BY 2016, Melissa Bernstein had built a multi-million-dollar company catering to the nostalgia of a generation of upscale parents who coveted and ponied up good money for designer old-school toys for their progeny. Over the course of three decades, she and husband, Doug, had turned their Wilton, Connecticut-based business, Melissa & Doug, into a $550 million empire, the Tiffany of toys. A sunny, ebullient mother of six, she embodied the mythology of the woman who had it all.
Except it was all a lie.
Not the commercial success-that was most definitely not a lie. But the façade, her image as the Martha Stewart of playthings, was a meticulously constructed gingham suit of armor, meant to deflect any gaze into how Melissa Bernstein really felt inside: scared, paranoid, and unable to forge meaningful human connections, damaged, depressed, isolated, and alone. “It’s exhausting,” Bernstein says today, recalling sleepwalking through much of her life and career. “I understand now the reason most folks don’t crash until midlife. Because in our teens and 20s, we shoulder it, right? We can bear the façade. We can pretend we’re someone we’re not, and we get through it. But as I started to get older, I started to hear—it was literally like a drumbeat: “You aren’t being true to yourself.’ ”
Bernstein had spent her life honing the art of being perfect, and perfect is a full-time job. She was proud to tell people she’d never missed a day of work, even while birthing six kids. Every day, it was up at 6, four different trips getting the kids to various schools, off to the office, a full day of work and calls and emails, home to make dinner, more kid duty, more work, and then a collapse into bed at midnight. She wore her stoicism as a badge of honor, would breezily tell a team member who was getting upset, “It’s just toys,” even as inside she questioned herself constantly, scolding herself that “you cannot afford to be less than perfect.” She led by faux example.
“She’s got a twinkle in her eye, and she makes magic happen,” says Christine Osborne, a recently retired operator of upscale toy stores in South Carolina and a longtime Melissa & Doug customer. “You would never know she suffered from depression. She hid it very, very well. I have a psych
