The prewar building has all the charm and headache that comes with an older space. Quite the departure from the LA architecture I’d been working with for the past seven years. My Pinterest boards were overflowing and my Facebook Marketplace inbox had more action than my actual texts have seen in a while.

The table came first. A Room & Board frosted glass top dining table that leaned into a tech noir, chrome futurism aesthetic I didn’t know I was seeking until I arrived there. Then came the vintage Ethan Allen Radius chairs. I creamed. It was also the first time someone finessed me on a price — I didn’t care. I let Linda run it up and drove an hour to Virginia in a Uhaul to get them.

But all that metal started feeling more like a coworking space than somewhere Sargent and I would share meals, do homework, and hopefully sit with tea and do nothing.

The Fable Fringe Wool Rug changed that. Warm, durable, machine washable. (Yes they gifted it, but I’m writing this while rubbing my toes on the rug.) I’m obsessed with walking around barefoot on it. I put it down and the room finally exhaled.

If you’re furnishing a space, put the rug down first. I could barely move this dining table to get the mat and rug underneath it, but 30 minutes of wrestling was worth every second.

This is Cool Moms Come Home — a series about making a house a home, room by room, piece by piece. Looking forward to sharing more.

Starting over in your 30s is not for the weak. Starting over in your 30s back in your hometown is something else entirely.

When I moved to LA in 2019, I hopped on a red eye from New York with a couple of suitcases, a stroller, a car seat, and the intention of building a fruitful life for Sargent and me. I didn’t have an apartment. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t even have a license. What I did have was a deep, bone-level desire for peace — something that had eluded me in my child-free 20s in New York. The lure of endless summers, palm trees, S P A C E to create, and the seduction of slowness (in comparison to NY, that is). I had a few people I already knew in the city. Enough to make it feel manageable.

What I didn’t know was that I was about to build one of the most profound communities of my life.

My godsister Corey let Sargent and me crash on her sofa in her studio loft while I found my footing. Then I met Marquise, my first friend who was born and raised, a true LA native. The kind of friend who folds you into his family so completely that you’re at his mother’s house playing Uno and eating gumbo and suddenly the city doesn’t feel foreign anymore. Through Marquise came DaVohn and Raven, who felt like old friends from the very first meeting. DaVohn and I have a knowing — our big three are the same. D’Ara, my Scorpio sister, who I love to giggle and shop with and who makes me feel seen in the way only a certain kind of woman can.

And then there were the ones who became everything.

Domo, my sister from DC who knew exactly what it meant to build yourself from the ground up in a city that didn’t owe you anything. She always made me feel like home when we were both navigating what it meant to be new somewhere. Always encouraged me. Always saw me clearly.

Carmela, my soul sister, who nourishes every spirit she comes in contact with. Who reminds you to breathe. Who will look you dead in the eye and tell you water should be in a glass bottle, never plastic, and somehow that is also life advice.

Stephania, my east coast sister who found her way to LA the same way I did — with a child, a dream, and the nerve to start over somewhere new. Our sons became besties before we fully understood what we were building. That kind of friendship doesn't happen by accident. It happens when two women recognize something in each other without having to explain it.

And Elle. My best friend. Sargent’s godmother. His second mom. My platonic soulmate. So locked in that the people at his school know her better than they know me, which tells you everything you need to know about how present she has been in our lives. She has been a co-parent in the truest sense of the word.

How do you leave all of that behind?

And then there were all the hometown folks who had made their own way out to The Land. The ones who became my brothers, sisters - aunties and uncles to Sargent. We celebrated milestones and holidays and ordinary Tuesdays together. Deep philosophical conversations with one. Dirty memes at 2am with another. Business advice, grief support, the kind of love that is impossible to manufacture and profoundly difficult to leave.

I never took it for granted. Not for one day.

But I left anyway.

Making big girl decisions is not new to me. I started Cool Moms because I was terrified of losing myself in motherhood. This decision came from the same place, spiritually led, and ultimately about what was best for Sargent. Allowing him to grow up in an environment that felt reflective of him, his culture, his family. Allowing myself to come home.

The timing, as with most of my major life moves, was chaotic. I was in the thick of planning the first Cool Moms Feelings and Finance Retreat, preparing Sargent to go away for the summer with his dad, and simultaneously orchestrating a cross-country move.

That’s when the relief hit. I had help.

There’s something that doesn’t escape me about the contrast between how I arrived in LA and how I left. I came with two suitcases, a stroller, a car seat, and no plan. I left with a community of people who sent me off with love, and a moving company that handled every single thing. Roadway made the logistics of an emotionally impossible thing physically manageable. For an insanely high-functioning Type B founder and mom, the seamless process and partial packing weren’t just convenient — they were necessary. Knowing my things were handled meant I could actually feel what was happening instead of just surviving it. That’s not a small thing. That’s growth. That’s what it looks like when you finally have a little more control over your own life.

Less than two weeks later, everything arrived at my new front door in DC. Three flights of stairs, no complaints, partially unpacked. My stuff was there. I was there. It was starting to feel like something.

The going away party photos in this post were taken before any of it had really sunk in. I didn’t know yet how much I would miss them. I just knew I was loved. Sometimes that’s enough to move on.

I’m still finding my way back home. DC is familiar and foreign at the same time, the city of my birth that I have to learn how to live in all over again as the woman I’ve become. My LA people are still my people. That doesn’t change with distance.

But my stuff is here. My son will be here. And slowly, this is starting to feel like home.

This piece was created in partnership with Roadway Moving. If you’re planning a local move, use code coolmoms10 for 10% off local moves and 5% off long-distance moves rdwaymov.co/48VxSY1

The desert heat in Palm Springs was unreal.

It was the morning all of the guests were to arrive to the first annual Cool Moms: Feelings & Finance Retreat (more on that soon!), and my hotel room had become gifting headquarters. Large gifting bags were set up assembly line style while I meticulously matched robes to slippers, boots to bags. In those early hours before anyone had arrived, it was just me, a hotel trolley, and over 20 gifting bags to deliver to every deserving mother’s room. This was the part of the work we don’t see, the part I honestly hadn’t considered much until I was face to face with towering boxes filled with things I knew would make the weekend feel intentional.

The sweat was pooling down my back as I made my way to the first room drop. Hyper focused on completing every delivery before check in, it wasn’t until I began the first setup that I was stopped in my tracks. I literally screamed when I unwrapped the buttery yellow Aarti Robe. Cool Moms beautifully embroidered on the back. Perfectly plush. The sensation of being held before the weekend had even begun. It was the first moment I truly understood that my idea had come to life. Right there, on the back of an UGG robe, read Cool Moms. I got the chills until the Palm Springs heat quickly reminded me there was more work to do. I stacked the iconic Scuffette II slippers and the newly-released Classic Mini Deconstructed boots atop the bed and headed back out.

Guests arrived and raved about the beautiful moments that welcomed them into the weekend. We smiled, laughed, hugged and took selfies as each mother walked in. It felt like the start of summer camp, full of excitement, a few nerves, but mostly wonder. The kind of energy we spend most of our adult lives trying to get back to.

