Brooklyn girl. proud Dominican 🇩🇴 roots. Mom of a teenager and a toddler (yes simultaneously, yes on purpose, yes I have questions for myself too).

I built a whole business, Jariinovates Studios, teaching women how to create and grow online. And then clinical burnout, multiple surgeries and postpartum arrived all at once and took everything I thought I was building with it.

What held me through it, you may ask? The same two things that have held me through every hard season of my life.

Not strategy. Not a five step plan. Just creation and connection. More Than a Mom was born from that season. Because in the rubble of the burnout I realized something I'd been too busy to notice before: I had spent years helping other women show up fully in their businesses and lives while quietly forgetting to show up fully as myself.

This newsletter is for the mom who loves her kids fiercely and completely, who is genuinely, unapologetically, brilliantly good at being a mom, AND who has a whole inner world, dreams, desires, a creative fire, a longing for connection and joy that exists entirely outside of who she is to everyone else.

You are not just somebody's mother. You were a person first. A full, complex, dreaming, desiring, becoming person. And that person deserves a space too.

More Than a Mom is that space. Every issue is written like a voice note from a friend who sees all of you, the mess and the magic and everything in between. No performance. No perfection. Just the most Jarii thing I can give you, every single time.

Welcome home, familia. I'm really glad you're here.

Tu Amiga Jarii Collado

P.S. Know someone who'd enjoy this? Forward it along. It's the best compliment a letter can get.