Mama Maker: Pamelyn, Finding Gratitude in Any Situation

Pamelyn Rocco wants to remind us that no matter how busy life gets, we can still carve out moments to feel grateful.

“Instead of being annoyed at all of the driving that I have to do, we take it as a time to look outside at nature and be grateful,” she says about chauffeuring her girls between activities. “Tennessee is so beautiful right now, like the amount of colors coming off of these trees and plants, it’s just gorgeous.”

“We’ll see how many colors we can count of flowers getting from here to the soccer field.”

It’s just one of the ways Pamelyn taps into her surroundings to guide her family through the practice of gratitude without it feeling like a lesson or chore. She also published a children’s book, Gratitude the Great, to help parents and kids learn together.

“A deep soulful feeling of gratitude is what I’m trying to get out there,” she says, pointing out the difference between gratitude and good manners. “Gratitude is like a whole different beast.”

“Our job as parents is to model that behavior on a daily basis and that’s why I think rituals are so important.”

As a busy mom that stays up late to work while everyone’s asleep, Pamelyn spends her first waking moments making mental thank you notes.

“My eyes wake up and I just start with anything that comes to my head,” she says. “If there’s something special that’s about to happen that day I make sure I give gratitude for that and it just like starts me off on the right foot.”

Pamelyn uses the “gratitude train” to illustrate the interdependence of the meals we eat and gifts we receive—which we all have a new appreciation for after dealing with 18 months of strained supply chains.

“If you can backtrack and explain to your kids all of the different stages and people and effort that had to go into that one meal on your table, from the farmers, to the truck drivers, to the grocery store workers, to your mom and dad working so hard in making this beautiful meal—that makes children understand that we all depend on each other and that it’s not just about us,” she says.

Her new book highlights the tradition of giving Rea bracelets as a visual reminder and gift to the people we’re grateful for.

“I’m all about prompts because you’re so crazy during the day,” she says. “You can be sitting waiting for your doctor’s appointment, or waiting for your oil change or waiting in the car line at school and you just look down.”

Pamelyn and her daughters have been giving out Rea bracelets to first responders, frontline workers, cashiers and delivery drivers throughout the pandemic.

“Even through bad things that happen in life, COVID and all these things, it has really been the most amazing tool for me to use to get through the darkest days,” she says.

“You have space for thoughts, and thoughts are what drive gratitude.”

Mama Maker: Lesley, Creating the Space for Women to Feel Supported

Every day Lesley Osei answers the call to help others, beyond her five children under four and her six siblings, across fifteen acres where she and her husband are building a church in Connecticut, with the thousands of followers she motivates on Instagram, all the way to Ghana where she’s bringing basic comforts to rural mothers-to-be.

“We actually stumbled upon a village where you can’t even take a car or bus there,” she recalls. “Once a month, they have to go and fetch water–it’s like a big thing–and so what we’re doing now is we’re getting developers to go and dig a well so that it will be easier access for water for them.”

After making progress with four wells, Lesley felt compelled to do more—especially after a group of husbands expressed what it was like to watch their wives suffering through labor and delivery in the elements.

“What we are creating are maternity pods where they can actually go and at least have a midwife there coach them through, be there with them, where they can lay on the bed–because a lot of them are squatting in the middle of their houses to give birth.”

It’s not the first time that Lesley has extended her arms out to fellow mothers. While counseling couples at church, she’s discovered that education and support is needed across the full spectrum of pregnancy and postpartum, which inspired her to start Moms Algorithm as a hub for “systems and processes” to support moms.

“I realized that a lot of people didn’t know things like folic acid was something that you should be taking, even before, to make sure you get your body right,” she says.

“I truly believe the Lord gave me a lot of kids just so I can get it done and teach people how to get it done and shifting your mind is very important to me. I am the the third of seven, and so my siblings are always calling me for advice, always in some type of emergency situation.”

Lesley makes it a priority to be present with her kids through all of her endeavors, and often wakes up before dawn to put her ideas on paper. For her latest project, she’s drawing inspiration from the experiences of her 3-year-old daughter.

“She loves princesses and anytime I’m trying to find her a black princess they don’t have any,” she says. “So what the Lord laid on my heart to do is to create my own and so that’s what I’ve been doing recently—trying to get all the different things and items and products that children normally use, and get characters that are biracial, that are African American, that have white friends, that have black friends and just trying to get more mixture into what they see.”