My anxiety hit a crescendo when it was time to sit down with the incomparable Ericka Hart, who took time from her national book tour to join us. We connected like old friends. The conversation helped set the tone for everything that followed.

This weekend was about deconstructing outdated ideas about ourselves, our bodies, our finances, our motherhood — breaking down concepts we’d inherited without ever being asked if we wanted them.

It felt only right that we were among the first to experience UGG’s Deconstructed Collection before it launched, styles that embody exactly that spirit: reimagined, lighter, and entirely our own.

Once the talk ended I felt my body relax. Wine and jazz amplified dinner and we all grew a little closer, a little more comfortable with one another.

The next morning one of the moms walked into breakfast like an absolute rockstar, sunglasses on, Aarti Robe draped perfectly.

The room cracked. We all giggled in the way we hope our children do, freely and without reason. That was the energy I wanted to sustain all weekend. The energy I wanted to permeate everything.

I almost felt guilty taking a break by the pool. Then I remembered guilt is useless and joined the other moms in the sun.

It felt like being a kid again only with spicy margaritas. Children spin. Children dance in the grass with their arms out for no reason. They don’t need a reason. Rolling around in our bathing suits, Classic Mini Deconstructed styles on our feet, I felt light and a sense of confident freedom in a way I hadn’t in a long time. Somewhere along the way we stop giving ourselves permission to feel that. This weekend in Palm Springs, on a lawn in the golden hour, we did it again.

Porsche Little read tarot and people walked out of that room laughing and crying in equal measure, robes wrapped tight like armor they hadn’t known they needed. There is something about being in your slippers when you finally tell the truth about money. The softness of it breaks the tension. We talked about our money stories, our shame, our hopes, all of it, in cozy slides and bare feet on cool floors. It turns out comfort is a precondition for honesty. Finance in robes. Tarot in robes. Both in the same weekend, because none of it is actually separate.

Planning the Cool Moms Feelings & Finance Retreat was a massive labor of love. So many things fell apart in the weeks leading up to it. Little fires everywhere. And somewhere in the middle of managing all of it I had to remind myself: the whole point was to build a room where mothers could stop performing. Where we could laugh and spin and ask the hard questions and leave with something real. The least I could do was let myself be in that room too.

What we took home wasn’t just the UGG styles, though yes, absolutely the slippers. It was the permission. The memory of spinning on a lawn. The understanding that comfort is not a reward for finishing everything.

It’s where we start.

UGG styles featured: The Aarti Robe, The Scuffette II, The Classic Mini Deconstructed, launching June 1.

A feeling I wouldn’t know again until driving my own car, bass on full, flying like a “bat out of hell” as a former fling so lovingly described it. (A first cigarette after two glasses of wine comes in a very close second, but that’s neither here nor there.)

The car has always been my reprieve. It’s where I take calls. Where I sit for another thirty minutes before going inside. Where, most valuably, I keep my adult boom box.(I’ve written about this before HERE) The vibration of the bass, the lyrics expressing things my own flood of emotions never quite could. Sometimes introspective. Sometimes silly. Sometimes I’m pushing weight from state to state. All versions of me get to live there, freely.

This isn’t a story about therapy. That’s for another day.

This is a story about music.

My relationship with sound is long and layered. A lifetime ago I was the founding music editor of Saint Heron, writing about the influence of Juvenile’s Ha, the complicated legacy and undeniable impact of Kim Burrell. An innate love that became something more studied, fueled by curiosity and a deep desire to know the story behind the story. Even preparing for birth, building a playlist was at the top of the list. I imagined myself in all white, light projected across the tall ceilings of my Fort Greene studio, Mama’s Gun ushering Sargent earthside. The music went out the window along with the birthing tub water when I needed an emergency C-section.

But this isn’t a birth story either.

I moved to LA the year Nipsey Hustle was killed. I remember crying in the kitchen of my Los Feliz apartment, the one with the checkerboard floors and yellow tile countertops. I was new to the city but I felt the loss in my chest. I sat that night listening through his discography, feeling motivated, ready to grind, doubling down on my pending success in preparation for my own victory lap.

I failed my first driving test. But once I passed and got my first real grown-up car, a Volvo C30 that Sargent lovingly named Monty, we were rarely without music. I was never a Kids Bop household. We played everything I grew up on, the new hits, the deep cuts, everything in between. Windows down, volume up, heads bobbing. In the car, we felt free.

I could sing at the top of my lungs, mess up the lyrics, make up my own. As Sargent grew older he started making requests. I loved that. I’d check the rearview mirror for a thumbs up or thumbs down, a rating system that at times felt more rigorous than a Pitchfork review. Azealia Banks’ 212 never got skipped. Neither did old Drake or Future. But then he’d hit me with a curveball like Laufey’s Falling Behind. That one never gets skipped either.

I found myself doing what only a millennial mother can: giving the full history lesson on a sample. The pipeline from Labi Siffre’s My Song to Kanye’s I Wonder. The lineage, the love, the overlap.

Eight years out of the womb and music is our connective tissue. The proverbial unseen umbilical cord that keeps us close, nourished, and endlessly curious about each other.

This is a story about how music has held me at every major and minor moment of my life, and how it now holds us. How it gives me an honest, unguarded path to knowing my kid.

Below is a playlist. Songs we love on the way to school, the grocery store, or that keep us locked in the car long after we’ve pulled up to the house. Press play and tell me yours.

No Kids Bop

1. Calvin Harris — How Deep Is Your Love

2. Mobb Deep — Shook Ones Pt. II

3. Mariah Carey — As Soon As I Get Home, Boy

4. Gorillaz — 19-2000

5. The Pharcyde — Passin’ Me By

6. Crystal Castles — Crimewave

7. Michael Jackson — Beat It

8. Azealia Banks — 212

9. Tupac Shakur — Hail Mary

10. Flight Facilities — Crave You (feat. Giselle)

11. Queen — Cool Cat

“It’s nothin’. It’ll be easy. You’ll be fine,” Sonny reassured me, loudly, as if we were the only two people riding the crosstown bus. Sonny was from Harlem, and her animated way of communicating with her arms gave it away before her uptown idioms caught up. Her smile was the biggest thing on her. Along with the joint I’d hit before leaving the house, it was the main reason I wasn’t wigging out.

I had been living in New York for two months and had run into some problems with the rent. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have it. Unemployed and restless, I called a good friend who put me back in contact with Sonny, because Sonny would know what to do. Sure enough, she told me to put on something nice and meet her by the bus in Union Square.

We were going to meet a guy. I looked over at Sonny’s thigh-high black leather boots and extra-tight American Apparel dress. I was wearing suede mary-janes and a floaty sundress, and I wondered if he’d be into it, then tried to distract myself with an empty water bottle I’d been fumbling with since the A train. Before I could fully take in what was about to happen, we were off the bus and walking toward the water. I searched through the bustling bodies trying to spot him. He’d be incognito, right? Baseball hat shoved low, wedding ring in his pocket? A trench coat? Across the street, a pair of pudgy arms waved eagerly, as if flagging down a helicopter. The arms were attached to a round, middle-aged, balding man. I sighed. Must be him. His size was at least a plus — short enough that I felt like we could take him if things went all SVU.

