Getting Sticky with Trinity Mouzon Wofford

What if we told you that the answer to profound, soothing-from-the-inside-out self-care lies not in an A-list astrologer or a private Gyrokinesis class, but in something we’re all already doing every day: eating? Well, frankly, we’d be stealing more than a few pages from Trinity Mouzon Wofford’s book, figuratively and literally. Earlier this year, the writer, entrepreneur, and founder of natural wellness brand Golde published Eating at Home: The Nourishing Practice of Everyday Cooking, a tender, deeply personal, recipe-laden case for the enduring benefits of preparing and eating meals with intention.

This isn’t about chewing your almonds slowly and carefully, it’s about reframing our attitudes toward grocery shopping, cooking, and mealtimes, treating them as sacred spaces worthy of our full attention—and the very key to wellbeing.

As a mother of two daughters, Ruby (four) and Maya (two), who runs her business from home alongside her husband, Issey, Trinity knows all too well the importance of carving out sacred spaces—both for herself and her family. In fact, the instinct to create and protect such spaces seems almost hereditary. In the seventies, her great-grandmother refused to abandon her Saratoga Springs home when it was slated for demolition. Thanks to her resolve, Trinity’s grandmother, mother, and eventually Trinity herself were all able to call what’s now known as the Mouzon House home.

It makes sense, then, that this instinct to create spaces of safety and comfort would guide Trinity through life’s more challenging moments, whether she’s meeting with investors, navigating some of the abysmal realities of black maternal healthcare, raising her daughters, or writing her book.

In Eating at Home, you’ll find mouthwatering recipes that make use of every last scrap in your fridge, plus indispensable tips on grocery shopping and storage. But above all, you’ll find a philosophy anyone can adopt. Trinity asks us to rethink our understanding of healthy eating not as an exercise in restriction, but as an opportunity to nourish ourselves with quality ingredients, to slow down, and connect with family. In other words, to give our full attention to the very things we tend to rush through. It’s a simple conceit, really, and one that’s worked so well for Trinity, Issey, and their two adorable daughters that she couldn’t not share it.

Here, Trinity talks surprise pregnancies and her experiences having natural births, the unspoken rules about when a successful woman is supposed to become a mother, and how practicing what she preaches has helped her family thrive.

Words by Rachel Hodin; Photos by Emily Winiker.

On the Mouzon House

I grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York, about an hour north of where I am now in a Victorian house that was built in the 1800s and originally purchased by my great-grandmother in 1919. So my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mom, and I all lived there. It’s a very matriarchal lineage. In the ‘70s, urban renewal swept through Saratoga Springs and the whole neighborhood was marked for demolition so they could make room for parking lots. My great-grandmother just said no and stayed. They shut her water off and her pipes froze in the winter. They dumped debris into her yard as they were knocking down every other house on the block. And now if you go look, it's the one house still standing in what is otherwise the downtown, urban core of Saratoga Springs.

The lineage is very strong on my maternal side, almost to a mythical degree. I never met my great-grandmother, but my grandmother and my mom would tell me such rich stories about her. We really honor our ancestors in our family. When my grandmother sold the house, she took the front door with her and attached it to her new home, and we still have it. My grandmother and my mom always called it, “mama's door.” We also have the original 1930s hotpoint stove. The spirit of this legacy inherently runs through us, and we’re also really committed to carrying it forward. 

20 years ago, my grandmother sold the house to a local family of restaurateurs with the agreement that they’d call it the Mouzon House and turn it into a farm-to-table restaurant that celebrates and protects the lineage. So for the last few decades, that’s been the beautiful sort of stewardship that the home has been under. It’s up for sale again and I've been in close conversations with the family, making sure we can preserve the home and see that it continues on. That legacy and heritage is so important, and it’s such an untold story in all the enthusiasm that's happening around the movement with Upstate New York. There's not a lot of knowledge around the different communities that have been there, the displacement, and that legacy of staying.

A very welcome plot twist

I guess I always knew I wanted to be a mom, but my journey to motherhood is funny. Four or five years ago, I was in the thick of a lot of work stuff and everything felt very heavy. Then all of a sudden, I found out by total surprise that I was pregnant with Ruby. During Covid, we had left our apartment in Brooklyn to stay with my husband's family for a while, and then with my mom for a while. When I found out I was pregnant, we were still living with my mom and hadn't even gotten our own space yet. I can still place myself exactly where I was when I found out and this feeling I had that life can still surprise me, versus the heavy, mundane feeling day after day. I hadn’t made a proactive decision to become a parent, and my journey to motherhood sort of started in that instant.

