I got pregnant at twenty-two which means I have never experienced my twenties without being in school or being a mother (and sometimes doing both at the same time).

For the last almost six years, I looked fondly at my son’s future first day of Kindergarten. Not because I didn’t love being a mother, but because it was becoming increasingly harder to be a present one while simultaneously pursuing my individual dreams. It would be the first time I would experience my twenties with a full work week to myself, & that freedom inspired me.

But after the first few days, I dead-ass thought: “a baby sounds nice.”

Which is funny to me because over the past year, I have probably wrestled with this question more times than my two boy children have wrestled on the trampoline. In fact, I even got pregnant in May, and maybe this thought was my body remembering that I actually could’ve had a baby to grow & nurture & distract myself with while my older kids were in school. But because I’m excrutiatingly self-aware — and because I was also considering a dog, “no... maybe a cat.” I know this thought was not the body remembering a lost future, but rather a fear of fully stepping into the one I’ve been dreaming of all this time.

For a woman who advocates for women, especially mothers, to spend more time with themselves I have never been more terrified to spend time with myself. Not because I don’t know what to do with myself, but because I have to be with myself. And all of the feelings, thoughts, & existential questions I’ve been avoiding.

Do I actually want a third child? Or am I trying to white knuckle grip onto my “childbearing” identity because it feels sad & scary to let it go? Why haven’t I meditated in over a year? I can’t even lay in the park without having to pick grass to entertain myself. Do I have ADHD? Why am I getting migraines all of the sudden. Or is it all of the sudden? I’ve had the hardest summer of my life, how have these experiences changed me?

After a week and a half of spiraling, I am no longer concerned with backwards self-discovery — the kind that requires you to find the answers to your life questions before you can start living your life. I am reminded that if I concern myself less with what kind of mother I am and how many kids I have, and more with becoming a better, more well-read well-fed, inspired, nourished, dancing-in-the-mirror, & joyful person who mothers, the answers will find their way to me.

And that’s MILF!

Xx, Amanda

As it turns out, I’m not in the business of becoming a better mother. I’m interested in becoming a better person, who mothers. A MILF, if you will.

This type of self-nourishment demands time & attention to oneself, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sometimes feel like an inconvenience to myself, husband, kids, and those around me.

But if my self-nourishment feels like an inconvenience, then it must be like all good things that are worth having.

An extensive vocabulary. The ability to speak another language. Asking my husband to cook dinner rather than getting take-out. Waking up early so I can get dressed before school drop off. Sex being over when I finish. Taking a sewing class during my kids bedtime. Reading before bed instead of scrolling through content I never retain. Raising my boys to pick up after themselves instead of constantly picking up after them.

Do you know what the result of a mother temporarily inconveniencing others for her own growth is? She is able to give more. She is able to show her children that being a parent & being a person with a future are not mutually exclusive. She feels happy because she’s prioritizing her pleasure.

So, no. You must not conflate inconvenience with something that is inherently wrong or bad. It is simply a side effect of being a MILF; a disruptive, selfish, nourished, & alive thing like a flower that emerges from a crack in the cement.

I’ve been seeing a lot of carousel posts with statements like “being a mother is hot” “wanting to be a mother is hot” “being pregnant is hot.”

And at face value — cool love yes.

I’m a mother of two. I have a whole brand called MILF Etiquette for fucks sake. I, without a shred of a doubt, can say that becoming a mother made me feel like my hottest, most confident, most empowered version of self. But it has nothing to do with me simply being a mother, and everything to do with the fact that I chose to become one.

I exercised my free will from a discerned place and was able to become confident and empowered because I made an informed decision. And I work to ensure that I have resources to make motherhood feel more hot.

I can recognize that these statements are supposed to feel empowering to mothers, but they feel hollow at their core.

Because what does it mean to be hot? And what is this telling young women who are not mothers yet? You’re taking something that impressionable young girls desire to be — hot. And then categorizing it into a specific look — motherhood.

Make babies. Have a family. Mind the home. And who does this benefit? Not women, objectively. It’s just another box of should’s we’re being told to shove our multidimensionality into while men can have children and a wife, but be excused from being a father and a husband.

It’s a tired game, darling.

And it is this deep. What we speak now becomes the narrative for the next generation. Especially when the words are coming from a woman who is objectively hot and empowered. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her consuming content that told her “motherhood is hot.”

I’d want her consuming content that challenged her idea of what it means to be “hot” and invited her to get to know the needs & wants of her soul rather than the opinions of society around her.