Lesley’s aspirations to support young girls and women all around the world are fueled by the care and attention she receives from her mother and husband.

“He always maintains time for me and when he sees that I’m withdrawn or quiet, he stops whatever he’s doing,” she says. “He doesn’t care who is around—he literally stops and has a conversation with me, which I always appreciate.”

The solid foundation of their faith-based family has stemmed into a global network of giving back.

Mama Maker: Viola, Drawing Us Towards Happiness No Matter What Happens

Viola Sutanto found joy within the four walls of a hospital room where her 9-year-old daughter awaited a bone marrow transplant for aplastic anemia, ultimately defying the odds of a match with her 3-year-old brother.

“They had told us of course we’ll test your son, but just know that sibling matches are a 25% chance, so don’t hold your breath,” Viola recalls her doctors saying at the time. “So when we heard that he was a perfect match, we couldn’t believe it. It was such a miracle.”

Now Viola wants to pay her gratitude forward by publishing Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness in partnership with The Collective Book Studio and will give a portion of proceeds back to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She’s been amazed at the response to her iFundWomen crowdfunding campaign, which has reached all the way to her hometown in Singapore.

“I was really very touched and overwhelmed,” she says. “In the first 24 hours of the campaign, we had raised thousands of dollars. Longtime friends of mine, people in our community and even friends I hadn’t heard from in years—suddenly I’m getting texts and messages from them saying, ‘I cannot believe you went through this’ and ‘here you go, I want 10 copies of your book.’”

Sharing Her Story

“I’ve been pretty isolated for more than a year since Maika was diagnosed, and I’m a very introverted person so I tend to hold it all in,” Viola says. “I realized, gosh, I’ve never even told most of these people what had happened.”

The inspiration for Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness began when Viola and her daughter came up with sketchbooks as a way to keep themselves occupied during the hospital stay. The “100 days” creative movement had also recently gained popularity.

“So that’s when the drawings started happening,” she said. “We’d pick one thing to draw and it could be just the most mundane thing in the world. I think my first drawing was actually a dinner at the hospital or something silly like that— but over time it just became something fun for us to do.”

Viola started posting the drawings on Instagram and as a former book designer, she naturally began to imagine them taking shape in page form.

“What happened last year made me realize, as a family, how much resilience we have,” she says. “I’m a more optimistic person now than I ever was before, and also very mindful of being grateful for everything that we have.”

Because Maika was immunocompromised following her treatment, Viola’s family entered another year of social distancing and mask-wearing with plenty of practice and perspective.

“I think it really helps to find the silver lining in everything and every day,” she says. “Being able to see that on the upside, while stuck at home I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, which I love. I have the privilege of working from home—some people don’t. There’s just so many things to be grateful for despite everything else that’s happening.”

Viola’s perseverance has helped her carry her sustainable bag and home goods business through the abrupt changes that came earlier this year.

“Our wholesale business plummeted between March and now,” she says. “It’s still very much in recovery mode and that was a real bummer because we had started off the year strong. Every day we’d pick up the phone and get order cancellations and postponements. It was really devastating because most of our accounts are mom and pop stores, or they’re small businesses like mine. We have real relationships with these people and worked with them for years.”

She stays grounded by centering herself with meditation and journaling, before jumping into full days of distance learning and running her now booming e-commerce business. It’s a practice that helped Viola get through her darkest days.

“The only other person who was really in the thick of it with me is my husband and that’s all we talked about,” she says. “Sometimes I just don’t want to talk. I felt like my journal and my meditation practice was my own thing that I could do solo, without having to worry about how everyone else is feeling. And that felt sacred to me.”

No matter what life throws your way, Viola recommends giving yourself a break, taking it one step at a time and focusing on the small things you can start with.

“Try to find the silver lining somewhere,” she says. “There’s going to be light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s a super long tunnel and these days of not seeing where it’s going to end. But I do believe it will be there.”

“If you just take the time to notice, there’s always something, some small joy to be found.”

Mama Maker: Sarah, Deciding How We Want to Live

Sarah Kelly’s rebound from a breast cancer diagnosis at 32 weeks pregnant to building a clean beauty brand featured by the likes of Good Morning America, exemplifies what “salty” women are capable of.

