The other morning I was standing at the kitchen counter with a mug of tea going cold, and something hit me. In a few weeks, I’ll mark the exact date — a July — when I first clicked “publish” on a little website I built at 2 a.m., rubbing my eyes, with a two-month-old asleep against my chest.
Twenty years. Two whole decades. I can hardly believe I get to say that.
Picture the version of me from back then. I’d just turned 32 a few weeks before, and I was on maternity leave with my fifth baby. My four older ones: one, four, seven, and eight. I’d been married ten years, and my eleventh anniversary was only a month away. I’d been shopping around for a creative project — anything to keep the postpartum fog at bay. Around me, it felt like everyone with a phone was starting a blog “just for fun.” I’d been reading essay blogs for a few years, and I’d even tried starting one, but I kept feeling my writing wasn’t strong enough.
Then I found the design blogs. They posted all the time, but the posts were short — a photo, a few paragraphs. That felt like something I could actually manage with a newborn. I kept picturing myself typing with one hand while the baby nursed, or two hands while she napped.
But what would I even write about?
The at-least-one-thing version
My degree was in graphic design, and I’d been working in New York as an art director at an ad agency. And I was the mother of five. Those were my two identities: designer, mother. I kept hearing the same questions from friends having their first babies — they wanted my advice as a mom, and also, apparently, as someone with a decent eye. Where should you find design-forward maternity clothes? Do you actually need to throw a first birthday party? Is there such a thing as toddler shoes that don’t have Disney characters on them?
I figured I could just answer those questions, week after week. So I went to a tiny website called Blogger.com — it still exists, which I honestly didn’t know until recently — and I made a blog with a tagline I’d unknowingly spent twenty years keeping: the intersection of design and motherhood. And I’ve been posting ever since.
What twenty years of showing up taught me
Reading the old posts, I kept coming back to one reader comment. “I was in the middle of a rewrite of my entire life”, she wrote. “I needed something small to look forward to, and your short posts were exactly that.”
That’s what I’m selling you on, in hindsight. Not the blog. Not the ideas inside it. The habit of showing up in a small size.
For most of my career I believed self-care had to look impressive. The spa day. The 5 a.m. routine. The meal-prep sunlight. Most of it I skipped, or faked, or quietly resented. And for years I told myself the skipping was the problem — that I wasn’t disciplined enough.
Then it hit me, slow: the skipping wasn’t the problem. The size was. A big, perfect ritual you can’t keep is worth less than a small one you can. Three minutes of real rest beats an hour of performed wellness. Three deep breaths at the counter before the kids haul you downstairs beats the meditation app you open exactly once a month. Eighty percent done, on your worst week, is not failure. It’s the whole practice.
That’s a harder principle to teach than it is to live. Which, for all my years of explaining nutrition to other people, is saying something.
How I’m marking the milestone
For the twentieth year, I recorded an eight-episode podcast in which I interviewed each of my kids about what it was like to grow up with a chronically online mother — and we closed it out by having one of them interview me instead. The full series lives on Substack, and it’s rolling out to Apple Podcasts and, eventually, wherever you already listen to your shows.
I published the episodes in the order we recorded them:
- I interview Oscar
- I interview Betty
- I interview Flora June
- I interview Ben
- I interview Olive
- I interview Ralph
- I interview Maude
- Ben interviews me
Some of you have been here since the first post. Most of you found me somewhere between 2006 and now. I don’t know how any of you got here — a friend’s share, a search engine at 1 a.m., a dead link that somehow still worked — and I’m genuinely glad every single one of you did.
Reading, sharing, and where you’re able, subscribing. That’s what keeps this going. Doing the same thing with love, week after week, for twenty years, is not a small thing. I could not have done it without you.
Frequently asked questions
No. You don’t owe it to anyone. The only one you’re writing for is the person you thought you couldn’t be at 32, who’d just had her fifth baby.I’m just starting my own thing now — does it have to be 20 years?
Why keep it small and consistent instead of going big?
Because I kept failing at “big.” Small and consistent is the only version of the habit that ever survived me.
Do the kids appear on every episode?
One episode each, all six of them. The last one was flipped — one of the kids got to interview me instead. That’s the one I was most nervous about.
a note from Hazel — I still reread those old posts sometimes, and I don’t fix what was wrong in them. The 2 a.m. me with the cold kitchen and the newborn on her hip did exactly what she had to do. The rest is just decades of small, unimpressive, repeatable choices. Twenty years in, I can tell you: it’s not the big days. It’s the eighty-percent days.
If this felt like the reminder you needed today:
– Mindful Eating, the section of the blog I keep coming back to myself in hard months
– Slow Living, where I write about the unmarked rest that actually recharges you
And if you’re finding it harder to start again on the days you need to — here’s the honest, unglamorous version of what got me through: the Daily Rituals posts on tiny, repeatable starts