AND/BOTH Podcast - Real Conversations, Shared Experiences, and the Community You've Been Missing

Kristin Smith has spent 20 years helping new families survive the hardest weeks of their lives. As the founder of Well Supported Family — a team of over 200 postpartum doulas, newborn care specialists, and nurses operating across 12 states — she’s built the modern village that most families desperately need and almost nobody has access to. Now she has a two-month-old of her own. An adopted son she...

Sam Kelly was making a Saturday morning to-do list for her kids on a Friday night when it hit her. She’d just spent a year teaching her husband not to rely on her to notice what needed to be done — and here she was, about to hand her children the same broken script. She dropped the marker, went to bed, and the next morning introduced her family to Notice and Do. Two years later she has a book deal...

Amanda Timonere spent a decade at the top of the clinical world — chief clinical officer of a multi-state mental health and substance use treatment center — before becoming a mom and realizing she wanted to do something different. Not because she couldn’t do the job. Because she was missing time with her kids and because she saw a gap in care for mothers that she was uniquely positioned to fill. N...

Betsy Cornwell saw a gap — artist residencies she qualified for but couldn’t access as a single parent — and instead of waiting for someone else to fill it, she built something herself. She crowdfunded the purchase of a historic 1906 knitting factory on the west coast of Ireland, turned it into a residency and retreat space for other single parent artists, and then wrote a memoir about how all of...

Laura Navaquin spent nearly 20 years in corporate America before one Wednesday meeting pushed her over the edge. Her husband said “just quit, we’ll figure it out.” She did, and then spent the next few weeks wondering if she’d made a catastrophic mistake before realizing she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Today Laura and her husband run four businesses rooted in real estate — a consultin...

Everyone dies. And yet most of us have no idea what dying actually looks like — because we’ve been shielded from it, and because everything we’ve seen on screen is wrong. Jade Adgate is a death doula, educator, and founder of Farewell Fellowship in Middle Tennessee. She’s spent years walking alongside families at end of life — not as a tour guide, but as a fellow traveler — and she’s on a mission...

Libby Ward built one of the internet’s most recognizable platforms for honest motherhood, and she did it by saying the things most moms were too afraid to say out loud. Now she’s put it all in a book: Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, published by Crown. In this co-hosted episode, Ashley and Erin sit down with Libby to trace the full arc, from the small town church community where...

What does it mean to break a cycle when you’re still inside it? Michelle Gibson is a psychotherapist, CEO of Gibson and Associates and the Nest Collective, and a mom of one, and she has spent her career helping people find language for experiences they were never taught to name. In this conversation, Michelle and Ashley cover a lot of ground: childhood trauma and the path into psychotherapy, the c...

What happens when two of the biggest life transitions collide at exactly the same time? For grief coach Sarah Kagan, that meant losing her mother at six months pregnant and learning to live through loss while preparing to bring a new life into the world. Sarah is a mother to two young kids, a former corporate professional who walked away from her career to follow a calling, and someone who is buil...

In this episode, host Ashley Blackington sits down with Caroline Benefield—digital marketer, stepparent, and someone who found herself living a decade of life in 18 months. Caroline shares what it really means to become the third parent in a blended family, how she navigated losing both parents while building a new family dynamic, and what happens when your dream job turns out not to be your dream...

This episode encourages embracing the messy middle, shedding old identities, taking small intentional steps, and cultivating a growth mindset as we navigate life's many transitions, personally and in parenting. Big question - What happens when the identity that once kept you strong… starts to burn you out? Dr. Anne Welsh shares her work supporting ambitious, working moms, and emphasizes the comple...

In this episode, host Ashley sits down with Nikki Weiss- digital thanatologist, project manager, and founder of Endevo, for a candid, eye-opening conversation about the intersection of caregiving, death planning, and our increasingly digital lives. Nikki brings not just professional expertise, but hard-won personal experience: she lost her father at 11, became her mother's primary caregiver at 21,...

