I am ten years old, standing in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, not far from where I spent many years of my young life.

We’re visiting Dollywood and the Stampede, and I still remember it. Yes, it was a little hokey. But it was charming and down to earth and one of the most fun experiences I had with my family. My brother was about the age my son is now.

Dolly Parton died last week. She was 80. And I want my kids to know what made her worth remembering.

She changed when she knew better

Back when I visited, the show was called the Dixie Stampede. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, medieval-times-style, but with the North and the South.

When Dolly heard that the word “Dixie” was hurting people, she didn’t get defensive. She didn’t wait it out. She just changed it. No drama, no press tour about how hard the decision was. She knew better, so she did better.

That’s a small thing, and it’s also the whole thing.

Her values spoke for themselves

There have been podcasts and even college courses dedicated to this, and here’s what they keep landing on: no matter what Dolly’s politics were, and I don’t think she ever actually told us, her values were never in question.

The COVID vaccine research she quietly helped fund. The Imagination Library, which has put books in the hands of millions of kids, including my own two. She just tried to do the right thing and be a good person, over and over, for decades.

She didn’t need to announce which side she was on. You could tell who she was by what she did.

Everyone is mourning her

Here’s what struck me this week. I’ve heard the grief from every direction. From my Lagree instructor. From the announcer at the Truckee rodeo. From the typically salty dads of my second grader’s friends, who I would not have pegged as Dolly fans.

She touched something in all of them. That’s rare. Most public figures belong to one camp. Dolly belonged to everyone, because she led with warmth instead of allegiance.

---

We’ve lost a great woman.

But let’s live in her legacy. Change when we know better. Give quietly and often. Let our values do the talking so we don’t have to.

Let’s all try to be a little more like Dolly.

Who taught you what it looks like to lead with your values? Hit reply. I read every one.

Before we start: join me at StoryCamp in Boulder Nov 3-6! Details here. I have a special $200 off code - reply to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIN :)

Golf is one of the most notorious boys’ club sports there is. The sexism is baked right into the language. “Ladies tees.” “Ladies clubs.” A whole vocabulary designed to remind you where you stand.

This summer, I’ve been taking ladies golf lessons at our local public club. It’s been a safe space for women to come together, practice our strokes, and meet other women golfers. Why? It’s hard to break into a group of four men. They’ll groan (or at least this is the perception), and women will feel intimidated, and so most of us just never start.

The lessons are run by the most wonderful woman in the world, an 89-year-old named Ruth, who you can imagine has seen some SHIT. Ruth loves golf but doesn’t love the boys’ club aura around it. So she built a space where that aura doesn’t exist. We meet for lessons with a lovely instructor named Bobby, then get a drink and some food after to build community. It’s $35, and it’s been the highlight of many of my weeks.

And then this happened

Despite all of that, the goons at Callaway and “Good Good” came together to make a marketing video.

It depicts a man trying to keep a woman away from his driver (the golf club) by physically pushing her down. She, by the way, happens to be an acclaimed golfer. Go look her up. The music is ominous. He goes on to “attack” the course, but as anyone who is a woman, or has seen a horror movie, can attest, it feels like he’s coming back to finish her off.

(I’m not linking it, for obvious reasons. But Google “Good Good Callaway” if you want to see what I’m talking about.)

The most generous read

I love to give the most generous interpretation. That it was a brief gone wrong. That they approved it quickly and didn’t think through the consequences.

But here it is, and the message is clear: women should be pushed out of the way so men can play golf (and inherent in this… anything that is in the “boy’s club.”)

A strategy that protects your “core” customer (men) while sacrificing your growing customer, and specifically works to keep her out of the game, is not going to win. We won’t let it.

We can speak with our wallets

Women all over the internet (and I’m sure some men, though I personally haven’t seen them) are clapping back. Sharing how they’re “86ing” Callaway from their collections, or calling them out outright.

Callaway has apologized. But the damage is done.

We don’t always get a say. But we can speak with our wallets. I’ll personally be boycotting Callaway for any new equipment (what a shame, I hear clubs are quite expensive, and don’t get me started on the cute golf outfits). And we have major influence over what our male partners and allies buy, too.

Until I see Callaway build something the way Ruth can build something, their apology is just words.

What’s a boys’ club you’ve built your own door into? Hit reply. I read every one.

The receipts:

• The “86ing” callout:

• How many people said yes to this:

• The half-hearted corporate apology:

I'm writing this from Menorca, looking out over the Mediterranean, and today my MVP was 30 minutes alone at the beach with a book.

Not with my kids. Not building sandcastles. Alone. My husband took the afternoon shift, I took the book, and I disappeared down the shore for half an hour of nobody needing anything from me.

It was everything.

Vacation doesn't cancel the need for a reset

Here's what I've learned the hard way: a vacation is not a rest, it’s a trip. Especially with little kids, a vacation is just your regular parenting in a more beautiful and less familiar location. New beds, off schedules, big feelings, and no village to tag in.

Which means the MVP framework matters more on vacation, not less.

So my husband and I did the thing we always come back to. We named what each of us needs to feel human, and we traded off to protect it. His MVP is a morning workout. Mine, this week, is 30 minutes with a book and no one talking to me. I wrote about how we figured this out here.

Small. Non-negotiable. The difference between a present parent and a crispy one.

And yes, I brought beach reads

No shame. I'm currently reading Carl's Doomsday Scenario, and I packed The Silent Patient and the next Throne of Glass (in my queue) for the rest of the trip.

There's a reason I pack these specific books for travel: short chapters. When your reading time comes in 30-minute windows stolen between beach shifts, you need a book built for exactly that. Something that grabs you fast & isn’t too heavy so you can put it down when a small human needs you and you can pick it right back up.

The best book isn't the impressive one. It's the one you actually like, and may finish, in four-minute increments.

That's the whole reframe that’s worked for my family. Rest isn't the reward you magically earn during the trip. You need to try for it. It's the thing that makes the trip survivable, for everyone in the family.

