Every Day Is Mother’s Day
A conversation with Mother Tongue founders, Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin.
MT founders Goldstein (left) and Rachlin
If The Full Bleed’s second season had a theme, it just might be “We Made A New Magazine During the Pandemic.” Listen to past episodes and you’ll see that our collective and unprecedented existential crisis ended up producing a lot of magazines.
Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin met as coworkers at the lifestyle brand Nowness in the UK. Later, with Melissa in LA and Natalia in Houston, they bonded over their new status as mothers: they had given birth a day apart.
And they both found that magazines aimed at mothers were barren. These titles spoke of babies and parenting and the decor of the baby’s room, but they rarely spoke of the moms as … people.
So they created Mother Tongue, a fresh look at womanhood and motherhood, and a kind of reclamation of both terms. The magazine functions as a conversation between like-minded moms from everywhere. Plus, like all modern media brands, Mother Tongue has great merch.
The election looms large, of course, over the magazine and our discussion—we spoke a week after it—and let’s just say both Melissa and Natalia were still processing the results. But Mother Tongue is not going to shy away from talking about that either.
“The visuals around motherhood and womanhood often were made to look very sweet or very ‘feminine’ or very cutesy. We thought, wouldn’t it be great to turn that on its head because that’s not how we find it at all. And probably a lot of the women that we know.”
Arjun Basu: So what’s the backstory right up to the point you decided to start this thing. I don’t know who wants to start, but Melissa, you look like you’re ready to go. So why don’t you start?
Melissa Goldstein: I love that my appearances are so deceptive. The backstory is that Natalia and I met in London. We both worked at a website called Nowness.
Arjun Basu: I love Nowness.
Melissa Goldstein: They’re still around. They’re still doing their thing. But yeah, we were there at the very start. And we met actually, I was about to leave and move back to Los Angeles, which is where I’m from originally. And Natalia was just coming on. She’d just left a gig at WSJ Europe.
And she was coming on as an editor, and we went out for a coffee-slash-lunch. We got fixed up by a friend who also worked at Nowness and we had this great conversation and this great sort of sparky beginning of a friendship that was really inconveniently timed and we said, nice to meet you, good luck with everything and followed each other on Instagram.
Later, actually, probably not even then, it was early for Instagram, I think, but we stayed in touch digitally. Very loosely. And then we went on to have these parallel lives where we both had our first kids the same, like a day apart. Natalia ended up moving back to the US. She moved to Houston.
So we were both in the US and kind of doing our own thing with our careers and I can let Natalia speak to everything that she was doing. I was writing a lot about art and design and Los Angeles for a variety of publications. And then the pandemic hit and that’s when we really reconnected.
And that’s when we started talking and commiserating and having these conversations about the fact that motherhood had become, like, a really major focus for us personally, and just in terms of the time that we were devoting to it, on a really practical level. And the fact that we really noticed that we were very put off by the idea of motherhood content that was aimed at us.
And why was that, because if we’re supposed to be the target audience, why are we saying, “Oh, that’s not for us?” And I think the thing that we really landed on was that we felt that a lot of sort of motherhood content was a little bit presumptuous of the fact that the only thing that mothers wanted to talk about were kids and parenting.
And of course that’s part of it, a really big part of it. And there’s a lot of rich conversation to have there, but it’s just not the only conversation. And Natalia kind of said, “Would you be interested in doing a project together?”
And I said, “Very interested.”
And we started brainstorming about what it could look like. And speaking of what it could look like, we had a lot of conversations about the visuals of motherhood and womanhood and the fact that things often were made to look very sweet or very “feminine” or very cutesy.
And we thought, wouldn’t it be great to turn that on its head because that’s not how we find it at all. And that’s not an aesthetic that really speaks to us either. And probably a lot of the women that we know. So I feel like I should hand it over to Natalia at this point. And let her jump in and give a little bit of her background and maybe, Nat, you can also talk about the early days like Kickstarter and all of that.
Natalia Rachlin: I can jump in and pick up. As Melissa said, it was really a very organic beginning, right? It was this moment in time where mothers across this country, across the globe, found themselves in this unprecedented situation where they were homeschooling and working and doing all the things at once.
And I think Melissa and I, in our particular stories, we found ourselves undertaking a kind of motherhood that we had never envisioned for ourselves, which was 24/7. Our careers had always been a huge part of our identity. And suddenly, like so many, we were putting that on a shelf just to keep the world running in these very small ways.
