Could you start by just sharing a little bit about your own story and your experience? Because it's pretty powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think I'll tell you a little bit about like how this book came to be because it's intersected with my own story.

So in my mid 20s, I got my dream job at Cosmopolitan and I quickly realized that I had some pretty intense social anxiety going on.

And I would be in my pitch meetings where we pitch ideas for the magazine and I couldn't read the notes on my page.

I couldn't breathe.

So how was that for you and what kind of responses did you get from your mom when you tried?

like say how you feel.

And so our dynamic got a little more like complex over time.

But I really always knew that my relationship with my mom was sort of different.

It felt different than the relationships that I saw with my friends and their moms in high school.

And I tried to compensate for those differences by sort of making bids of connection, as they say.

I would offer to do my mom's makeup and she would tolerate it.

And instead of turning it into like a bonding moment, it was kind of like she became my child who I was getting ready to go out with.

on that note or not terribly unrelated, someone asks, am I too hard on my mom or should I give her grace since it was her first time being a mom and she was probably just passing down her own mommy issues?

So let's, how, how was it for you? And tell us a little bit about your relationship with your mother.

Yeah.

So I think a story that sort of illustrates my relationship with my mom is, um, when I was eight, I was hanging out outside with a girlfriend, and her mom came out and was like, "Hey, time to come in for dinner." We were chatting about whatever eight-year-olds chat about, and while we were doing that, my friend's mom put her arms over my friend and was sort of playing with her hair, and I was like, "Oh, that looks really nice.

I would like some of that." And so I went home, and I asked my mom, "Why don't you baby me anymore?" And her response was, "You want me to treat you like a baby?" And I was like, "No," and I tried to explain, you know, what I meant.

And she said, "Oh, you would like a smother mother." And that was sort of her phrase for an overly attentive mom, um, someone who was pretty nurturing-

Mm.

I think for me, the shame and stigma also came from comparison, and one example, uh, my freshman year of college, my sorority had Mom's Weekend, where you...

It's basically an excuse to invite your moms up to school to hang out, go on a bar crawl, go to a Sunday brunch hosted by the sorority.