About Megan

Hi! My name is Megan. I have 5 young children with my software geek husband in Silicon Valley. My first big girl job after college was working at a little news start up called MSNBC.com, which is now known as NBCNews.com. I also helped produce an MSNBC TV show and worked as an editor before getting my master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School in the City of New York. I was a fact checker at The New York Times. I love truth. I’m a news junkie.

No one could have told me when I got pregnant with my first child that I had started the most rewarding and hardest adventure of my life— becoming a mom and building a family life with my best friend and husband.

I’ve moved a half dozen times since having kids—from East to West Coast, with a stint living as an expat mama in Asia.

When my oldest two children were ages two and one, we went to Thailand, not knowing it was during the Yee Pang Festival, which locals have been celebrating for over 700 years. For a few nights, families light large paper lanterns and release them, filling the warm, dark sky with thousands of shimmering white dots for hours. It was straight out of the movie Tangled, at the end when the music swells and everybody is celebrating that the princess has returned to the castle. It was beyond a fairy tale for me—I looked at my daughter, son and my husband as we lit our huge lantern to contribute to the drama unfolding above and all around us–candles lit, hundreds of orchids and trays of Thai delicacies in a garden— and my heart filled with love and gratitude.

This was my story, but more significantly it was our story.

We were told that by releasing our lantern, we let go of things that needed to be put in the past and opened ourselves to new and better things in the future. So, at some point, we lifted our fingers off and opened our hands to all that could be. Together.

You have power at the tips of your fingers too. Your partner and a pair of tiny hands also are grasping for their place at the same lantern—and down the road, maybe even more little, growing hands around you reach up, their eyes looking up at you to take the lead. What do you need to let go of and take hold of so you can step into a greater story of “we” instead of “me?” You get to be a mom. You have power within you.

And as a family, we let go of the past, and looked up at our future. We became another light to make the world around us a better place and your family can too.