The hotel — or “inn,” or alternate universe — was the type of place that had rooms by the hour and vending machines offering condoms and peanuts. We made our way to the bar, which had about a five-person capacity and featured blue drinks served in blue glasses. Sonny excused herself to the bathroom. Peter, as he had been introduced, commenced with coarse small talk. I downed three gin and tonics in an attempt to lubricate my way through conversation while simultaneously trying to remember the story of how Sonny and I met, as concocted about eight minutes earlier: Oh, you know, Georgetown Law, blah blah, sip. When Sonny finally returned, we had another round, paid for the key, and went upstairs.

Peter unlocked the door to a room barely large enough for a queen-size bed, a flat screen TV, and a mirror on the ceiling. I slid myself into the space between the bed and the window and started talking to myself in my head. Just take off your clothes, I said. Once you take off your clothes you’re in it, and it won’t be a big deal. You’re an independent, liberated, at times salacious woman. You can do whatever the fuck you want. I pulled my sundress over my head and spun around on my tiptoes — a move that made my calves look firm and my ass tight — to find that Sonny was already naked. Peter was rambling on to no one in particular. He paused to say, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Angela Davis? Gosh, you two are just gorgeous. I really love black women.” I giggled. Of course you do, Peter.

Peter was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He was also going through a stiff divorce — one that had, by the way he talked about “that bitch” and “my money,” left him just a little bitter. He seemed to spend most of his time maintaining — not gaining — control in his personal life, perpetuating a false sense of power through the numbers in his bank account.

We were the transaction through which he could briefly feel both powerful and known. I had paid enough attention in my college gender studies courses to recognize it even then, barefoot on a scratchy carpet, trying not to laugh.

He sat awkwardly at the edge of the bed gawking at both of us while commenting on the never-ending G-20 summit coverage buzzing on the flat screen in the corner. The room held its breath. Sonny knelt down in front of him and carefully unbuckled his belt. She gently unzipped the zipper, then took off the pants. She fondled her way to his Fruit of the Looms. The white briefs came off, and suddenly — Sonny burst into total hysterical laughter. We laughed until we were clutching our invisible pearls, and then we laughed more. Peter’s mound of wiry salt-and-pepper pubes yielded the smallest penis I had ever seen in the flesh.

I turned to him after catching my breath. “I bet you could barely fuck your wife with that,” I said. Sonny came in with, “Isn’t that why she left you?” The penis trembled slightly, then stirred. We kept hurling insults. The more and the harder we insulted him, the harder his dick grew, because Peter, as you may have guessed, was kind of a slut for degradation. After only a few minutes, I felt things nearing a quick climax. Peter’s eyes were beginning to roll back. His mouth was open.

I positioned myself at the head of the bed. Remembering the best part of our small talk down at the bar, I placed my feet on each side of his head and took a slight squat. Then, looking up at my friend I hadn’t seen since college, I emptied every last gin and tonic directly into Peter’s mouth.

I’ve heard a lot of great one-night stand stories in New York City — taking home the taxi driver, even — but nothing, not even the most brain-splattering orgasm, could beat the satisfaction of getting paid to pee on that white guy’s head.

Not the word as metaphor — as actual fact. The idea that you can take something ordinary, something that exists only in your head, something you haven’t told anyone about yet because you’re not sure it’s real, and transmute it into a room full of people breaking bread at golden hour at The LINE Hotel in Los Angeles while Elaine Welteroth sits across from you and says the word “Oprah.”

That happened. To me. In real life. On film.

I want to tell you what it felt like to sit across from her, but first I have to tell you what it felt like to want to.

I was in New York when Elaine Welteroth became Editor-in-Chief of Teen Vogue. I was paying attention to culture the way you do when you’re in your twenties in that city and you believe, with your whole nervous system, that something important is always about to happen. And then it did. She was 29. She was the first. And I watched it the way you watch someone do a thing you didn’t know was possible — not with envy, but with a recalibration. A quiet internal adjustment. Oh. So that’s what’s available.

I didn’t know her. But I have been in conversation with her work for a decade.

So when she walked into the room on the evening of our season finale, and the room shifted the way rooms shift when a certain kind of person enters, I had to remind myself I was the host.

The evening was intimate by design. Fifteen women. Dinner. A show. An invitation from It’s Good — who understood from the beginning that the most powerful thing you can do for a community is seat them together and let something real happen.

What happened was this:

We talked about surrender. About the particular difficulty of being a driven, purposeful, arrow-shooting Sagittarius woman — her words, with great enthusiasm — who has to learn, over and over again, how to be still. How to wait for direction instead of manufacturing momentum.

She described the season before every major pivot of her career as one of terror. Of going quiet. Of stopping the parties and the socializing and sitting with the question: what did God put me here to do? And then listening. Actually listening. Not for the answer that made sense on paper, but for the one that arrived with conviction.

“God’s voice doesn’t confuse you,” she said. “If you’re confused, that’s probably not God.”

The room got very still.

She talked about her birth. About finding Black midwives. About having an experience so transcendent, so confronting with her own power, that she emerged from it with what she called downloads. Initiations. A sense of herself as something ancient and capable and not done.

She said she’s a warrior who is learning how to lay her weapons down.

I said I understood that completely.

We talked about motherhood as a master class in tenderness. About how the very things that made us successful — the drive, the intensity, the forward motion — are not always the things that make us good mothers. About how the universe keeps asking us to soften, and how softening is not the same as shrinking. About how she melts in the presence of her children in ways she could not have predicted and does not fully understand and loves completely.

I told the room I don’t carry a lot of mom guilt.

She did not flinch. She understood exactly what I meant.

I am still not fully okay about it.

Here is what I want you to know about this evening, and about this season, and about why it ends here:

I built Cool Moms because I was the first of my friends to become a mother and I needed the wisdom of women I admired. I didn’t know that eight years later I would be seated across from one of them, at a dinner I produced, in a room of women I chose carefully, talking about the things that actually matter. Purpose. Pivot. Tenderness. Faith. The alchemy of turning an idea into a room.

Elaine Welteroth gave this evening everything. Not as a celebrity doing a favor. As a woman who believes in what happens when you gather the right people and let them be honest with each other. She stayed. She ate. She talked to every person who wanted to talk to her. She is exactly as warm in person as you hope she is, and she is also funnier, and she is also doing the work, quietly and persistently, on the parts of herself that don’t make the highlight reel.

That’s the thing about sitting across from someone in real life. You stop seeing the resume and you start seeing the person. What I saw was a woman who is in her becoming — not arrived, but deeply, intentionally, joyfully in motion.

I am grateful she let us witness some of it.

This is the season finale. The conversation is long because it had to be. Watch it with dinner. Watch it in pieces. Watch the moment she talks about Ava DuVernay’s couch and tell me you don’t feel something shift inside you.

Thank you to It’s Good for making this evening possible, and for understanding that good food and good conversation are not separate things — they are the same offering.

Thank you to every Cool Mom who has shown up this season. In Los Angeles, in DC, in cities I haven’t gotten to yet.

I’m coming.

