Reading · Decks and Diapers

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In 2020, I had my first daughter in the middle of a pandemic.

The world felt small and scary. Parenting felt isolating and confusing. The changes in me and what parenting meant for me and my career felt overwhelming. I craved a community and space that didn’t ask me to choose which version of myself was the real one.

It was isolating in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

And in that isolation, I kept running into a question I couldn’t find good answers to anywhere: How do you build a serious career and raise children with intention … without treating one as the compromise for the other?

I looked for the content and the community. It didn’t exist in the form I needed.

So I decided to create it for myself.

[I talked about the origin story and why I continue to do this alongside a demanding career and motherhood on The Mambition Podcast]

At the time, I didn’t feel qualified to write from certainty. I was still in the middle of becoming. I had no idea how to do the parenting thing.

So I started reaching out to other parents - ambitious, thoughtful, honest humans who could help me figure out this parenting thing. Help me figure out all that I was feeling and experiencing. Help me make sense of it all.

And I called it The Coffee Chats series.

I think a part of me believed that if I interviewed enough people, eventually someone would hand me the map.

I had spent most of my life operating in systems where effort created progress, where there was a right sequence of moves, where you could optimize your way toward an outcome.

Somewhere along the way, the conversations stopped feeling like interviews and started feeling like mirrors. They expanded my understanding of ambition. Of partnership. Of identity. Of success. Of what a meaningful life could actually look like.

They also made me feel far less alone.

Via the chats I’ve met founders and physicians, executives and educators, parents who scaled companies and parents who quietly restructured their entire lives. I’ve heard stories about burnout, negotiation, guilt, partnership, invisible labor, reinvention, and ambition that refuses to die just because children arrive.

Each conversation changed me. And along the way, this newsletter found its people. It still shocks me that week after week, over 2,000 of you choose to read this. I’m deeply proud of what we’ve built together.

But lately, I’ve felt myself wanting to go further.

The patterns are becoming clearer. The tensions more familiar. The question has shifted from “What are we all experiencing?” to “What do we do with what we now know?”

The Coffee Chat format has naturally run its course. And so, at 115 conversations, I’m retiring it.

I’ve thought carefully about the final four. Together, they capture something of the remarkable range of parents I’ve had the privilege of profiling.

You’ll meet:

A performer who has danced with Beyoncé and appeared in the Super Bowl halftime show
A venture capitalist who became a father to twins and, for the first time, felt truly seen by the world
A climate activist whose wife co-wrote the movie adaptation of Wicked
The CEO of a highly respected Canadian company, who opens up about raising a child with a disability

What’s coming next is something I’ve been building toward for a while … less about collecting stories, more about making sense of them.

I want Decks and Diapers to become the place professional parents come to think, not just to feel seen. A space for both stories and for sense-making.

More intentional conversations. More expert voices. More of the personal essays many of you have told me resonate most. All of it connected to a larger body of thinking about work, ambition, caregiving, and what it actually means to build a meaningful life alongside children.

For now, I’m closing the Coffee Chat chapter with deep gratitude. The Coffee Chats did exactly what they were meant to do. And like all good seasons, they’re making space for the next one.

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

After 115 conversations, I have something to tell you

And I called it The Coffee Chats series.

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