Bad Mothers Podcast

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged, an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to running TE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community.

This episode includes Angel’s own experiences of estrangement and motherhood. Last week I shared the first half of our conversation about the practicalities of estrangement, alternative ways to frame our emotions around it, and the work of Together Estranged.

Here’s the link to the Surgeon General’s report about the stressors of parenting, which includes:

While parents and caregivers are working more, they are also spending more time engaging in primary child care than before. This care includes physical care, education-related activities, reading to/with children, and playing/doing hobbies with children, among other activities.b, c, 33 Time spent weekly on primary child care has increased by 40% among mothers from 8.4 hours in 1985 to 11.8 hours in 2022, and by 154% among fathers from 2.6 hours in 1985 to 6.6 hours in 2022.

Resources from Together Estranged

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Community Resource List

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For more about Together Estranged, listen to Episode 8 with Angel, published last week.

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged, an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to runningTE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community.

I’ve divided our conversation into two parts. Today’s episode is focused on the practicalities of estrangement, alternative ways to frame our emotions around it, and the work of Together Estranged.

Next week I’ll share the rest of my conversation with Angel, focused on her own experience of estrangement and motherhood.

Resources from Together Estranged

Events

Advice Column

Community Resource List

Private Support Group

1:1 Therapy Token with Betterhelp

Volunteer

Join our Board

For the final episode of the season, I’d like to host a Q&A. If you have any questions for me about estrangement or being child-free, please email [email protected]. We can of course keep all questions anonymous, but if you’re comfortable doing so, feel free to send your question as a voice memo that I can play on the podcast.

Elizabeth Austin is a writer whose work has appeared in TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, Narratively, and many others -- some of it focused on how she considers herself to be a ‘bad’ mom. As a memoirist she explores the intricacies of relationships and often self-interrogates -- something that anyone who is estranged knows can be a complicated process. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Root Cause: Stories of health, harm, and reclaiming our humanity in an epidemic of loneliness.

You can find Elizabeth on Substack here.

The book Elizabeth recommends is In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate.

Maggie Frank-Hsu is a writer based in San Diego. She is the author of a poetry chapbook “A Drop in the Dry Season,” and the Estranged newsletter on Substack.

Estranged features essays, interviews, news, and reviews all about parent, child, and sibling estrangement with a focus on understanding, not blame.

Our conversation covers Maggie’s limited relationship with her mother, her research on estrangement, and her thoughts on parenting and how those thoughts evolved thanks to her research.

We also veer a bit into feminism and domestic labor, just for good measure! I hope you enjoy this episode, and be sure to subscribe to Maggie’s newsletter, Estranged.

Recommended reading:

Fault Lines, by Karl Pillemer

Shadow Daughter, by Harriet Brown

And on Reddit: Estranged Adult Kids and Estranged Adult Child

Please be aware that this episode includes discussion of suicide attempt, addiction and alcoholism.

Kari Bentley-Quinn is an award winning playwright whose work has been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other places in the US and Canada.

Kari got her BA in Theater Arts at Pace University and her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College, where she studied with Tina Howe. She was a co–founder of Mission to Ditmars, a theater company in Queens, NY. Alongside her fellow co-founders, Kari facilitated the development of more than 30 new plays. In addition to her work as a playwright, she is the writer and publisher of The Long Climb on Substack, which contains essays about her experiences with trauma recovery, parental estrangement and late diagnosed ADHD.

Kari lives in Astoria, Queens with her husband Mike and her cats, Annie and Talula. You can learn more about her at her website: www.karibentleyquinn.com.

Kari’s essay on her estrangement from her mother and choice to not have children is on her Substack, here.

The essay that Kari references from Gabrielle Moss is here.

This episode is a bit different, which is why I’m calling it a bonus. It’s a much shorter interview, and it’s with an academic scholar, Dr. Katie Gaddini.

She is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. From 2022-2026 she is a United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI) Research Fellow at Stanford University and UCL. Her debut book, The Struggle to Stay, was based on over four years of in-depth ethnographic research with single evangelical women in the US and the UK. She is currently writing a book on Christian women and conservative politics from 1970 to present. Her writing has been published in San Francisco Chronicle, The Conversation, The Hill, Religion & Politics, LA Review of Books, The Marginalia Review, and more. Katie holds master’s degrees from Boston College and the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.

