The Mama Bear by Chairman Mom

I’ve missed you guys.

After writing to you almost every day for the last 15 months or so, I took two weeks off for family, future planning, and sanity.

I actually didn’t mean to take two weeks off of writing. I meant to put out the newsletter this past week. But Lily misunderstood and announced we’d be taking a break through the seventh, and I took it as a sign. Sometimes the team knows best!

I hope you missed us too.

There is a ton we have planned for Chairman Mom this year (this week even!), and I’m going to tell you all more about it in the coming weeks and months. For now, let’s all sit back and feel comfortably smug about the fact that those of us who are working moms managed to survive winter break. Read more...

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I was going to write a newsletter today about the world going to hell in a handbasket.

Particularly, I was going to rant about this study that argues that caused Amnesty International to declare trolling of women on Twitter a human rights abuse, and Citron Research citing Twitter as “toxic” for advertisers as a result, leading to a downgrade of its stock.

Companies like Twitter have refused to take a stand on so many moral issues shrugging about their “fiduciary duty” to shareholders. Well, now toxicity is costing those shareholders. Will “woke” T-shirt-wearing Jack Dorsey finally do anything about it? Read more...

Are you a Chairman Mom member? If so we’d love your feedback! It’ll take less than two minutes!

“Only two stuffies!” I said in my sternest mom voice. Someday, I won’t have to spend days packing for an entire family—including all of the presents we bought—and I’ll miss it. No really, I’m sure I will. That’s what empty nesters always tell you right?

I could see Evie was already plotting a loophole in this two-stuffy rule. Indeed, two extra mouseys would stow away in my purse later that day. But Eli wants to negotiate the rules, not bend them. There’s a difference. Read more...

Are you a Chairman Mom member? If so we’d love your feedback! It’ll take less than two minutes!

Hello from a bench in the Children’s Museum of Memphis!

Yesterday I wrote about some of my favorite books of 2018. I read <10% by male writers, and there were a few overrated titles (IMHO) and several amazing gems.

First the ones I thought were overrated (don’t come at me!): Lincoln at the Bardo was clever but…not worth the hype. Likewise Warlight. And here’s where you really yell at me: I didn’t think When Breath Becomes Air was nearly as good as everyone else did. (The overrated theme wasn’t exclusive to men. I spent more time trying to figure out why Girl Wash Your Face was such a monster hit than I did actually enjoying it…) Read more...

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to read a book a week this year. There was a point when I was so behind on this goal that I almost gave up. But I clawed my way back and last night finished my 51st book, giving me a luxurious half a month to finish my last book of the year.

I had to keep a list to make sure I really read enough books, and it’s pretty amazing to look back on a year’s reading. I read a ton of novels, nonfiction, some business books, poetry, short stories and collections of essays. I read and listened to books. (Don’t give me that face…The New York Times wrote how neither reading or listening is cognitively superior…) Read more...

If you know me, you know I take goals and New Year’s resolutions seriously. One of my big ones this year was to take control of my weight again. Unlike the last few years, nothing could stop me. Not pulling my knee early in the year running and having to cut out everything sinful to keep from getting derailed. Not new flare ups from my asthma that kept sending me to the pulmonologist. Not a fall of near-endless travel. As I get close to the end of the year, I haven’t lost the whole 30 pounds. But I’ve lost 20 on the scale, and likely more than that in fat. But that’s not the only way I’m measuring progress. Read more...

That’s what VC and all around good guy Micah Baldwin said on Facebook after I posted yet another photo with my growing Seattle badass posse. I went from having basically never gone to Seattle to doing three trips this summer/fall and making—no joke—at least 20 close female friends, almost all of whom I didn’t know last year.

I met a lot of these women through the Chairman Mom community—Seattle has become a definite cluster of amazing on the site. We had a holiday dinner for about 20 of these women last night. It’s amazing how deeply I feel like I know Chairman Mom users, even though I don’t know many of their real names, what they look like, what they do for a living or any other surface-y things that most social networks trade in.
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I went to school with a stunningly brilliant woman named Joann Self who would wind up becoming a stunningly brilliant documentary filmmaker. (She’s also an active member of the Chairman Mom community!)

Her current project is called Juvenile and it tells the story up close about how the criminal justice system across America is failing our children. Children who make mistakes. Children trapped in systemic racial injustice in America. Children who weren’t given legal representation in some cases. Children who couldn’t navigate a justice system that adults struggle to navigate, and spent their lives paying for it. Read more...

Does anyone embody the theme of my recent book more than Amy Nelson of The Riveter right now? 

Her journey to leave her cushy legal job started with maternal bias, where she got passed over for a promotion once she became a mother. And this week she has had a two amazing announcements: She is pregnant with her fourth child and she has raised a whopping, gigantic $20 million Series A.

Raising a $20 million Series A is a lot for any founder. It is a gigantic feat for a female-led company, with a first-time CEO…who is also pregnant. It’s monumental when you consider that Nelson is outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber and going up against the heavily funded WeWork/The Wing juggernaut. Just to add: VCs hate funding real estate plays. Read more...

Nearly two years ago, we were first talking about building Chairman Mom. We’d spent months talking to people about why they quit women’s and moms’ groups online, trying to deduce what made so many women’s communities go sideways.

Our belief—which most of the world still does not believe—is that the Internet doesn’t need to be toxic for women. That women don’t naturally one want tear one another down. That it was actually engineered into software in the earliest social networks, and we could engineer it out of software. (The hope of course is that we can also help engineer that out of society…) Read more...