Our Mothers Ourselves

Happy Mother's Day!  Sending some extra love today to all the extraordinary mothers out there!

And speaking of extraordinary mothers....

This week, Katie interviews her sisters-in law, Lori Wolfson and Andrea Wachter, about  their mother, Bernice Wachter. 

Bernice raised her kids in quintessential “Mama Bear" mode, striking the perfect balance between giving guidance and granting independence. She gave her children the room to make their own mistakes, but still pushed them to do what she sensed was right. 

And through all the ups and downs, Bernice has never lost her wonderful sense of humor!

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producers: Alice Hudson & Sophie McNulty

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud.

Also, starting this week, we're  bringing you the Mother Mine mini-series from producer Katie Semro, right here on the Our Mothers Ourselves Buzzsprout feed. 

Mother Mine is about our mothers and how they’ve shaped us. It will be coming to you as 75 short episodes in the voices of people from across the globe. I hope you’ll listen along as we explore who our mothers are and who we have become because of them. 

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

Sarah Kuhn is a busy person. She's the founder of Juna, a community and app for moms and moms-to-be; she hosts the The Juna Women Podcast; and she's a mom herself -- three times over. 

In this episode, Sarah talks with Katie about her own mother, Lorraine Fixler, who was born in the UK and emigrated to the United States as a child.  Lorraine met Sarah’s dad while working in his law practice.

Lorraine was the kind of mother who could run a  business and still host the best slumber parties for her daughter.

In our interview, Sarah discusses the dramatic way her relationship with her mom has changed  in the last decade. Lorraine was just 60 when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She's been in decline since Sarah was in her 20s. Through genetic testing, Sarah has discovered that she too is at high risk for developing Alzheimer's.

 Sarah talks about the way she has struggled without her mother’s guiding hand as she raises her own children but also the way she works to hold on to the good memories she has of the vivacious and wonderful woman who raised her.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud at www.ourmothersourselves.com

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

Sonia Levitin was born to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1934, just as Germany was entering its darkest period in history. With Hitler tightening his grip on the country, Sonia's mother, Helene Goldstein Wolff, plotted their escape. 

In 1938, Helene fled with her children first to Switzerland, then America. Helene instilled in her daughters a sense of dignity and the courage to persevere—lessons that have lasted a lifetime. 

As her aging mother developed dementia, Sonia became her caretaker, repaying the tender kindness and loving protection Helene brought to Sonia’s own childhood. Helene died in 1993, and Sonia would give anything to tell her mother just how much she loved and appreciated her, one final time. 

In this week’s episode, Sonia tells Katie about her early life in Berlin, the family's escape to Switzerland, and the deep love she and her mother shared for each other.

Journey to America, Sonia's fictional account of the family's escape from Germany,  is both beautiful and harrowing. Sonia Levitin's website can be found here.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty
Producer: Alice Hudson

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud at www.ourmothersourselves.com
 

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

Every month is women's history month at Our Mothers Ourselves. Still, we wanted to mark the occasion by talking to a young woman who has plans to make a big mark on history.

 This week, Katie speaks with Abby Harrison, also known as Astronaut Abby. Abby has wanted to be an astronaut since she was a little girl, and the 23-year-old Harvard research assistant wants to be the first person to walk on Mars. Abby and her mom, Nicole Harrison, have launched the nonprofit The Mars Generation to encourage young women to become interested in the STEM fields. Only one in ten astronauts has been a woman, and as Abby sees it, that statistic needs to change. Abby has her sights set much higher and believes she can inspire the next generation of astronauts, with the potential to reach Mars within 20 years.

NASA recently promised to put a woman and the next man on the moon by 2024.

Abby tells Katie how her mom demonstrated strength and drive throughout her life, growing up with a single mom herself, then becoming one to Abby and her sister. Now, Nicole Harrison runs a successful social media marketing agency and is a space exploration advocate.