I'm excited to share this new episode of Bad Mothers, because it's my first speaking to a fellow child-free person. I've noticed that many people assume that the reason I don't have children is due to my fraught relationship with my mother. It's a reasonable thing to think, so I wanted to meet more women who are child-free and estranged. Were they, like me, never really inclined to have children, or have their mothers played a role in some way?

My guest today, Aarti, has not stopped contact with her mother, but she lives very far away. Aarti lives in the US, and her mother in India. They have a complicated and distant relationship. Many of Aarti's experiences as an adolescent have contributed to her decision to not have children, but as she explains, her choice is also related to how she'd like to live her life and her awareness that we do not live in an equal society. In many ways Aarti has moved beyond her mother's more traditional expectations for her -- both in terms of being a woman but also being an Indian woman. Aarti’s fruitless struggle to be known by her mother in spite of these differences, I think, will be familiar for many of us. If you're going through something similar, I hope this conversation offers you some support.

In this episode we discuss being child-free, the myth of a carefree or careless estrangement, setting healthy boundaries, the responsibility of caregiving, finding balance in romantic relationships (especially when we carry a lot of emotional baggage), cultural expectations, narcissistic mothers and hyper-independence.

If you have any feedback, you can reach me at [email protected].

For the second episode of the podcast, I spoke to an anonymous Substacker called Your Own Mother. In her newsletter, she offers beautiful and insightful essays about her personal experience with estrangement, recovery from an abusive and traumatic childhood, and some of the overlooked but equally painful repercussions of estrangement.

She has two children, and like Gina in episode 1, becoming a mother was a trigger for seeing and acknowledging the abuse inflicted by her own mother. We get into that, but also the long-lasting effects of emotional and physical abuse, the primal need to have a mother who makes things better, and on coping when life doesn’t give you a “good” mother.

Resources:

* According to Psychology Today: Parentification is a role reversal in families in which the child acts as the parent in the family system. For instance, emotional parentification can take the form of a child mediating between family members, acting as a parent’s therapist, or being privy to their parents’ adult problems, such as a single parent's dating struggles or financial woes.

* Read to Your Own Mother here.

* The book my guest recommends is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay Gibson.

My central goal for the Bad Mothers podcast is to remove the guilt and shame many of us feel for creating boundaries with abusive parents. I want to know if fraught relationships with our mothers play a role in our decisions about having children, which of course feeds into a larger cultural narrative about the declining birth rate, family policy and abortion rights.

So, I thought the best place to start was a conversation with my sister, Gina. I decided not to have kids, and Gina has two daughters – but we’re estranged from the same mom, and grew up in the same household with our two other sisters.

In this episode, we discuss how our mother’s treatment affected us and our choices, what we thought about motherhood as children, and how that perception evolved over time.

Gina and I don’t discuss the details here of how our mother hurt us as kids because I don’t think that’s as important as the fact that we know our estrangement to be necessary for our well-being and safety. I’ve written about the hows and whys here.

On the Bad Mothers podcast, we’ll dive deep into our maternal urges, or lack thereof. We’ll talk about the mothers we left, or who left us, and whether they haunt our own choices about having children.

Why?

I created Bad Mothers to give women space to be whatever they want to be, even if that is a “bad” mom – a woman who is frustrated, or doesn’t love being a mom, or decided not to have kids, or isn’t sure, or doesn’t work outside the house, or does…

It’s mostly rooted in my interest in maternal ambivalence or even apathy – a disinterest in having children.

While I’ve thought about this for most of my adult life, I began researching it in earnest as part of a PhD, learning how the choice to have kids has evolved both legally and culturally in the US.

I have never had a sincere interest in having children, but when I began talking more about this as a political choice, it became apparent that most people close to me believe my feelings about motherhood are due to my estrangement from my mother.

I don’t believe that is the case. My apathy toward motherhood was there long before my mother cut off communication. But, I did begin to wonder if there are women who make the decision about whether to have kids with deep consideration of an estrangement from their mothers. And I wanted to know how they think about motherhood, what it means to be a good mother, whether they believe they are capable of it without having had a happy childhood, whether their own mothers were good in any way…

So that’s what the Bad Mothers podcast will bring you – conversations with women who are estranged from their mothers and who are thinking deeply about their own maternal choices and how or whether their mothers are weighing on their minds.

When possible, I’ll also continue to share conversations about abortion rights, the falling birth rate and family policy, since all of that plays into our choices.

I’ll plan to publish new episodes every 2-3 weeks, beginning in January.