“I was up in Maine at my parents’ house and my sisters were there and it was one of those moments that you’ll never forget,” she says about the dreaded phone call that no one ever expects.

Just 72 hours earlier at a routine prenatal checkup, Sarah mentioned the lump she’d recently found to her OB-GYN, at the encouragement of her sister Leah, an oncology nurse who’s now her business partner. That Tuesday appointment led to an ultrasound on Wednesday, followed by a biopsy on Thursday and confirmation on Friday that it was indeed stage 3, triple-negative breast cancer.

“They wanted to start chemo right away, and it was too big for surgical removal,” she says. “The first cancer treatment that you do, you can receive while you’re pregnant. So I started two rounds of chemo and then they induced me at 38 weeks.”

What Sarah calls her “warrior week” started with the birth of her daughter, followed by blood transfusions two days later, and her third round of chemo two days after that.

“It’s just amazing; I always say, your body can handle so much,” she says. “You just have to have the right mindset.”

Sarah also credits the support she had during treatment, especially while she and her husband were between houses and living with her in-laws. She points out that her 14-month-old and newborn were in incredibly capable hands with her mother-in-law, a neonatal nurse.

“Cancer sucked, but it also gave me perspective on how I wanted to live,” she says.

“I think I was checking the boxes—half of them were making me happy and the other half were creating a lot of toxicity,” says Sarah about life back in Boston, which involved battling traffic to and from work, taking time away from her kids.

The idea of starting a business with her sister Leah entered the equation, inspired by the emerging interest in green beauty and a lifelong dream to build her own brand after working in sales and corporate marketing.

“Having lost my hair and everything, putting on a lipstick really empowered me to feel a little bit more feminine throughout my journey,” says Sarah. “That’s the direction we decided to go in and then it just evolved, talking about how we take care of ourselves, eliminating stress in our lives.”

Salty Girl Beauty took a minimalistic approach to cosmetics and body care, made locally in small batches using organic coastal ingredients. The name is a double entendre, honoring the resilience of women.

“What we were going through at that time in our lives, you needed a lot of grit and sass and attitude,” she says. “I think women feel that throughout the day they need to have that armor—whether you’re going through amazing things or a really hard time in your life.”

Sarah noticed that while she was getting a lot of attention during her treatment, finding ways for her husband to feel supported too was critical. So she, Leah and their siblings started Foundation4Love as a non-profit arm of the brand to carve out quality time with caregivers.

“Making sure that we were staying connected was really important to me, and so people would come over and watch the kids while we could go out to dinner,” Sarah says. “So that’s kind of the thing we do with other people going through this. Who’s their number one, is it their family or is it a sister, a husband? We try to do something that allows them to disconnect from their cancer and connect with whatever is love in their life.”

Through the spirit of partnership they’re also funding the cold cap program at New England Cancer Specialists, running workshops with Mount Sinai, and even spun up a new kind of cancer wellness retreat called Warrior Revolution—together with Cynthia Besteman, the cancer survivor behind Violets are Blue Skincare.

“There are so many conferences around the medical side and the treatment side but we really wanted to focus on, ‘yes, you’re going through cancer, but how do you live through that?'” she says about the full-day events which covered a range of wellness, intimacy and mental health topics and ended with a pajama party.

“At the last retreat, we had about six stage IV 30-40 year-old women they didn’t know in our own community,” she says. “And now they’re best friends. Being able to create those connections has been really great.”

While 2020 brought a lot of uncertainty for Sarah, Leah and their team through the spring and summer months, things took a very exciting turn when the opportunity to be featured on Good Morning America popped up.

“Getting that national exposure has been life-saving,” she says. “It’s been literally the biggest whirlwind ever. To see how the four of us, as well our greater community, helped and pitched in so that everything came together for it was just really, really special.”

Coming together, whether it’s as “Salty Girls” or as a family has given Leah the life she reimagined for herself five years ago.

“As much as I probably work too much, it’s on my own terms and I can do it in the living room while my kids are around,” she says. “I’m very present and we’re able to do the things that they want to participate in and spend a lot more time outdoors and all of the things that I think create a happy house.”