And, we just thought, why are there not conversations about motherhood that are a bit more challenging, that ask hard questions, that are a bit more pointed, that sort of analyze the role of motherhood in a wider cultural context?
So it’s not about the snacks that you’re making for a lunchbox. It’s not about clothing for children. But it’s actually about a much broader conversation about how motherhood applies to everyone—not just women with children—but to all people, human beings who have all come from a mother ultimately. And we thought that there must be other people out there who wanted to have discussions in this space, but there wasn’t currently a kind of media catering to that particular need.
We essentially saw, as you tend to do, a gap in the market. And we thought, Okay, let’s see if we can cobble this thing together. And we launched a Kickstarter. I think it was April or May, 2021. So very much in the thick of it. We put the idea out there because we certainly weren’t about to make a magazine that people didn’t want. So it was really sort of a, “Knock-knock. Is there anyone listening?” And we funded that first issue within 48 hours and off we went to make it. And the first edition launched in August, 2021.
Arjun Basu: Forty-eight hours. That’s amazing. Talk about proof of concept.
Natalia Rachlin: It was a delightful surprise, but I think also somewhere deep down, we knew there was a hunger for this, and especially in that moment and receiving that response was super satisfying and encouraging, because for sure, making an indie magazine in the best of times is a crazy undertaking. Doing it in the midst of a global health crisis is arguably slightly insane.
Arjun Basu: Motherhood just seems, more than any other human endeavor, just feels like a juggling act. And all life is, but motherhood in particular. And with Mother Tongue, you’re speaking about the humans that happen to be mothers and some of them, as you said, aren’t even. When I came across it, it just felt like this is a woman’s magazine, like in the purest sense of the word, it’s womanhood and motherhood all at once. It’s like a reclamation of both words.
Natalia Rachlin: I love that you say it’s a reclamation because I think that was very much our intention. And the magazine has a little tagline on the spine, which says: “A mom magazine for the now.” And that has tortured us since day one, because we thought, are we going to put off so many women just by that “a mom magazine” phrase?
And we dug in our heels and we said, “No. We’re going to reclaim that. We’re going to flip on its head what a mom magazine is and how it talks and who it talks to and what that means.” And that is very much what we’re still striving to do is to prove that preconception of what motherhood content looks like. And really show that what it once was is not what it needs to be anymore.
Arjun Basu: It’s not just the messy part of it, but it really does feel like this conversation that is probably happening all the time. And then some of it just gets into print.
Melissa Goldstein: Yeah, definitely. And I think this question or this point that you made about it not being always mothers either in the conversation, that’s an important one for us. Because we feel that it’s important to interrogate the way that culture puts this expectation of motherhood on women, definitely in this country and beyond this country.
And we’re really interested in looking at that and picking that apart and talking to people who have not subscribed to this cultural myth that the only path for a woman is to get married and have kids. That’s very much part of it for us too.
Arjun Basu: Neither of you claim to be experts, which I love. You’re mothers, in my book you’re an expert already being mothers. That’s great. But you said, this is looking at things from a cultural lens rather than a lifestyle lens. So I get that superficially, but what does that mean on a deeper level?
Natalia Rachlin: Yeah, I think it comes back to what you were saying—that we don’t pretend to be experts—we set out to ask a bunch of questions. Some of those were selfish things that we wanted to know personally. Some of them were much broader-spectrum questions that we wanted to dig into. And I think we weren’t interested in portraying this very polished, soft-lit, usually very privileged iteration of motherhood that was presented in mainstream media for so many years. It was baby on the hip in front of a pool. And, when this began, women’s lives were falling apart in so many ways, and we’re like, why can we not show some of that honestly? Why can we not scratch away at this veneer of motherhood having to be, you know, neat and always a walk in the park, and let’s have real conversations around these topics.
We didn’t want to put any kind of façade up. And it was not about me and Melissa and our personal experience of motherhood, it was about creating a platform for a diverse array of women to come together and form a community that is all about sharing different experiences and different perspectives and viewpoints.
Melissa Goldstein: I think I would just say on the lifestyle versus cultural examination front lifestyle treatment is much more—and nothing against that—but I would say a lifestyle treatment is much more: This is how I do it. Here’s my advice.
