Model Minority Moms

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For millennial women, if you're lucky, your parents won't start getting sick until your kids are out of the house. But for many of us, the reality will be that we will be sandwiched between raising kids who are still-to-launch and parents who are starting to develop serious health problems. Parenting and caregiving to an ailing senior can each be full-time jobs but add to that a "real" full time job and you're working triple time.

We talk to Dr. Kathy Zhang, a Chinese-American palliative care doctor who has worked with many families that are supporting a loved one through serious illnesses and end-of-life issues. She talks through what she's seen that helps families navigate these times more smoothly and what can be done now to try to prepare for the future. Closer to our current reality, she also talks through the most common end-of-life regrets and how those hold important lessons for all of us who are still living healthy lives.

To check out more about Dr. Kathy Zhang, follow her on IG at @dr.luyikathyzhang

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If your kids are four or older, it may have started. The questions about getting a puppy. Or a kitty. The promises that they will "help take care of it." You might start thinking, well, the kids are out of diapers now so maybe we can manage. HALT. HIT PAUSE and listen to this episode first. Ok, it might be an hour long episode just for us to tell you DON'T DO IT! But we guarantee several disbelieving snorts from Jeanette, something about Italian men professing their love to Kate and Susan, cyrofreezing for pets, invitations to ride an elephant (please, it's a real elephant) and dogs on roofs. 

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If you could be the chief policy maker for your country right now, what would you change to make having children more attractive to women? Longer parental leaves? Childcare subsidies? Making corporate life entry/ exit/ part time jobs easier? Artificial wombs? Kidding (maybe not entirely)

In this final episode of our series, we grapple with what things we wish were true at a macro level to make it easier to raise kids and also to make the choice to have kids more attractive. We also speculate as to why even countries with very generous support for parents (e.g., France) still have low and declining birth rates.

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Oof, it's one thing to negotiate and navigate power and money issues in your own marriage - it can hit a different way when you think about how your own kids might have to deal with these issues with their romantic partners. What are you communicating (directly or indirectly) to your kids about how power and money work in a marriage? Is it different by your kids' gender? What would you hope for them in dealing with power and money issues in their future relationships? To what extent are you able to live out those hopes in your own relationship right now? ****Also, very important question- do you think you'll offer childcare as a grandma/ grandpa? Or are we crazy for even thinking that far ahead?

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Post-trip recording where we dish about the BSB show (TLDR: It was amazing), share tips about going to concerts at the Sphere and argue about NSYNC vs BSB. We also talk about what else we enjoyed in our whirlwind Las Vegas mommy weekend, from where to eat and cool non-gambling fun to be found in Vegas. We're posting this pre-trip recording with our pre-trip thoughts as a two-fer and we're taking a short break in releasing more episodes until September 4th! We hope you enjoy this lighter episode and we will see you in the fall!

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We're interrupting our series on Power, Money and Marriage to talk about... Vegas. And the Backstreet Boys. Yeah - moms gotta go a little wild sometimes (just kidding, more like moms gone mild). Anyhow, we talk about mom fun trips, how we chose Vegas, our BSB teenage nostalgia, and how we're fretting about what to wear. We're posting this pre-trip recording with our post-trip thoughts as a two-fer and we're taking a short break in releasing more episodes until September 4th! We hope you enjoy this lighter episode and we will see you in the fall!

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Our millennial well-educated woman fantasy: We would be running a major company/organization, calling the shots, showing people how brilliant and capable we are. But then we come home, slip into our A-line dress and go harvest zucchini from our weed-free garden. And we're so well rested and our children come in and say, "Hello, Mother." Everybody's emotionally regulated and connected and the children go and practice their piano and everybody sits down for dinner, and then the dishes magically disappear, clean themselves, and go into the cupboards.

In this episode, we talk about what's been held up as cultural norms and expectations that promise women value and power in relationships and society, what it was like to go through the Lean In era of the 2010s as young, child-free professional women and then encountering the tradwife memes of the last few years.

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Susan complained that the last episode sounded like everything is totally peachy with all of us when it comes to Power, Money and Marriage in each of our lives. Of course, the reality is more complicated than that. In the big picture, things might be fine but in the reality of daily life, there is friction and... resentments. A good healthy dose for each of us apparently. This series is supposed to be about power and money in the context of marriage and parenting but when we tried to put the spotlight on the problems around money and power, we got to... resentments. But why? Maybe it's because we feel that the level of power afforded to moms is unfair. Maybe the low value placed on the work of mothering is unfair (and we equate having value with having power). Maybe the expectation around earning income and being a good parent is unfair and wildly unrealistic (and we equate meeting others' expectations to having value to having power). So the chain is: unrealistic expectations that cannot be met --> feeling devalued in others' eyes --> feeling like we get less respect and power --> feelings of unfairness and resentment. Capiche?

Maybe some of those resentments are justified. Maybe some are within our control to mitigate and reclaim that power. Anyhow, we dissect in our usual style on this episode.

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We cringe even as we write this title. Should we use the word "downshift"? Is that a betrayal of generations of feminists who fought for our right to equal opportunity in the classroom and workplace? To current and future women who work so hard for their place in society? Should we use a more neutral word like "renegotiate" instead? But at the exact same time, the question is so obvious to any mom who lives between the paid working world and the child-rearing world. We downshift/change/renegotiate our careers (or don't) because of financial considerations, the emotional weight of going either way and the power that is lost or gained. 

For the three of us, we are seeing it happen to mom friends all around us. Quietly shifting to something less than full-time. Moving to a related but lower-stress field. Leaving the industry altogether and building something more flexible and maybe more personally meaningful. But it doesn't mean that these women aren't working. On the contrary, many are working more than ever across family and outside of family. At the same time, the specter of expectations of still contributing half of the family income still hangs over many of us. We process it out loud on this second episode of our series.

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Oh boy we're on a roll with the sticky topics so many of us deal with but are rarely spoken of in polite company. In this new series, we're talking about Power and Money in Marriage. When women did not have equal access to education, financial products or job opportunities, having a lopsided balance of power with your husband was pretty typical, even predictable. But as Millennial women who often outshined our male peers in academic achievement, could run our own financial lives and careers, and was brought up on the 90's slogan of "you can have it all"... what happens if you decide you maybe can't have it all actually (at least not at once) and take a step back your career (and earning power) to focus on motherhood? What are the emotions associated with that? (for us: a curious mix of guilt, shame, self-doubt mixed with deep conviction) What are the social costs? ("I'm a full-time mom" is not often the strongest opener at a mixer) What are the costs to your power in your relationship? What are the financial costs? In true MMM style, we romp through it all.