Full disclosure: I've written for Cookie. I have friends who have written for Cookie, and friends on the masthead. Cookie is a Shine partner, and many of you will have seen the magazine's posts on this site.
But before I wrote for Cookie and before I was the Parenting editor at Shine, I was a woman standing in an an Albuquerque airport with a three-week-old secret. I was nervous and alone and stuck between cities--a reality that felt like a too-apt metaphor. I hadn't told my husband I was pregnant yet. My family didn't know. It would be months before the rest of my friends would understand why I was rejecting invitations to bars and music shows and mountain climbs.
Any woman who has made the transition to motherhood knows how fraught even the simplest moments can be, and for me, this was one of them. I needed a magazine. But which one? Fashion no longer mattered. Heady intellectual articles wouldn't make it past my attention span. Parenting magazines were for parents, and I was just a woman with Godzilla-sized nausea and an ability to smell everyone else's deodorant.
So I was relieved, genuinely relieved when I found Cookie. Do you remember the moment you realized that you weren't alone with your pregnancy? That in addition to your partner, and family, and friends, you were going to meet a bunch of other mothers who were in it with you? For me, picking up Cookie at the airport was that moment. Sure, the women on its pages were far more lovely/ famous/ talented/ moneyed than I was, but that mattered less to me than the fact that I wanted to read everything on the content page. Should you let your son wear a dress if he wants to? Please tell me. Crafty Valentine cards for kids? Something to look forward to. A trench coat with pockets big enough to hold a bottle? Oh, go on!
So thank you, Cookie. Thanks for making my transition into motherhood a little easier, and for sitting with me in that weird place between cities. You will be missed.
