True Mom Confessions
 Since we last checked in with True Mom Confessions, almost a dozen more women have agreed that they often find other peoples' kids ugly. Nearly 50 have said "me too" to preferring sleep to sex now that they're parents. In the small amount of time that the site has existed in the world (it launched earlier this year), this anonymous forum has opened a peep hole into the candid, wondrous, startling inner world of motherhood. When we asked, co-creator Romi Lassally shared the story of how her secret-hoarding site came to be...
Romi, with the recent launch of confession sites for office workers, dads, and brides, you are at the center of a burgeoning empire of secrets! How did you get started? I actually had the idea for the site following a weekend during which I committed many, many parental misdemeanors. I'd followed conflicting parenting book advice about dealing with sibling conflict (one book had me leaving my kids to duke it out in the back seat of the car while I got out and sat on the hood—a disaster; the other had me using a calm voice and trying to reason with them—also a disaster). There were many parenting "don'ts" throughout the weekend but the topper was when my son woke up in the middle of the night and threw up all over my sea grass carpeting and being so exhausted (and having to put us both in the shower and bedding in the wash), I left the vomit on the floor hoping the dog would eat it. I was wracked with my standard mommy guilt on Monday but found that after confessing all my sins to a friend, I actually felt better... and so True Mom Confessions was born! That may be the best site-creation story we've ever heard. Did you already have experience on the Web? I had worked as a film producer in Hollywood and as an editor at The Huffington Post, so between my old media and new media lives I knew how to make my Internet business a reality. What about your partner, Rebecca Woolf? I was lucky enough to find Rebecca after reading her blog and knowing that a fellow mother, a great writer, and an active member in the blogging community would be a very valuable addition... so I "picked her up" with a cold call/email. She responded and that was that! We love the look of the site. How did that come about? A fellow website owner, Amy Keroes of Mommytrackd.com, introduced me to Katie Bush of Katie Bush Design. We talked over a few concepts and very quickly she sent samples of the True Mom Confessions logo with a black and white image. We tried a few different versions and eventually settled on the high heels and the bottle—the juxtaposition of sexuality/femininity/motherhood was exactly what I had pictured in my mind and Katie tapped into it without me even telling her. We all know how people love to be really, really, really brutally honest when posting comments online. How do you filter for shameless profanity and other out-of-control comments? We don't filter for shameless profanity... as you can see, there is quite a bit of it on the site. We do, however, filter confessions which just don't ring true, are too vulgar, or cross a line which we admit can change depending upon the day. Because of the volume of confessions, we have several confession moderators and it's a pretty subjective process. We also avoid putting up confessions that aren't really confessions—those which are blatant insults, judgments or just plain boring statements. Anything to confess yourselves? I confess that I spend too much time on the computer working on building the company. We have a huge learning curve and everyday feels like a semester of business school and require much more than 8 hours a day. But I love it... I really do. I don't think I've ever been so satisfied creatively. And hopefully we'll see some financial success too... We hope so, too. Good luck, Romi!
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