This is why “being a mother” and “looking hot” was never the ethos of MILF Etiquette. By redefining “hot” from looking a certain way, to feeling a certain way (which is also subjective for everyone), I’m conscious of pushing a specific “look” on women. It serves only the patriarchy.

I’m not saying that a pre-requisite of being “hot” is wanting children, being pregnant, and becoming a mother.

I’m saying that being confident and hot requires you to connect with your individual soul, your individual needs/wants, and move from that place. So that when you wear the hats that you choose to, you feel hot wearing them. No matter the color, style, or shape.

So yeah, being a mother can feel hot, if that’s what you choose. If you nourish the individual underneath your mother role and make those individual needs/wants a priority.

And if we completely dismantle what the current maternity care looks like in the western world so that women didn’t have to choose between feeling hot (or literally surviving) and being a mother.

But you can also just be hot.

I spoke to a man in… the industry. I know, brave.

I’ve been creating online for what feels like my whole life, but it wasn’t until last July that I really found my thing.

MILF Etiquette — a video series (read: movement) I originated with the intention of reminding mothers that they are individuals first, and that in order to feel confident in motherhood you have to keep radical self-expression and autonomy at the forefront. Do motherhood and marriage on your own terms, in your own way.

I posted my first video last year in July, and have since amassed over 100,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok. I’ve been the reason for thousands of kitchen & car dance parties to help mommy’s become the energetic DJ’s of their household — to take the energy from chaos (bad) to chaos (good) via my CLUB MILF playlist. I sold out of 100 “MILF” mugs in collaboration with Kait from Party Mouth in 24 minutes. Not 25, 24.

I’ve taken all of the wisdom, the struggle, the chaos, and the cool that I have cultivated through raising my babies for the last six years and transmuted it into a movement that has allowed people to change their own narrative around motherhood and improve the mindset & quality of life of women and mommy’s around the globe.

And then I found myself on an hour long zoom call telling a man all of my biggest and wildest and beautifulest dreams, and asking him how I could make them come true.

Before you yell at me, let’s ground ourselves into the knowledge that it’s always easier to preach than it is to practice. Knowing what you need to do to make your dreams come true, but not acting on those things vs. actually doing the things and failing is a lot more risk adverse.

Sometimes it’s easier to turn to the industry man because if it doesn’t work, you can blame him. And my god, the prospect of blaming a man for my failures is attractive as fuck.

I took the call because I want to expand MILF Etiquette. I want to create a podcast. I want to walk in the Sports Illustrated Swim runway show. I want to attend a New York Fashion week. I want to write a coffee table book. I want MILF Etiquette to be sort of a cunty version of Joanna Gaines, meets Martha Stewart, meets Britney Spears, meets Toni Morrison Gen Z love child.

My vision is specific in taste, and I recognize not everyone has the palette.

And although I’m not in a rush, I feel myself at the edge of a quantum cliff being asked to leap in my Stuart Weitzman cheetah-print kitten heels. I want to see what’s on the other side. I guess I was hoping for some entertainment insider info from him. You know, the classic, “I want to be a star” and a response maybe kind of perhaps like “I can make that happen baby!”

You’re going to Hollywood, MILFy mommy!

What I wasn’t prepared for was to be told, “you might be a star, you might not be. But you’ll have a better chance at becoming one by getting rid of the whole MILF shtick.”

Gut punch. Thunder storms. Walls closing in on me. I wanted to scream, “fuck off.” And I think I did tell him to. He as an individual was cool, I have no qualms with his soul and I will admit he did say some things that felt helpful. It’s more so what he represents metaphorically (the media manosphere) who I want to fuck right the fuck off to fucking fuckery street.

I spent the last year building my platforms around this concept, and while it is not “my identity,” it is the container in which the coach, speaker, fashion enthusiast, comedian, mother, wife, and cool ass woman in me gets to be expressed.

I couldn’t believe that in order to be successful I had to kill the thing that gave me (and so many others) so much. That I needed to make myself more palatable, appropriate, “brand safe” to slide across the likes of Sports Illustrated’s desk. But I allowed this industry man to make me think so. I wrestled with it in my head, curled up in a ball on my bed, vented to all of my girlfriends (all of which whom were like why the fuck would you listen to a man), tried to take MILF Etiquette out of my bio, the whole shabang.

I moved through all of the stages of a high school heartbreak in the span of a week.

Because I don’t claim to be above validation. I like to flirt with it from time to time. But if there’s one thing I don’t play with it’s my babies. My career baby included. I don’t like when people call it ugly. However, I always came back to my senses, and once I realized that the relationship between me and mainstream success meant becoming more like my cooking… I was out.

