BOSTON MAMAS (2006-2022)
I started a blog at midnight
because the thing I wanted didn't exist.
Boston Mamas began in 2006 — me, a baby, and a blank page at 12am. Within a year it became something I hadn't planned and couldn't have predicted: a pioneering model for hyperlocal lifestyle media that got written about, copied, and eventually retired on my own terms in 2022.
HOW IT STARTED
The resource didn't exist, so I built it from scratch.
This is the same move I've made my entire career. See the gap. Build the product. Figure out the rest along the way.
I was up with my firstborn at midnight — miserable amidst my postdoctoral fellowship — and looking for something that didn't exist: a resource that combined Boston lifestyle content with the depth and voice that parenting deserved. There were calendar sites and generic national lifestyle content — nothing that felt like the city I lived in or the parent I was.
So started sketching out ideas for content, a friend helped me set up a blog on Moveable Type, and I designed my own branding elements. When I hit publish on the first post and refreshed the screen, I felt an overwhelming shift. I'd found the format my brain was built for — the immediacy, the directness, the ability to say something and hear back from people who recognized themselves in what I was creating.
What followed over the next 16 years was a media brand, a book, a podcast, a community, and a model that other outlets started replicating — sometimes without attribution, which I noticed, and which I took as the clearest possible signal that I'd built something real.
2006
Founded on my own — before "hyperlocal media" was a category
16
Years of continuous publishing, community-building, and showing up
2022
Thousands of blog posts later, I retired the site on my own terms.
WHAT IT BECAME
A model that others started copying.
Boston Mamas was eventually described as a pioneering model for hyperlocal lifestyle media. I know this both because that is what I was told and also because I started watching other outlets copy (sometimes verbatim) what I had built, sometimes in direct response to the audience I'd created.
The thing I'm proudest of isn't the traffic or the press. It's the emails I got — privately, from parents who said, "Wait, we can do it differently?" — after I wrote something that named what they already knew but couldn't say.
The site was featured in outlets such as The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Romper, The Chicago Tribune, Forbes, CNN, NPR, and Parents Magazine. The way I showed up online and in person led to partnerships with brands such as Disney, American Heart Association, Fidelity, Microsoft, Staples, Tufts Medical Center, and more.
2022
Retired on my own terms.
I retired Boston Mamas in 2022 after 16 years. Not because it failed — because it had done what it set out to do, and because I knew what was next. Knowing when something has run its course, and leaving cleanly, is one of the things I'm good at. Boston Mamas was no exception.
The community, the voice, and the instinct that built it are all still here. They just live somewhere else now.
And while I could have just turned out the lights in 2022, I continue to pay for the site’s hosting so it can live on as a useful archive.
THE VOICE CONTINUES
The writing and podcasting that grew out of Boston Mamas lives on through Edit Your Life and my newsletters.