What's your MVP when you travel? The one small thing that keeps you human on the road? Hit reply. I read every one.

*P.S. If you've never done the family MVP exercise with your partner, it's the single best thing we've added to how we travel. Start here.

I’m excited about the week’s activities, including seeing some dear friends. But it’s happening the week before I take my family to Europe for the first time… I’m finding myself using New York as my prep ground to go overseas.

We’re going to Spain and Portugal, and I cannot wait. But there’s a LOT to do before I go. Here’s what’s swirling around my head:

• Reminding my husband to book the rental car

• Finally pressing buy on the Amazon order I’ve been mulling over

• Ordering my Rent the Runway Europe outfits so I can have new clothes arrive before we leave (girl math)

• Going to the Genius Bar in Chelsea because my personal computer decided to die this weekend

• Organizing cat care

• Buying a gift for the birthday party for a 5-year-old on Friday because of course

I’m sharing this because

1) it’s actually helpful for me to make a list (ha! sorry)

2) to empathize with the 1,343 of you who subscribe to this and find yourself in “the thick of things.” I’m right here with you.

Do I have a solution for this? Sort of. One foot in front of the other. And some things will get dropped. I’m OK with that.

I’ll be trying my damnedest to not be thinking about whether my cat is being fed while I’m drinking sangria and swimming in the Mediterranean with my family.

Besos,

Mary

Two minutes later there were two more kids in my backseat. Four sets of sticky hands, someone’s shoe already off, a debate about sprinkles versus gummy bears reaching full volume behind me.

And it was easy. It didn’t feel like a favor. It felt like a Tuesday.

A couple of years ago I would have told you this was impossible for me. We’d just moved here. I knew a couple of people, but I’d left a real community behind, the kind that takes years to build, and I was starting over from almost nothing. No family nearby. No grandparents down the street for the emergency pickup, no built-in babysitters, none of the default scaffolding some people get to lean on. The idea that I’d have a village felt like something other people had. People who grew up somewhere and never left.

But I have one now. A real, thriving village. One of my favorite things about my life here.

It did not happen by accident

The village doesn’t appear because you’re friendly and hope for the best. You build it. On purpose. By going first.

The things I do, on repeat:

I take other people’s kids to ice cream when I’m already going. I volunteer to drive to camp when I know we’re headed the same place anyway. I offer to add another kid when I score a babysitter for a weird day off. I pick up someone’s kid when I hear a parent is traveling. I say “just drop them here for an hour” so another mom or dad can go for a run or run an errand alone (or scream into the void? Whatever they need… no judgment!)

None of this is heroic. Most of it makes my life easier, because my kids are happier with friends around anyway. But every small offer is a brick. Enough bricks, over enough time, become something you can build a village on.

The part that surprised me

Here’s what I didn’t see coming. All that offering changed how it feels to ask.

For most of my life, asking for help felt like admitting I couldn’t handle it. Like I was handing someone a burden and hoping they were too polite to say no.

But when you’re the person who takes the ice cream crew, who opens your door on a random Tuesday, something shifts. Asking stops feeling like taking. It starts feeling like the other half of a rhythm you already started.

I don’t feel bad asking anymore. And people don’t feel bad asking me. That reciprocity is the whole thing. It’s not a favor economy where everyone keeps score. It’s a village, where enough people have gone first that nobody has to feel small about needing something.

If you’ve moved somewhere new and you’re waiting for the village to find you, this is your nudge. It won’t. But you can build it, one small offer at a time.

What’s one thing you could offer a neighbor this week, before they ask? Hit reply. I read every one.

P.S. Start smaller than you think. “I’m already going to the park Saturday, want me to take yours?” is how it begins.

I was on the floor at my daughter’s fourth birthday party when it hit me.

She was tearing through presents in an order I had not authorized, wrapping paper everywhere, a dozen people crowded into a tiny space at our local children’s museum. And suddenly I was drenched. Sweat down my back, heat crawling up my neck, that specific full-body flush that made me want to walk directly into the lake.

I didn’t know what it was yet. I just knew I was overwhelmed, confused, and mortified, trying to look normal in front of a room full of people while my body did something I hadn’t agreed to.

That was my first hot flash. I know that now.

The slow creep before the flash

Looking back, the signs had been there for months.

The irritability I couldn’t explain. The brain fog that made me lose the word I was reaching for mid-sentence. The sense that my emotional thermostat had been recalibrated by someone who didn’t ask me. For six months, maybe twelve, I’d been quietly wondering what was wrong with me.

Turns out: nothing was wrong with me. I was/ am in perimenopause. My estrogen was falling off what the internet has lovingly named the “estrogen cliff.”

I was, for the record, that girl at book club who insisted we all read All Fours (sorry, ladies!). So I got the education. I just didn’t connect it to the sweating woman on the birthday party floor until later.

So I did something about it

A couple of months ago, I started hormone replacement therapy.

I’m lucky. Here in Tahoe we have a nurse practitioner who actually knows this stuff, which is rarer than it should be. A lot of my friends are going through Midi Health instead, because finding a provider who takes perimenopause seriously is still weirdly hard in 2026.

And here’s what happened. The hot flashes stopped. I’m sleeping through the night again. The brain fog lifted enough that I noticed it lifting. And maybe most of all, I feel like I’m back in the driver’s seat of my own emotions instead of white-knuckling the passenger side.

I actually didn’t realize how well it was working until I ran out.

Which brings me to the most 2026 thing imaginable

There’s a national estrogen patch shortage right now. A real one.

Here’s the sequence, and I promise it’s almost too on the nose. In November 2025, the FDA finally removed the black box warning that had scared women and doctors off hormone therapy for two decades. Menopause care went mainstream. Demand roughly doubled. By early 2026, about one in twenty women aged 45 to 54 had an active estrogen prescription.