And I think for us, we’re less interested in the advice. We’re more interested in the, you take what you want to take from this. We’re not gonna tell you and the people we’re talking to are not gonna tell you and the conversation is only gonna lead to more questions and that’s what we like about it. We like that sort of exploration and—
“It’s actually a much broader conversation about how motherhood applies to everyone—not just women with children—but to all people, human beings who have all come from a mother, ultimately.”
Arjun Basu: —that’s how the magazine is set up. I can imagine four or five mothers, in this case, sitting around a table having an adult conversation, because someone’s got the kids. And of course that conversation is going to go all over the place.
Melissa Goldstein: Yes. Yeah. Yes. And that kind of, it’s funny, we get asked all the time by contributors: “Is this next issue going to have a theme.” Because it’s easier, right? To think of ideas if there’s a theme, but for us, it’s the sort of thing where we’re not interested in narrowing as you’ve seen. We’re really not interested in that.
And inevitably, as we commission the magazine, it’s very based on, kind of, intuition and serendipity of who comes into our orbit, and what people are talking about. And at the end, we do see these red threads that run through it. There are things that people are thinking about in that moment in time that really come through in the themes and the writings.
But yes, it is intentionally sprawling and intentionally diverse in terms of format. Some of it’s quite dense, some of it’s quite compact. We like to balance the visuals with the words. So yeah, I think that’s very apt what you’ve discerned from it.
Arjun Basu: Both of you have design and interior kind of backgrounds in terms of your writing. I know that one of the worst things that happens to art directors is when the editor hovers over their shoulder and watches them move every single pixel, at least in an office. Now you’ve gotten rid of that hovering-over-the-shoulder part, but what is it like for your art director to have to deal with both of you?
Natalia Rachlin: Probably not always a walk in the park. Our fantastic creative director and designer Vanessa Saba, she’s based in New York and she’s an incredible artist in her own right. And we are lucky enough to somehow convince her to come in twice a year and help us put the magazine together.
I definitely don’t think it’s easy for her. Perhaps, thank goodness, for us all being in different locations, as you say. But, it’s extremely collaborative. We’re on constant calls. We’re on constant Zooms. There’s a lot of live action Zooms towards the end.
And we are moving pixels around together. But also, Vanessa is such a talent and has had such a vision for how to build this out from an aesthetic point of view and to capture that tension and the sort of rough-around-the-edges nature of motherhood through her work that she also very much just does her thing and then Melissa and I come back and say, “How did you do it?” So there’s a beautiful, sort of, symbiosis at this point.
Melissa Goldstein: She is incredibly welcoming of input, I will say. Probably more than any other creative director I’ve worked with. Because I’ve definitely done that sort of going in and offering my two cents, and it’s definitely not always welcome, which I completely understand. But she’s like fitting in words for us. She’s moving things around. To her credit, she’s incredibly collaborative in that sense.
Arjun Basu: That leads to my next question in terms of just how it comes together on a basic level as a magazine. I can imagine there’s a lot of Zooms, there’s a lot of DMs. It’s this constant screen. And the irony, of course, is that this came out of the pandemic when we were all on screens and just ruing the day screens happened in many ways. So how does the magazine work?
Natalia Rachlin: It is like you say, a constant digital stream of communication. We have our shared Google sheets, our shared Google docs. And from the very sort of early days of commissioning and an issue we’re having—Melissa and I are in constant communication, probably too much, so our partners would argue.
And then we have weekly check-ins with Vanessa, our CD. And then, of course, at all scales, as we’re getting closer to closing the production. But it is, as Melissa said previously, it’s a really organic commissioning process. We usually have a few things that roll over from the previous issue, and then it starts there, building around it, and increasingly, there is order to the chaos. You say that there’s a diverse sort of slew of stories, but we do have some certain sort of internal formats that we’re always looking to fill. So that does help create sort of a system as we go.
Arjun Basu: What about the community? It started right from the start with the Kickstarter. You’ve created this community. How do you bring it together outside of the print?
Melissa Goldstein: It’s so incredible. It’s really incredible to us. It’s still very incredible to us. Just the way that we’re in conversation, on Instagram, with people that we would never have been in touch with otherwise, just an incredible group of women.
And then, yeah, that has evolved to be in person. We’ve only had launch events in New York and Los Angeles so far. But when we have had those events, it’s been truly incredible to see the women who come out and to be in a room together. It’s just, it is a little bit magic, that sounds cheesy but it really is, to be in that room and know that you have this shared value system about the importance of narrative and telling stories.