While that often means Sarah has a six-, five- and two-and-a-half year old clinging to her while trying to put makeup on, she still believes in the importance of self-care “without it being a big production.”

“Being able to have that message to talk to women about taking care of themselves and not putting themselves last,” is what fuels her.

“Because when you’re healthy, everyone else around you can be healthy,” she says.

Mama Maker: Angela, Creating Our Own Story

Angela Engel flips right past the “why me?” question that many stumble over when the opportunity to make a difference presents itself. The mother of three is a publishing industry disruptor by day, who mobilized the creation of PPE at the start of the pandemic–while continuing to lead the San Francisco chapter of Hey Mama, support social causes, and navigate distance learning.

Her response when people ask how she raised $30,000 and distributed 10,000 face shields across the country—including Children’s Hospital Minnesota, Alameda Health Consortium and Navajo Nation clinics in Arizona and New Mexico— says everything about her willingness to spring into action.

“When this all hit and I saw my best friend literally in the ER when the Princess Cruise landed and he was working night shifts and lost it when he couldn’t get a face shield, I was like, ‘who else is going to save him?’”

“I think that same spirit is the greatest thing you learn when you’re an entrepreneur,” she says. “That fire, that spirit, that idea…what’s the worst that could happen? Someone says no, right? That’s not a big deal.”

Angela felt a similar call to action when she was “really pregnant” with her third daughter and had grown weary of publishing industry trade shows where she struggled to find a humane place to pump in concrete convention centers.

She dabbled in children’s apparel for a while, which was more kid-friendly and introduced her to the faster pace of retail.

“I would bring the baby with me and put her in the stroller and that was great, but I missed publishing,” she says. “It’s the creative piece.”

While doing business development for an independent publishing house in Petaluma, Angela “noticed the surge of self publishing” that was more akin to the speed of fashion than the traditional publishing industry.

“Why are we letting Amazon and self publishing take that market share?” she realized. “Why not pull together my colleagues from traditional publishing who are fantastic, who are graphic designers, who are typesetters, who are editors and let’s form a collective? We can do this as good as any big house and we can do it fast.”

The Collective Book Studio was born in 2019 around the idea of “partnership publishing” which retains the authors’ creative control and has gained the attention of her industry peers for its disruptive business model.

“We don’t print on demand,” she says. “We really believe the book is an art form.”

One example is how the team packaged up a series of beautifully crafted pages from parenting coach (and Mama Shaker) Sue Groner in Parenting with Sanity & Joy: 101 Simple Strategies in a way that even the most exhausted among us can digest at our own pace.

“What is the message that you want your reader to take away?”

It’s the first question that Angela asks prospective authors (and something that anyone creating content should take the time to answer).

“That will help decide why are you writing this book,” she says.

For Maika handbag designer Viola Sutanto, it’s a reminder that even in our darkest days, happiness is all around us. She’s working with Angela and iFundWomen to fund Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness—inspired by Viola’s 9-year-old daughter’s hospital stay while she awaited a bone marrow transplant from her 3-year-old brother.

Whether our story involves putting an important message out into the world, or giving back in another way, taking action is the antidote to fear.

“I think the first step is to practice,” Angela says. “Write a sample chapter. Just write, even if it’s not good at all. It could literally be bullet points for all I care. But just get it down on paper.”

Mama Shaker: Tina, Empowering the Whole Family to Take Part

A set of color-coded cards plays a significant role in Tina Murray’s household, helping her teenage son track his daily routine while navigating distance learning with a visual impairment.

“I can just put those Kanbans next to his breakfast and he knows sometime throughout the day, ‘I’ve got to shower, I’ve got to go water my cucumbers,’ and later empty the dishwasher.”

“I think that COVID has actually gotten more kiddos involved in independent living skills,” she says.

While it can be tempting to speed through her son’s chores herself, Tina has learned to delegate out of necessity and to foster independence in the long run.

“He used to have an aide in the class that could help him locate the position in the notebook or the textbook that he needed to go to if he couldn’t get there as quickly as the teacher,” she says. “So that support is not physically close to him anymore; or, the vision teacher who’s teaching him how to cut safely because he’s down right where the knife is with his cucumber.”

