The Mothers Building Cannabis -

Cannabis has long been spoken about in feminine terms: the Green Goddess, lunar cycles, pot girls, and canna-moms. Cannabis growers speak about the “mother plant,” the living genetic anchors from which entire harvests emerge. A healthy mother plant is not rushed. She is protected, tended to carefully, relied upon for consistency, resilience, and future growth.

And yet, despite the cannabis industry’s dependence on the language and labor of caregiving, motherhood itself is still frequently underestimated inside the business. Mothers are often treated as peripheral to innovation rather than central to it. They are expected to nurture quietly while an industry built on wellness, healing, and community increasingly profits from the very skills women, especially mothers, have long been forced to develop.

The women shaping cannabis today tell a story where motherhood may be challenging, but it is not a weakness to overcome. Motherhood is an operational advantage, a leadership skill, a source of emotional intelligence which contains the vision that the industry desperately needs.

For these women, cannabis entered their lives through caregiving, pain, healing, stigma, and the search for a better way to care for themselves and their communities.

“That Fight Made Me Fearless”

If the cannabis industry often celebrates resilience, few stories embody it more clearly than Thunder Walker’s.

“Cannabis was never a trend for me,” Walker said. “It came into my life through caregiving, legacy, advocacy, and healing. Motherhood and this industry have never been separate for me. They built each other.”

Walker’s daughter, Pystol, transformed the way she moves through the world.

“Raising a child with special needs and profound autism forced me to become an advocate, a protector, and a voice for families navigating systems that routinely fail them,” she said.

Then she lists the realities plainly:

“15 CPS cases and counting. Educational battles. Public judgment.”

“That fight made me fearless, and that fearlessness is what I carry into every room in this industry.”

Today, Walker owns Proud Mary Cannabis in Oklahoma City, created Pressure News Media, the Weed Moms Symposium, and is preparing to release her forthcoming book TrapHouse Nanny, exploring “motherhood, trauma, caregiving, stigma and building a life while navigating legacy, legalization, and public judgment.”

“My daughter and my adult children get to see me in my full fire,” she said. “I am proud of the plant, proud of the work, unapologetic about every bit of it.”

That fearlessness matters because industries evolve as people who have been underestimated refuse to stay invisible.

“I Get to Be Me Outside of Motherhood”

For creator Sabrina Rebolledo, cannabis became tied not just to expression, but to recovery from the isolation many mothers quietly experience.

“Creating content and hosting events has been an outlet for me,” Rebolledo said. “It’s where I get to be me, a person outside of motherhood.”

She describes building a life where creativity and motherhood could coexist instead of compete.

“I have a good balance going. I’m not burnt out from mom life, so my kids get the best version of me.”

That balance came after hardship. Rebolledo openly speaks about postpartum depression and rediscovering her sense of identity.

“Becoming a mom can feel very isolating and lonely,” she said. “I had to pull myself out of a PPD hole and find my place in this world again.”

Now, that experience informs the kind of spaces she creates for other women.

“I know how hard it can be, so providing women with funny, relatable content where they feel seen and a safe space to network, make new friends, or simply get out of the house has become a passion of mine.”

“I Actually Found My Way into Cannabis Because of Motherhood”

For Mskindness B. Ramirez, cannabis began with injury, pregnancy, and a deeper reckoning around care itself.

“I actually found my way into cannabis because of motherhood,” Ramirez said. “During my second pregnancy, at twenty-six weeks, I experienced a personal injury that changed the way I understood pain, healing, and advocacy.”

Navigating that injury while preparing to become a mother forced her to question “the kinds of support people are denied when they are trying to care for themselves and their families in ways that may be perceived as unconventional.”

Cannabis became part of that journey personally before it became professional.

“Over more than thirteen years, it has taught me the importance of leading with honesty and education instead of fear or stigma,” she said. “I want my children to see a woman who asks questions, challenges outdated narratives, and creates space for informed conversations.”

That same perspective now shapes her work through Club Kindness and Kind Works EDU, where she focuses on workforce development and helping people enter the industry with “dignity and real support.”

Motherhood, she says, changed the scale of her thinking.

“It naturally makes me think about legacy, safety, and community.”

“I Lead with Heart First”

For Parisa Mansouri-Rad, motherhood sharpened her sense of empathy and advocacy inside cannabis.

“As a special needs mother, cannabis became personal for me long before it became professional,” she said. “It opened my eyes to alternative wellness, patient rights, and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations without shame or stigma.”

Mansouri-Rad alongside Adelia Carrillo, is the co-founder of Blunt Brunch, a networking community for women in the cannabis industry. Like many women in the industry, she sees caregiving not as separate from leadership, but foundational to it.

“Motherhood has also completely shaped the way I move through this industry,” she said. “I lead with heart first.”

That leadership style is often undervalued in industries still shaped by aggression, speed, and extraction. But emotional intelligence, resilience, communication, and community-building are infrastructure.

“Being a mom taught me resilience in a way nothing else could,” Mansouri-Rad said. “That resilience has carried me through building businesses, communities, and platforms in an industry that hasn’t always made space for women to lead authentically.”

“The Line Between Office and Home Gets Blurry Fast”

Shauntel Ludwig, CEO of Synergy Innovation, has spent more time in cannabis than she has as a mother. For her son, the industry is simply part of normal life.

“He knows I make ‘vapes,’” she said. “Beyond that, he’s blissfully unaware of the details and I’m in no rush to change that.”

She laughs describing what happens when outsiders enter her home.

“There’s a point where having vaporizers and bongs on every surface just becomes your normal, and then a friend walks in for the first time and you watch their face and remember that it isn’t everyone’s normal.”

But motherhood fundamentally changed how she leads, especially within her work at Synergy Innovation.

“The patience alone, the ability to stay calm inside genuine chaos, that translates directly into leadership,” Ludwig said. “There’s a nurturing quality that comes with motherhood that I didn’t expect to show up at work, but it does. In how I build teams, how I develop people.”

That ability to stabilize chaos, anticipate needs, and hold multiple systems together simultaneously is rarely acknowledged as executive training. Yet mothers perform it daily.

The Cannabis Industry Cannot Afford to Undervalue Mothers

The cannabis industry often talks about authenticity, community, healing, and culture and mothers bring all four qualities instinctively. They know how to educate through stigma. They know how to build trust. They know how to stretch resources, manage crisis, and create safety in unstable conditions.

And perhaps most importantly, mothers know how to think long term.

In cultivation, the “mother plant” is the protected genetic foundation of an entire grow operation. She is carefully maintained, preserved, and depended upon for consistency, resilience, and future harvests. Entire ecosystems are built from her lineage. Without healthy mother plants, there is no continuity of genetics, no stability, no future crop to sustain the system.

Like the mother cannabis plant itself, mothers in the industry are often expected to quietly sustain the entire ecosystem while others take credit for the harvest. But without them, there is no continuity. No resilience. No future. It’s time we acknowledge their gifts.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers in this industry, today and every day.

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