Proof that the pregnancy glow is real

For both kids, the first trimester sucked. You just kind of have to get through those really awful first 90 days by any means necessary. I have this flashback of trying to eat a bagel with cream cheese and finding even that to be too strong. But with both pregnancies, my eating habits didn't dramatically move around. 

Aside from that, both pregnancies were good and uncomplicated; honestly, I think I like being pregnant more than I like not being pregnant. It’s definitely the best part; the hard part comes when the kid shows up. They were two years apart and now that I'm finally fully out of a lot of that postpartum period, and my skin's not as good, I'm like, shit, would another kid be an unreasonable beauty expense? I was one of those people who liked being pregnant and the attention. It’s like you're a princess for a few months. The first time around is easier though; the second time, you want to be a princess, but there's already someone you’re beholden to who takes first priority.

A change of plans (and practitioners) 

My intention with my first was to have a regular hospital birth because I don't consider myself to have a high pain tolerance. I’d been using a standard OB/GYN, and I think the more time I spent there, the more I realized how it works. They rotate you through all these different practitioners; you don't know who's actually going to be there during the birth. One time I went in, and it was like the third person I had seen, and I remember asking, “Can we go check out the hospital ward or something?" And she was like, "Oh, no, no, no," as if that was so ridiculous to ask. 

I did have a sense of everything feeling really good and peaceful within my unit, but I began to feel more and more afraid and nervous of how much control I’d really have in the hospital setting. Around six months in, they made a mistake on my testing. Some labs came back and were flagged for a really elevated level of something that could indicate a case of spina bifida. Which is pretty scary when you Google it, and could have some pretty horrific implications for the pregnancy. So they scheduled me for a level two ultrasound and I spent those days leading up to the appointment cursing the fact that I hadn't been good about taking my multivitamins. I went to the ultrasound and they were like, “Oh yeah you're fine. They read your test results as if you were white, but you're not.” Apparently, different races have different levels of hormones so because they had put down the wrong race on the test, the results came back saying that the baby had a pretty severe health issue. That was sort of the last straw. I was like, these people don't see me. I don’t feel like I’m in good hands or that they understand me as more than a number on a chart.

A friend of mine did a home birth and I decided to talk to her midwife. When I spoke to her, I felt so immediately well cared for and held through the process that I made the 180 and decided to go with a home birth. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to have the baby at home, I just wanted to know that I had some care that I felt trust in. Also, where we live upstate, the nearest hospital is a 40-minute drive away and that seemed really scary.

“It was like a cross between a marathon and a shroom trip” 

The home birth for Ruby, my first, was great and uncomplicated. My husband was obviously there and my mother-in-law was there, who’s like a force of nature. She’s Japanese and had both of her kids unmedicated; they don't really do epidurals for labor there. So what I was doing was sort of standard to her. Things started up a bit the evening of July 25th, but it didn't really kick in full force until the morning of the day I had her, the 26th. My mother-in-law was giving me these intense back rubs, the midwife assistant was there, and my midwife was like, "I'm not coming anytime soon because first babies always take a long time." The whole thing was fairly efficient; by the time she was born, it was like 2:00PM. It ended up being a little bit of laboring around the house, and the last couple of hours in a birthing pool that Issey and the midwife assistant set up. 

It was like a cross between a marathon and a shroom trip; I felt super high. The contractions were really intense and extremely painful, but I focused on what I knew. My midwife had taught me about letting your body get out of the way. With any sort of fear or pain response, you want to tense up, so with every contraction that would come, I just tried to be as loose and relaxed as possible. And that's the hard work: not resisting the contraction really hurts. It was so painful and I wanted to get it over with so I was like, I’m going to make sure that I let every contraction do its job. 

I remember I was in the pool with my head leaning back on the edge and a wet cloth on my forehead and my midwife finally came in. It was probably 1:00PM by then. She just looked at me, put her hand on my forehead, and it was the most soothing touch of my whole life. I felt so mothered in that moment. And then I was like, "Okay, we can do this." It was intense, but when I wasn't in a contraction, I was in, like, a giddy stupor; I kept asking these funny questions, like, “Do you think she’s going to be here by lunchtime?”