The network of services and experts that Tina constructed for him over the years—thanks to the advice of fellow special-needs parents—has been reshuffled based on what’s available virtually and still funded amidst budget cuts.

Vista Center and its “expanded core curriculum that’s available to blind and visually impaired students” remains at the top of her list.

The 75-year-old Bay Area non-profit (which is currently running a back-to-school fundraiser to bridge the education gap created by remote learning) has empowered Tina and other families to think beyond the challenges posed by traditional sports and recreation to “push those boundaries a little bit,” she says.

“Let’s do kayaking, or maybe whitewater rafting. Let’s listen to a movie that is audio described as a group and enjoy that experience together.”

Tina says it’s “amazing to be a fly on the wall as a volunteer,” and it’s an opportunity for the parents to check in with each other.

“It’s pretty brilliant,” she says.

Tina also hosts the Vision Parents Google Group to continue the conversation.

“If my child is feeling successful, if my child is independent, if they are making their own dinner—hey, I am now in my ‘wow,’” Tina says about hitting a groove as a family. “It’s that progression towards independence in adulthood, given the state where we are. Those are my shining days.”

For those times when it “feels like one big long day” while blending school, work and everything else under one roof, she recommends reading Raising an Organized Child: 5 Steps to Boost Independence, Ease Frustration, and Promote Confidence by Dr. Damon Korb.

As a professional project manager and natural multitasker, Tina believes in “not trying to boil the ocean, not trying to solve everything at once, not taking on too much–because that is overwhelming.”

Instead, she suggests breaking up problems into manageable parts and celebrating the milestones along the way.

“It’s the opposite of low hanging fruit,” Tina says. “You have to pick the hardest things because that’s where you’re going to see the biggest gains.”

“You’re never done being a parent,” she says. “You’re never done figuring out how to connect with and relate to your child.”

“It has been a complete roller coaster to get to where we are, and I know there’s more coming,” she says about parenting in the teen years. “And I love roller coasters.”

Mama Shaker: Rebekah, Providing Comfort When It’s Hard to Know What to Say

Rebekah Rosler dedicates her waking hours to supporting women who are trying to become pregnant, navigating postpartum and the rigors of motherhood—all of which she’s experienced firsthand on the uphill climb to conceive her 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old twins.

“Whether you’re a therapist or a coach or a friend, what you really need to be doing is listening and supporting and helping—and oftentimes that’s all somebody else needs,” she says. “They don’t need an expert. They don’t need the most knowledgeable human being on a particular topic. They just need to be to be seen and they need to be respected and they need to be comforted.”

In the years it took Rebekah to prove the doctors wrong who told her she could never get pregnant, she formed bonds with a community of women going through their own infertility struggles. She learned how powerful it was to simply be present when someone is grieving.

“I often get messages from friends saying ‘I just found out my friend suffered a miscarriage. What should I say or what should I do? How should I act?’ and of course you don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she says. “But oftentimes, people just say nothing. And that’s the worst possible reaction. Even if you say the wrong thing, you’re trying and people want support, even if they don’t want it in that moment, or say they don’t want it.”

Rebekah’s advice is universal for the moments that we find ourselves sensing the pain that someone we care about is feeling, but we struggle to come up with the words to show them we care.

“I always say what you can tell them is you have no idea what the f*ck to say, you just know you want to be there for them,” she says. “You will be there when they want to talk. You are there for them now, tomorrow, in 10 years, whatever it may be.”

“Don’t leave them alone. Don’t leave them to their own devices. Let them know that they’re not alone, they have friendship and family and they have what they need. They might just not be ready or willing to dig deep and ask for it, but be present and be there.”

We often underestimate the power of sitting with someone—physically or virtually. Rebekah found a way to provide comfort through her Facebook “warrior” groups and 1:1 video calls available through It’s Conceivable, long before the rest of us relied on these forms of connection.

“Once I went through my own fertility journey and had my own experiences, really every aspect of trying to become a mother changed everything for me,” she says. “It shined the light on what it is that I’m intended to do with this wild and precious life.”

Even though Rebekah supports women all the way from pre-conception into the early years of motherhood, she admits to feeling the same imposter syndrome that most of us do.

“I’m an expert in some ways, but I’m obviously not a medical expert, and there’s a lot of things that I don’t know,” she says. “But I think sometimes just having a nonjudgmental ear or somebody to listen to, or talk to or communicate with or have camaraderie with; sometimes, that’s just what we need.”