And then the patches ran out. Only a handful of manufacturers make them. Demand doubled, production didn’t, and now women all over the country are calling three pharmacies to hear “backordered” three times. Supply issues are expected to drag through late 2026, and some estimates say years.

Sit with the irony. The single best year in decades for women’s access to hormone therapy, and we can’t actually get the hormones.

I’ve already had to change doses because of it. I ran out for a few days. That’s actually how I knew, without question, that it was working. The fog (and irritation) rolled back in like it had been waiting.

Why this is the most 2026 thing ever

We are living in a moment that rewards a certain kind of loud, chest-out, dominant energy. It’s in our politics. It’s in our president. It’s in the whole cultural temperature.

And at the exact same time, millions of women are standing at pharmacy counters being told the thing that makes them feel like themselves is out of stock.

A crisis of too much testosterone in the discourse and not enough estrogen on the shelf. If you wanted to design the most 2026 thing possible, you could not do better than this.

I’m still early in this. Doses are still shifting, the shortage is still a factor, and I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

But I wanted to say it out loud, because too many of us are sweating through birthday parties thinking we’re broken and alone. You’re not broken. Your estrogen is just leaving, and you’re allowed to do something about it.

Are you going through this too? Hit reply. I read every one, and lately I’m reading a lot of them.

Skills. Agents. Automations. The words sounded like something happening in a hoodie somewhere, in a language I didn’t speak. Every time someone mentioned building with AI, I pictured a wall of code and a room full of guys who’d been doing this since they were twelve.

So I stayed out of it. I used AI like most people do: ask a question, get an answer, move on.

But maybe that’s what they want you to think.

Then a woman showed me what she’d built. Not a demo, not a pitch. An actual tool she used in her actual life, solving a problem I also had. And it clicked. This wasn’t about code. It was about knowing what you need and being willing to describe it.

The tech bros don’t own this. We’re just letting them talk the loudest.

Why this matters for us specifically

Here’s the thing about the mental load. It’s invisible, it’s relentless, and it falls disproportionately on women. The calendar invites. The camp forms. The birthday parties. The “who’s covering pickup” texts. The thousand tiny threads you hold so nothing drops.

For years the advice has been “delegate” or “let it go.” But you can’t let it go, because someone has to hold it, and that someone is usually you.

AI changes the math. Not because it’s magic, but because you can finally build something that holds the threads with you.

I used to think “I can’t afford to spend time building this.” I’ve flipped it. I can’t afford not to.

How I AI: my 4-step framework

1. What’s annoying me? Start with the friction. For me: the millions of calendar invites and forms scattered across camp emails, school portals, and group texts. Name the thing that makes you sigh.

2. What would I ideally want? Skip reality for a second. In a perfect world, what happens? I wanted one shared calendar that pulled everything into one place, automatically.

3. What’s the easiest way to do this? Occam’s razor. Not the most impressive version. The simplest one that works. Resist the urge to build the cathedral when you need a shelf.

4. How will I ACTUALLY use this? Be honest about your real life, not your ideal one. A tool you’ll use twice is worse than a simpler one you’ll use daily. Build for the Tuesday you’re exhausted, not the Monday you’re inspired.

What I built: the calendar skill

Here’s the annoyance. Calendar invites come at me in a dozen formats. A flyer in a backpack. A text from another mom. A camp spreadsheet with both kids, every start and stop time, locations, special weeks, which friends are going. Organized, technically. But it lives in one place and my actual life lives somewhere else.

So I told Claude I wanted to build a skill.

A skill is just a repeatable prompt. That’s it. The vocabulary is most of the barrier. People say “skill” and it sounds like engineering. It’s a prompt you save so you don’t have to write it again.

What I actually said was close to this: I have calendar invites coming at me in every format. Paper, text, screenshots, spreadsheets. I want a skill that takes any of them and maps them onto our real Google Calendar, and invites my husband so we’re on the same page.

Then it got it wrong. The first version worked but it was too many clicks. I’d have to open the thing, connect the calendar, confirm the invite, add my husband. Technically functional, practically useless. If a tool has five steps, I will not use it on a Tuesday.

So I iterated. I connected Google Calendar directly so it could write to it without me babysitting. I told it to always invite my husband. I stripped it down until there was almost nothing left to do.

What it does now: I take a photo of anything. A flyer, a screenshot of a text, the spreadsheet. It goes on our calendar. My husband gets invited. Done.

The whole build took about twenty minutes. Loading the camp spreadsheet in took another five.

Twenty minutes. Against an entire summer of being the only person who knows when anything is happening.

This is already a movement

Business Insider profiled Whitney Stefko Dover, a Ford executive and law professor who built an AI “chief of staff” for her family. It sends a 4am briefing that coordinates her, her husband, and their au pair: calendar, bills, birthday parties, even recycling reminders.

What I love is how it started. Her husband asked her to send him a daily to-do list. Her answer was basically “absolutely not,” followed by “wait, could I automate that?” The refusal became the build.

Her words: “It sounds so silly, but it has really improved my marriage. I don’t feel resentful now around having to carry around these additional mental tasks.”

That’s the unlock. Not productivity for its own sake. Relief from the invisible weight.

She wrote up exactly how she built it, prompts and all, free for anyone to copy.

My calendar skill is a much smaller build than her chief of staff, but the method is the same. Name the annoyance. Describe what you want in plain English. Start simple. Iterate until you’d actually use it.

Your turn

If any of this sparked something, I want to hear from you. Reply to this email or send me a note on LinkedIn and tell me what you’d build if you knew you could.

And keep an eye out. This September I’m launching something new for ambitious women who want to future-proof their careers in the age of AI. This newsletter is a preview of the thinking behind it.

The tech bros have had the mic long enough. This one’s ours.

Links & Resources

• Whitney’s Daily Dover method: her full build guide, free at https://whitneystefko.github.io/daily-dover/

• The MVP framework: the thinking behind building for your real life, not your ideal one

• Claire Vo’s awesome How I AI podcast - esp ones that help with the mental load like this episode:

I’m not ashamed. I’m reporting the facts.

