For the first time, Michelle Browder turns the mic on herself. In this solo episode — celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Mothers of Gynecology Monument and the tenth anniversary of More Than Tours — Michelle traces the full arc of how she got here: leaving her "best life" in Atlanta to answer her mother's call back to Montgomery in 2002, turning a run-down café into a safe haven for the city's young people, and the professional humiliation during COVID that sent her into a depression — and, unexpectedly, straight to a horse stable, where the idea for the monument was born.

She walks through it all: dropping out of the Art Institute of Atlanta after a professor called her portfolio "too black," discovering Robert Thom's postcard-sized painting of J. Marion Sims that changed the course of her life at 19, teaching herself to weld in a San Francisco shop during the pandemic, and the five-year sprint from sketch to sculpture that led to Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey standing in Montgomery today. Along the way, she gives credit where it's due — to early believers like Gloria Steinem and the Packard Foundation, to partners like Charles Johnson and Dr. Aletha Maybank, and to a memorable tour she gave to Governor Gavin Newsom that helped move real legislation for doulas and midwives.

Equal parts vulnerable, hilarious, and hard-won, this episode is the origin story behind the movement — told, for once, entirely in her own words.

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