Women Helping Women

While the healing power of human connection is undeniable, Rebekah cautions that all of the messages about motherhood that we consume digitally are a “double-edged sword.”

“Whether it’s celebrities or Instagram or social media or whatever social space and voice is out there now, I think there’s a lot more normalizing of things that either didn’t have a voice as much before—just by the nature of we didn’t have a platform for it—but I think the moms’ space, the fertility space, a lot of it is really being brought to the surface,” she says.

Whether it’s baby announcements, gender reveals, or breastfeeding, the social celebrations of motherhood can be painful to scroll through when you’re struggling with any stage of motherhood.

“I think we do need to be kinder to ourselves,” she says, and sometimes that can mean “hearing the positive stuff that’s coming from social media but blocking out the picture perfect images that people are putting up.”

“We’re all doing our best to get by, whatever that looks like. You have no idea what’s going on behind closed doors or the other side of a camera.”

Even when life feels overwhelming, the Golden Rule can help us figure out how to comfort those who need it.

“Treat your friends the way that you want them to treat you,” she says. “Treat your family the same way. Just love the people that love you and do your best. That’s all we can do.”

“People don’t want to be alone. People don’t want to be lonely. People need community, or at least a few people, or at least a person. Somebody, everybody needs somebody.”

Mama Maker: Megan, Getting the Most Out of Every Room

While our homes are multitasking more than ever, Megan Hersch wants to help families make the most out of every square inch.

“A lot of people don’t have a separate space that they can make their office,” she says, which is leading to requests like, “How can I put a desk in this corner? I really need to be able to focus. I need to feel like it’s away from my family. But also, I don’t want to feel like work is always in my home.”

As someone who’s sharing a home office formerly known as “mine” with my husband, I find myself dodging his booming voice during competing conference calls, and slipping into whichever bedroom isn’t occupied at the moment to escape the hollers from our two rowdy boys. For parents of school-age kids, online learning is a whole other dimension of space planning.

“Luckily, about two months ago, I converted a corner of my kitchen into an art zone with a countertop and cabinets under it, in lieu of a breakfast nook and I have been thankful for that every day,” says Megan. “My older daughter is on a Zoom call with her school and she works on that countertop and then my younger daughter will be in the dining room. I did get these plastic blow up chairs from Amazon that are have glitter inside of them and they sort of became portable reading chairs.”

Options also provide the opportunity for movement, which may feel aspirational during the workday as an adult but—as Megan points out—is a necessity for kids.

“They go to a Montessori school so they’re used to walking around their classroom all day,” she says. “I think in any classroom, kids are used to moving a little bit more. The biggest thing I’m focusing on is moving around and changing the location of activities, so we’re going to do art in the kitchen and then we’re going to do reading on a couch my younger daughter built for this morning.”

Beyond work and school, families spending all their time together in the same space gives us perspective and motivation that we may not have had before.

“I think the most important thing right now is to be grateful for what we have and focus in on what we can do,” is what Megan has been telling her daughters. “This is an amazing opportunity that we’re never going to have, again, to really be together.”

All of this togetherness provides inspiration to make the rooms we share more fluid, and perhaps even carve out a space for ourselves to catch a breath.

“I think getting a little bit of separate me time is really important and I think that that’s super hard, especially for moms, because we’re usually the ones that the kids come to if there’s a question or a problem,” says Megan. “But I think it’s also really good for kids to learn that everyone needs a break and sometimes we can’t be available.”

“That’s something that I’m trying to work on,” she says. “Maybe we’ll be really good at it, by necessity.”

Regardless of whether you have the space to spread out, the opportunity to reflect on what matters most in the spaces where we live, learn and work is spurring a lot of creativity. (Our toddler-proofing strategy changes on a weekly basis.)

“There are a lot of people who are sitting in the house that they don’t normally spend a lot of time in thinking, ‘Oh, it’s time for me to change this room’ or ‘I really need more seating because we’re just hanging out here,’” says Megan.

A growing focus of her interior design business, RoomLift, provides everything clients need to embark on a redesign in the convenience of a box shipped to their home.