Not like a regular mom.

xx Elise

Cool Moms LIVE with Dr. Wendy Osefo is out now!

I need to tell you about the day before this episode dropped, because it almost didn’t feel like it was going to happen at all.

My order from SSENSE hadn’t arrived. My hair wasn’t cooperating. I was at a new venue without my usual crew, which meant sound issues, lighting issues, and me quietly spiraling in a way I hope didn’t show on camera. I had put so much into getting home — to DC, my actual hometown — to bring Cool Moms LIVE to the people who knew me before any of this existed. My sister was there. My aunt was there. People who have watched me build this thing from the beginning were finally in the room.

And I was standing there holding it all together with a prayer and a flat iron.

I’m telling you this because I want you to watch this episode knowing: the production quality is different. The soul is not.

Dr. Wendy Osefo is taller than you think.

I say this as someone who has watched every season of Real Housewives of Potomac with the kind of devotion usually reserved for religion. She walked into Shanklin Hall and I had to remind myself to be a professional. She is warm in the way that genuinely confident people are warm — not performing it, just extending it. Gracious with every person in the room. Never once short on words or wisdom.

She had come straight off filming a new season. I was gagging.

What I didn’t expect was how much she would give. This wasn’t a celebrity doing a favor. This was a woman who showed up fully, to a podcast, in her hometown audience’s city, for a community of mothers she had never met, and just gave.

On finding your voice:

At one point I asked her when she knew her voice was her gift. Her answer was honest in the way that reframes the question entirely.

She said she’s still finding it. That what’s changed is she’s stopped making excuses for it. Stopped dimming it so other people wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. Someone told her once: if someone feels inferior because of your light, that has nothing to do with you. She said that changed her life.

I believe her.

She talked about being a disruptor — about walking into a company culture and asking why lunch is only ten minutes. About how that kind of disruption makes people uncomfortable not because you’re wrong, but because you’re making them ask questions about themselves they weren’t ready to answer. She said she’s made peace with the fact that some people will never like her.

“My existence irritates their spirit. And I’m okay with that.”

The room erupted. Rightfully.

On motherhood and mom guilt:

One of the audience members asked about mom guilt — specifically, how do you let it go when you’re putting yourself first? And Wendy was honest: she hasn’t conquered it. She still has it. She probably always will.

But then I pushed a little. Because I’ve been sitting with something lately.

I told the room that I don’t carry a lot of mom guilt. And I meant it, not as a flex, but as something I’ve genuinely had to work through. When you co-parent, when you’ve had to humble yourself and accept that you cannot be everything, you start to understand that your child’s world is bigger than you. That the aunties, the grandparents, the village — they’re not filling in for your absence. They’re expanding what’s possible for him.

And sometimes I’ll say it: I think mom guilt is ego. The belief that we are so essential, so central, that our children can’t thrive without our constant presence. Sargent has an entire identity outside of me. It is my job to guide him to it, not hover over it.

Wendy looked at me and said: you should write a book about that.

She didn’t have to say that. She said it because she meant it. And I won’t forget it.

What I want you to know about Wendy now:

A year has passed since we filmed this. Things look different for both of us. And I won’t pretend I don’t know what she’s navigating publicly right now, because I do, and because meeting someone in person changes everything.

She is not a character. She is someone’s mother, wife, daughter, friend. She is a woman who woke up at 5 AM the morning of this event to do Pilates and meditate before showing up fully for a room full of strangers. She is a professor who has never failed a student because she believes that just showing up in this world already earns you something.

I wish her and her family the very best outcome. Deeply, genuinely, because I sat across from her and watched her be a whole, full person who gives more than she takes. That’s rare. That matters.

This episode is for the DC girls.

For my sister who was in the front row. For my aunt who finally got to see what I’ve been building. For every Cool Mom who has shown up for this community in cities I haven’t made it to yet — I’m coming!

And for everyone who has ever held something together with a prayer and a flat iron and done it anyway: the soul was always there.

“Many of us don’t have relationships with mothers. So we have to look for mothers in other places.”

Once the room settles you’ll hear what I’ve been sitting with all week: mothering is bigger than biology. Sometimes it’s your mother. Sometimes it’s the women you call when you’re unraveling. Sometimes it’s the community that reflects you back to yourself when your own home mirror can’t.

This conversation is a love letter to that kind of mothering — and a reminder that repair is a practice, not a personality trait.

We’re joined by actor, producer, and all-around multi-hyphenate Tika Sumpter a Queens-born New Yorker who’s been building a decades-long career across TV and film, from her early hosting days to roles on One Life to Live, The Haves and the Have Nots, Mixed-ish, and her unforgettable portrayal of a young Michelle Obama in Southside with You. She’s also Maddie Wachowski in the Sonic the Hedgehog films which is exactly why my son Sargent suddenly developed perfect posture the moment he realized who was in the room.

Tika showed up warm, grounded, and funny as hell AND she brought her mother with her. That kind of generosity is its own flex. Her newest chapter is deeply aligned with what we talk about at Cool Moms all the time: giving kids language, giving kids agency, and giving ourselves permission to apologize.

Her debut children’s book, I Got It From My Mama, centers on what kids absorb from us and what happens when we model repair. And if you’re trying to reduce screen time without turning into the Screen Time Police, she’s also building a whole audio world for kids through her podcast Adventures of Curiosity Cove, anchored by stories like “Ella the Curious.”

“Apology does not take power away from you. You’re giving your child a power they’ll thank you for later.”

This episode is about truth without fluff, motherhood without perfection, and becoming someone your child (and your people) can consistently return to even when you’re being held accountable by a small person with big opinions.

I have been in the gym.

Initially, vanity propelled me into a plank.
Adjusting to the new dips and curves of my body as she steadies toward 40.

What a trip.
What a blessing.

Back to the barbells.

I joined a gym nestled in the suburbs so I could try and fail in peace. The gym isn’t fancy, but it isn’t cheap either — respectably in the middle, with a few luxuries like a sauna and those massage chairs you find in the middle of the mall.

Each week, after school drop-off but before calls, I venture into new corners of the floor clad in a big t-shirt, tight leggings, and toe shoes, because I have not yet been brainwashed enough to buy a matching anything. I can barely find a sports bra.

I create and accept small challenges: try a new machine, attempt a new circuit saved in my “workouts” folder on TikTok.

One week I worked up the nerve to ask the incredibly bald and buff guy wearing locs to show me how to adjust the leg press.

Anxiety did not win that day.

I had a tryst with the StairMaster.
Got very hot and heavy with the free weights.
Learned how to commit to the row machine.

Then I found the green.
The faux grass. (AstroTurf?)

The turf became the place that comforted me in my moments of unease.

Spraying down my mat with disinfectant, I’d find just the right spot — close enough to the mirror so I could see if my ass looked any fatter after squat reps.

It always did.

Here, on the turf, I could push myself to lift heavier, longer, so I could walk away feeling lighter.

Farmer’s carries carried me through really hard days.
I upped my reps and my weights on gorilla rows — the move that let me live deep in my masculine.

I loved.

It happened.

I began to love the gym.

The locker room proved to be a different kind of refuge.

