I had just started, and I hadn't earned the right to be distracted by becoming a parent yet — not until after I nailed a huge presentation, when I finally felt like I had a place.
A few months later I was holding back tears at daycare drop-off, telling my tiny son, "Mommy will be back soon and we will be alright." But would we, I wondered? As he got older, separation-anxiety tears derailed our mornings. I went looking for something that would help me explain what I did after I disappeared for the day. There wasn't one. So I made it.
Jossy Lee, founder
MIT-trained entrepreneur · Board Member, MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association · mom of three boys · LinkedIn
Drop-offs are hard. Parental guilt is real. We don't pretend it away — we give families language for it. Each book runs a parent's day and a child's day side by side, page for page, so a goodbye reads as a shared adventure instead of a leaving.
Working with employers was in the plan from the beginning — not to hand out a book, but to make the moment a company welcomes a new parent mean something. In that first round of testing, a corporate leader asked about branding it and putting it in the package for employees coming back from leave. The program grew from there.
The family pulled picture books off every shelf in Harvard Square, Kendall Square and the Cambridge Public Library looking for the right hand. They found Nila Aye — a world-renowned illustrator who took a chance on a first-time author.
The process has a name, and it's the one Jossy came out of MIT doing. Over 100 people across the globe read it before it was printed: working mothers and their partners, colleagues, teachers, librarians, career coaches, early-childhood experts — and the toddlers and kindergarteners who had to sit through it. Every page was shaped by a real reader. We called them co-creators, because they were.
The first prototype was made on a dining table and the living room became the design studio. In 2021, 525 backers raised $29,191 on a $10,000 goal to put the first edition into print.
Five years later the same method runs the whole collection — and it's why a company can hand this book to a new parent and trust what's inside it.