We’d done a small-town parade, hours at the lake, and hosted what felt like half of Tahoe at our house the night before. By 7pm my four-year-old was running on fumes and my social battery was completely dead. So was everyone else’s. The fireworks could wait ‘til next year.

This is not the summer the internet told me I was supposed to be having.

The “perfect summer” is a lie

You’ve seen it on Instagram: The pressure to make this the most magical summer of their childhood. The 90s summer: no screens, no schedules, just kids running barefoot and discovering creeks. The curated lake days and the s’mores and the “we were just so present.”

I love all of that. I am also a human person with a social battery and a four-year-old who today napped from 5 to 6pm because her body needed it after two weeks of camp with no naps.

Do I recommend a 5pm nap? No. Did it reset her entire system? Completely.

That’s the thing about summer. It’s not one long vacation. It’s a series of small disruptions that compound until your whole family needs a reset at the same time.

What actually helps: the family MVP

I’ve written a few times about the MVP (Minimum Viable Person), the idea that you don’t need a perfect day to feel like yourself. You need a small handful of non-negotiables that keep you functional. A walk. Hot coffee alone. One focused hour.

What I’ve learned since talking about this: your kids have MVPs too.

My seven-year-old needs to move his body right after breakfast or the whole day unravels. My four-year-old needs protein, her brother’s attention, and apparently more sleep than camp is giving her. When we protect those basics, everything else gets easier.

A reader named Hrishikesh took this beyond families. No kids, just roommates. Their MVP turned out to be one funny story with roommates at dinner each night. That small thing reset the mood of their whole house.

The reset (not the restart)

I’m not starting over. I’m resetting.

A restart means the last few weeks didn’t count. A reset means I know exactly what I need, I just drifted, and today I’m walking back.

My summer MVP right now: a 20-minute walk after I get the kids off to camp. That’s the whole thing. Not a workout. Not a routine. Just enough to feel like I showed up for myself before the day showed up for me.

Some mornings that’s enough to skip the BBQ without guilt and watch TV on the couch like a person who made a choice instead of a person who failed at summer.

You don’t need a perfect summer. You need to know what brings you back when it goes sideways.

What’s the one thing that, when you do it, makes everything else more manageable? Hit reply. I read every one.

P.S. Here are the books by women authors I’ve pre-ordered for some summer reading! Preorders matter a LOT - help them out by ordering today!

The Three Graces of Pearl Street, Elizabeth Wellington Rollins, - she did a great guest post back in March!

The Parisian Heist, Jo Piazza - Love her podcast and substack!

“For your hair, Mama.”

We do this on the nature path between our house and her preschool. My daughter picks whatever flower she finds. I wear it the whole way. Some mornings she tells me about Benny, her new friend, and how they play fox family at recess. Some mornings she just holds my hand and sings.

Last week something shifted. She handed me the flower, I tucked it behind my ear, and I felt it before I could name it. A drop in my stomach on an ordinary Tuesday.

I knew. While it was happening, I knew. This was the last one.

She graduated preschool last week. In the fall she starts at the elementary school, three blocks further, drop-off at the door. No nature trail. No dandelions.

We don’t always know when we’re in the last

The last time an old friend really opens up to you. The last “carry me.” The last “Mommy, can you come snuggle me?” Said in that voice, at that age, in that specific way.

Most lasts don’t announce themselves. You only recognize them looking back, and by then the moment is already archaeology.

My kids are four and six. They can do a lot by themselves now, but they still think I’m cool. They still need a nightlight, a stuffy, and two stories to fall asleep. They still sing “What Does the Fox Say?” at the top of their lungs with the whole family in the car (we are really into foxes these days).

I know this season has an end. I just don’t know which ordinary Tuesday it will be.

The only move that actually works

I’m not going to tell you to cherish every moment. You know that already and it doesn’t help when you’re just trying to get out the door.

What I will say is this: you don’t have to know it’s a last to be present for it.

The dandelion didn’t matter because I knew. It mattered because I was there. I wasn’t on my phone. I wasn’t running the calendar in my head. I was just walking, holding her hand, wearing a flower in my hair like it was the most normal thing in the world.

That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it.

What’s a last you didn’t know was a last until it was over?

Hit reply. I read every one.

It’s end of school year, which means I have been living and dying by THE spreadsheet. You know the one. The camps spreadsheet that contains timing, location, pick ups, after care, friends in the camps.

I have two kids. Mostly in different camps because my daughter is only 4. Different drop-off times. Different gear lists. Five birthday parties coming in like calendar Jenga; two of them are on the same Saturday. Two preschool graduations this week alone.

For months, besides that spreadsheet, all of the details lived in one place: my head.

I’d be in a work meeting doing pick-up math in the background. I’d lie awake Tuesday night trying to remember which friend was at which camp and whether someone needed to wear jeans for horseback riding or a swimsuit for water play. My brain was running a second job I wasn’t getting paid for.

Researchers at the University of Bath found that mothers carry about 7 out of 10 household mental-load tasks, regardless of income or career level. That’s the invisible job. And I’d been carrying it for years without questioning whether I had to.

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What happens if I just try this

So I got curious. I opened Claude, described my frustration out loud using the voice feature, and asked it to turn birthday invite screenshots and carpool chaos that I spoke into the app into clickable calendar entries, time zone set, husband included. That was the whole prompt.

It worked. I refined it over a week. Then I did the scary thing: fed THE camp spreadsheet in all at once. Twenty minutes later, every entry was on a shared family calendar.

Four hours saved. But the exhale was the thing. I’d been carrying that for weeks. And suddenly I wasn’t.

The reframe: a skill is just a prompt you want to do again. You’re not building software. You’re just saving something that worked.

