I was driving my son to school. Late. Exhausted. He was mid-tantrum in the back seat, and I was holding it together the way I always did, white knuckles on the wheel, running the mental list of everything I was already behind on before 8am.
Then The Chainsmokers came on. Something Just Like This. And I turned it up. Loud. Way too loud for a school morning. And something shifted. He stopped crying. I stopped clenching. We started screaming the words, then singing them, then laughing, full volume, windows probably shaking, two people who had been at war with the morning suddenly on the same team.
He walked into school in a completely different mood than the one he woke up in. And I drove to work proud. Not of a deal I closed or a meeting I crushed. Proud of that. Proud of the redirect. Proud of the instinct to turn the music up instead of the pressure up. It was an ordinary Tuesday. Nothing about it was supposed to matter.
I did not know it yet, but that was the seed. Later I wrote it down in a notebook, in San Francisco, in 2017, because I wanted to keep the feeling of being fully alive inside a life that looked, from the outside, like it was swallowing me.
I called it a MOMumental Moment, the first of what would become MOMumental Moments®. I thought it was a note to myself. It turned out to be the first brick.
The wanting had started before that car, though. I became a mother in 2013, and from the day I did, one thing in me never wavered. I wanted to support women, and especially mothers, the ones holding an entire world together and being asked to do it quietly. For years I did not have a shape for that. The notebook was the first time the mission found somewhere to live.
There is a part I never say out loud in the rooms where people ask how I built this. By then I had already led four companies. I had moved my life across two states. I knew how to build the things the world could measure. But I was never a journalist. I had no credentials as a writer, no permission slip, no one waiting on my words. Writing did not begin as a career. It began as an escape. It was the one place I could go and tell the truth about my life without softening it for anybody. And slowly, without me ever deciding it, the escape became the truth, and the truth became a body of work, and one day other women started reading it and finding themselves inside it.
I want to be honest about the middle, because the middle is where everyone quits. The middle was not a rise. It was a loop. I started and I stopped. I restarted. I hated WordPress with my whole heart. I changed the tech stack three times because I could never get the thing on the screen to match the thing in my head. I wrote Tuesdays that no one answered. I sat in the silence after publishing and thought, plainly, I am a nobody, who exactly do I think is waiting for this. And then the next Tuesday I wrote anyway.
That is why, when people ask how the Substack grew, I never let the numbers be the headline. Whatever it has become is not the accomplishment. It is evidence. It is proof of the only thing I actually did, which was keep coming back to a desk that owed me nothing, for years, before a single person clapped.
There were seasons when the coming back looked different. There was a stretch, the postpartum year with the early edge of perimenopause folded into it, when I could not produce at the pace I had convinced myself a real builder should. I would open the laptop and the woman who used to move fast was simply not in the chair. My husband would read the emails landing in my inbox, the ones from women telling me a thing I wrote had reached them, and he would say, you need to keep going, people are telling you this matters. And I would get frustrated with him, because he could see something about my own work that I could not. It took me a long time to understand what he was actually pointing at.
I did not need to build this perfectly. I needed to build it honestly. This was never journalism. It was never a performance. It was the one place I got to tell the truth, and the truth does not require a good day to be worth writing down.
Somewhere in there I met a person I did not know lived in me. I design my own covers now. I build my own sites. I experiment, I break things, I rebuild them late at night because I finally saw what they were supposed to be. Yes, I have tools in my corner now, NEON ID and Claude and CapCut and Little Bird, and they help me execute a vision faster than I ever could alone. But the tools are not the story. The story is that I stopped waiting for a team to arrive and hand me permission. I did not build a team first. I built the muscle first. The scaling comes after. The muscle comes from Tuesdays.
People always want to know when it became something real, as if there were a morning I woke and found it had turned overnight. There was not. There were small moments that quietly rearranged me. The first time a stranger told me something I wrote made her feel less alone. The first time a reader came back weeks later and handed my own words back to me. The first time I understood that people were not consuming the work, they were building a relationship with the ideas inside it. The numbers came later, and when they came they were only catching up to something I already knew. The real turn was quieter than any metric. The turn was the day I stopped asking whether people wanted to hear from me and started writing because I had something to say. I stopped waiting to be given permission. I gave it to myself.
If I had to hand you the whole decade in three words, it would be these. Write. Build. Return. You write the thing, even when the writing is bad and the room is empty. You build the thing around it, the letter, the site, the library, the small structure that holds the work upright. And you return to it, on the Tuesdays you doubt it and the Tuesdays you almost walk away, until returning is not a decision anymore, it is just who you are.
So this is what I know, and it is the only thing I actually know. You do not build it all at once. You build a decade of Tuesdays. People see what you built. They never see the Tuesdays. They do not see the letter you sent to no one, the website you redesigned again, the stack you changed for the fourth time, the night you were certain it was over. They see the finished thing and give it a name, and you smile, because you know what it really was.
And if you are the woman reading this on an ordinary Tuesday, wondering why the thing you are building is not bigger yet, I need you to hear me. Maybe nobody is watching you build yet. That is okay. They are not supposed to. Right now there is just today. The email you write. The thing you make. The idea you keep coming back to. The one you almost quit and didn’t. And then another Tuesday. And another. Until one day someone looks at what you built and cannot imagine the years of quiet it took. You will know. You will know it was a decade of Tuesdays, and every single one of them counted.
Your work is not waiting to be discovered. It is waiting for you to stay.
You are not falling behind. You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika Hanafin Austria
PS · If you are somewhere in your own decade of Tuesdays, I have quietly been building a library for you the whole time. Come sit with the podcast on a Thursday. And when you are ready to build alongside me, my Library is open. Not a program to join. A room to look around in. I have been building right next to you the entire time.
Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention · Co-Founder, NeonID