Natalia Rachlin: When we started this project, we really were just thinking of it as a magazine. And as it’s evolved, what we’ve realized is that the way it operates, and this is definitely how we think about the future of Mother Tongue is that it operates as more of a brand.
And that has really extended into this aspect of the community. Because our logo has become this secret handshake, “Oh, you’re a Mother Tongue mom?” Well that means that you also have questions about this job and you don’t always totally buy into it. And you’re not afraid to have that discussion with someone you meet at the playground.
There’s this sort of, yeah, this delightful sort of connection point to know that you’re in a safe space with someone to have these sorts of conversations. And that’s been incredible to see that, beyond the pages of the magazine, there is actually a real life understanding that we’ve come together around a certain vision of what motherhood means.
Arjun Basu: Mother Tongue as a mother tongue, which I’m sure you guys have thought of. Every media eventually it realizes it’s a brand, and that means that you have a source for it, which in this case is the magazine and the people who sustain it, which is the community. And then we have interactions and some of it’s commercial and some is transactional, but a lot of it is community based and it’s just a support group, really. So what have you learned—besides what we just talked about, maybe we’ve already answered the question—but what have you learned making this magazine that has surprised you?
Natalia Rachlin: This is the kind of one where we look at each other and decide who goes first. Do you want to go, Melissa, or do you want me to?
Melissa Goldstein: I think that surprised us, the sort of embrace of the logo as a symbol. I think that was really surprising early on. Early on, we had a conversation about making t-shirts, and we pretty much just planned that we would wear them, and our moms probably, right?
It was like, “Who’s going to buy these t-shirts?” But, people did and people do. And the baseball caps and the totes, and it’s meaningful to us because it, like Natalia said, it shows that they’re proud to have this symbol of the way that they view being a woman in the world, essentially, not to give us too much credit for that. But there is a reason why they like to wear it.
We’re not huge. So it does, to many people, have the effect of, “Oh, is that a band?” But I think that’s what was so surprising to us that, like you say, that is a path that indie magazines go down and they want to be a brand and that’s a great path to go down. It’s a sign of success, if you can expand it out that way, but it was surprising to us early on that people were attracted to that.
Natalia Rachlin: Yeah. And I’ll also say, and in a way this is not something that you want to admit is a surprise, but perhaps, it always is when you’re starting something out. You always hope that something will resonate at a really deep level. And we got that initial thumbs up from the Kickstarter and so off we went and we were like, okay we’ll make one and then we’ll see. We didn’t even sell a subscription on the Kickstarter. That’s how cautious we were. And then, the first one—
“We knew there was a hunger for this. And for sure, making an indie magazine in the best of times is a crazy undertaking. Doing it in the midst of a global health crisis is arguably slightly insane.”
Arjun Basu: —wait a second wait, you didn’t sell a subscription. So what were you selling?
Natalia Rachlin: T-shirts and some prints, but we didn’t want to promise a number two. That’s how much we were tiptoeing into this. And I think it was a surprise, Melissa, I think, correct me if I’m wrong, when we put out the first one and then it was sold out within two months, and we were like, “Oh, okay, so we got to do another one now.” And that evolution, that journey that has happened from that initial print run to now issue seven, which we just released, I think it proved this feeling that we had that has obviously always been the case, but we wanted to believe was true in the space too that storytelling can be a kind of activism.
You know, that for so many mothers, this content sparks some kind of reflection or they see themselves in it. And that is so incredibly meaningful to us. And, we’ve been getting messages these past few days, given the election, where women have been popping in to say, “Please keep doing the work that you’re doing.” And we are so honored and totally humbled that people feel like we have a tiny little place to share these stories, which frankly are going to be more needed than ever, going forward.
Arjun Basu: So I was going to talk about the “election in the room.” How does it change you guys moving forward? What do you do? If it does at all, I know it’s very soon and this is probably a question that you will have to ask and answer a lot in the coming months, perhaps years. And so it’s really probably an unfair question right now.
Melissa Goldstein: It's not unfair. I think in many ways it doesn’t change what we’re doing, but it makes it feel more urgent. Like it makes us feel more passionate about doing it. In the last year, I’ve been focusing so much on reproductive justice and that conversation among mothers which is like, yeah, we feel extremely passionate about and will continue to feel more passionate about, I’m sure.