A place that holds small rituals.

Picking the same locker.
Settling into the same mirror.
Checking my hair.
My calves.
My sanity.

I navigate the locker room the same way I move through my home.

Slow.
Unarmored.
Familiar.

The comfort of generationally femme energy surrounds me.

Growing up with a naked mom, I’m no stranger to an enviably large bush or the sway of a grown woman’s body.

Now, my own.

I watch as women — like superheroes — transform from spandex into red lipstick and trench coats. Preparing new armor for whatever awaits beyond those locker room walls.

Bare toes.
Bare buns.
Bare bellies.
Steam.
Mirrors.

What I’m witnessing is not a study of appearance, but of perception.

Of what it means to be “free” when you are constantly being watched.

Of what it means to stand in front of a mirror and question what you see and who it really belongs to.

Some women arrive with ease.
Others with apprehension.

All of us in flux.

Beneath the surface of confidence or curated appearance, the locker room holds modern echoes of ancient tensions — with the female body as a site of power, beauty, labor, exposure, control, and politics.

And somehow…

An untenable relationship with shame becomes impossible here.

Not because shame doesn’t exist.

But because it cannot survive collective witnessing.

The more weeks that pass, the less clothing I wear in the locker room.

Not for anyone else.

For me.

Liberation.

This is my love letter to the women’s locker room.

Subscribe now

Press play below for Changing Room, directed by Turkina — a visual meditation on bodies in flux.

Last year, in a room full of women at The Line Hotel in Los Angeles, I sat across from someone I’ve quietly admired for a very long time.

Long before panels and podcasts and personal brands, I knew Jeannie Mai as the woman on How Do I Look? warm, funny, stylish, and somehow always talking to women instead of at them. She felt like the cool older cousin who told you the truth, fixed your eyeliner, and sent you back out into the world a little braver.

So when she joined us in front of a live audience mothers, aunties, women in various stages of figuring it out the energy shifted immediately. Not performative. Not polished. Just present.

What unfolded was not a keynote or a highlight reel. It was a conversation. The kind that moves between laughter, side comments, and moments that sneak up on you when you are not trying to be profound.

We talked about dating including my poorly timed decision to go on a date with a white man on Day 1 of Black History Month. We talked about why our nervous systems cling to what is familiar even when it is not serving us. We talked about cringe moments being proof that you actually tried. About changing your mind out loud and letting your past selves exist without dragging them.

The nervous system will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.

Jeannie spoke with a kind of honesty that did not rush toward a takeaway. She talked about healing in pieces. About motherhood reintroducing her to herself. About raising a child with emotional regulation and unapologetic confidence in a world that will absolutely try to humble you early.

And then she would say something that cracked the room open and follow it with a laugh that reminded you this was not therapy. This was life.

Then we opened it up to the room.

This is our Ask A Cool Mom segment where the audience gets to ask the questions they are actually carrying. Not dressed up. Not theoretical. The kind that come from living a little and still wanting clarity.

How do you know if a decision is coming from a healed place or a hurt place

Ask A Cool Mom turned the conversation communal. Aunties. Mothers. Women brave enough to ask without over explaining. Less interview. More collective exhale.

There were moments that felt tender. Others that felt messy. A few that felt like inside jokes you did not realize you needed. That is the thing about being in a room like that you are not consuming content. You are witnessing something.

This episode was recorded last year but watching it now it still feels exactly on time. Because these are the questions we keep circling back to. About identity. About choice. About how we stay soft without losing ourselves and how sometimes staying soft looks like laughing at your own bad decisions.

This video lives here on Substack exclusively for subscribers because it deserves space. Because it deserves to be watched without multitasking. Because some conversations want your full attention and maybe a glass of wine.

Press play.
Pull up a chair.
Welcome to Cool Moms!

With Jeannie Mai, Tika Sumpter, Wendy Osefo, and Elaine Welteroth, the conversations move between laughter, honesty, side comments, and the kinds of questions you don’t always see coming. Motherhood, ambition, identity, relationships, reinvention. All of it, on the table.

There’s no playbook here. No perfect takeaway. Just smart, funny, honest women talking it through in real time.

Watch the trailer and stay tuned for more…soon!
Not like a regular season. A cool one.

xoxo Elise

I was in labor for three days with Sargent.
I wore white. Took it off. Squatted. Bathed. Bounced. Contorted.
I shit myself, outside, and kept going.

This isn’t a birth story, though.
It’s a reminder that labor doesn’t end. It evolves.

Eight years later, the labor looks different.
It looks like texts across time zones. Flights booked. Aunties rearranging schedules. My mother touching down like clockwork. My sister sliding into place. His dad. Our people.

This January 15th, Sargent turned eight.
And somehow, without formal rehearsal, the village assembled.

Los Angeles did her part: 75 degrees, sunshine, a park dressed in palms. We brought a bouncy house, custom soccer merch, noticed immediately by the adults, briefly by the kids, then discarded so they could run faster, stickier, freer. It wasn’t extra. It was intentional.

This is the labor I want to talk about.
Not the invisible kind we resent.
But the coordinated kind we choose.

Motherhood, at its best, is world-building.
It’s logistics as love.
It’s saying: this moment matters, so I will arrange reality accordingly.

Eight years in, I know this much:
No one does this alone.
And if you’re lucky, the labor is shared
standing, sitting, squatting
right beside you.

Happy birthday, Sargent.
You are held. Always.

There was just enough salt to cover the bottom of my glass with kosher crystals. Turning on equal parts hot and cold water, I swirled the liquid around with enough vigor to watch as the warm water dissolved the salt into a foggy solution. I dipped my finger in and tasted the salty potion. The cut on the inside of my lip began to burn a little. I threw my head back and swished around what was left in the glass. The burn coming from my swollen lip intensified. Grimacing, I spit it out and watched the now pink water fill up to the porcelain crack in the sink. The building was pre-war, which war I’m not sure, but we were excited to be moving in together.

Shake had just come back from a nine-month, post graduation trip touring France and his father’s hometown of Dakar, Senegal. I remember trying to stay busy when he left: conducting countless research projects on the different places he would be, anticipating stories of the breathtaking architecture of Notre Dame, the inherent romance that I dreamed wafted through the Paris streets, and the solace he would find in finally being home in Senegal, in Africa.

I, now home and resentfully alone in DC, found solace at the end of a spliff. He’d only been back a few months by the time I was kicking him out of our place with intentions on an end that was doubtful. We’d never been apart longer than a few hours since we’d first started dating a year prior. I worried about the separation.

I worried about how I would support my smoking habit. Daily, I reveled in the warmth that only occurs at the end of a joint. I buzzed in anticipation of rolling up. It made the solitude palatable. Shake doubled as my dealer. Without him, I was left to the arduous task of finding someone reliable, who would deliver, and hopefully throw a little extra in the bag.

I examined the inside of my mouth. Leaning into the mirror, I could still see the brown stains that dappled the inside of my bottom row. Most of the damage had been done thanks to the twelve backwoods we would roll and smoke daily that first lusty summer together. My dentist was annoyed. He thought my teeth were perfect aside from the stains.

