On Mother's Day, Jon led me into the kitchen with my eyes closed. When I opened them, a boob cake that said Happy First Year of Breastfeeding was on the table. I laughed and teared up at the sight of it. Recognition for a year of one of the hardest and most beautiful things I've ever done.

I have been breastfeeding since April 19, 2025. Day and night. That's over a year of being someone's entire food source, immune system, and soothing during a 3 AM wake-up. Roughly 1,800 hours. A full-time job. Your body burns 500 extra calories a day making milk. Nobody pays you for it. There is no trillion-dollar marketing budget for breast milk, lobbying, or sponsored influencers. And there’s very little government-mandated support. Mothers are mostly left to figure it out on their own.

I assumed breastfeeding would just work so I didn’t prepare. I was wrong, so so wrong. Summer has a tongue tie and a shallow latch, and she lost ten percent of her body weight in the first twenty-four hours of her life. Every feed was this sharp pinch that made me wince and hold my breath until it was over. The pressure to supplement with formula was immediate with multiple staff members at the hospital told me I needed to. I had to say no, over and over, fighting for something I wasn't even sure would work yet. I just wanted the chance to try with support at home since I was getting none at the hospital.

And then at home it was five weeks of YouTube videos on feeding positions, manually fixing her latch every single feed, cracked and bleeding nipples, silverettes taped to my boobs around the clock, and wearing the My Brest Friend pillow like a permanent fashion accessory. My doula came over two days postpartum and massaged my rock-hard breasts to get the milk out while I held back tears. Five weeks of wondering if it would ever stop hurting.

And then one day around week 6, it just worked. And I’ve never loved any physical activity more.

I share this not to say breastfeeding is best. I share it because I think we see women breastfeeding and assume it was natural. Instant. And so when it's not working and it's painful, you wonder if something is wrong with your baby or something is wrong with you. It's exhausting in every direction. There’s a constant worry and pressure around whether you're doing it right. What I needed was not pressure and worry but time. Summer and I needed to get to know each other earthside. We'd never done this before. Neither of us.

Breast milk is vastly understudied and nobody talks about how powerful it is. It contains over 400 different proteins. It’s alive. It changes composition based on what your baby needs — more antibodies when she's sick, more fat as she grows. It's her first vaccine, her immune system, her gut health. Breastfeeding for over a year reduces your risk of ovarian cancer by up to 63% and lowers breast cancer risk too. The most sophisticated food on the planet, and your body just makes it.

People ask me when I'm going to stop. I genuinely don't know how.

Breastfeeding releases oxytocin every single feed. It's more than nutrition, it's co-regulation. She snuggles up next to my breast and uses it to fall asleep. My body was her first home, and it still is. We are each other's safe place as she grows and explores. I'm not ready to close that.

People tell me it's going to become a habit, like a pacifier. But the pacifier was created to imitate me.

I admire all moms and their choices around feeding. It's personal, and moms have to do what's best for them and their babies. Some of those paths are harder than mine.

I'm sharing my story because the difficulties of breastfeeding are not explored enough. People think if you're doing it a year in, you must have some gift. I don’t. I just had to survive the first five weeks.

The cake on Mother's Day meant so much to me because it recognizes the labor. The hard and the holy. All 1,800 hours of it.

Happy Mother's Day to all our SheFi Moms.

The Inner Circle Kicks off May 22,
And I Want You in the Room 💫

The Inner Circle is happening. Our first call is Friday, May 22. Founding member spots are filling, and I want you in.

The Inner Circle is a small group of women in crypto, finance, AI, and tech going deeper together. A place for real connections, career momentum, and a bigger view on what's actually happening in frontier technology. Not a Discord. Not a content channel. A room.

Here's what I want for every woman who says yes. I want you to do business with these women. I want you to walk into your next deal, your next role, your next round, and find that someone in the room already knows your name. I want you to make genuine friends here, the kind you text your wins and on your hard days. That's why we're building this around small group networking sessions, regular member introductions, and a lot of honest conversation between women actually building in this industry.