Your turn to poke at something

If you’ve been hesitant to start, here’s exactly how I’d do it:

frustration → prompt → skill

Step 1: Find the friction. What’s something you do repetitively that you dread? Not a big hairy work problem, but something small and annoying. Mine was “I have to manually enter every kid’s schedule and my husband still doesn’t know what’s happening.” That’s the thing. Find your thing.

Step 2: Describe it out loud to Claude like you’re complaining to a friend. Don’t overthink the format. I like clicking the microphone on the Claude app or even doing a voice memo (making sure transcription is turned on). Just say what’s frustrating and what you wish would happen instead. That description? That’s your first prompt.

Step 3: Use it a few times. See where it works and where it breaks. This counts as testing. Tweak the output. When it’s working consistently, when you’d want to do it again save it. (You literally say - Claude - save this as a skill). That’s a skill. Literally just a prompt you’ve decided is worth keeping, that you can now pull up any tim.

That’s the whole move. No coding. No app. Just: frustration → prompt → skill.

One of my best friends Whitney Stefko Dover, Ford exec, mom, one of the sharpest people I know, built her family an AI “chief of staff” that briefs her every morning on the day ahead. We’re a small and growing group of working parents figuring this out by testing, not waiting for permission.

The distance isn’t having the right tool. It’s the curiosity to keep poking at it until it works for your actual life.

You don’t have to hold all of it in your head. You just have to get a little curious.

What’s something you’ve been meaning to test? Hit reply I’d love to hear it.

Xo,

Mary

———

P.S. Want the calendar skill I built? Reply to this email, or DM me on LinkedIn with the word SKILL and I’ll send it over.

Because I was turning into a pterodactyl. Obviously.

I said yes… probably by Thursday. He nodded like that made total sense and went back to his dinosaurs.

I’ve been thinking about that moment all week.

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When did we decide the path was fixed?

Not in a dramatic way. No one sat you down and said: here are your options, pick one, no changes. It happened in small increments. A choice that narrowed things. Then another. Then the next logical step.

At some point you stopped asking “what if I tried that” and started asking “is that realistic?”

That’s the trade. Most of us made it without noticing.

What it actually costs

It’s not some big dream you can name. Most of us can’t even find that anymore.

It’s smaller. It’s the thing you loved. Just because you loved it, not because it paid anything or made sense on a resume. The thing you were becoming before you got practical.

What if you just... reopened it?

What if, like my friend Rebecca, you started making jewelry again?

What if, like my friend Monique, you started singing again?

What if, like me, you finally published a book after 7 years of trying to?

What if you tried something you’d never even thought of, just for the hell of it?

My son doesn’t ask whether pterodactyls are realistic. He just knows the wings are coming. And honestly? That kind of certainty sounds pretty good right now.

You have my permission to try the thing you set down.

What did you quietly tell yourself you’d come back to later? Hit reply. I read every one.

P.S. If this landed, forward it to someone who needs the reminder.

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Two. Graduations. For preschool.

There’s also a one-night camping trip, an 11am end-of-year celebration (love a Thursday morning commitment when I have a 9am executive review), and a week that my calendar turned from white space into an abstract painting. And none of this is for my school-age kid. That chaos is its own separate column.

I’ve started calling it calendar Tetris. That frantic moment when you’re staring at June and trying to figure out how the pieces fit. The camping trip can’t move. The graduations can’t move. The work deadlines can’t move. And somehow you have to find a shape that holds all of it without the whole thing collapsing.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: the calendar isn’t the problem. The problem is what we tell ourselves it means when we can’t make it all fit.

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The internal monologue

Because the internal monologue goes something like: if I miss the 11am celebration, I’m a bad mom. If I leave the camping trip early, I’m a bad mom. If I bring my laptop to any of the above, I’m a bad mom. And if I drop a work deliverable because I was at preschool graduation number two, I’m a bad employee.

There is no version of this week where you’re not failing something by someone’s measure. And the sooner you say that out loud, the sooner you can actually make decisions instead of just spiraling.

The reframe

So here’s the reframe I’ve been using this month.

You are not the architect of a perfect June. You are the air traffic controller of a very small, very chaotic airport. Your job isn’t to make all the flights land on time. Your job is to prevent collisions.

In practice, that looks like this for me:

I looked at the month and identified the two things that were genuinely irreplaceable. Not everything feels irreplaceable when you actually sit with it. The camping trip? That’s a moment. The executive review? I can reschedule or send a brief. The 11am celebration? I’m going. The second graduation? My husband is our co-pilot.

That’s it. No elaborate system. No color-coded calendar. Just: what are the two things that matter most if I’m honest with myself, and how do I protect those?

One thing you can do today: open your calendar for the next two weeks and put a star next to the two things that are actually non-negotiable. Not ten things. Two. The rest gets renegotiated from there.

June is not a test of your commitment to your kids or your career. It’s a test of your ability to make a decision and not apologize for it.

You’re doing fine.

Mary

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Reply and tell me: what’s the one thing on your June calendar you’re protecting no matter what? I love reading these.

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P.S. Know a mom who’s currently losing a game of calendar Tetris? Forward this her way.

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I'm writing this from a hotel room in Texas, which is where I seem to be every other week lately. I have a rule about Texas: I try not to come back five pounds heavier. The food is too good and the portions are wildly unfair. So before this trip I asked Claude to make me a simple infographic of what to eat while I'm here, something I could screenshot and pull up instead of just defaulting to the queso. Took maybe five minutes. Genuinely useful.

Exhibit A - this was great to have and took less than 5 min!

I'm telling you that because it's relevant to what I actually want to talk about.

On Tuesday, Intuit cut 3,000 people. 17% of its entire workforce, gone in a day. Same day, Meta cut 8,000. That's 11,000 people total in tech in a week, many of them talented, senior, doing good work, who showed up and had no idea Tuesday would be the day. Just scratched off a list.

I think about the people who had been meaning to update their LinkedIn. Meaning to experiment with AI tools at work. Meaning to get clear on what they actually want to do next. Meaning to start.