Ruby was born in caul, so she was still in the sack. My water never broke. During the birth, I also never really knew where I was in the process; we never checked how dilated I was. My midwife just watched my breathing and we went from there. And actually I was in such a stupor that I don't think I even knew exactly what was happening, but I remember looking at my husband's face and he was crying so I knew that the baby was there. The next thing I knew, she was on my chest. It was pretty magical, really beautiful, sweet, and lovely, and the hardest thing I've ever done. I think I liked the challenge of it and, I mean, how many times in your life do you get to feel the moment of new life coming through? It’s like piercing dimensions. 

“We would’ve never made it to a hospital even if we had wanted to”

My second was born in a very, like, animal way. We would’ve never made it to a hospital even if we had wanted to so thank God we’d already had an at-home birth. 

My midwife had said that the second baby comes faster than the first. I have a picture of myself that I took in the mirror like a week past my due date, completely not in labor. Her birth time ended up being 30 minutes after that. There was no time for anyone to come. I literally just jumped into the bathtub at home, on all fours, saying that I didn't want to do this without the midwife here. She was on speaker phone listening to the breathing. My husband was like, “I see the head,” and caught the baby and it was fucking crazy. So that was sort of terrifying.

That whole day we had thought that maybe today would be the day. Conveniently, my mother-in-law just happened to be with us. I was getting Braxton Hicks; sometimes they actually hurt, but it was hard to know if anything was really happening. Then contractions started to come on that I actually had to breathe through. But me and Issey were cooking dinner and thought we had hours. Then my water broke, which hadn’t happened before, and by that point it hurt a lot. It all cranked up so quickly that I got really scared. It had only been about 15 minutes and I was completely bent over with pain.

The pregnancy wasn’t physically hard, but I felt a lot more exhausted and I had a lot more guilt. I felt like I wasn't being a good enough mom to my one kid and that I wasn't being a good enough “pregnant goddess.” And I’d worried that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself well enough while I was pregnant because I was always running after a toddler. So in that moment after my water broke, I was like, Oh my god, I'm so not prepared, this is going to last hours and I already can’t take it. And then Junko, my mother-in-law, ran Ruby down to the neighbor's house and in that time frame, I was like, “Issey, we don't have time to fill up the pool. You need to just get me upstairs into the tub and fill it with some water.” I literally climbed up the stairs on all fours and I remember still being so scared, thinking, oh my god, it's been only minutes since this started. 

In hindsight I realize I was probably all the way at the transitioning phase; it just happened so fast. I think it must have been within 10 minutes of making it into the water that the baby was born. Once we knew she was safe and that we had accomplished the task, it felt pretty cool. I wouldn't like to try that again; I would much prefer to have had a medical professional on staff, but it all kind of fits Maya’s personality. she’s a fucking firebomb of a human being. So it makes perfect sense that she announced herself to the world in full force.

Something borrowed, something postpartum 

I think one of the biggest upsides of a home birth, besides not having to go to the hospital when you're in the throes of labor, is not having to leave the house for the postpartum visits. So for the first two months after giving birth, the midwife came to my home to do checkups on the baby. I remember my postpartum period with Ruby feeling, for the most part, really easy-breezy. 

Me and Issey had gotten engaged in 2019 and we were planning to get married in 2020. That didn’t happen. Then I got pregnant, which was a surprise and we had the baby in 2022. Ruby was born at the end of July and we wanted to get married somewhere upstate. If we waited a couple months it’d be shitty winter weather, and if we waited even longer, then we’d be getting married with a toddler around. So we just went for it; we booked the wedding for September 3rd. Ruby was born July 26th so we ended up getting married when I was five weeks postpartum. I'm just glad I didn't know what a poor decision that may have been when I initially made that call. 

Everything with the baby felt really easy-breezy, but I was nervous and concerned about pulling off a wedding. I was so not ready to show myself to the world in that way. I had bought my dress while I was pregnant and had been too pregnant to try it on. So I remember trying on my dress for the first time at, like, two weeks postpartum, trying to figure out how I was going to wear it, and just feeling very panicked. 

Three days after she was born, Issey needed to go to the city to get his suit fitted for the wedding. I was in the house with my in-laws and the new baby, up and about making them tea, being like, "Oh, I had such an easy birth, such an easy pregnancy." And I ended up in bed with a fever, completely laid up, crying. I called the midwife and she was like, "What are you doing on your feet?" I think because everything had been so breezy and I was like I don't know why anyone says this is hard, I didn't really understand that you still have to take it easy. That first experience of being sick with a fever and a headache in bed, and there being a newborn I needed to feed, was the first time I had that feeling that you don't get to take a moment off. It doesn't matter if you’re sick in bed with a fever, you’ve got to nurse this kid. That felt like a real arrival point in motherhood.