The right side of my bottom lip hung heavy, cut, and swollen. Gravity was not forgiving and neither was the vanity mirror. I looked at the blushing water stagnant in the sink, then at my lip, and back in the sink. The waters of Lake Retba in Senegal are a luminous hue of pink. The salt content in the lake is oddly high and with a marriage of the sun and special algae, the combination turns the water to a rich shade of strawberry milk. “Lac Rose”, as the locals so fondly refer to it, is so buoyant its patrons float in the water with ease. If I wanted to float, I was going to have to roll one. I pulled the stopper up and watched the pink water swirl down the drain, re-exposing the crack in the porcelain.

I sat in the only chair left in the apartment. A vintage mahogany chair with mustard velvet upholstery he had found on the side of the street and carried home. The weed made my lip itchy. The swelling made it tricky to roll. I didn’t mind.
Limp, languid, and disengaged, I sunk deeper into the chair and watched as the thick clouds seeped out of my mouth and wafted through the empty apartment.

Neither was the joint, but it made me numb. I smoked, masturbated and waited for something to happen.

“Bitch, it’ll get done. It always gets done.”

I’ve been trying to have this conversation with Ilana Glazer for a long time — not the fictional Ilana Wexler, but the real Ilana: the mother, the artist, the Aries who refuses to learn the astrological big three but instead finds faith, the human who can move between chaos and clarity in a single sentence. When we finally sat down together in the daylight at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, something in the room unlocked. It felt exactly like the best afternoon conversations do: a little chaotic, a little holy, very funny, and surprisingly honest.

We talked about motherhood and identity, the slow deepening of faith, the spiritual ickiness of hope, and the strange pressure of being an “elder millennial” trying to hold it all together. We asked whether it’s PMS, perimenopause, paranoia, or just the culture collapsing. Ilana opened up about the early days of Broad City, what still drives them creatively, and how they are learning to parent, partner, and participate in the world with more intention.

There were jokes about astrology, questions about race and belonging, confessions about corporate alter egos, and the kind of soft power only another mother in the room can recognize. And the audience brought their own fire — naming the parts of motherhood that feel isolating, liberating, or both at the same time.

The conversation ended the way all truly good Cool Moms moments do: with a hug, a knowing smile, and the reminder that everyone in the room is just doing their best to live, evolve, and take themselves seriously in a world that rarely makes space for it.

Ilana Glazer is not Ilana Wexler — the reality is sharper, funnier, and far more compelling. And in this episode, all of that comes through

.— Elise

Photography by Jamie Pearl

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I didn’t know many mothers - certainly not Black mothers, and even fewer who moved through the art world with the kind of conviction that Dominique Clayton does. The mother of three felt like a new person who’d been waiting for me - familiar, deeply generous, and delightfully untamed in her way of moving through the world. She introduced me to Barnsdall Art Park (naturally) and has since become both a champion of my own (sometimes latent) creative practice and a steadfast advocate for Black women, Black mothers, and Black art. LA born and raised, Dominique opened her eponymous gallery in West Adams in 2015 with a focus on diversity and Black representation, later expanding it into a hybrid digital and project-based space that reflects the layered nature of her work. Her latest exhibition, Giving You the Best That I Got, presented at Art + Practice in partnership with the California African American Museum, gathers artists including Shaniqua Jarvis, Derrick Adams, Calida Rawles, and Carrie Mae Weems to honor the beauty and complexity of Black motherhood. Through images and narratives that span pregnancy to the forever-journey of what it means to mother, the show reframes care, nostalgia, and cultural inheritance as acts of resistance and reverence.

Giving You the Best That I Got honors the beauty and complexity of Black motherhood. When you first began curating this show, what emotional or intellectual labor did it demand from you as both a curator and a mother?

I began work on this show back in 2024. The CAAM museum director and I were in talks for a couple of projects, and I expressed how important this topic is to me and how it hasn’t really been done. Once I got a green light I started connecting the dots and dreaming big. That’s the fun part, but then LA fires happened, schedules, plans and priorities shifted. I was thrown into mothering, recovering, rebuilding and also checking in with all the artists I work with. That’s the emotional labor of being an arts worker. I’m always checking in or responding and sometimes putting out fires (literally and figuratively). It never ends.

Making sure other people see and feel what I do. That’s the eternal struggle of being artists and a Black woman.

How do you hold space for the duality of labor in your life: the creative, intellectual, and physical work of curating alongside the invisible, emotional labor of motherhood? This can be pragmatic or idealistic.

There’s no rhyme or reason. I just make it work . No two days or nights are alike. I’m grateful that I started my family relatively young. I married at 27 and had my first kid at 28, followed by another at 30, and my last one at 32. Starting younger when I was more flexible in my life and career set the foundation for me to be able to easily shift and pivot between roles, projects, locations, homes, and more. My kids are “art kids”. Their father is an artist (sculptor), and I’ve always worked in the arts or entertainment industry. It’s all my family knows. When I first opened by gallery I was 8 months pregnant. After she was born, I spent the days in the space with a newborn. She slept on the floor or in her stroller and I’d breastfeed and sit by the window ready to put her down if I saw anyone approaching. I recall with my other two kids taking off temp jobs in between projects that were by no means mom friendly and having to pump milk in bathroom stalls and essentially hide the fact that I’m a mother.

In what ways does curating feel like an act of mothering - of nurturing ideas, artists, or communities into being?

Artists are children stuck in adult bodies. I saw that with all due respect to children, lol! But seriously, both roles require mind, body, and soul synergy to nurture, inspire and grow.

The show’s partnership with CAAM and Art + Practice situates it within a larger institutional framework. How did that shape your approach to centering such personal, intimate subject matter?

That’s the platform I always intended for a show concept like this. Women and children need to take up as much space as possible. My original vision was for a show with 30-40 artists but I had to reduce it because of size constraints. I’m not shy about inserting myself and ideas into any space. Institutions aren’t used to this and in some ways not equipped to handle this type of subject matter without someone with direct experience in art and motherhood. I’m changing that.

Do you see your curatorial work as part of a larger maternal lineage? (One that includes artists, organizers, or everyday women who’ve modeled creation under constraint?)

Everything I do is part of that matrilineal lineage. I come from a long line of strong feisty women and I’m raising the next batch. We’re here to break glass ceilings, knock down walls, and build our own tables to have our own seats.

Was there a moment during the making of this exhibition that felt like a reclamation of time, space, or self?

When I first saw the wall treatments and graphic design and was told there were going to be street banners, that’s when I felt that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. As an LA Native, to see a part of yourself or your vision around the streets of LA, it’s so deeply special.

We often talk about labor in creative work, but not always about compensation both financial and emotional. What does fair recognition look like for women who labor in the art world while mothering?

I’m still looking for that. I’ve never been paid what I’m worth or in relation to the work I’ve done. I’ve taken pay cuts and compromised on budgets just so I can maintain the opportunity. But in no way is it what I actually deserve. I’m raising three kids and literally changing the landscape of contemporary art. Add another zero to my paycheck please.

What do you hope your children, or the next generation of curators and artists, take away from seeing this show or from seeing you create it?