Abby also talks about her recently published book, Dream Big! How to Reach for Your Stars which offers advice on planning and achieving your dreams.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty
Producer: Alice Hudson

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud at www.ourmothersourselves.com
 

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

This week, Katie speaks with MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle about her charismatic and vibrant mother, Harriet. 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Harriet, a spirited woman, longed for a husband and family. Her first marriage, however, did not work out. Her in-laws did not approve of her non-Kosher lifestyle and her husband had started performing Skinnerian-like experiments on their infant daughter Sherry. Harriet left him, taking Sherry with her and covering up all traces of her former marriage. 

Harriet soon remarried and Sherry grew up with her being told to pretend that he was her biological father. The lies and omissions that surrounded Sherry’s childhood colored her relationship with her mom, leading to anger, and what Sherry describes as an “indirect cruelty” toward her mother.

To learn more about Sherry and Harriet, read Sherry’s her new book, The Empathy Diaries, A Memoir, which explores her relationship with her mother. 

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)

Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry

Host: Katie Hafner

Producer: Alice Hudson

Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

As mothers, we try to raise our children with all the resources, attention, love, and support we can muster, but sometimes forces far bigger than us make doing so impossible. 

This week, Katie speaks with Simeng Dai, a Facebook data engineer who grew up in China under its One-Child Policy.
 
In her conversation with Katie, Simeng discusses the challenges she and her mother, Aiying Huang, faced in 1990’s China. As the mother of three children, Aiying underwent a forced late-term abortion and, eventually, a mandatory sterilization. Simeng, Aiying’s second-born daughter, grew up apart from the family, feeling unwanted and unloved.

This episode is about troubled motherhood, and the systems that prevent mothers from raising their children with the resources, attention, and love that they need.
 
To learn more about Simeng Dai and Aiying Huang, check out Oh! Mama, a podcast Simeng made that is centered on an interview with Aiying. Note: The podcast is in Mandarin. You can find a translation here.

NOTE: This episode contains disturbing content describing forced abortions.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty

Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud at www.ourmothersourselves.com 

Translation:

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

This week, Katie talks with Dr. Malaika Horne, a public policy scholar and author, and her sister Gwen Moor, curator at the Missouri History Museum, about their inspiring mother, Flora. 

Flora Horne was born in Mississippi to sharecropper parents in 1916. During the Great Migration of the 1930’s, she moved to St. Louis with her family. There, she married and raised six children at the height of the Jim Crow era. Although Flora was deprived of a full education, she instilled the values of learning in her children from a young age. To Flora, education was the wisest path to independence and prosperity. 

In this episode, Malaika and Gwen discuss the racism and violence that their family faced in the middle of the 20th century. They also discuss the many ways in which Flora rose above near-impossible circumstances to provide loving, nurturing homes for her children.

To learn more about Flora, her life,  and her children, you can find Malaika’s book here: Mother Wit: Exalting Motherhood While Honoring a Great Mother  

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Associate Producer: Sophie McNulty

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud on the Our Mothers Ourselves Web site.

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

Maria Tallchief  was  born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief  in 1925 in Fairfax, Oklahoma, where her grandfather had served as chief in the Osage Nation. Seventeen years later, she found her way to New York and became one of the most famous American ballerinas of the 20th century.

She rejected suggestions that she change her name to Tallchieva, at the time when many American dancers adopted Russian stage names,

Tallchief would become forever linked to some of George Balanchine's most transformational ballets. (Not only was she his prinicipal muse, but she was married to him  for six years). In 1949, when she danced the title role of Igor Stravinsky's  Firebird to Balanchine's incredibly complex choreography, she caused a sensation. No one had seen anything like it. At the height of her career, Tallchief was considered  the most technically brilliant ballerina the U.S. had ever produced.

I spoke with Maria Tallchief's daughter, the renowned poet Elise Paschen,  about her mother's childhood, her devotion to Balanchine, her hard work and self discipline, her marriages, and the ways in which she expressed her love for her daughter. Elise read two poems she wrote about her mother.

