What Does It Mean To Be A Cool Mom

But do I want to hang out with me?

That’s the question I asked myself in 2017, gallery hopping in Chelsea with friends. I was in my second trimester — my first time being pregnant, my first time becoming someone’s mother. I had no idea what to expect. What I did know was that motherhood would look different for me than it had for my own mother. I was an artist and writer in New York City. My entire life revolved around me. As the first of my friends to have a kid, I was terrified for that to change. Would I still think I was cool? Would I still want to spend time with myself?

I started asking women I admired. Those conversations were good, like life-changing good. So, I did what any millennial would do: I started a podcast. Cool Moms was born in 2018 out of uncertainty and a deep desire to know. To know that I would be okay. To know that my son would be okay.

I believe storytelling is the pathway to liberation. And for a while, the stories were enough.

Cool Moms evolved from a podcast into a live talk show, my ode to Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Ricki Lake, who I had the full-circle moment of interviewing in front of a live audience in Los Angeles. After every event, messages would flood my DMs: This conversation got me through postpartum. This felt like a friend. I knew we were onto something. I just didn’t know what to do with that magic once the night ended.

What I didn’t talk about online was everything happening in the background.

Layoffs. Romantic breakups. Friendship breakups. Upsizing, downsizing. The extreme pressure to perform, to show up as the version of a millennial mom that people — that I — wanted to see. Yes, I was posting Erewhon runs. I was also paying for them with an EBT card. I was letting go of the shame of spending money just to know how it felt, and then feeling ashamed about that, too. I was navigating what it means to be a single mother without wanting to collapse into the tired tropes of what that’s supposed to look like, while also knowing that so many mothers — partnered, financially stable, seemingly fine — were struggling in the exact same ways I was. We just weren’t saying it out loud.

The more honest I got about what I actually needed to thrive — emotionally, spiritually, financially — the more I understood that my story wasn’t unique. And I knew I couldn’t build what I was imagining alone.

Then Sarah Kim called.

The timing was what it needed to be. Sarah had been building community the same way I had — the kind that drives real impact, not views. We’d known each other for years. We had an old idea we’d never quite executed. We decided it was time. If we built a retreat that actually held mothers in all the ways we needed, not for two hours, but for a whole weekend, we believed something real could shift.

This past May, 20 mothers came to the Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs for the inaugural Cool Moms Feelings & Finance Retreat. From the woo to the pragmatic, tarot and tax strategy, gut health and investment accounts, spiritual liberation and credit card debt, we covered it all, because none of it is actually separate. The event was presented by Greenlight, UGG, and Deaddirt, the sports fashion house reimagining women’s soccer merchandise, because soccer moms are cool moms.

One of the greatest reliefs of the weekend, and I don’t use that word lightly, was the session with Greenlight. There is something quietly devastating about being a mother who is still figuring out her own finances while being responsible for teaching her children about money. Greenlight gave us the words and the tools to do exactly that: To talk to our kids about money with honesty and intention, even when we’re still in the middle of learning ourselves. The shame started to lift in that room.

Emily Benedetto of Abacus Wealth, who had no idea she’d be leading what became equal parts financial workshop and group therapy, held us in ways none of us expected. One mother paid off a credit card she’d been avoiding since 2020. Another walked out of a 15-minute tarot session with Porsche Little with tear-streaked cheeks and something that looked a lot like relief. Ericka Hart, who was in the middle of her national book tour, joined me for a Cool Moms LIVE centered on liberating our sexual selves and raising children in a queer world. Anabel Gonzalez of Good Bacteria shared her own postpartum healing journey. And on the final morning, perfumer Mar Boswell of Mar Mar Candles led us through a scent session where we each chose the smell we wanted to carry home. We took it very seriously.

But I also can’t stop thinking about Saturday night.

We had every intention of going out. Instead we wandered into the hotel bar and simply never left. At some point the DJ showed up, the lights came on, and 20 mothers took over the lounge completely, sloshing margaritas, dancing to Britney Spears and Whitney Houston, piling into a photo booth, playing musical chairs like we were 12 years old and had nowhere to be. Nobody planned it. It was perfect. I keep coming back to that image. Mothers, unbothered and untethered, just free.

I also spent Mother’s Day weekend with my own mother. Somewhere between the financial workshops and the late nights, we found ourselves in a conversation I don’t think we’d ever had, about her relationship with money, her fears, what she hopes to leave her children. We saw each other, maybe for the first time, not just as mother and daughter but as two women who had both been quietly doing it alone, for a very long time.

There is so much more work to do. That weekend we only scratched the surface. The real work, the sustained, unglamorous, deeply necessary work of becoming emotionally and financially free, that’s what comes next. That’s what Cool Moms has always been building toward. Because that’s what it actually means to be cool. Not the aesthetic, not the effortlessness, not the performance of having it together. Cool is what’s left when you put all of that down. When you’re free.

When I look back at the 29-year-old Elise on those Chelsea streets, in her mom’s Stan Smiths, a few months pregnant, completely uncertain about what came next, I feel tender toward her. She was about to become someone’s mother, and she was so afraid of losing herself in it.

My 37-year-old self is still figuring it out. But I’m doing it without fear, and I’m not doing it alone.

That’s cool.

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