I want folks to stop and have a moment of reflection, respect, and reverence when they see Black women and their kids. I want you to take your hat off to women who have to show up to work, to relationships, and to life with a history of matrilineal trauma and medical negligence, economic disparities and other social and personal forms of abuse. Black women are probably the best actresses on the planet. We wear our pain well, but I wish we didn’t have to. I want the world to soften up for us. Give us a maternal hug.

Anything else you’d like to share?

My gratitude to the creator for the lives and health of my children.

On Rituals:

• Morning ritual before you start working? Begging for more minutes and snoozing alarm. Then jumping into action. No time for rituals now.

• A piece of art or music that grounds you right now? Amel Larrieux’s voice grounds me and also dirty hardcore LA rap i.e. Blue Bucks Clan. And my favorite piece of art is “eXelento” by Ellen Gallagher which you can see at The Broad anytime. I used to stare at it daily when I worked there.

• Favorite L.A. space to feel quiet or inspired? Larchmont

• Something motherhood taught you about art or art taught you about motherhood? Imperfections are sexy.

• Who are you giving “the best that you got” to these days? To myself. I lost a bit of myself after having kids back to back. I just re-encountered the old Dominique and I forgot how fly she is. I’m enjoying dating myself and nurturing my quirky wild self. I’m relieved to know I didn’t lose it.

I got the news about Diane Keaton and felt a thud in my chest - not just for the films, but for the permission she gave so many of us to opt out of scripts that were never ours. Keaton died at 79 on October 11, 2025, and the tributes called her what she always was: singular, fully herself

I keep replaying Baby Boom. The film opens with Linda Ellerbee’s voice telling us that “fifty-three percent of the American workforce is female,” a line that lands like a bell. It isn’t just data; it’s a pivot point - a reminder that modern womanhood is a moving target, not a verdict.

When I call my grandmother to share good news about Cool Moms (another live program, more women gathering around their passions) she pivots, lovingly, to her prayer that I’ll “meet someone.” I feel my angsty teenage shoulders rise. I hear the cautionary tales: forty, fifty, sixty - beware the loneliness. The boogeyman waits in the empty house, they say, indifferent to achievements, friendships, community. It’s told with care. It still lands like a warning label.

Baby Boom is that warning made cinematic. Diane’s J.C. tries to keep the city suit on while juggling a diaper - refusing, at first, to change the costume even as the plot changes her life. Her boyfriend reads the moment and offers an “out clause.” The baby sits literally between them at the table, a tiny wedge of truth: something is already over. She stays; he leaves. It’s funny and brutal, like most honest transitions.

(Also: produced and co-written by Nancy Meyers, whose genius was making women’s interior lives look like headline news.)

I didn’t chart a path identical to Diane’s on or off the screen, but parts rhyme.

The relief of not having to bend my home around someone else’s unspoken rules, of merging only with the highest version of myself. I’m a lover girl; I love partnership in theory. As a mother, I’m cautious about what “having it all” costs in practice, because I’ve watched the small concessions accumulate-so often by women-until a life is quietly re-authored by compromise.

Keaton’s own life threw me a rope when I needed it. She never married. In her 50s, she chose motherhood, adopting a daughter in 1996 and a son in 2001. “Motherhood has completely changed me,” she later said. “It’s just about the most completely humbling experience I’ve ever had.” There’s something liberating about the fact that her timeline was her own. Choice didn’t end with the decision to have children; it kept unfurling.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is tone - how to inhabit your life with both seriousness and play. Bette Midler’s tribute caught that exact temperature: Keaton was “hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile.” That’s what I want in my motherhood and my work: originality without armor, sincerity without apology.

When I ask myself W.W.D.D., it’s less about copy-pasting her choices and more about her posture toward choice. In Baby Boom, J.C. steps off the escalator just long enough to hear herself think and then she builds something that fits her. In life, Diane kept building - films, houses, books, a family on her terms. I hear people ask if women can “have it all.” Maybe the better question is: can we have what we actually want, and in what order? Can the answer change over time? (Yes. And yes.)

My grandmother’s fear is love wearing a superstition. I can hold that and still say: I’m content. Not every day, not without doubt but content in the direction of my life. Content in the city apartment that looks like me. Content in the kitchen where I once cried while texting my son’s dad about guilt and two-parent households and then laughed at myself for blowing my nose over the sink. Content because I am choosing, not obeying.

And still, I keep an eye on the loneliness myth. Not to deny it, but to right-size it. The loneliest women I know are not the ones without partners; they’re the ones who outsourced their choosing for too long. The cure isn’t a ring; it’s a life that echoes who you are. As Diane showed, that echo can arrive at 25 or 55; it can come via a script, a farmhouse, a child, a book, a hat with a tie. It can be funny. It can be deadly serious. Often it’s both.

So this is my prayer back to my grandmother, and to any modern mother reading: Choice doesn’t stop at the womb. We get to keep choosing - work and love, solitude and ceremony, cash flow and Bluey, the apartment, the farmhouse, the townhome, this season’s quiet, next season’s roar. We can decide to be fearless for an hour a day and see what expands. We can measure success not in snapshots of engagement but in the fit of our days.

Diane’s passing is a loss, yes. But also a nudge. If you’ve been waiting to live like yourself, consider this your permission slip. Ask W.W.D.D., then ask W.W.Y.D. (What Would You Do?) And then, do that.

“Fifty-three percent of the American workforce is female,” the movie told us in 1987. It’s more complicated now - different jobs, different pressures, different freedoms - but the assignment remains: write your own story. And if anyone wonders how you dared, point to those who did it first.

If you’ve ever Googled “what do lesbians actually do?” in a moment of panic, this one’s for you. Reading back on this piece, I see a younger me fumbling through suburbia, Howard dorms, and Judith Butler footnotes just to land on the very obvious truth: gender is theater, and sex is improv. Two decades later, I’m a mother, a founder, a Scorpio with bad (I’m working on it!) boundaries and good stories, and I can confirm that the roles haven’t disappeared — they’ve just changed costumes. We’re still playing house - juggling therapist’s sliding scale invoices with bills on auto-pay, swiping through Zillow like its Hinge, and working up the nerve to follow through on play dates. The script for modern womanhood reads something like: be soft but not weak, ambitious but not greedy, maternal but never tired oh and SELF CARE! And so we keep role-playing, toggling between “breadwinner,” “caretaker,” “sex symbol,” “taxpayer” — costumes still slightly ill-fitting, but at least now we know they’re costumes.

I went to college because:

a) that’s what you’re supposed to do after high school

b) I wanted to hook up with a girl.

In the insular world of my early-00s suburbia, being gay or gay-ish was totally not on trend, and “bisexual” just meant you were a slut. At 16 you got a boyfriend and a car, drove past cow fields blasting “Holla Back Girl,” and made pit stops at the Waffle House so you and all the other kewl kids could tote leftovers to first period the next day.

This is because in Grayson, GA, there are a lot of white folks: The kind that sport Lilly Pulitzer and pearls while giving oral and nothing but. Good girls save “all the way” for their husbands or prom dates, whichever comes first.

When I was around, most of the above applied to Black people who lived there too.