The worst place to be when a layoff hits is mid-meaning-to.

There's that line about planting a tree. Best time was ten years ago. Second best time is now. So here are two things you can actually do today, that take less than an hour combined.

Learn one thing about AI. Anything.

Not a course. Not a certification. Something real. The infographic I built for my Texas diet, that counts. If your kid is struggling with math, build them a simple explainer tool. If you have a specific goal you're working toward, ask Claude or ChatGPT to help you make it visual, trackable, simple. The point is to do the thing, not plan to do the thing.

What recruiters are looking for right now is not that you finished a course. It is that you are experimenting. Trying. Building. Talking about it. That is the signal that gets attention in 2026.

If you want a concrete place to start, Claire Vo and Hilary Gridley (a new mom and entrepreneur) recently did an episode of "How I AI" showing how Hilary built a kind of personal mission control for her work and family life using Claude Code, without being an engineer. It's 30 minutes and immediately useful.

Look at your LinkedIn like a stranger.

I post every day and it takes more time than I would like to admit. I am not saying do that. But you should be able to answer one question: what story is this telling, and is it the one I want?

Here is a Claude prompt worth trying right now: Ask it to act as a career coach and have it interview you. Ask it to dig into where you want to go, what kind of work actually lights you up, and then go through your resume asking for specific stories that the bullet points don't capture. Just talk. Use voice (and on the mobile app - ask it to talk to you - mine is a British man and it is making my life so much easier). Get it all out. Then use what comes out to figure out where the gaps are and how to start closing them.

For example, if you want to move from consumer to B2B SaaS, if you want a portfolio career, if you want something entirely different, now is the time to lay the foundation. Not when the Slack message comes.

I saw a product designer post last week about getting laid off from Meta. She was already building something. She looked relieved (and fabulous). That is the version of this story I want for you.

Remember: You get to write this before it gets written for you.

This is your permission slip to stop waiting for the right moment.

Reply and tell me: what's the one thing you've been meaning to start?

Mary

P.S. 130,000+ tech workers have been laid off in 2026 so far. Built For More is what I'm building for exactly this moment. More soon.

A company announces an AI initiative. Employees get a mandate: use AI tools X times per week, log your usage, hit your quota. HR sends a deck. Leadership pats itself on the back for being "forward-thinking."

And somewhere in a Slack channel, someone bravely asks: but... what are we actually supposed to build with it? And how?

Crickets.

This is the AI carrot and the AI stick, and most companies are skipping straight to the stick without ever figuring out the carrot. Forced adoption as a substitute for strategy. It's not leadership. It's theater.

The Missing Strategy

My management style has always been: lead by example, not by mandate. I am genuinely skeptical of any workplace behavior that requires a quota to exist. If you need to force it, something is wrong upstream. Either the tools aren't actually useful for the work, the culture doesn't support experimentation, or most likely, there's no real strategy behind the push.

And here's what I keep thinking about: most of these same companies don't have an AI strategy. Not a real one. Not a "here's what we're trying to accomplish, here's what success looks like, here's how this changes our work" strategy. They have a slide deck and a directive. That's not the same thing. It makes me think of “flair” from Office Space (which… if you have no idea what I’m talking about, go check out this classic movie): flair, like fluffy AI goals, has undefined rationale, hazy goals, and leads to employee demoralization.

This Is a Change Management Problem

And like all change management problems, it lives or dies on whether people actually believe the change is worth making. You can't mandate your way to belief.

So what does real AI adoption look like? Three things, and none of them is a quota.

First: build the infrastructure before you issue the mandate. Set up the tools, the permissions, the shared workflows. If getting access requires an IT ticket and a two-week wait, no one is going to experiment. Remove the friction before you ask people to change.

Second: give people full access. Not a watered-down version. Not a pilot for a lucky few. If the tool is worth using, everyone needs to be able to actually use it.

Third, and most important: show what's possible. Build something real and share it. So while all of the above is happening, I've been doing exactly that. I built a messaging and positioning agent in Claude, one that takes a product brief and outputs a working positioning framework, complete with audience lens, market insights, key messages, and proof points. Something I used to do manually with stakeholders over days. I built it to solve a real problem I had, not to hit a number on a spreadsheet. Then I shared it.

That's it. That's the whole strategy. Find a real problem, solve it with AI, show your team what just became possible. Do that enough times and you won't need a quota. People will be pulling the tools toward them instead of being pushed.

If you're at a company pushing AI quotas right now: your job isn't to hit the number. It's to find one use case that actually makes your work better and go deep on it. That's what will matter at your next performance review, not the log of how many times you opened ChatGPT or Claude.

And if you're a leader watching this unfold: answer the strategy question before you mandate anything. What problem are we solving? What does good look like? Then build something. Show your team. Earn the belief first.

That's the permission slip this week: mandate behavior only after you've earned the belief.

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What's one thing you're actually using AI for right now, not because someone told you to, but because it genuinely helps? Reply and tell me. I'm collecting these.

Xo,

Mary

P.S. If this landed for you, forward it to someone navigating the AI pressure at work.

Underbabied.

“Dr.” Oz, yes, that Dr. Oz, now head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, defined it this way: not having children when you might otherwise want them, or having fewer children than you’d normally want to have.

Not undersupported. Not under-resourced. Not burned out by a system that treats caregiving as invisible labor that women should just absorb.

Just... underbabied.

The Actual Conditions

The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation. Postpartum care is chronically underfunded. In some states, childcare costs more than college tuition. Paid leave is still a privilege, not a right.

The administration pointed to a $50 billion rural health fund as evidence of investment in families. That money is spread across all 50 states, over five years, for broad rural health. It is not a maternal health policy.

