Last night, my phone buzzed with a notification I had never seen. It was from Jetpack, the stats tracker on my website, informing me that 31 people had viewed my latest blog post in a single hour. To anyone with a real online platform, that number is laughably small. But for me, on a site where the average hourly view count was a solid zero, it was an earthquake.
The post was a raw follow-up about the behavioral contract my son and I are navigating. It was honest, a little messy, and deeply personal. And apparently, it was exactly what people wanted to read.This little explosion of interest in metacocomom.com isn’t just a fluke; it’s a case study in the very work I’m exploring with the Labor Pains Project. It’s a story about the unseen, often unpaid, and emotionally taxing labor of building something from scratch, and what happens when you finally find the right formula: radical honesty.
A Brief History of Unpaid Labor (aka MetaCocoMom)
My dream of hosting a parenting resource blog started ten years ago, back when I was a teacher and first stumbled upon the concept of metacognition. It’s basically the process of teaching kids to think about how they think, which is proven to build resilience, empathy, and critical thinking. The problem was, I couldn’t find a space where Black parents were encouraged to foster these “soft skills.” The focus for us is so often on teaching our children to withstand a harsh world—a completely different skillset rooted in survival. We’re taught that we don’t have the luxury of time or space to unlearn old habits and adopt new ones.
MetaCocoMom was meant to be a space to synthesize what I was learning and build a community with parents who wanted to raise their children with the same principles I was developing. But dreams don’t pay for diapers.
When MetaCocoMom first began, I couldn’t blog consistently because I didn’t have the content—I hadn’t yet put in the years with EJ to prove my theories. Then, after the twins arrived in 2019, I didn’t have the time. As I was coming off maternity leave in March 2020, the entire world shut down. No melodrama, it actually shut down. You’d think a global pandemic would be the perfect time to blog, but I was too busy trying to hold down a full-time job, manage my son’s virtual kindergarten, and meet the needs of twin infants, all while confined to a two-bedroom, fifth-floor apartment. The rhythm never came.Something shifted this summer. Having a supportive wife who sees the vision, having three school-aged children learning to care for themselves, and having the intense focus of the Labor Pains project gave me the energy to commit again. I’d been practicing branding, content marketing, and writing consistently for this project. It was time to apply that labor to my other baby. It was time to finally write the book she deserves.
Writing a book is hours upon hours of unpaid labor and research. There is no inherent promise of gold at the end of the rainbow. Book authors are in it for the sheer joy of it, whether that be sharing information or creating a new world.
Sounds like just the thing to add to my plate. But here in lies the rub, the way to become a better writer is to do it. No fancy sauce to it, just the consistent action of writing and editing every day. That’s why I wanted to do a blog in the first place. Chicken meet egg, who comes first?
The Pivot: When Honesty Became the Algorithm
I started with a weekly schedule in mid-August. That first week, the site had 39 visitors. The next week, 40. My most popular posts, polished listicles like “Stop Wasting Your Weekends!”, capped out at 10 views. I was putting in the work, but it wasn’t connecting.
Then came September. The headlines were trumpeting the news that 319,000 Black women had lost their jobs over the summer, and the veil just dropped for me. I was tired of pretending to have it all together. I just wanted everyone to know me, Jae Gayle, for who I am: a plebian just trying to figure it out, too.
So I wrote a post titled, “It’s All Falling Apart or Coming Together.” And the dam broke.
That post alone got 52 views, driving 83 visitors to the website that week. The site’s total traffic jumped from 78 visitors in all of August to 235 in September. As of today, we’re at 266 for October (210 views for a blog I posted last night), and the month isn’t even over. The data is clear: my attempts at a perfect formula—an AFROP book review on Tuesday, an event review on Thursday—couldn’t compete with the raw, relatable power of discussing discipline, struggle, and the feeling of falling apart.This, right here, is the work. The undocumented, emotionally taxing, and entirely unpaid labor of building community by showing your scars. And it’s the exact kind of labor the Labor Pains Project exists to archive and honor.
The Accidental Formula for Building Something Brave
For any artist, creator, or fellow mommy blogger out there trying to build something from nothing, here’s the process I stumbled into. It’s not about perfection; it’s about persistence and authenticity.
- Find Your “Why” (Again): I had to reconnect with why I started MetaCocoMom in the first place. It wasn’t to be a polished influencer; it was to build a community for people like me. Once my mission was clear, the content followed.
- Embrace the Mess: The breakthrough didn’t happen when I had the perfect photo or the most well-researched list. It happened when I admitted things were hard. Your audience isn’t looking for perfection; they’re looking for recognition. They want to see themselves in your story.
- Track Your Data, Trust Your Gut: The numbers told a story. 10 views for a listicle versus 52 for a vulnerable post isn’t just data; it’s a direct message from your community about what they need from you. Listen to it.
- Repurpose Your Labor: The skills I was honing for Labor Pains—grant writing, content strategy, community outreach—were directly transferable to MetaCocoMom. Don’t discount the skills you use in one area of your life. They are all part of your toolkit.
- Serve Before You Sell: The goal was never to monetize quickly. The goal was to build a resource and a dialogue. By focusing on the community’s needs (clearly, help with discipline!), focus on building trust through consistency. So much of our culture is built on capitalism, profits and loss; it is distinctly counter-cultural to give first, to improve quality of life for someone else, before looking to barter or sell goods and services.
From Personal Blog to Community Movement: Labor Pains Updates
The labor I pour into MetaCocoMom is a microcosm of the work we are doing with the Labor Pains Project—building a community dialogue from scratch, on two coasts, with amazing partners but no pre-existing institutional roadmap.
We are actively building this archive, and I’m thrilled to share that we successfully piloted our first oral history and body-mapping workshop at the Oakland Eastmont Library! The insights were invaluable—we learned we need to adjust the time to be more accessible and offer a “no-trace” option for participants who want to share their stories without being physically traced.
With that feedback, our first public community workshops are now scheduled!
- Thursday, October 30th from 2-4 PM at the Eastmont Library Community Room
- Wednesday, November 5th from 5-7 PM at the West Oakland Library
Please come share your story.
This work is only possible because of the incredible partners who have invested their trust and resources in this vision. We are building this together, piece by piece:
- East Oakland Boxing Association (EOBA): We are so proud and honored to announce that EOBA is the official fiscal sponsor for the Labor Pains Project! This is huge. It means that any contribution you make to this project is now fully tax-deductible. With Giving Tuesday right around the corner, this is the perfect time to support the work of archiving Black women’s economic histories.
- West Oakland Mural Project: Our incredible performance site partner in Oakland, where the Myth & Marrow solo performance will be held in June 2026.
- Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate NY: My East Coast artistic home, who will be hosting a staged reading of the ensemble script in March 2026.
- AAMLO Archives & University at Albany (SUNY) Archives: The institutional homes of the records that form the historical foundation of this entire project.
Trying to build something big and brave often feels like screaming into the void. But every once in a while, the void echoes back. And you realize you were never really alone.
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