THE 3 THINGS I AM THINKING ABOUT — Saturday, May 9th, 2026 Edition

It is the Saturday before Mother’s Day. I am sitting with my coffee writing this. Yesterday was my daughter’s sixteenth birthday. Tomorrow is the day everyone in my orbit calls their mom and tries to find words for something there are not really words for. I am in this strange in-between, watching my own daughter become a person from far away and watching the women in my life be the kind of people who shaped me into whoever I am, and trying to make sense of all of it before the noise starts up again Monday morning.

These are the three things I have been chewing on this week. They are not polished. They are the things that are still moving around in my head, which is usually how I know they are worth writing down.

THOUGHT ONE: THE COMPOUNDING I COULD NOT SEE FOR YEARS

I have been thinking about the math of mothers. Specifically, the math of what mothers do over decades that nobody has the language to measure correctly while it is happening.

If you put any operator’s career on a graph, you can draw the line. The reps. The pivots. The breakthroughs. The losses. The reps build the skill, the skill builds the leverage, the leverage builds the result. We can talk about it. We have frameworks for it.