High school was role-play: a make-believe scenario not to be taken too seriously but still requiring one to fulfill the foreordained expectations of others — even if those expectations were the antithesis of one’s true self. Oh, and sometimes it required a schoolgirl uniform.

Enter Julie

Somewhere around my junior year, a new girl enrolled who fulfilled teen fantasies of post-pubescent Lil’ Romeo. Her crisp cornrows and basketball physique had straight girls questioning their sexuality — in whispered conversations, of course. She piqued my tender curiosity too, but not so much that I was willing to try on the Scarlet S.

I was a cheerleader! In a small-ish town, you don’t need to be Lindsay Lohan for everyone to recite your fuck list. So I vowed I would dive into the depths of lady-on-lady love at a later date, in a place far, far away from teen shame — a place like Washington, D.C.

The summer rounding out my first year at Howard, I had only been able to go as far as first base with a woman.

I’d long since hung up my pom-poms for poom pooms, visited a few gay clubs — packed with day-straight men — pierced my lip, and even bought a few rainbow-clad accoutrements. Like trying to find the g-spot, I knew I was close but couldn’t quite reach it. Wet with anticipation, I was so damn ready.

Luckily, there was an untapped resource I’d been chipping away at the entire year. By chipping away, I mean eye-fucking her through the aisles of plastic bamboo earrings at Up Against The Wall, making sure to look away the moment before our pupils could flirt.

Let’s call her Julie. Aesthetically, Julie was a mix between Snoop from The Wire and Queen Latifah the first time she came out in Set It Off. She sported a faux-hawk and True Religion jeans like it was her religion. I was smitten.

The Sidekick, The Dorm, The First Time

The summer waned on; I got a job tutoring, and started squatting in a recent friend’s dorm. I had low, low grades and a lot of penis-regret. Nothing had gone according to plan… until T-Mobile announced a change in my fortunes.

Remember the Sidekick? After months of working my butt off to snag one from the kiosk at the mall, I walked in to find that my friendly, welcoming, eager-to-please sales rep was Julie.

She left her number, you know, in case I needed any help troubleshooting. Fifteen minutes later, I did. The next day because lesbian time moves faster than mere mortals — we were hand in hand, in the park, divulging secrets and sharing stories with newness enthusiasm.

By night, after giving my BFF the play-by-play, Julie who lived on the 4th floor of the same building — invited me to come back to her room.

I felt excited and clueless. Do I shave completely for better visibility? Leave a love patch for traction? Embrace my ‘60s sensibility and, with it, the bush? Who starts? Who’s the guy? Are strap-ons standard? What if our scissors don’t fit? Dear God I have a short tongue!

Like any young, resourceful woman of the new millennium, I turned to Google. Search: lesbian porn. Erase. Search: black lesbian porn. After a few scenes of phallocentric, high-gloss, baby-oiled “Ebony Babes,” I closed the laptop and let my naïve confidence lead.

Julie answered the door in a towel. Dead ass, I could have fainted. Under her baggy denim and oversized shirts, she had the softest, supplest, most curvaceous body I’d ever seen. At least D-cups.

When I woke up the next morning, still floating on my euphoric flying carpet of muff, I texted her to say it had been my first time. Her only unruffled response: “Ah man, I’m always somebody’s first.”

— Yal, I am still cringing thinking about this moment! —-

My summer tryst with Julie propelled me into a three-month performative relationship, with gender being the framework. Because in all reality, “Gender is not something that one is,” recalling Judith Butler, “it is something that one does, an act…a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being.’”

Roles liberated by the absence of penis, we happily oscillated between dominant and submissive, top and bottom, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’.

The Bank

Years later, still living in D.C., I went to open a new bank account.

The banker was Julie. Her hips were wider, but she still had a faux-hawk, and she was wearing one of those horrific royal blue dress shirts from Burlington Coat Factory with slacks and a tie.

We survived the awkwardness the same way we survived our fling — me playing nice and her playing it cool.

Read more

I’ve been hiding—emotionally constipated and in desperate need of reprieve. Summer couldn’t have come soon enough. I’d clogged my schedule with outings, end-of-year school activities, and all the behind-the-scenes that comes with keeping Cool Moms moving forward. I’d just been laid off from an incredibly toxic job and my son was preparing to leave for the entire summer with his dad. I was wrestling with what I wanted, what I needed, and how I actually felt. Most days, I’d doomscroll my way through the morning, mentally bookmarking all the things I’d get to… eventually.

Jolted by the sun and my own guilt, I felt like I should be doing something—especially with Sargent—before he flew off for the season. But I didn’t expect my holy water to come packaged as slime at an all-inclusive, kid-friendly resort in Punta Cana. Yes. You read that right: all-inclusive, kid-friendly, and reprieve—all in the same sentence.

Towering yellow SpongeBob statues, buffets of fruit pizza and chicken nuggets, adults squeezed into slightly-too-tight Fairly OddParents costumes, and slime—glorious slime—turned out to be exactly what I needed to get out of my head and back into my body. Sure, the unlimited adult beverages helped ease me into submission. But more than that, I had to submit to the reality that I’d been operating on autopilot—so disconnected from desire that I didn’t even know what I wanted anymore. What even brought me joy?

I was absolutely a Nickelodeon kid. Rocko’s Modern Life, All That, Hey Arnold!—they brought me into worlds layered with curiosity, camaraderie, and characters who were both weird and wonderful. Fun used to be simple. I knew what fun looked like and then poof! I’d manifest it. These days, my adult fun looks like nigiri and natural wine, maybe an occasional cigarette and belly laughs with girlfriends. And most of the time, those moments come at a cost—whether that’s babysitter logistics or sacrificing sleep I can’t really afford to lose.

By the time summer arrived, I was languishing. Disengaged. Clarissa didn’t need to explain anything. Still, the promise of fun tugged at me. How can I make a lasting memory? Enter: Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana and four roundtrip tickets for me, Sargent, his bestie, and his bestie’s mom.

After a midnight flight, a layover, and an airport with no AC, we were whisked away to a gated oasis of slime, white sand beaches, and the kind of tan you only get from rolling around in both sand and rum. Each day was plotted by a concierge. My bed was made. My meals cooked by kind, incredibly accommodating staff. I was chauffeured around in a golf cart, no stress, no spreadsheets. If we wanted to do nothing, I’d just slide open the door to our room’s swim-up pool and let Sargent splash for hours while I read… or scrolled TikTok. And for the first time in months? Joy actually crept back in—despite being surrounded by other people’s children.

I didn’t have to compromise to play. The kids stayed up late while Stephania (bestie’s mom) and I talked for hours on pool chairs—uninterrupted. It didn’t matter that the wine wasn’t skin-contact or that I’d swapped sushi for fish sticks. I allowed myself to be—in a world of fantasy and play. I danced with grown adults in cartoon costumes, cannonballed into pools with my son, wore flip-flops every day, and it was… magical.

Even if just for five days and four nights, Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana gave me the joy of play without worldly compromise. I remembered what it felt like to be in wonder. I remembered myself. And I can’t think of a better gift to give any mother who’s been hiding, too.

Listen below for a little something I recorded while at the resort.