn and became more recipe-oriented the more I saw people responding to the recipes.”

At the same time that Laura was feeding her blog, she cashed out her retirement account to pay for the design and prototyping of her lunch container, which would later be manufactured in China. During the third round of prototypes, Laura picked up the container from an importer, a three-hour drive from where she lives. When she hit her brakes hard at a railroad crossing, the prototype flew off the front seat and broke beyond repair. Laura would not be able to test it. “I had just written this big check,” Laura says. “It was like the sky had broken. I called my husband and I cried until there was no more to give, and when I finally was able to pick myself up, I said, ‘I’m not meant to create a container.’ My husband said, ‘Drive home, it’s not a big deal.’ I just had a feeling that I wasn’t meant to be in the product manufacturing and retail business. By the time I got home, I had this vision that I would be doing something that helped moms feel good about the food they make for their families. I thought, parents don’t need another Lunchable; they need a MOMable. And that’s how MOMables was born.”

In late 2011, while pregnant with her “surprise” third child, Laura launched MOMables as a weekly meal plan subscription with family-friendly recipes for even the pickiest of eaters. She includes all of the items needed to make family meals possible and charges a fee for subscription. She has built an engaged community of eighty-five thousand parents and gets hundreds of emails each week from parents desperate for help on feeding their kids. She loves the feedback from the parents; it gives Laura a true feeling of purpose and personal impact.

Stay Steady and Do What You Love

In 2013, a publisher contacted Laura to write a cookbook about school lunches. The cookbook turned into a series of three cookbooks and a chance to compete on the Food Network show Rewrapped, to recreate snack classics. Laura was both thrilled and terrified by the opportunities. “I’m not a trained chef. I’m a mom who taught myself how to cook by following recipes,” Laura says. “My second cookbook was on snacks. I didn’t even grow up in a snacking culture in Europe, but it gave me the chance to ask other parents what they look for in snacks. The icing on the cake was when the Food Network asked me to audition and compete on a show. I won making a Monte Cristo waffle sandwich with a fried egg. I won being true to myself. I realize that when you are doing what you love to do, things that may be scary aren’t so scary—they become opportunities.”

Laura has seized on those opportunities. She regularly appears on TV segments where she cooks and shares kitchen tips. She also contributes to several online and print publications. Laura says that her past life has helped her build her new one—her MBA gave her the skills to plan the growth of her company. These days, she’s looking for strategic partners to help her reach a broader audience, and just recently her husband quit his corporate job in health care to join Laura’s company.

As eager as Laura is to expand MOMables, she believes that “slow and steady wins the race.” The online space is incredibly competitive, but Laura believes that she can continue to grow her business to meet the evolving ways her audience consumes content. Right now, her focus is on growing her YouTube channel and increasing TV opportunities. “My goal isn’t to become famous or to have people know who I am,” Laura says. “My goal is to help my audience feel really good about the food they make by providing them with the tools they need to pull it off. I feel proud knowing that in a small way I’ve contributed to helping parents make feeding their families easier.”

WOMEN EMBRACE THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

We are in the throes of the “creative economy,” where anyone can make a website, build a brand, sell products, and share just about anything on a platform that reaches the entire world. Since the early 2000s, the Internet has democratized work. Online, anyone can be a writer, video producer, political commentator, artist, filmmaker, or entrepreneur. You no longer need a storefront with a lease to sell your goods, crafts, or services. You don’t need a newspaper or magazine to publish your writing, or a TV or radio show to broadcast your voice. Virtually everything can be shared, traded, bought, and seen online.

Just as the washing machine and dishwasher liberated women from the drudgery and toil of all-consuming housework in the 1950s, the Internet has empowered women to create businesses and professional identities for themselves—on their own terms. It’s no coincidence that motherhood triggers an entrepreneurial spirit in many women. Women who are home with their kids may finally have the mental space to explore creative endeavors or new careers. Others are driven by necessity, wanting to develop products or services that, as moms, they find lacking. Still more women, pushed out of the workforce by unforgiving jobs that just don’t merge with motherhood, also turn to entrepreneurship. Crowd-funding platforms are giving entrepreneurial women a place to test their products, raise money, and get critical feedback for ideas.

