When Maryam Mehrtash walked onto the Disney lot for her first day as a Hollywood executive, she wasn’t just arriving at a new job. She was stepping into a dream that began decades earlier when a little girl who had fled Iran learned English by watching Disney cartoons.
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Today, Maryam is a former Disney executive, former Vice President at Paramount, author, entrepreneur, and mother of two young children. But behind the impressive resume is a story of resilience that started long before Hollywood. “I actually started learning how to speak English through storytelling and watching Disney cartoons,” Maryam shared. “It was a full circle moment for me when I started working at Disney because so much of how I was introduced to American culture and American storytelling was through Disney.”

A Family Built on Sacrifice

Maryam’s story begins in Iran during one of the country’s most turbulent periods. Her parents fled following the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s, searching for safety and opportunity. During their escape, Maryam and her mother were accidentally separated from her father and ended up in a refugee camp for months before he was able to find them.

Her father had one overriding goal: to create a different future for his daughter. “He didn’t know at the time what gender I was going to be,” Maryam recalled. “But he had this feeling that he was going to have a daughter. His goal became getting us out of Iran so that his daughter was going to have a life where she wasn’t silenced and she had opportunity in life to become who she wanted to be.”

The family eventually settled in Canada, where her parents built businesses from scratch despite speaking little English. “I watched my parents hustle,” Maryam said. “That’s what, from such a young age, ingrained in me the ethics of hard work and the ethics of really going after your dreams.”

Those lessons would become the foundation of everything that followed.

Chasing Hollywood

Like many children of immigrants, Maryam grew up balancing practicality with passion. She loved storytelling and theater, but her parents encouraged her to pursue a stable career. Rather than choosing between creativity and business, she found a way to embrace both.

After graduating at the top of her business school class, she began working in creative agencies in Canada. Eventually, she realized she had reached a ceiling. If she wanted a career in entertainment, she would need to take a leap.
Thirteen years ago, she packed up her life and moved to Los Angeles. That decision led to leadership roles at KTLA, CBS Interactive, Paramount+, and eventually Disney, where she oversaw global marketing promotions and partnerships for major franchises including Marvel Studios and 20th Century Studios.

Yet one of her most meaningful moments wasn’t a promotion. It was simply arriving. “I remember walking on the lot about a year ago,” she said. “I was just completely entrenched in the magic of Disney.” As she toured the historic studio, she found herself reconnecting with the child who had once dreamed of being there. “It was a surreal moment,” she said. “I felt that little girl again.”

Motherhood Arrives Alongside a Pandemic

Maryam became a mother in 2020, just months after the world shut down. Her daughter was born during the height of the COVID pandemic. Her son followed two years later.

Like many mothers, she was navigating career ambitions and newborn life simultaneously. Unlike most, she was also helping launch Paramount+, one of the largest streaming platforms in the industry.

Despite having six months of maternity leave available, she chose to return after ten weeks. “I felt that I had a big responsibility on my shoulders as an executive,” she explained. “I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be there for this big moment in my career where we were launching a streaming platform.”

The pandemic created challenges, but it also provided flexibility that previous generations of working mothers never had. Maryam could breastfeed between Zoom meetings, work from home, and receive support from her mother, who temporarily moved in to help care for the baby. Looking back, she sees both sides of the experience. “The blessing was that I had a lot of time at home with my child even though I had a very demanding job.”

The Myth of Doing It All

Ask Maryam how she manages a demanding career, motherhood, writing, and a growing Substack community, and her answer is surprisingly simple.

She doesn’t believe anyone truly does it all. “I think the secret to being able to do it all, because I actually don’t think that exists, is relentless prioritization.” Her system centers around identifying the three most important tasks each day and protecting time for them on her calendar.

Motherhood, she says, taught her to become ruthless about where she spends her energy. “Life is about trade-offs and you can’t have it all.”

That mindset extends into her marriage as well. Rather than silently carrying the invisible workload many mothers shoulder, Maryam and her husband regularly discuss responsibilities, schedules, and mental load. “I’ve sat down with my husband and I’ve done this,” she said. “I said, this is all of the invisible work that I do. What part of this list can you take off of my load?” The exercise brought visibility to work that often goes unnoticed and created a stronger sense of partnership.

