The Mom Behind
The Mic

I'm Ash. Mom of two boys.

Storyteller for nearly 20 years.
Creator of wonderbefore.

I've spent my career helping Fortune 500 brands find their voice, but this project didn't come from a boardroom. It came from my living room, watching my own kids lose access to something I didn't even realize was disappearing: boredom.

How wonderbefore began

I didn't set out to make a podcast.
I set out to solve a problem in my own home.

I noticed it slowly at first. My kids couldn't sit with silence. Every pause needed filling. Every car ride needed a screen. Every quiet moment felt like a problem to solve. My boys had forgotten how to be bored. And honestly? I'd forgotten what it looked like when they were.

I kept thinking:
”when did boredom become the enemy?”

Then I started digging into the research. Turns out, the moments we rush to fill are exactly the ones where imagination grows. The Default Mode Network, the part of the brain responsible for creativity, daydreaming, and emotional processing, only activates when kids aren't being stimulated.

We've been stealing their boredom. And with it, their imagination.

I couldn't unlearn that. And I'm a storyteller. I know how to build worlds with words. So I started wondering: what if I could create stories that didn't fill the space, but opened it up?

That's wonderbefore.

Read the research

Storytelling is my thing

I'm not a child development expert. I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm a storyteller.

That's what I've done for nearly 20 years, working with Fortune 500 brands and executives who needed help finding their voice. wonderbefore is where I finally used that skill for something I actually care about.

See my other work

The bigger picture

My hope is that wonderbefore becomes more than a podcast.

I want it to be a permission slip for parents to stop filling every moment. And a doorway for kids to discover what their own minds can do when given the space.

Explore the Four Acts