“My eye for design put into an easy package for people to implement themselves is the idea behind it,” she says. “I’m just giving you a few great ideas to work in the room—something that comes from an expert opinion—and then you take it from there.”

Before and after: RoomLift client results

“You don’t need a major renovation to really change your space,” she says. “I came up with the name RoomLift because it’s like a facelift; you’re working with what you have. You might have your grandmother’s beloved table that you want to keep, but you want some new chairs and some paint or wallpaper and a light.”

While Megan believes it’s “so important to have a printed image as opposed to looking at furniture on a computer screen,” and “it makes such a difference to have it actually in front of you printed in color so that it feels as real as it can,” she offsets her high quality card stock, photos, samples and packaging by donating to One Tree Planted with every order.

“I try to focus on the fact that so much is going to change and hopefully we’ll be less wasteful and more cognizant of our impact on what we’re doing in our day to day lives,” she says, as we reflect on the positive changes resulting from families staying home together.

“Even just like eating the heel of the bread,” she says, providing a perfect metaphor for how we’re doing more with less.

Mama Shaker: Whitnee, Fueling Parents at Work

Helping mothers thrive in the workplace is literally what gets Whitnee Hawthorne out of bed in the morning. She’s honed the art of a 4:45 a.m. wake-up call, so she can dedicate two hours before her son wakes up to The Savvy Working Mom, her coaching business and brand new podcast—all before she heads to the office.

“What inspired me was seeing this gap in support for this population that I am now part of, that I believe is ultimately the game-changing population for our country and for the world,” she says about creating a platform to help working mothers, alongside her full-time role as a technology director at JetBlue.

“Society is not set up to support us in the right way, and that kind of pulled back the curtain on the challenges,” she says. “I get a lot of head nods. I hear a lot of support and I get a lot of thank you’s for bringing this conversation forward.”

Whitnee and I share a passion for celebrating inspirational and entrepreneurial mamas despite us both being fixtures in a corporate setting. From her perspective, therein lies the opportunity.

“I know that there are a lot of groups out there supporting working moms as entrepreneurs,” she says. “But I also feel very strongly that we need to keep women in corporate. I really believe working moms are the backbone of society, and if we get supported better, our society is going to improve and our corporations are going to do better.”

Whitnee believes that taking a holistic approach to supporting caregivers in the workplace goes a long way.

“There’s a focus on providing tools to help people multitask better, and manage their time in the office, but there’s not an understanding that when you show up to the office, you show up as a full person,” she says. “And I think there’s a big gap in addressing what does someone need across the day, across the week, across their life, so that they can show up with their A-game at work.”

How This Mama Makes it Work

“Eating right and working out helps me to have the energy level that I have,” says the former personal trainer and gym owner, who incorporates yoga into her morning routine since she has another baby on the way.

While it may sound like Whitnee has endless energy, it’s passion that fuels all her pursuits and a personal definition of success. It’s a framework that she follows for her clients too.

“A huge part of that is getting to a place where you know yourself, where you accept what you want, and you believe that you deserve what you want,” she says. “And making decisions that are right for you and your family; not making your decisions based on what somebody else, some outside force—your neighbors, Instagram, your colleague, your boss—think is right for you.”

“When you have that clarity of what it is that you want and what success looks like for you, then you can align your actions to it and it makes life much more joyful.”

Now, those early morning hours, that many of the women I speak with swear by, start to make sense as a critical foundation for a happy and fulfilling work day.

“I get a lot of pleasure out of helping others, so success for me also looks like, ‘who have I helped today, whose life have I made better and have I contributed outside of myself to make the world better?’ Whitnee says. “And when I feel like I’m doing that, then I feel like I’m being successful.”

Mama Maker: Shweyta, Going the Distance

After leaving New York to spend a year in Singapore and Mumbai, Shweyta Mudgal reconnected with a childhood memory that inspired her to repurpose her design skills as an airport architect into an ancient form of Indian textile printing.

“Singapore is a takeoff point for anybody to travel that side of the world,” she says, which exposed her to Asia’s maker economy and gave her the opportunity to rekindle a creative pastime from her youth.

Shweyta fondly remembers how she would “walk in to a tailor in Mumbai in this lane that I was living in and give him a piece of scrap cloth, or even fabric or material that I found somewhere,” and together they would design something completely original out of it.