What does it look like to make a huge life pivot in the middle of raising small kids—and during a global pandemic? In this episode, Ashley talks with Danielle Alvarez, a mom of three who walked away from the business she’d spent years building and went to law school with a six-, five-, and one-year-old at home. Now a corporate attorney with her own small business-focused firm, Danielle shares what...

Burnout doesn’t always show up as falling apart. Sometimes it looks like holding everything together for too long. In this episode of AND/BOTH , Ashley sits down with Sarah Smith — founder of Iconoclast Innovations, mom of two, and self-described iconoclast — for a deeply honest conversation about motherhood, mental health, and rebuilding yourself after burnout. Sarah shares her experience navigat...

What do you get when you mix startup experience, mother-of-a-newborn energy, and a deeply broken system for working parents? You get Recess. Amy Kiska is the co-founder and CEO of Recess , a platform parents are calling “the Booking.com of kids’ activities.” In this episode, she joins Ashley to talk about building a tech company while parenting a newborn, the invisible mental load of managing care...

What if fertility and reproductive health were treated like skincare or mental health, something we talked about before it became a crisis? In this episode of AND/BOTH , Ashley sits down with Sam Diamond, co‑founder of Bird & Be, to talk about building a clinically‑backed fertility company in the middle of a global pandemic, and why proactive, inclusive fertility care matters more than ever. S...

This week on AND/BOTH, I’m joined by Nomiki Petrolla, founder of Theanna and a mother of four who is reshaping what early-stage entrepreneurship can look like for women in tech. Nomiki has spent 15 years in the tech world, sitting beside founders, engineers, and venture-backed teams, often as the only woman in the room. That experience eventually led her to build Theanna: a platform designed to su...

In this solo episode, I’m taking a moment to pause, look back on Season 9 , and share what’s coming as we head into a new year and our tenth season of the AND/BOTH podcast. This season brought so many meaningful conversations on the mental load, the realities of modern motherhood, how we build community, what comfort and safety look like in hard seasons, and the ways we try (and often fail) to car...

This week on AND/BOTH, I’m joined by Lauryn Warnick , CEO and founder of Villain Branding . Lauryn shares how she went from film school to tech startups to leading a verbal-first brand consultancy—and how the business has grown and shifted alongside marriage, motherhood, and the many seasons real life brings. We talk about: Building a business that doesn’t pretend life at home is paused Why B2B st...

In this episode, I’m joined by Brea Starmer , founder of Lions & Tigers, a company she started after being laid off while seven months pregnant and serving as her family’s primary income. What began as survival quickly became a new way of thinking about work: flexible, skilled, sustainable, and built around real life. We talk about the myth of stability in traditional employment, why so many w...

November Roundtable: The Holiday Overwhelm Episode with Paige Connell & Allie McQuaid The holidays are supposed to feel warm and joyful- but for most moms, they also come with nonstop logistics, emotional labor, and a running mental checklist that never really turns off. And for millennial moms especially, the expectations feel higher than ever. In this month’s roundtable, Erin Holland (PG-ish...

In this episode, I sit down with Kendra Koch , the founder of Divergently , a private community built for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women who want clarity, support, and a softer landing than the internet usually offers. Kendra came to this work through her own late diagnosis, years spent in the Silicon Valley wellness world, and a growing sense that the tools available to neurodivergent women...

For more than 100 episodes, AND/BOTH has shared conversations with women navigating identity, care, and capacity — and this week, the conversation widens. In this episode, I sit down with Michael Perry , founder and CEO of Maple , to talk about what it means to be part of what he calls “the transition generation” — a time when fathers are learning to show up differently, families are renegotiating...

In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Westpfahl , founder of Be. Retreats , to talk about what it looks like to build a life and a business that make space for rest, intention, stillness, and connection — and how those four pillars spell something else entirely: RISK . Jennifer shares the winding story of how B-Retreats came to life, not from a business plan or a strategic vision, but from a f...

In this second half of my 100th episode conversation with my friend and poet Megan Leonard , we talk about what happens when we finally start letting go of what’s not working. We call it The Colander List — a way of noticing what’s naturally slipping through, what’s too heavy to hold, and what we might finally have permission to set down. This conversation isn’t about getting more efficient or org...