Courage Is a Muscle

A few years ago, Maryam faced a major professional setback when she was laid off from Paramount. She had two young children, an uncertain future, and plenty of reasons to doubt herself.

Instead, she chose to build something new.

Today, she is writing her first book and growing her Substack newsletter, This Is Not a Memo, which has attracted thousands of subscribers. What changed? She started taking small steps. “Courage is a muscle that takes practice,” she said. “You develop it through doing more and more reps.” Rather than waiting until she felt confident, she committed to writing for twenty minutes a day.

Those daily sessions eventually became articles, a newsletter, a literary agent, and a book project. “I just started writing every day for 20 minutes,” she said. “That really built momentum and gave me the confidence.”

The Legacy She Wants to Leave

When Maryam talks about success, she rarely focuses on titles or achievements.
Instead, she talks about example.

Her mother modeled resilience. Her father modeled vision. Together, they showed her what was possible.
Now she hopes to pass that same lesson to her children. “I want her to see that I’m following my dreams,” Maryam said about her daughter. “She can do whatever she wants, but I just want her to see me continue doing it even after having two kids.”

Perhaps that is the thread connecting every chapter of Maryam’s journey, from refugee camps to Disney, from executive boardrooms to bedtime routines.

Dreams don’t stop when life gets complicated. They evolve. And often, the courage to pursue them begins with a single small step.
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As Maryam reminds mothers who feel overwhelmed or stuck: “Just start doing it. Don’t overthink.”

When Nasha Fitter talks about motherhood, she does not sugarcoat it. She speaks honestly about exhaustion, resentment, ambition, grief, marriage, and survival. But she also speaks with remarkable clarity about joy, resilience, friendship, and purpose.

Nasha is a Harvard MBA, entrepreneur, rare disease advocate, and mother of three. Her youngest daughter, Amara, was born with a devastating genetic condition called FOXG1 syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that affects mobility, communication, muscle tone, and seizures. What began as a terrifying diagnosis eventually became the catalyst for building two organizations that now support thousands of families navigating rare disease care.
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In our conversation for Trust Me Mom, Nasha shared what it was really like to go from ambitious startup founder to full-time caregiver almost overnight, how she saved her marriage during unimaginable stress, and why exhausted mothers need to stop glorifying self-sacrifice.

“I always wanted to do something really great with my life”

Nasha grew up in an immigrant family after moving to the United States from India as a child. Education and ambition were deeply woven into her upbringing. “I was ambitious just naturally from a young age,” she said. “I always wanted to do something really great with my life.”

That drive showed up early. At just 13 years old, she convinced an accountant to let her work for free simply so she could learn. She built an exciting global career, eventually launching an education technology company called Schoolie while raising two young children. Like many ambitious women, she found herself balancing growing professional success with the invisible labor of motherhood. “It was especially hard for me and women like me who are very ambitious to then deal with motherhood and what does that mean and your love for your child, but your love for your career,” she said.

Although she grew up in a household where both parents shared responsibilities fairly equally, marriage introduced a different reality. “My husband’s career always ended up taking precedence,” she admitted. “You resent being at home doing the housework because no one’s doing it and you resent then also working and also having to do everything.”

The diagnosis that changed everything

When Nasha became unexpectedly pregnant with her third child, life was already stretched thin. She was fundraising for her company’s Series A round while caring for three children under four years old.

Then Amara began having seizures.

Within months, genetic testing confirmed FOXG1 syndrome. Doctors told Nasha her daughter might never walk or talk and could remain cognitively at the level of a one-year-old for life. “They told me there were no therapies. There were no cures,” she recalled. “No one is going to focus on this condition because there’s only a few hundred patients we even know of in America.”

The experience shattered the life she thought she was building. “It was honestly very difficult because all of a sudden I had three children under the age of four,” she said. “And then everything changed dramatically.”

Those early months became pure survival. “I was just trying to keep my daughter alive, honestly,” Nasha said.
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At the time, she had little family support nearby. Her husband’s demanding new job required constant travel, and she was running on almost no sleep while caring for a medically fragile child. “She was on a medication where she would wake up every two hours at night,” Nasha shared. “I just was not sleeping at all and still managing my other two young children.”

