The Mother Of It All
We are Miranda Rake and Sarah Wheeler, two friends, mothers and professional writers on the parenting beat. The Mother Of It All is a podcast where we dive deep into the culture of modern motherhood. Expect warmth, humor and over-considered takes on hot topics, fresh takes on old ones, expert guests and good times. motherofitall.substack.com
Episodes
Jessica Grose On What MAHA Momfluencers Get Right, What They Get SUPER Wrong & Where We Go From Here
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?
Some people have told us that this podcast is for “literary mom nerds” and we’re into that! So, today for our beloved die-hard paid subscribers we’re leaning into that! (Please consider becoming one of those, if you aren’t already!) We decided to make an episode about what we’re reading and loving right now, and what’s in our TBR piles...
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...
We reunite with author and parent Jessica's Slice ahead of the release of her tremendous book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, to learn how her life with a second child has taught her to throw out the milestones and ask for help (even when it involves a dead possum!). Then, you get to listen to Sarah’s initial interview with Jessica, which remains one of our all time favorites and touches on parent...
Debbie Reber, the host of the Tilt Parenting podcast, talks to us about what she’s learned from having hundreds of conversations on raising differently-wired kids. We discuss independence versus self-determination, low-demand parenting, how to find your parenting integrity, and whether even having these conversations is a parenting privilege.
Links:
* Miranda is So Busy So Bored
“I remember the bizarre feeling of my baby kicking inside me while taking care of patients dying of COVID in the hospital.”
Brett was a doctor in a small town when the pandemic hit, with a toddler at home and a baby on the way. In this episode, she and Miranda (who are childhood friends) talk through her experience as a parent, spouse, and physician during those intense years, and the way they continue to impact her and her family f...
“Coming into parenthood for the second time, I knew a lot. And I think I had this vision of what I would do differently, and I was going to plug into the local mom's groups, or plug into the play dates and take the yoga classes with the kids and things like that. And it became not that. It became just very, very isolating.”
Sarah talks to Marta, who had a fresh professional and parenting start planned, only to be hit with the pandem...
Sarah speaks with Arianne, who gave birth just days into the pandemic lockdown. They discuss how birth trauma and isolation led Arianne to doubt her attachment to her daughter, tricky family relationships, and how she’s healed and found what they call “heart family.”
Links:
* Our pandemic parenting survey (you can still take it if you want to)
* The first episode of our pandemic parenting survey
If you love (or honestly even just lik...
One of The Cut’s parenting columnists and official friend-of-the-pod, Amil Niazi, joins us to talk about her recent essay on weaning her kids off YouTube. We’ve covered screen time, but this time we’re talking about algorithmic content. Is the algorithm as unavoidable as it feels to many of us? Or is it worth it for parents to push back — even when it makes for some awkward moments with other families — and try to hold out as long ...
“I truly believe in the power of policy, and I have been like radicalized by that, since becoming a mom and living here.”
Sarah chats with Ariana, a mom in Norway, about how it felt to be a fresh ex-pat when the world shut down. They discuss the overlap and many differences between parenting in the U.S. and Norway during covid, the impact that financial support makes, and how hard it can be to navigate new places at a time when peop...
“Our foster daughter was doing virtual school. My partner was doing virtual school in the other room. My foster daughter couldn't really stay in virtual school unless I was right next to her, and I was often also on a video call with her social worker ,whose daughter was in virtual school. So it was just like, infinity schools in our house.”
Ashleigh had recently quit her job to become a foster parent, and found herself intensively ...
“I had already formed an identity as a parent, which made it easier for me to make decisions in the best interest of my family and kids during that time without heightened fear of judgment. I continue to be grateful for that. If I had had my first child during Covid I know it would have been different.”
As part of our pandemic parenting series, Christine, a parent in Brooklyn, joins Miranda to share her reflections on giving birth f...
About 500 parents poured their hearts out in the pandemic parenting survey that we sent out into the world last fall. We’ve been reading your words for a few months (THANK YOU) , and now, here we are in March of 2025. Somehow, it’s been five years since the world shut down, and we’re ready to talk through our own pandemic experiences, share some of our favorite quotes from those responses, and we’re also so grateful to share some o...
Sarah is joined by Garrett Bucks, founder of The Barnraisers Project and author of the The White Pages and The Right Kind of White, to talk about the movies of 2024 and what they say about gender, parenting, sex, and more. Find out which of the 24 and 39 movies Garrett and Sarah watched (respectively) are their best and worst. Also — why Dune is a boymom movie, why Garrett had to fast-forward The Substance, and why Challengers is ...
The Double Shift’s Katherine Goldstein joins Sarah and Miranda to talk about her creative solution to the problem that is American summer, why parents are set up to fail in finding summer care, and how to actively create the kind of community we need to build something better.
Links:
* The Incredible Things You Can Do Instead of Paying For American Summer Camp
* How Other Countries Handle Summer with Kids
* Katherine’s How to Find You...
We’re continuing to focus on the experience of trans children and their parents this week with this reading of the exquisite essay As They Like It: Learning To Follow My Child’s Lead, by the author, Nicole Graev Lipson. The piece — about gender in Shakespeare and Nicole’s journey of watching her child let go of girlhood — was originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and then included in The Best American Essays, 2024, ...
Today Marlo Mack, of the How To Be A Girl podcast, and her friend, “Kay,” join us to talk about their experiences of raising transgender kids in America today. We also dig into what families with transgender kids expect to be dealing with under Trump’s second term, and how those of us with trans kids in our lives and hearts can step up and become more active allies in an increasingly unsafe landscape.
Links:
Sarah and Miranda move through their own climate change cognitive dissonance with the help of Elizabeth Doerr, author of the Cramming for the Apocalypse project. We discuss how parenting lends itself to climate action, how facing the climate reality can actually make you less anxious, and how mothers can give prepper stereotypes a much-needed makeover.
Links:
Katie Beck is a Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics where she helps municipal leaders design more child-friendly cities. She joined us to chat about what child-friendly, care-centered city design really looks like, and who is doing it well. We talk about Bogota’s revolutionary ‘care blocks,’ what happened when Athens experimented with using a few parking spaces as a park instead, and how easy it really can be to make c...
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