For many years now, women have been founding companies and start-ups at twice the rate of men. Between 1997 and 2014, there was a 68 percent increase in women launching businesses, and nearly 30 percent of America’s business owners were women.³ The progress for minority women has been particularly swift, with business ownership skyrocketing by 265 percent since 1997, according to an Institute of Women’s Policy Research report. And minorities now make up one in three female-owned businesses, up from only one in six less than two decades ago.⁴ Women are innovating and producing products and services that fill gaps in the market. There are detractors, though. Some see the fact that the vast majority of these women-owned businesses have no employees other than the employer as evidence that women still can’t raise the capital they need to grow their businesses as successfully as men. Still, women are out there on their own, creating.

And if there was ever a time to create and share, now is that time.

PAVING A PATH TO TODAY

When I sit down with Meredith Sinclair, she is kicking back at the Soho House in New York City, black retro Ray-Bans perched on her nose and only traces remaining of the TV makeup she had worn that morning for a live Today show segment. At forty-four, Meredith, bubbly and blonde, still has the effortlessly cheerful and down-home vibe of the small-town high school cheerleader she once was. Raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania (touted as the “Christmas tree capitol of the world” and birthplace of actor Jimmy Stewart), Meredith met and married her high school sweetheart, the towering six foot seven inch television producer Jon Sinclair. Meredith jokes that she and Jon are the 1980s reality version of High School Musical. They moved to the big city life of Chicago two decades ago when Jon landed a job in production at Oprah.

For the past three years, Meredith has been a regular Today show contributor, doing segments on the best toys and activities for kids. When I meet her, she has just wrapped up a story about ways to keep your kids entertained during this interminably long, cold winter. Meredith’s journey to Today show segment contributor didn’t happen by accident. She nurtured a passion into a strategic online presence, growing her on-camera skills and taking smart steps along the way. When Meredith’s first son Maxwell was born, she decided to leave her job as an elementary school teacher and embrace the at-home mom life. Three years later, after having her second son Truman, Meredith got restless. Her brother suggested that she write a blog to stay creatively engaged. Blogging was new in 2003, and for Meredith it began as an outlet to share her experience as a young mom of two. “The only people who read my blog were my family,” Meredith says.

A few months after beginning to write on the pioneer blogging platform Blogger, Meredith was at the library with her boys reading Chicago Parent magazine where she saw an ad for mom bloggers. The magazine was looking to start an online mom community and put out a call for mom bloggers to submit their samples. Meredith applied and got the job, creating her blog A Mom’s Life. About a year later, she went to her editors and said, “You don’t have anyone doing local TV. I want to do it.” Meredith had only one experience on live TV at a local PBS station in Pittsburgh, where she had volunteered to help with an on-air fundraiser. She loved the rush and spontaneity of live television and saw an opportunity with Chicago Parent to be its face on local television. She also felt that her skills as an early education teacher were perfect training for TV.

“Being a teacher of second graders was my first live audience,” Meredith says. “You are on stage and you have to be compelling. Their attention span is really low. So there was a thread of sameness for me—being in front of a classroom and being in front of a camera wasn’t a complete departure, and it was something I was good at.”

Finding Her Voice

In the dawn of blogging, blogs weren’t yet businesses and blog conferences were just emerging. There were no brands or PR people trolling for talent, just women who were trying to understand the online space and create something meaningful and perhaps marketable out of the emerging platforms. Meredith gravitated toward video blogging at a time when most people weren’t there yet. “I got in early and was only the expert because no one was doing it,” Meredith says. “There were writers who were petrified to be on camera, and I was doing panels on video blogging. That gave me a platform and so I was considered an on-camera person.”

