More than 130 moms tell Fast Company about the companies they’ve launched to try to fix at least part of our broken system. Check out our exclusive list of 75+ businesses.
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When Stephanie Fornaro was 5 and her younger brother was 6 months old, her mother left and did not come back. When Fornaro had her own children, she vowed she would do better. She left her sales job in preparation for the birth of her second child in 2017.
But after the birth, Fornaro struggled. Her husband, an entrepreneur, was on the road half the time. And she was lost in a fog of postpartum depression. Fornaro didn’t want to hire help. “It felt like I was failing as a mother because I was allowing someone else to raise my son,” she says. “I spent my entire life wondering how does a mother leave her children? It wasn’t until I went through a bout of postpartum depression myself that I understood. It wasn’t a lack of love. It was a lack of resources and support.”
America tells women they can have it all: children, a career—and their sanity. But the numbers don’t bear this out.