Inside the room you'll also find six annual career workshops led by women like Amanda Cassatt of Serotonin and Lindsay Mason of Coinbase, monthly affirmation and goal setting sessions I host myself, a private members chat, a private job board where members refer one another into roles, and partner discounts with Trezor, CoinGecko, and more. Those are all real, and they are yours. But the heart of it is the women.

Founding member pricing is $199 a year or $250 paid monthly, capped at 100, locked in for as long as you're a member.

Kickoff is Friday, May 22. That's the call where all of us new founding members will be in a room together for the first time. If you want to be there at the start, now is the time:

APPLY HERE: https://pctxqsdzgk0.typeform.com/to/zlmsbG3K

Would love to have you in.

My Favorite AI Tool This Week 💡

I've been telling women that AI literacy is the path to agency. Then yesterday, the largest npm supply chain attack of the year hit.

Developers don't write all their code from scratch. They grab free building blocks from a giant public library called npm, snap them together, and ship apps. One app might depend on hundreds of these blocks. The whole modern internet runs on this.

Yesterday, attackers poisoned 170 of the most popular ones (TanStack, Mistral AI, UiPath, OpenSearch). They get downloaded 518 million times a week. The malicious code rides along with a normal install and steals developer credentials, GitHub tokens, cloud secrets, password vaults from 1Password and Bitwarden, and crypto wallet seeds. Then it uses those stolen keys to infect more developers. A worm.

The impact goes beyond people who write code. If you use Claude Code, Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bolt, or any AI tool with agent permissions, you're operating inside developer infrastructure now. You're installing packages. Granting OAuth permissions. Giving agents access to your email, calendar, files, GitHub, your terminal. The line between normal ambitious person using AI and developer security surface has basically disappeared.

I spent yesterday morning auditing my own systems. Two years ago AI literacy meant knowing how to prompt. Now it means knowing what you installed, what has access to what, and how to pull it back when something goes wrong. The bar moved and most of us didn't notice.

I've told thousands of women to stop waiting and start using these tools. I still mean it. But I owe them the next layer too. What to check. What to rotate. What permissions to pull back before the next attack lands.

I put together a simple audit guide yesterday morning. The exact checks I ran: https://sheficrypto.notion.site/ai-literacy-issue-01-the-may-11-audit

Mother’s Day Perk From a SheFi Member —
Caring For Mama Boxes 👩

I've been getting all of my mom and soon to be mom friends a Box from Caring For Mama, and the team behind includes SheFi Member, Michele.

We have special discount code for SheFi Members.

Get the moms in your life wellness and care boxes.

Use our special discount here: https://caringformama.co/discount/SHEFICARES

SheFi Global Events 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

05/15 Virtual: SheFi Investment Club with Christine Marie Turner: Members only
Join the SheFi Investment Club every Friday at 11am EST! Find the zoom link on Mighty Networks.

05/16 Arlington: SheFi DC Field Trip: Members only
BYOBrunch or a dish to share as we picnic, see the lambs, and tour the agrivoltaics at Carbon Country!

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 05/14 Rio de Janeiro: Web3 Café #5 Democracia Deliberada na Prática: Privacidade, Coordenação e Ação Coletiva: RSVP here

• 05/18 Vienna: Global Digital Asset Week Vienna: RSVP here

• 05/21 Lisbon: Lisbon Ethereum Community Hub Launch: RSVP here

• 05/27 NYC: Light x Lovable x McKinsey QB Finance Hackathon: RSVP here

• 05/28 Boston: InTheRoom: Founders, Builders & Connectors - #BosTechWeek: RSVP here

• 06/04 NYC: InTheRoom: From Match to Meeting- #NYTechWeek: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

👉️ Share your wins so we can celebrate them 👈️

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