No one eats my cooking because it lacks flavor. But I am not in the business of sweetening my energetic spice. My aura is too umami for that shit.

If there’s anything that call taught me it’s that I am not in a rush, I am in trust. I don’t need to appeal to an industry in order to be visible. I can disrupt it because what I have to offer is good, necessary, and inextricably me — to kill it would be to kill me. And that feels so disingenuous to what I preach.

I’m ready to practice now. I’m ready to maintain my flavor and attract the restaurant-goers who like that sort of thing. I don’t need anyone or any algorithm telling me what to put on the menu.

Fuck virality, Marry integrity, Kill the industry man.

Because it’s Mother I’d Like To Fuck, after all.

I traveled to NYC this past weekend with my husband to guest on a podcast, visit our sisters, galavant with our friends in the city, and simply just enjoy ourselves (because we can).

Our two children stayed with grandma eating copious amounts of Annie’s gummies, getting any toy they wanted from the store, and watching movies before 9 am.

We were all living out our wildest dreams this weekend.

I posted a video saying I’m, “big on bringing the kids along or leaving them with grandma because giving up the life I want was never an option.”

And I was met with shame, judgement, and other people’s mommy issues projected onto me — which is, btw, exactly why I post things like that. I want to trigger you.

These comments don’t penetrate me because I am happy to be a mirror for others if it means I can open up a conversation & change the narrative around what mothers “can” and “can’t” do.

So let me say this.

“Mom guilt” is a construct manufactured by men who think there is something wrong with a mother existing outside of the home.

I simply will not buy what they’re selling.

Darling, if I want to give my children the world then I must go live in it.

And I must come back and nourish them with the stories, pictures, and an impromptu fashion show of all my patterned vintage finds from the weekend. We can laugh together over the freshly baked banana bread muffins that I toss mini semi-sweet chocolate chips into.

Because whatever the fuck I pour into myself, I will pour into my children.

I am not raising dependents who remain dependent. It is my goal and hope that I turn them into capable, inspiring, generous, and compassionate individuals who have something to offer the world — albeit through their creations, relationships, or pure existence.

They have a better chance at doing so if being a capable, inspiring, generous, and compassionate individual is safely modeled to them by us, their parents.

How is giving up my individual life, life-giving to my children?

Just as potty training at two, or teaching them how to ride a bike is direct action towards their development, filling my own mind & body with experiences is indirect action towards their growth. My enrichment only benefits theirs.

The definition of being a good wife, mother, or woman is not self sacrificing. It isn’t based on how good you are at shrinking yourself. It’s your ability to self-give and therefore, give to them. It’s your ability to expand your aliveness, and therefore teach them how to be utterly and totally alive. It’s your fierce prioritization of choosing connection with the person you chose to build a life with. Because you guys came first.

One of the reasons young women are scared to have children or be wives these days is because they see TikTok’s with the text overlay “day in the life of a 19 year old stay at home wife” who do not leave the house save to get groceries. Or hear of men who want a wife and kids, but do not want to be a father or a husband.

And if I want children to grow up experiencing the bliss of an equal, loving partnership and the euphoria of having children without the fear of it taking away their freedom and individuality…

Then I have to show them that it’s possible.

I wish your mother showed you how to work through your wounds and exist bravely in the world instead of turning your wounds into shameful comments on the internet. But I take pride in knowing my children will be too busy living their own lives to leave hate comments on strangers TikTok’s.

Darling remember, motherhood does not have to limit you, it can expand you.

Imagine hearing that as a twenty-two-year-old-first-time-mom already navigating the projected narratives of shame from generations before her. The covert and, in cases like this one, extremely overt instances of “I know better than you” most likely fueled by an unhealed wound of wanting to be heard and a God complex given to her by a medical degree.

My baby was breech, and because I questioned why I needed a C-section to deliver a breech baby my OB attempted to fear-monger me into submission. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she didn’t know I preferred being a Dom since she didn’t spend more than 15 minutes in the room with me at one time.

You gained 7 pounds, your baby is feet down, let me check the schedule to see when we can cut you open.

But it’s not the woman’s fault, it hardly ever is. She was just regurgitating the song of capitalism and burnt out medical professionals.

I don’t have a qualm with modern medicine. I have a qualm with modern medicine and “research” being used as a weapon to eradicate my autonomy. I take issue with statistics replacing empathy and having a god damn compassionate conversation with another human being.

At least take me to dinner before you imply I’m putting my child at risk for death.

Nevertheless, like all indecent interactions we learn something valuable from them.