Learning to let grief move through her

One of the most powerful moments in our conversation came when Nasha described finally allowing herself to fully feel grief after months of suppressing it.  “I sat in a dark closet for about five hours,” she said. “And I just said, 'Okay, I am going to just let all of the grief [in]. I'm going to feel it.”

Instead of continuing to push away fear and sadness, she allowed herself to fully experience them. “The thing with grief is so fascinating,” she explained. “If you let it come in you, it will go through you. It will not stay, but you have to allow it to come in you, and you have to let it process. And then it will leave.”

That moment became a turning point. “I told myself, I am not going to be a victim of my circumstance from this moment onward,” she said.

I hope her words resonate with and inspire other mothers who try to numb their pain, push through exhaustion, or pretend everything is fine while silently drowning.

Why mothers need more help and less guilt

Throughout the interview, Nasha repeatedly emphasized something many women struggle to hear: mothers are not supposed to do everything alone. “The society we live in now has focused on independence to a fault,” she said. “Women with this whole DIY mentality, do it yourself. And there is a badge of honor in being exhausted.”

She believes that mentality is harming women physically, emotionally, and mentally. “A child needs a stable, happy parent more than anything,” she said. “We don’t need to do everything for our children to be good parents.”
Nasha openly admits she wishes she had hired help much sooner. “Even if you have to put your whole salary to just having help in those early years, it’s worth it,” she said.
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Today, she relies on caregivers and support systems that allow her to continue running two organizations while still being present for her family. One of the caregivers she hired during those early crisis years has now been with her family for nearly a decade. “If I didn’t have that help, I couldn’t run two organizations,” she said. “That is the brutal fact.”

Building something that did not exist

Rather than accepting the lack of resources available for rare disease families, Nasha decided to create them herself.
She co-founded the FOXG1 Research Foundation, which is now advancing a gene therapy into clinical trials. She also launched Citizen Health, a technology platform that helps rare disease families manage daily care, access resources, and connect with advocacy communities. “We are building the tools to help families manage day-to-day care,” she explained.

Citizen Health now supports over 8,000 patients and more than 100 advocacy groups. “I had to create these opportunities because they didn’t exist,” she said.

For Nasha, pain became fuel for purpose. “Whenever you’re going through something, look at it as an opportunity to then create something that can help yourself and help others.”

The marriage survival strategy no one talks about

Families raising children with special needs often face extraordinary pressure, and divorce rates within these communities can be high. Nasha and her husband managed not only to survive but to strengthen their relationship. “The lucky thing for me is my husband and I are very in love with each other,” she said.

She credits honest communication and flexibility as essential tools. “What my husband and I have done is we accelerate and decelerate at different times,” she explained. Sometimes his career took priority while she worked part time. Later, they reversed roles so she could accelerate professionally. “It is very hard to have three children, one with special needs, and two parents with big jobs,” she said.

Nasha also emphasized the importance of recognizing each partner’s strengths rather than demanding perfect equality in every task. “You can outsource the cleaning. You can outsource the cooking even,” she said. “But you can’t outsource being there.”

Friendship as survival

One thing Nasha spoke about repeatedly was the importance of female friendships. “My friends are everything to me,” she said.

Whether it is weekend getaways, reading alone for two uninterrupted hours on Saturdays, or simply getting her hair washed every few weeks, Nasha now treats her own wellbeing as non-negotiable. “You have to set your boundaries,” she said. “You have to kind of treat yourself at that same level.”

She believes women often prioritize everyone else’s needs while abandoning their own. “I stopped reading for a really long time because I didn’t have time,” she shared. “And I realized what an impact that it had upon me.”

For mothers who feel isolated, overwhelmed, or guilty for needing rest, her message is simple: taking care of yourself is not selfish. It is necessary.

Hope for the future

Today, Amara walks, communicates through an iPad, and continues to exceed expectations. “No FOXG1 children walk,” one physician once told Nasha. But Amara did. Nasha remains hopeful that ongoing clinical trials may bring even more breakthroughs for children like her daughter. More importantly, she hopes mothers stop seeing themselves as failures for needing support.
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“You human beings have the capacity to get through anything,” she said. “We absolutely can get through anything.”
And perhaps that is what makes Nasha’s story so powerful. It is not just about surviving unimaginable hardship. It is about refusing to disappear inside it.