What Actually Works

France spends roughly 3.5% of GDP on family benefits, for example: subsidized childcare, 16 weeks of maternity leave, real infrastructure. Their birth rate has recovered. Denmark offers universal affordable childcare and generous parental leave. Japan recognized its crisis and committed $22 billion annually toward child-rearing support, parental leave, and childcare, because their government understood that declining birth rates are a policy failure, not a personal one.

Women aren’t choosing to have fewer children because they don’t want them. They’re doing the math. And the math doesn’t work.

Your Permission Slip

Who in your life is doing the math right now and coming up short? Forward this to her. Not because it fixes anything. But because she should know she’s not the problem.

You’re not underbabied. You’re under-supported by a system that has never fully counted the work you do.

My call to corporations and our government: Fix the system. The babies will follow.

Leave a comment on substack or reply to the email you received: what would actually change the math for you?

Three days. No school. A product going live. My husband traveling. I won’t tell you I handled it gracefully. I’ll tell you what actually got me through it: 5 minutes of meditation and 20 minutes of movement. Every single day, no matter how chaotic the morning got.

That was my floor.

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Most advice tells you to optimize your time. Batch your tasks, protect your calendar, wake up at 5am. Maybe that works on a normal week. But that month wasn’t a normal week. And what I’ve learned after years of hard weeks is that optimization is a fair-weather strategy. What actually holds when things fall apart is knowing your floor.

Not your ideal. Not your aspirational morning routine. Your floor.

I call this the MVP Method. MVP as in Minimum Viable Person: the most essential version of you that keeps everything else standing. Here are the 5 steps:

1. Name what you need. Not what looks good on a habit tracker. For me it’s energy and a clear head. That points directly to movement and some quiet. Get specific.

2. Protect the time for it (non-negotiable). This is not the reward at the end of a productive day. It’s the foundation that makes the day possible. It goes on the calendar and it doesn’t move.

3. Communicate it clearly. Tell your partner, your kids, your team. “From 6 to 6:20 I’m not available.” Naming it out loud is what makes it real. It also gives the people around you a chance to support it.

4. Build the habit. Start small enough that you can’t talk yourself out of it. A 5-minute meditation is not impressive. It also doesn’t require childcare, a clean house, or a free morning. Five minutes you do beats 30 minutes you skip every time.

5. Reassess regularly. Your floor today might not be your floor in three months. New season, new kids’ schedules, new demands at work. Check in every few weeks: is this still the right floor? Adjust without guilt.

Snow days plus a launch. I didn’t do it all. But I showed up to both because I had a floor that held.

You don’t need a perfect system. You need a floor that holds.

What’s yours? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

Your permission slip this week: you’re allowed to let something be small. The floor counts.

This week’s CTA: If you’re building your MVP and want a community of women who get it, the Propel Yourself mastermind is open. Apply here.

Imagine being in your 20s, a single mom of newborn twins, standing at the absolute beginning of your career, and feeling like the odds are stacked so far against you that you just need to say it out loud to someone.

That’s where Hope Chauland was. And the thing her uncle said back to her changed how she thinks about everything.

He reframed it for her: there will come a time when your daughters are older and more independent, and you’ll be thriving at a point where other women are only just starting to think about having children and making tradeoffs. Your path is your path. Stop watching everyone else’s unfold.

Hope is now an ICF-certified coach, a product marketing leader, and the host of Career Evolutions, a podcast built on raw honest conversations about what career change actually looks like. She recently had me on as a guest, and I got to be on the receiving end of her questions for once. So I’m flipping it and letting you hear from her this week.

These are her answers. I think you’ll want to save a few of them.

On how she knows when it’s time to make a shift:

“I see seasons as what’s going on in our real lives and what we truly need at that time. Then phases as what drives and motivates us. Both happen in parallel. The time to shift is when one of these is out of alignment. Either what we’ve always done doesn’t work anymore, or where we’re going doesn’t feel like us anymore. We’re bored. We’re unmotivated. We’re missing direction.”

That last part hit me. So often we pathologize the boredom or the frustration instead of reading it as data.

On feeling “behind”:

“Ask yourself: what does momentum actually need to look like for you right now instead? And could letting go of old momentum bring you time and space for something you couldn’t do before?”

Permission to define momentum on your own terms. That’s the whole thing.

On what sustains an ambitious career that the highlight reel doesn’t show:

“Defining what success looks like to me rather than what society unconsciously taught me. And then having to let go of limiting beliefs to take a leap of faith.”

The question she wishes more women asked themselves:

“How do I truly define success right now in a way that will look and feel good to me for this season of my life and the phase of my career I’m currently in?”

Not last year’s version. Not the version that looked impressive to someone else. This season.

You can find Hope and Career Evolutions here. If you’re in a season of feeling stuck or questioning what’s next, her show is worth a listen.

And for what it’s worth, her fill-in-the-blank answer when I asked what more women need permission for? “To put their needs first. Seems counterintuitive at first, but you can’t pour from an empty cup.”

She’d fit right in here.

Reply or comment and tell me: what does “momentum” look like for you in this season?

P.S. The full episode with Hope is out now. We talked PMM origins, mom life, and what happens when you stop performing and start being honest about what you actually want. Worth a listen. Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Website

My 99-year-old grandmother needed to move into a skilled nursing facility. I was the one coordinating it. Not because anyone formally asked me. Just because I’m the one who makes things happen in our family. You probably already know how that works.

Every morning I showed up to standup. Got the kids out the door. Answered Slack. Said “I’m fine” when people asked, and mostly believed it.

What I didn’t say: I had a legal document I didn’t understand, a list of calls I kept avoiding because I didn’t know what to say when someone picked up, and no clear picture of what needed to happen in what order. I was managing the overwhelm. I wasn’t actually moving through it.

This is the “I’m Fine” phase. Not falling apart. Not dropping the ball. Just holding so much that you’ve gone completely numb to the weight of it. High-functioning overwhelm doesn’t look like a crisis. It looks like competence. Which is exactly why it’s so hard to name.

The hardest part isn’t the volume. It’s that there’s no clean entry point. So you manage instead of move.