Meredith also spent time trying to craft her writing voice and figure out her niche. She knew she couldn’t be a generalist; she needed a specialty. “When I started, there weren’t that many mom bloggers. And then like Minions, they started growing,” Meredith says. She dabbled in fashion and trends and kid stuff, but as her two boys got older, they made it clear that they didn’t want to be fodder for her writing or photographed for her blog. Much of mom-generated content connects back to their children, but Meredith’s kids were off limits. It was at blogging conference BlissDom where Meredith heard Kevin Carroll, the author of Rules of the Red River Ball, talk about the playground and how play changed his life as a child. “There was something about the playfulness piece that zinged me,” Meredith says. “This is what I did in the classroom, and I thought I could get really passionate about it.”

Meredith began focusing on play as her niche and strategically funneled just about everything she wanted to talk about through the lens of play. Even if she did fashion posts, she managed to weave play into it. She became intentional about crafting a brand for herself. At the same time, Meredith was honing her on-air skills on local Chicago television doing toy and parenting segments. She was extending her platform from online to on-air. It wasn’t glamorous or profitable, but it was valuable experience. “I’m shlepping all of my stuff down to studios at five in the morning and not getting paid. But it was an amazing training ground,” Meredith says.

Grabbing Hold of Opportunity with Gumption

Meredith seized a new opportunity at the Mom 2.0 summit in 2013. The conference speakers included Alicia Ybarbo and Mary Ann Zoellner, Today show producers and authors of the best-selling parenting book Today’s Moms. Meredith also participated, giving a five-minute talk about her passions. Before the conference ended, she was determined to introduce herself to the Today show producers. This was her opportunity—three years of working in local TV segments, and now she could meet producers from a national morning show, the Holy Grail for anyone in the parenting space. So on the final night at the conference cocktail party, Meredith approached the producers and told them she had ideas for story segments on concepts the Today show was not yet doing—but should absolutely be doing with her as the on-air contributor. Ybarbo told Meredith to email a few pitch ideas the next week.

Television show producers get a lot of women coming up to them at these types of events looking for advice or hoping to land a segment. Most women don’t follow up with the persistence of Meredith; or if they do, they may not have the polish to secure themselves on the show. But three weeks later, Meredith was booked on Today. “I have moments of great gumption,” Meredith says. “And the biggest things I’ve ever gotten in my life have come from gumption, which I consider pulling up your bootstraps, puffing out your chest, and knowing you can do this. I feel like it’s a force and you have to grab it. Going over to the Today show producers was one of those moments.”

A few days after Meredith met the producers at the conference, she followed up in an email that outlined an entire script of what she could produce on the show, even starting with the opening line, “Lifestyle expert Meredith Sinclair will show you how to make back-to-school more fun for your children.” She put herself into the script. Was it audacious? Absolutely. But she demonstrated a level of confidence and what she was capable of. It wasn’t all bravado; Meredith had TV segments, which she shared, highlighting her talent and skillset. She had spent years doing spots on local TV and was now ready for the next step. “In so many situations we don’t have anything to lose, but we are so afraid to have gumption,” Meredith says. “You have to have laid some groundwork, so when you have that big moment of gumption you have something to support it. I think as women we get more and more scared to do stuff the older we get. We’ve had those disappointments and those failures.”

When I first met Meredith in 2011 at a different mom blogger conference in Park City, Utah, she was leading panel discussions on how to shoot cool videos. Over cocktails one night, she had mentioned to me that she wanted to write a book. Lots of people say that, but most never get beyond page one of a book proposal. But Meredith now has a book deal with HarperCollins, and her first book, Well Played: The Ultimate Guide to Awakening your Family’s Playful Spirit, was published in June 2016.

Small Steps Build Momentum

Meredith went from elementary school teacher to local Chicago mom blogger to Today show contributor and published author. In 2015, she also became the national spokesperson for the Toy Industry Association’s Genius of Play, a nonprofit whose mission is to show the importance of play in building critical thinking, creativity, and confidence in children. Meredith will be the first to tell you that none of this happened overnight. There were long hours, strategic relationships, tons of networking, pivoting, brand building, moments of gumption, and plenty of serendipity.

Meredith thinks women need to embrace taking small actions—even incremental movements forward can produce momentum. We may want to make immediate change, but that’s not always realistic.