I researched, and read, and learned everything that I could about the history of breech vaginal birth. How they no longer teach it as a routine learning in obstetrics and gynecology. “By 2019, 74% of fourth-year obstetrics and gynecology residents in the U.S. stated they would not be comfortable with vaginal breech delivery” (source).

Talk about harmful, doc.

I voice memo’d shutthekaleup on IG to ask about her breech home birth and who her birth professional was (Dr. Stu Fischbien). I quickly realized that there is in fact a breech birth coalition of midwives and OB/GYNs who dedicate themselves to keeping this practice, and your breeched baby, alive, but are often expensive.

Like all decisions I make, I have to dive head first into the deep end just to see if I like the temperature. I almost drove 7+ hours to Cedar City, Utah to have an unassisted breech home birth for fucks sake.

But then I remembered that I do my best decision making in shallow water.

I got in the bath for like three nights in a row and read, “The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth” and once I got dry, I realized I would schedule the C-section.

Not because I was told to, but because after my research I decided it was the best option for my baby and I.

At my 36 week appointment I surrendered and told her let’s do it — except I told her I would be picking the c-section date.

If anyone’s going to play God, it’s me.

It is my belief that having autonomy is not just the birthright of every single individual on Earth, but it’s also an act of resistance. So I have vowed to always inconvenience others to exercise that right.

Reading is the thing that allowed me to become informed enough to make that autonomous choice. Not because I couldn’t have a choice if I didn’t read, but because it gave me the ability to stand confident in said choice.

And this isn’t your normal motherhood book list. I’m not sharing the typical parenting books because I never read those. I’m sharing books that spoke to me, as a human being and individual, that I’ve watched bleed into every aspect of my life, but particularly motherhood.

Because when we grow our minds we grow the catalog of offerings we’re able to give to our children.

So it is my pleasure to share with you the official reading list that made me become a better, more informed, more witty, more well-read, and more confident mother. A MILF, if you will.

• “The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth”

• “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” by Ina May Gaskin

• “The First 40 Days” by Heng Ou

• “Wintering” by Katherine May

• “The Woman in Me” by Britney Spears

• “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coehlo

• “The Art of Seduction” by Robert Greene

• “Sula” by Toni Morrison

• “Love, Pamela” by Pamela Anderson

• “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison

• “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” by Rufi Thorpe

• “The Coldest Winter Ever” by Sister Souljah

• “Many Lives Many Masters” by Brian L Weiss

• “The Artists Way” by Julia Cameron

• “We Should All Be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• “Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You can also find all of the links to these books here.

Xx, Amanda

It was July, and I was sitting in my car after dropping the kids off at daycare. The AC was on full blast and there was a deeply unsettling, burning knowing washing over me.

I needed to end yet another project I thought was going to be “my thing.”

For majority of my twenties I jumped from project to project. Falling pregnant and postpartum twice. Becoming a health coach, reading human design charts, creating content on social media, designing fine jewelry at a local shop, hosting a podcast — ok, creating and hosting four different podcast shows in the span of two years… when I have an idea I like to move quick.

Nothing feels more urgent to me than needing to birth something into the world. That bulging pressure you feel at your pelvis when you’re in transition. Telling your husband to call the nurse because you need to push. You simply need to.

We cannot control the rate in which a baby descends through the birth canal, much like we cannot control the speed of a visceral knowing dropping into the body.

When something is no longer serving me, I know it. And I cannot control the awareness no matter how deeply I breathe into the contractions.

The knowing of needing to end this particular podcast, Consciously Unconscious, devastated me more than any project I’ve ever ended previously. Not only did I lose a friend in the debris, but I also lost the potential of what I knew this podcast was capable of.

The potential of what I thought I was capable of.

Potential is something that’s consumed me my whole life. I’ve held onto relationships because I could see the potential. I held onto projects, businesses, environments, and friendships because I knew the potential they all had to be wonderful. Chalk it up to God Complex, or being a projector in human design, but I think seeing the potential in others is both one of my biggest blessings and exhausting curses.

Even so, I grew tired of it — the dreaming without the actualizing. Somewhere between the countless hours spent editing episodes and using all of the childcare hours we were paying over a thousand dollars a month for hoping that this would be the clip that went viral, or this placement on Apple Podcasts New & Noteworthy playlist would be our momentum-shifting moment… I realized it never would be.

I realized that if the other person only wants to live for the hope of it all, that’s all it ever will be.

A dream.

With my second baby, we didn’t find out the gender until he was born. I was pregnant, but I didn’t know with what yet. Connected to the experience, yet disconnected from the reality of it. I labored for 10 hours unmedicated, wanting to feel the reality of it all, and right before I pushed my midwife said, “final guesses?”