What actually helped

One night this winter I opened ChatGPT and typed something like: I’m coordinating my grandmother’s move into full-time care and I don’t know where to start. Here’s what I know.

Then I just dumped everything in.

I asked it to interpret the key sections of her will in plain English. I asked it to build a move checklist broken into weeks. I asked it to script the call I needed to make to her financial advisor, the one I’d been putting off because I didn’t know what to say when someone answered. I asked it to sequence everything into an actual order of operations.

45 minutes later I had a plan I could work from.

It didn’t grieve with me. It didn’t make this easy. But it took the cognitive weight of figuring out where to start off my plate, so I could save my energy for the parts that actually required me.

That’s what AI is good for when you’re in this phase. Not replacing your judgment. Just getting you unstuck enough to use it.

Try this today

Open a new chat and start with: I’m overwhelmed by [situation]. Here’s what I know and what I don’t know yet. Dump everything in. Then ask: What are the next 5 steps I should take, in order?

You don’t need a perfect prompt. You need a starting point.

You can be the person who holds it all together and also ask for help. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole point.

Reply and tell me: Are you in your own version of the “I’m Fine” phase right now? What’s on your plate? I read every one.

P.S. If you know someone white-knuckling through a hard season, forward this to her.

The MVP in MVP Mindset stands for the Minimum Viable Person, or the minimum you need to do for yourself each day to build a strong foundation. Read more here: Something Is Better than Nothing 🌱

A question from the audience has stuck with me: "How do you choose your MVP over, say, washing the dishes, when a 15-minute window pops up?"

My answer was immediate. You choose to prioritize yourself. You are the MVP (in this case, the most valuable person!). The dishes will get done. They always somehow do. But that window to do something for yourself? That closes fast, and no one is holding it open for you. You have to choose it. You get to be a little selfish here, and that is not only okay, it is the whole point.

What MVP Looks Like on a Bad Day

The MVP Mindset is simple: Minimum Viable Person. Something is always better than nothing. It's not about perfection, it's about the smallest intentional choice you can make for yourself on any given day.

Here's the thing though: your MVP is a moving target, and that's by design. On a good day, when childcare is covered, work is humming, and you actually slept, your ideal might look like an hour-long workout and a 20-minute meditation. Most days, your real MVP is something smaller. For me, that's 20 minutes of movement and 5 minutes of breathing. Not glamorous, totally doable (for me, in the season I’m in. If this seems like a stretch for you, that’s OK. You get to choose your own).

But then there are the bad days.

When Even Your MVP Feels Like Too Much

On those days, we go smaller. Way smaller. The minimum of the minimum. Can you step outside for one minute and feel the sun? Can you take five slow, purposeful deep breaths before you open your next Slack message? Can you text your best friend an SOS so she knows you need her later?

Those count. Every single one of them counts. They are small, intentional choices you made for yourself, and they are better than nothing.

And here is the permission slip you might actually need most today: it is okay to reset. The MVP Mindset was never about a perfect streak. On my worst days, if I can, I put down my phone, go to bed as early as possible, and start again tomorrow. That simple reset has done more for me than pushing through ever has.

You don't have to nail it every day. You just have to keep coming back to yourself.

What's your bad-day MVP? Reply and let me know. I read every single comment.

Xo,

Mary

P.S. Wish me luck this week, I am doing solo spring break with the kids. A future newsletter on MVP-ing with two small humans and no backup may be incoming 😬.

20 minutes ago I learned that our preschool after care is stopping next month. (Preschool “after care” = after 1:30pm ☠️ ). No idea what I’m going to do yet, but polishing this week’s newsletter was a good reminder that I CAN ask for help, I can delegate (e.g. to other caregivers) and I don’t have to do everything myself. Now, let’s get into it.

Here’s something I’ve said out loud more times than I can count: “It’ll be faster if I just do it myself.”

At work. At home. On the playground. Honestly, everywhere. And the wild part? I’m usually right. I am faster. I do know how to do it. Which is exactly the problem.

The Competence Trap

We don’t burn out because we’re bad at things. We burn out because we’re good at everything, and somewhere along the way, being capable became synonymous with being responsible for it all. For ambitious moms in tech, this hits different. We’ve spent years proving we can handle it, and now “handling it” has become our entire identity.

We’ve been talking recently in the mastermind about the mental load and letting things go. What would it look like if we DIDN’T send the grocery list? What would happen if your kids made the lunch instead of you? It might not be how you do it… but everyone will eat, right? (Maybe. I’m personally working on letting these go).

The cost of “I’ll just do it myself” is real. When we’re the last line of defense on every task, every decision, every dropped ball at home and at work, we don’t just get tired. We get resentful. And resentment is the slowest leak in an ambitious woman’s life.

The D.R.O.P. Method

Here’s the reframe I come back to whenever I feel myself white-knuckling my to-do list:

D — Decide what only you can do. Not what you do well. What only you, specifically, can do. This list is shorter than you think.

R — Resist the efficiency argument. Yes, you’re faster. But your speed today is tomorrow’s bottleneck. Every time you “just handle it,” you rob someone else of the chance to grow and yourself of the chance to breathe.

O — Outsource one thing this week. At work or at home, it doesn’t matter. Start with something low-stakes and notice what happens to your mental bandwidth.

P — Practice tolerating “good enough.” This is the hardest one. Perfectionism and the “I’ll do it myself” trap are first cousins. When we let go, things will sometimes be done differently. That’s allowed.

One of our Mastermind members put it perfectly: “I realized I wasn’t delegating because I didn’t trust other people. I wasn’t delegating because I didn’t trust myself to be okay if things weren’t perfect.”

That one landed.

This week, I want you to catch yourself the next time you say “I’ll just do it.” Ask: is this mine to carry, or am I just the most capable person in the room? Those are two very different things.

Reply and tell me where this is showing up for you most. I read every response.

Xo,

Mary