“So that’s the how the idea of ‘8,000 miles’ really started after all of that travel and being inspired by the rich textile culture of Asia,” she says about the birth of her clothing brand.

It was integral to Shweyta to weave social impact into the fabric of Eight Thousand Miles from the start, so that it wasn’t merely an “afterthought.” She identified two ways to empower the local community of artisans in India who would bring to life the garments she designed.

“One was to be able to work with artisans and communities that were either disadvantaged, financially,” says Shweyta, or “were working in textile cultures which are being threatened by extinction now due to mechanized, digital printing and more modern techniques of fabric production and printing.”

She was equally clear about the other major thread of her purpose-driven model: “I wanted it to be done in a fourth generation textile printing design community based out of a village investor in India, which has been block printing for generations on fabric.”

“Both of these worlds came together” when she found a “small sewing unit, which was very, very self reliant and independent because it was set up by a woman who really just wanted to do the same, which was to give work to disadvantaged women,” she says.

This culminated in a process that requires Shweyta’s presence in two time zones (primarily through WhatsApp), now that she’s living back in New York with her husband and daughter. She designs all the prints by hand or on her computer; they’re printed out at scale and attached to two pieces of wood back in India, and then replicated for every color needed for that particular print.

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“This is in fact a very, very ancient way of printing fabric but to me it was the best way of representing drawings,” she adds.

Women Helping Women Succeed

In the six years since she launched, Shweyta has maintained the same standards for her garments and the women who craft each one by hand.

“Every unit that we’ve ever worked with has been composed or vetted to make sure that the end artisan is also someone who has undergone training, but is also very, very happy working in the unit, not being exploited,” she says. “It’s fair trade, the unit is well lit and clean; the artisans are being provided for.”

Going back to Shweyta’s original vision, she ensures the artisans are paid for each piece that they make instead of “an assembly line method because then you know they’re not sort of small cogs in the machine, but they are responsible for having created the entire garment from scratch.”

“We also invest back in their children and in their lives by doing this on a day to day basis,” she says, noting that making it to work is not without its challenges “if you’re a woman in that strata of Indian society.”

“Women are not always available to come work because they’ve had a problem at home or they just were not able to walk to work that day or had to stay home to take care of an ailing mother-in-law and things which you know come in the way of your working life,” she says.

The endurance required by all involved is not lost on Shweyta.

“We’re just happy that we’ve been able to keep the business model alive and always have social impact in every little piece that we make.”

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Shweyta has had to learn how to pace herself and stay present in her two different worlds of motherhood and entrepreneurship.

“I try not to push myself too hard,” she says reflecting on how far she’s come since the “initial years trying to set things up and establish everything.”

Shweyta admits to “mom guilt” while not feeling totally present with her daughter.

“We would read at bedtime, but I would still be thinking in my head about my next print that I should line up for the season ahead,” she says.

So she’s started treating her evenings like more of a “9-to-5” and tries “not think about work unless it’s just before a show, we’re rushing a deadline, or things like that.”

“I used to be really, really harsh on myself about trying to get a lot done and this whole philosophy that I’ve literally been brought up with of ‘if you have to do it tomorrow, you do it today; if you have to do today, you do it now,'” she says.

Shweyta cautions other entrepreneurs just starting out to temper their enthusiasm so it doesn’t snowball into martyrdom.

“I know it’s very difficult early on, especially if it’s your passion that you’re transitioning into a profession or if your business is really your baby,” she says. “In that case, ImI know it’s very difficult to draw a line between how much of yourself you want to invest in it.”

“If you’re going to do a lot of it yourself, then you really have to understand that you’re doing four or five different jobs at the same time,” she says, pointing out how long it would take that many people to work together to get a job done.

“If you’re doing it all yourself then give yourself that kind of time,” she says.

Now, when Shweyta finds herself up against a deadline that’s pulling her mentally away from time with her daughter, she takes a different approach.

“So now what I’ll do is I just talk to her about it,” she says. “She has her own inputs. I realized that sharing it with someone is better than actually just ruminating about it in your own head and constantly being obsessed with your work.”

“If you just seek out or find a mentor, or just tell a friend or family, it gives you some sort of a break from the journey, which is really, really hard as somebody starting out,” she says.