Fortunately, the fever passed and the wedding was a really great time. What was really nice was all of our friends and relatives had gathered to celebrate not just our marriage but also this new family of ours. If we hadn’t done the wedding, I think it would’ve been difficult for a lot of our friends and family to meet Ruby before she got much older. Two weeks after the wedding, I remember her being alert enough to know if she had mom holding her or not, and thinking there’s no way we could’ve danced on a dance floor with her being this alert. So we were able to have a good time and the whole thing was just beautiful. I think we nailed it. 

The myth of having it all 

The first time around with Ruby, I didn't tell anyone publicly until I was seven months along, aside from my family, my close friends, and our employees. I felt like I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my career and so I hadn’t earned the right to be taking this next step. Culturally, we've sort of decided that motherhood is what you do after you've gotten far enough in your career. Then you can take a little sabbatical to be a mom before getting into, like, phase two. When Ruby was born, I was 29, which is like a teen mom in the 2020s, but both times I was pregnant, there was a hint of, Am I allowed to do this? 

My second was also unplanned and throughout the pregnancy, I felt really guilty. I kept thinking I hadn’t waited long enough to have the second. I think this feeling has finally gone away now, but as the founder of a business that has investors and employees, there was an awful lot of guilt about whether or not it was okay to even have children. Oftentimes, even while just changing a diaper, I’d picture my meanest investor in the back of my mind being like, “Why are you doing this when you should be running the company?” We’ve kept the kids with us this whole time, which has worked for me and Issey, but I felt a lot of guilt about it too. Choosing not to send them to daycare so that I could get back to “what really mattered,” the work of it all—it felt like I was doing something naughty. I hadn’t planned my first; ending up surprise pregnant again, I felt like I wasn't a responsible parent or a responsible CEO. It made everything a lot harder to enjoy. 

On Eating at Home 

I wrote the book through both pregnancies. I was pregnant with Ruby when the woman who ended up being my agent reached out to me. She’d read about my work with Golde and its mission of wellness for all and thought it would be a beautiful thing to do a cookbook around. 

The book is really a collection of my family's home recipes. And the thesis is: we're living in a time where the rushing and the busyness has become a moral high ground, where we all want to talk about how many meetings we had today and how super super busy we are. And meal time is the first thing that comes off the list when we feel like we're already drinking from the fire hose. 

Funnily enough, our culture is also very hyper-aware now of these wellness techniques, like breath work and meditation and journaling. It’s all in service of being more present, but we also have to eat. And I've found personally through my experience that finding ways to be a little bit more intentional with everything, from the way I grocery shop to cooking to sitting down and eating a meal, has been my most accessible and relatable entry point to a sense of grounding. So Eating at Home shares all the beautiful recipes that make that a reality. Almost more than that though, it really argues that food can be our means to a practice of groundedness versus a means to getting back to everything else that really matters.

A little goes a long way: self-care edition

My kids turned two and four this summer, and they're very busy bees. For the most part, my husband Issey takes them during the day and I get a lot of the work stuff done. 

I had gotten to a point where I didn't want to hear the word “self-care” anymore because it just felt so cliché. But I’ve really gained a new appreciation for how non-negotiable doing basic things to care for myself is now that I have these other small people in the house all day. If I'm feeling depleted, that shows through to them really easily and then they’re going haywire. It only takes one person's energy being off for the whole vibe to be in the toilet. 

What I try to do is create small, achievable goals that I can actually commit to. Like, when my husband is getting breakfast ready for the girls, I go take a walk around the block for 10 minutes. I haven't figured out yet how to venture out for  an hour-long workout class, but just taking time for myself, the intention of it and the commitment to it, keeps me from boiling over. Especially as a mom. The dynamic with their father is so different; but with me, they're seeking comfort. Oftentimes they're pulling on me or  the younger one wants to nurse. A lot of times it feels like the kids have a straw and they're just sucking on you for comfort and safety. And it can leave me feeling very depleted if I haven't done something that day for myself. So I try to do that first thing in the morning, otherwise if I let the whole day go by and not do anything for me, I end up being a mess. 

It could be a walk. Or making a point to make dates with girlfriends and being proactive about doing things with them without the kids—even if we both have kids that like to play together. It’s important to take that mom hat off for a moment. No matter what your family dynamic is, you have to intentionally manufacture these sacred spaces for not being in mom mode.