Real conversations for Black moms. No performance required.
Mom Ish: The Conversation is a podcast created for Black mothers navigating real life in real time.
Hosted by Nikki Williams Rucker and Jacinta Gholston, this space centers honest dialogue about motherhood, identity, healing, rest, relationships, and the things we don’t always say out loud. There’s room here for laughter, reflection, softness, and truth.
This isn’t advice shouted from a mic. It’s a conversation you’re invited into. Each episode is designed to help you feel seen, less alone, and more grounded in your own experience.
Pull up a seat. Listen in. Join the conversation.
Hosted By
Nikki Williams Rucker & Jacinta Gholston
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Latest Episodes
🎧 Episode 12: When The Holidays Hurt
The holidays are often framed as a season of joy, togetherness, and celebration. But for many, they are layered with grief, memory, pressure, and quiet heaviness.
In this episode of Mom Ish: The Conversation, Nikki Williams Rucker and Jacinta Gholston open an honest dialogue about healing during the holidays. Jacinta begins by naming the pressure many people feel to “be merry,” even when their hearts are carrying something else entirely.
Nikki shares personally about losing her father just two days before Christmas and how that loss reshaped what this season means for her. Together, they explore what it looks like to grieve while still being present, to hold joy and sorrow at the same time, and to release the expectation that healing has a timeline.
This conversation creates space for:
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Navigating grief during celebratory seasons
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Letting joy and pain coexist without guilt
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Releasing the pressure to perform happiness
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Honoring loss while staying connected
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Redefining what healing looks like in real time
“When the Holidays Hurt” is not about fixing grief. It is about making space for it.
If this season feels complicated for you, you are not alone.
🎧 Episode 11: The Price of Peace: Money, Motherhood, and Mental Health
Peace is often talked about as a feeling, but rarely as a cost.
In this timely episode of Just Breathe: A Black Mom Ish Podcast, Nikki Williams Rucker and Jacinta Gholston unpack what peace actually requires of Black women—especially during the holiday season. From financial pressure and motherhood expectations to emotional labor and mental health strain, this conversation names the quiet trade-offs many Black women make just to keep things together.
Nikki opens the discussion by examining how money stress, hustle culture, and caregiving demands disrupt peace. Jacinta follows with a grounding truth: real peace is internal. If it can be shaken by outside circumstances, then it was never truly rooted.
Together, they challenge the idea that peace can be bought, earned, or outsourced, and instead explore how discernment, boundaries, and self-trust are essential to protecting it.
This episode invites listeners to stop paying for peace with their well-being and begin choosing it with intention.