“We’re in a culture of wanting it now,” Meredith says. “I think we need to be patient with ourselves. You have to give yourself room to play with lots of things before you figure out what lights you up. For some women, it might happen quickly, and I have seen people who jump into stuff. But don’t be afraid to take the baby steps. They are beneficial and teach you what you’re doing right and what you want to change. If I hadn’t done three years of local TV at five in the morning when no one was watching, there is no way I would’ve been confident to pitch Today show producers.”

For most of us, it can be unsettling and even stressful when you don’t know which way to turn or what to do next. You may be trying to move into a new position and create a project or a business, and nothing seems to be moving forward. You feel stagnant. Inertia can make you tense. The stars are not aligning, and you feel helpless. But Meredith believes we need to make peace with that in-between unsettled, unnerving space.

“The uncomfortable pauses where you think nothing is happening is often where things are brewing,” Meredith says. “If we can get friendly with a little of bit of discomfort and the process, then it’s not as scary. I wanted to know where I was going and see the light in my path. But you have to give stuff a minute to let it noodle. We get too afraid of those unclear places and don’t realize that they’re a valuable piece of the pie. It would take a lot of fear out of people if they understood that this time is valuable, even if there is no final product yet.”

GETTING COMFORTABLE IN THE UNCOMFORTABLE

The U.S. Navy SEALs have a saying: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” It applies not only to the intense and extreme physical conditions they endure, but to the psychological ones too. Lisa Skeete Tatum, CEO and founder of the start-up Landit, a LinkedIn type of career platform for women, would agree with the SEALs’ mantra and with Meredith’s philosophy. “Being a CEO is incredibly uncomfortable,” Lisa tells me. She wakes up at 2:30 a.m. anxious about everything that needs to be done to grow her business. But Lisa believes that women need to figure out how to live in that uncomfortable zone. “That’s how you learn and grow the most,” she says. Most entrepreneurs share similar feelings of unease—it’s often panic laced with exhilaration. When you are comfortable, you get complacent. When you are uncomfortable, you push yourself. And in those moments of discomfort, we can also develop more confidence, which in Meredith’s case turned into gumption that she used to take a leap into national TV.

Meredith forged her own path to get to the Today show. Interestingly, she used the digital world to launch a traditional TV career. Meredith was not a brand or marketing expert and yet she figured out how to craft a brand for herself. She networked and went to the mom blogger and women’s conferences that helped inform what she was doing. She volunteered for speaking roles at the conferences to increase her visibility. She met a book agent through her blogger network. She seized on the opportunity to approach the Today show producers and, like we discussed in chapter 3, Meredith engineered serendipity in that moment. She had laid the groundwork, saw the possibilities, and went for it. In 2015, when Meredith became the spokesperson for Genius of Play, she happily took the position as a way to give more gravitas to the platform she had been building for herself. She now travels to Washington, DC, as one of the play industry’s spokespeople.

Laura Fuentes also stepped out of her comfort zone. Writing cookbooks and competing on a Food Network show with chefs tested her confidence. After the prototype for Laura’s food container broke in her car, she knew her business wouldn’t be a packaging product but rather an online recipe subscription site for parents that inspired community and conversation. Laura and Meredith both grew their brands and created their own serendipity- building networks, taking risks, and seizing opportunities. They even took baby steps along the way and pivoted their original plans.

After twenty years in Chicago, Meredith is moving to Los Angeles because of her husband’s job. She doesn’t think she will be a TV play spokesperson forever, or even beyond another five years. But she imagines at some point maybe opening play spaces for children, or a toy store, or even a play-inspired preschool. Like the “adjacent possible” described by Steven Johnson in chapter 3 as a kind of shadow future and a map of all the ways the present can reinvent itself, Meredith is laying a foundation for herself where doors can lead to more doors. “I think about how I’m going to evolve from where I am now,” Meredith says. “I’m not going to be doing toy segments when I’m fifty-two years old. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t know what it is that I’ll be doing, but I want to always be relevant to myself.”