And in the Department of Odd Coincidences, there's this: For years, every time I've moved (and I've moved a lot), I've taken with me a much loved  book I own, titled Poetry Speaks. I bought it for the written poems, but also for the  three CD's it came with, filled with spoken poetry. For years I kept the discs in my car and listened to those CD's while driving, soothed by verse read by the poets themselves:  Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot; Dorothy Parker;  Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg,  Sylvia Plath. At some point after Spotify had taken the steering wheel of  my listening  habits, I lost the poetry CD's.

But the book remains in my possession. And I keep it close at hand on the bookshelf next to my desk. Occasionally, I take it down, open it, and read whatever poem I happen upon.

Then, a few weeks ago, just  before Elise and I were set to talk, I glanced at the shelf, and my eyes lingered  just long enough on Poetry Speaks to take in the names of the volume's editors: Elise Paschen. How strange that I'd never bothered to read the name. Yet now, how fitting. And thirty minutes later, there she was, reading poetry -- her own -- aloud.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson
Social Media: Sophie McNulty

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud at www.ourmothersourselves.com

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

As anyone who's watched the new HBO documentary Tiger can tell you, when you catch the golf bug as a kid, it can stick with you for a lifetime.

Amy Alcott fell for golf when she was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Her mother gave her garden over to her daughter's passion, and the front yard became a putting and chipping green. Soup cans were hammered into the ground to make the holes. 

It paid off. Amy became a member of the LPGA Tour in 1975, and won five major championships and 29 LPGA tour events in all. She's in the World Golf Hall of Fame.

What kind of kid -- especially a girl in pre-title IV era --has the self confidence to pursue a dream like that? And what kind of mother would glory in her daughter's delight, as Lea Alcott so clearly did in hers?

Katie and Amy chat about Lea's own childhood, the idea of giving to your daughter what you didn't have access to, and the evocative powers of a good glass of Scotch whiskey.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud.

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.

In 1929, Anne Spencer Morrow,  a 23-year-old introverted intellectual, married a man who was, at the time, arguably the most celebrated person in the world. He was Charles Lindbergh, and his incredible solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 had catapulted him to a wild level of fame. 

It was Charles Lindbergh, decades before Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, whose fame first gave rise to packs of news photographers. They followed the Lindberghs everywhere. When the Lindberghs' infant son Charles Jr. was kidnapped in1932 , the press paid frenzied attention to the crime;  the story remained in the headlines for months.

Among the many heartbreaking artifacts that remain from the kidnapping is a front-page item in The New York Times from March 3, 1932: It's a brief notice,  stating that the baby had been ill: "In the hope that whoever has taken the baby may see and understand the necessity for care, Mrs. Lindbergh...gave out the diet she had been following." It included -- underscoring a young mother's anguish in the most painful conceivable way -- "half a cup of orange juice on waking."

                                                                        * * *

Anne became both an aviator and a writer, and her book, Gift From the Sea, has sold some 3 million copies since it was first published in 1955.

Katie talks with Anne's youngest child, Reeve Lindbergh, also a writer.  In her 2018 memoir, Two Lives, Reeve reflected on her own “Two Lives,” navigating her role as the public face of her family while, at the same time, leading a quiet existence in rural Vermont.

Charles Lindbergh was a complicated man. Historians have documented his respect for the Nazis in prewar Germany. And in 2003, it was revealed that he had led a double life, having had a years-long affair with a woman in Germany with whom he had three children.

But that isn't what Katie wanted to talk to Reeve Lindbergh about.  In the blog post that accompanies this episode, Katie writes about her reasons for not asking Reeve about her father's other families.  It can be found on the podcast's website. Here's the blog post.

Artwork by Paula Mangin (@PaulaBallah)
Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry
Producer: Alice Hudson

Mother Word Cloud: Please contribute the one word that best describes your mother to the Mother Word Cloud.

Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please share the one word that best describes your mother on the Mother Word Cloud.