The Mother Of It All

We’re joined by science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, author Hello, Cruel World! Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times. Melinda’s work has long been a trusted source for parents, and here, we talk a little bit about a lot of things that are on our minds right now. Melinda shares thoughts everything from Botox and dying our hair to resilience & kids, to nervous-system regulation to whether divorce...

In this bonus episode for paid subscribers, Sarah and Miranda go long on the PTA (Sarah is this year’s PTA President for her school—something she thought she’d never do) — balancing anxiety about your kid with collective goals and getting involved without losing your boundaries. Also radio nostalgia and whether your clothes just look l...

Sarah and Miranda are joined by guests Christie George and Jihii Jolly to discuss how motherhood and creativity fuel or constrain one another, and how we navigate life as mothers who also want to make art, or artists who want to mother.

Links:

* Christie George’s Practice Practice

* Jijii Jolly’s Time Spent

* Christie’s book, The Emergency Was Curiosity

* The Mother Artist by Catherine Ricketts

* Scrap SF

* Ruth Asawa

* Designing Motherh...

With the (yes, weird to make it a footnote but) footnote that the global environmental, cultural, social and real human costs of AI are massive, today we are zeroing in on just one question about AI: the impact of AI on kids and parents. How will the coming ubiquity of AI tools in our homes, schools and workplaces impact child development, parenthood and the world our children will inherit in their adulthood?

Our guest today is Doc...

To celebrate ADHD Awareness Month, Sarah is doing a little read aloud for us. Her essay, Call Me By My Name: How I Studied ADHD for 15 Years and Didn’t Know I Had It, remains one of the most read pieces on her newsletter. Listen to an audio recording of the essay — about identity, relationships, and what getting a diagnosis does and doesn’t do for us — read by Sarah.

Links:

* Call Me By My Name on Mompsreading

Sarah and Miranda are joined by Taylor Harris, the author of a new column, You’ve Always Been This Way, about her later-in-life AuDHD diagnosis. We talk Autistic burnout, empathy for the neurotypical parent, the Enneagram, RFK, and sneaker deals.

Links:

* Taylor’s column (McSweeney’s)

* This Boy We Made (Taylor’s book on our Bookshop storefront)

* Holotropic Breathwork

* Climbing inside a Tauntaun

* Spoon Instagram

* Celebrity Height Ins...

Sarah and Miranda talk to journalist Abigail Leonard, author of Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, about the social, cultural, and political forces that shape what it unfolds when women become mothers in Kenya, Finland, Japan, and the U.S. Would Leonard have had a third child if she hadn’t been living in Japan at the time? What is it about Finland that makes an ambivalent dad s...

Kathryn Van Arendonk is a critic at New York Magazine who writes about TV and comedy, and I (Miranda) have loved her work for a long time. I was watching a lot of Bluey when I first started realizing that all my favorite TV reviews on New York Magazine’s Vulture site were written by the same person, and that person was Kathryn! It felt like magic when she started writing about Bluey and like even MORE magic when Kathryn announced t...

One last summer check-in to tide us all over until Season 3! Sarah and Miranda dive into the chaos and comedy of back-to-school season, teen babysitter economics, toy gun ethics, and of course, the emotional calculus of modern parenting (and Miranda accidentally makes Sarah cry). We unpack whether Stepbrothers is misogyny at its most insidious, why we are selling kids pink AK-47s, our crone fantasies, and the weird beauty of watchi...

Hi! We’re alive out here! (Whether we are truly more alive than usual or merely feeling like we should be because it’s summer remains unclear.) Tune in for a meandering summer catch up between seasons in which we cover vacation nonsense (like asking for an hour to yourself and then waiting for someone to offer it to you), summer illness, whether or not it’s a good idea to throw your phone into the river, a little bit of camp gossip...

Today, we’re kicking off our summer bonus episodes with a little ode to sidewalk art installations! We’re not just talking about little free libraries (though those are awesome!) we’re talking about the weird, wild and creative ways people express themselves and spread joy through artistic, playful, interactive installations on their sidewalks, stoops and fences, and the unique, important role these little joy blips have in buildin...

“You're going to spend, if you're lucky, a quarter or a third of your life ‘in menopause.’ And we need dialogue about it. We need to talk about it.”

Angela Garbes returns to explore the pains and delights of middle age. Angela schools us on the sex lives of menopausal orcas, why Carl Jung wants us all to become more selfish as we age, and her pitch for a rebrand of the “crone” stage.

Links:

* Angela in Romper on The Morning Rush

* An...

Journalist Frankie de la Cretaz joins us to talk women’s sports and all things WNBA! We dig into player and WAG fashion, the visibility of queer families on and off the court, the truth about trans athletes, and mother-athletes past, present and future.

Links:

* Frankie De La Cretaz on Substack

* Frankie’s book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League

* Molly Dickens’ the Maternal Stress Project

* WNBA Docu...

British author Helen Jukes joins us to talk about motherhood in the animal kingdom, and what human mothers can learn from mothers from other species. What is “natural” about motherhood, what is the true nature of motherhood across species? What can we learn by allowing ourselves to truly see and examine the many roles of the mother in nature? At one poetic and rigorous, Helen Jukes’ beautiful new book, Mother / Animal, is an illumi...

MAHA (or “Make America Healthy Again”) motherhood is a bit of a mindf*uck. What, one asks oneself, unites “crunchy” hippie-leaning momfluencers (like Rudy Jude & her wannabes) of the world with someone as spray-tanned Marjorie Taylor Green? One looks like a sentient carcinogen, and one looks like she's never even heard of food dye! So how do we understand their alliance under the umbrella of Making American Healthy Again?

For man...

New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess joins us to talk about the convergence of parenthood and technology. We dig in to everything from freebirthers to prenatal testing, and from “complicated” pregnancies to the many anxieties (and joys, too) of raising a child in a world where a $1600 Snoo has become a newborn must-have and corporations know about our pregnancies before our immediate families do. Hess’s much anticipated memoi...