And I think, yeah, just, offering a counter-narrative, I think, is kind of the mission, for lack of a more eloquent way of putting it. The stakes are just higher now for the mission.
Natalia Rachlin: And I think the magazine will continue to be, what is the magazine, if not something that’s responsive to the moment in time, right? That’s the beauty of it. Every six months you get to respond to the state of the world, whether that’s incredibly grim or a bit more hopeful.
And I think the first couple issues of the magazine that came out really in the thick of the pandemic—Melissa, there was an undercurrent of anger, right? And frustration in the kinds of stories that we were telling. And then maybe in the last few years there’s been a little bit more of a breath where we’re, finding our footing again.
And I have no doubt that the issue that will come out in the spring, will be taking a hard look at this new era that we’re now re-entering or entering again, or entering a different version of, and yeah, we’ll be taking a hard look at what that means for women and mothers, which remains unknown, but obviously not super hopeful at this current moment.
Arjun Basu: It’s definitely still new.
Melissa Goldstein: A big part of the point of the magazine from the start to and the fact that it is this object that you return to and is in print and is the kind of thing you can put down and come back to. And you don’t have to try and find whatever link that you opened and never got back to, it’s just physically there. It’s supposed to be an escape, too. And that’s always a balance in the way that we put things together. But there are always opportunities for comedy and respite, and that’s a really important part of the recipe, too.
Arjun Basu: Absolutely. Back to the idea of the conversation, no conversation has one tone. It has many tones. I’ll ask each of you, what are your three favorite magazines or media right now?
Melissa Goldstein: That’s a great question. Or media. When you say, “or media,” like podcasts?
Arjun Basu: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a magazine.
Melissa Goldstein: On the podcast front I’ve been listening compulsively to The Rest is Politics. It’s been in the lead up to the election but, in listening to that, I’ve grown quite attached to it. I’ve never been someone who really listens to political podcasts, but there’s something about it that I really appreciate the sort of insights and they have a great rapport and I just find myself really looking forward to listening to that.
I haven’t listened to the latest episode, I will say, because I’m not ready to go there yet. But that’s on the top of mind. I’m going to keep thinking. Nat, do you want to go back and forth?
Natalia Rachlin: We can, yeah. On the more escapist side, I have a real soft spot for the likes of apartamento and Pin-Up and Ark Journal. My safe space is going back to interiors and architecture, which is the world I came from before. And in moments where I truly need to go elsewhere mentally, that feels incredibly indulgent and luxurious. Melissa, back to you.
Melissa Goldstein: Let’s see. I think, so unoriginal to say The New Yorker, I’m trying to avoid saying The New Yorker, but I do end up, inevitably, coming back there and their editor actually had an incredible, incredible reel that he posted yesterday just about the importance of journalism right now and the importance of standards moving forward. And I found it really inspiring. And reassuring too.
Natalia Rachlin: Yeah. And I’m also frightfully unoriginal in that sense. Melissa knows that I’m somewhat obsessive-compulsively a newshound. And I am a devotee of the Times, and The Atlantic, and WSJ on occasion as well, those little rags, I think it’s like for us, it’s, they’re not novel answers, but the truth is, it’s I think so much of what we do today is it is just trying to keep up and then finding our little corner of that new space to dive into the stories that we don’t feel are getting told in the mainstream. And using our modest pages to unfurl women’s stories in a different kind of capacity.
Melissa Goldstein: I’m trying to think of another podcast to give you because—would you like another podcast or what else would you like?
Arjun Basu: I’m not going to tell you what to say—
Melissa Goldstein: —besides our very original sources.
Natalia Rachlin: I wish we had some really, like, esoteric, absurd—
Melissa Goldstein: I’ll go a little bit high/low for you. I’m the low editor in Mother Tongue. I’m the pop culture one. But I did recently, on the podcast front, I did a little while back listen to one called Sentimental in the City. And it was basically like an analysis of every episode of Sex in the City. But it’s like a cultural analysis of it and how it’s held up and what the things we hold on to from that and all of that. And I found it so entertaining and delicious, frankly.
Natalia Rachlin: Melissa, amongst being a co-founder and co-editor, is also our very official reality TV editor.
Arjun Basu: We all have to be good at something and—
Natalia Rachlin: It’s a skill set that I truly enjoy and admire. So I’m very grateful for it.
Melissa Goldstein & Natalia Rachlin: Three Things (So, 6 Things)
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