Momé.

Brittany Ishibashi Is Redefining What Work-Life Balance Looks Like — and She Couldn’t Be Happier About It The actress, producer, and mother of three on her “refusing to pick” era: filming Brothers in Austin, the mom guilt that came with it, and the freedom she found in loosening her grip at home.

My house no longer has cribs, diapers, bottles, or anything else that comes with babies. Instead, there’s sports equipment, textbooks, laptops, and deodorant. My kids are in that strange in-between stage where they aren’t little anymore, but they can’t drive either. We spend years teaching our children to become independent. From the moment they insist on holding the spoon themselves, we’re slowly working ourselves out of a job. Then it starts to happen. They make their own breakfast.

Underneath every part she’s played is the same instinct: there is always another way to try. Motherhood just made it personal. Picture her three flights up in a Williamsburg walk-up she’d rented for the winter, wrapped in her coat like a human burrito against a cold she could not get warm enough from. She was prepping to direct four episodes of Doctor Death. She hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant yet. It was early, and there was a set to run.

September has a way of making everything feel like it’s starting again. School is back, calendars fill up, mornings get busier and somehow, you’re still exhausted. If you’ve been feeling more tired than usual lately, you’re not necessarily imagining it. There are a few things that could be behind that fall slump, from your sleep schedule to the changing daylight. The back to school season can make sleep one of the first things to get pushed aside.

In 1997, Nellie Akalp and her then boyfriend, Phil, started their first company with $100 in their small apartment living room. Akalp was in law school at the time and knew she didn’t want to take the typical route of becoming a lawyer, but she valued the training law school offered. It was in a class that she and Phil came up with a business idea and launched a one-page website to help people complete the legal documents needed to start a business.

Fahima Degia is a journalist, multimedia storyteller, and creative strategist based in New York. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she has reported on culture, identity, social issues, and the experiences shaping communities today. Her work has appeared in outlets including The U.S. Sun, New York Focus, Feet In 2 Worlds, The Nation, The Quint, The Indypendent, Norwood News, The Independent, and Columbia News Service.

Tassia (Tasha) O’Callaghan is a freelance SEO content strategist and writer specializing in women’s health, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause content, with a decade in the industry and clients including Peanut, Rescripted, and Seen Fertility. Her own trying-to-conceive journey, longer than she ever expected and marked by four losses along the way, is something she shares openly, because she knows how much it matters for people to hear they’re not alone.

It’s all about the boards — those gorgeous displays of food that are practically art. And nobody does them better than The BakerMama, Maegan Brown. Her new book, Celebration Boards: 50 Creative Boards to Turn Any Occasion into a Celebration, showcases desserts, cocktails, mocktails, and creative spreads ideal for baby showers, game nights, Easter brunch, Halloween, Christmas, pajama parties, and more.

Sheryl Nance-Nash is a freelance writer specializing in travel. She loves writing about the intersection of travel, history, wellness, art and culture. Travel feeds her adventurous spirit, whether it’s jumping off a cliff into a cenote in Mexico, soaring in a hot air balloon in the Arizona desert or parasailing in Maui. Her work has appeared on TravelandLeisure.com, CNTraveler.com, Fodors, Afar, Lonely Planet, The Daily Beast, Newsweek.com, TravelAwaits, Global Traveler Magazine, among others.

Beneath every version of her is the same woman doing the same thing she has always done: leading with the truth about who she is, and who she is becoming. Lauren Bosworth practices straightforward, unflinching honesty. She shares the raw, unfinished, and unglamorous parts of her life plainly, without performing or seeking validation.