I knew and said, “boy.”

MILF Etiquette felt much like that. The longer I did the podcast, the more I began to realize it wasn’t going to last. I remember saying to Lucas in the winter months, “I know there is a short form series that I need to create, but I just don’t know what it is yet.”

I couldn’t connect to the idea growing inside of me just like I couldn’t connect to my second baby until I knew his sex, felt his tiny fingers wrap around my pinky, and smelled the soft spot on his head ferociously like a finance bro sniffs cocaine on a Wednesday night. I’m serious, it’s that addictive.

My co-host went to Europe for the summer, so I took it as a fabulous opportunity for both a girls and work trip. I flew to Nice, France on my second baby’s third birthday, June 11. When I returned home from that trip I was even more clear that the end was near. I was in the third trimester ready to birth something else.

I feel lucky that I never experienced the debilitating nature of postpartum depression or anxiety, although I was plagued with massive brain fog during the postpartum period. And for those who are not Mothers, this just turns into Mom Brain and feels similar to being in a creative rut — staring at a blank page and all of the sudden becoming illiterate.

That liminal space of labor before giving birth to “your thing” is uncomfortable, but necessary. A rite of passage that requires preparation from the body before holding what is about to be born. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through it all is that you cannot force your water to break, but instead trust that it will. It always does.

I decided to sweat it out — the writer’s block. I walked for an hour and with each step and frantic notes app sentence, I felt my mucus plug loosen. I opened up my instagram and realized the answer was right in front of me in my bio, “full time milf.” I felt my heart contract as I dialated closer to the idea, and knew just the thing to midwife it into existence — King Diva.

My husband has been an integral part of every single thing I’ve created. At 17 years old I had a fashion blog and he was taking my outfit photos. He came up with the name “justmands” that I’ve maintained as my instagram username since high school. He’s hosted two podcasts with me. King Diva has stayed up late brainstorming creative ideas, concepts, marketing objectives, and projects with me. He has been in the birthing room time over.

So when I came to him with the idea of playing on the word “MILF,” gender roles, confidence in mothering, and empowering moms to connect to their identity, joy, and self-expression through the lens of “class is in session” car rants, he said yeah call it “MILF Etiquette.” Just like that, the ultrasound turned into a real baby.

The difference is that MILF Etiquette is the first thing I’ve created that fully embodies every facet of who I am. The mother, the wife, the speaker, the writer (because let me lift the veil for a moment, I write every lesson out before I speak it), the fashion lover, the witty and sometimes raunchy woman, the teacher, the coach. Every hat from my 28 year closet gets to shine through my MILF Etiquette lessons. And that’s why it hits so hard. It’s undeniably me.

I often get asked, “why the word MILF?” And I’m always inclined to answer, why the fuck not? Men have been using this word as a way to reduce the existence of moms down to an object of their sexual wants and needs for centuries. It’s always women as an object for men to possess. If they can’t domesticate us, at least they can fuck us. I grew tired of that, to be honest.

My mission is to take the word MILF from the male gaze, and reclaim it through the feminine vision. It’s not about looking hot, it’s about feeling hot. It’s an energy that you can embody by simply choosing to.

It’s not “mother you’d like to fuck,” it’s “mother I’d like to fuck.” Who am I becoming? Who do I want to become? And what is the life that feels most attractive, erotic, and orgasmic to me? Because you’re allowed to ask those questions as a mother and a wife.

At the heart of MILF Etiquette is this statistic, “62% of mothers feel like they’ve lost their identity in motherhood.” I first read that and thought to myself, that simply won’t do. Throughout my life I’ve seen women do motherhood in so many different styles, and it’s always the one’s that do it on their own terms that are the happiest. The women who recognize “mom” and “wife” are roles that we play in, but that we are not just our roles. These roles are hats that we wear — you get to choose what they look like, and when to take them off.

While at the moment my brand remains a weekly short-form series found on Instagram & Tiktok, I have plans for it to expand into something much bigger than just social media content. It will have a whole, rich, life of it’s own — a wish I have for all my babies. At the core of it, autonomy, self-expression, confidence, humor, and heels exist. Because I feel the most MILF when I’m in heels.

Literally the day after Lucas and I came up with the concept I wrote, filmed, and edited my first ever “MILF Etiquette” video. The response was overwhelming. I had never received so many comments, shares, likes, and follows off of a piece of content that felt so palpably me. Birthing it into the world felt euphoric, and the response told me I was onto something.

My co-host commented on the video and said, “is that my lip liner?”

I replied, “no.”