Our Mothers Ourselves

What are you to make of it if your mother isn't demonstrative with her love? She doesn't hug you or kiss you or tell you she loves you. But still, you know at your core that she loves you truly, madly, deeply. But how do you know?

Katie explores the phenomenon of invisible love with the writer Will Blythe, whose mother was too shy and reserved to express her love for her four children in ways you might expect of a loving mom. She did other things instead to show her feelings. One of those ways was to take up a passion of her children's: Gloria Blythe became, like them, a hard-core fan of The Tar Heels, the University of North Carolina's legendary basketball team. She's also the hero of Will Blythe's book, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.


Don't forget to visit us at ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.

Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry.
Artwork by Paula Mangin. (@PaulaBallah)
Producer: Alice Hudson
Intern: Rosie Manock (@RosieManock)

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.

Chuck Yeager didn't have anything on Lillian Yonally. 

Sure, Yeager was a record-setting test pilot, the first to exceed the speed of sound. But Yonally broke through a different barrier: gender stereotypes. 

Yonally, a World War II pilot, was one tough woman. She served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.  The WASP picked up the slack at home when all the male pilots went overseas. Yonally's main job as a WASP was flying B-25 bombers with a target in tow, while new recruits on the ground fired with live ammunition at the  target.

More than 25,000 women applied to the WASP program. Only 1,830 were eaccpeted and 1,074 completed the training. 

At age 98, Yonally is one of the few WASP still alive.  Katie speaks with Yonally's daughter, Lynn Yonally.

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.

Katie talks with Erin Brockovich (yes, that Erin Brockovich), who attributes her doggedness and fearlessness to her mother's  own unwavering determination, wrapped in a lifelong embrace of encouragement, love, and faith. 

Erin's childhood memories are of unalloyed happiness and optimism. Betty Jo Pattee, born in Ponca City, Oklahoma,raised Erin and her siblings to see things through, however tough it gets. She was spiritual without belonging to any particular denomination. B.J. was the first to pinpoint her daughter's dyslexia, and became Erin's most ardent champion, determined to let Erin know she was different but far from inferior.

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 Danielle Mika Nagel, Director of Mindfulness at Lululemon, about her mother, Michiko "Miki" Gorman, the first American woman to win the New York City Marathon, in 1976. Four decades passed before another American woman won that race.

Gorman arrived in the U.S. from a small Japanese village in 1963, at age 28, took up running in her 30s, and never stopped. She was so accustomed to running 100 miles at a time that a marathon was a relative cinch. She won the New York Marathon twice, and the Boston Marathon twice.

Danielle talks about her mother's optimism and grit in spite of growing up in a Japanese culture that expected women to be submissive and unambitious.

Gorman died in 2015, at age 80. Her 2018 obituary appeared in The New York Times's Overlooked No More series of belated tributes.


Don't forget to visit us at ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.

Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry.
Artwork by Paula Mangin. (@PaulaBallah)
Producer: Alice Hudson
Intern: Rosie Manock (@RosieManock)

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.

For a Father's Day change of pace, Katie speaks with Dr. Talmadge E. King, Jr., a world-renowned lung specialist and Dean of the Medical School at the University of California, San Francisco.

In the 1960s, Dr. King's father, Talmadge King Senior, born in 1922 in the segregated South, was recruited by the small community of Darien, on the Georgia coast, to serve as the city's first African American police officer. 

Mr. King instilled in his five children a sense of doing better with each successive generation. He offered a simple metaphor: "If your father builds a wooden house, it's your responsibility to build a brick house."

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.

Katie talks with Zeke Emanuel about his mother, Marsha.

Marsha raised three incredible sons in the 1960s: Zeke, now a prominent physician and health policy expert; Rahm, President Obama's Chief of Staff and former Mayor of Chicago; and Ari, a famous Hollywood Agent.

Instead of Boy Scout meetings and Little League practice, Marsha Emanuel took her three little boys to Civil Rights marches and anti-war protests.

Zeke and Katie explore what it was about Marsha's out-of-the-mainstream approach to child rearing that helped shape him and his two younger brothers.


Don't forget to visit us at ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.

Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry.
Artwork by Paula Mangin. (@PaulaBallah)
Producer: Alice Hudson
Intern: Rosie Manock (@RosieManock)

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.

Athena Linos, 68, a highly regarded  Greek epidemiologist, has been called that country's Anthony Fauci. She was born and raised in a small Greek village, the daughter of the town's baker. Athena succeeded in Greece's patriarchal society because her mother did all she could to see that Athena had a chance for academic achievement that had been inaccessible to her.

All of Athena's four daughters have succeeded in their own right, as has her son.  Katie interviews one of those daughters, Natalia Linos, 38, who followed in her mother's footsteps and became an epidemiologist. And like her mother, Natalia is a strong advocate for health equity. She's now executive director of of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard.

Don't forget to visit us at ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.

Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry.
Artwork by Paula Mangin. (@PaulaBallah)
Producer: Alice Hudson
Intern: Rosie Manock (@RosieManock)

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.

Katie interviews Marya Stark, founding executive director of Emerge America, about Marya's mother, Helen, who lived for most of her life with a debilitating lung condition that left her with 25% of normal lung capacity. 

Helen had nine children, and somehow managed to make each believe that that one child was her favorite. Katie and Marya dig deep into how Helen might have managed to pull that off.

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.

Katie talks with art historian Peter Chametzky about his mother, the feminist poet Anne Halley, whose family fled Nazi Germany for the United States  in the 1930s. Halley's Holocaust poems are haunting and precise. Her "housewife" poems are by turns funny and searing. 

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.

UPDATED NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Katie interviews Dr. Shirley Weber, California Secretary of State whose mother, Mildred, raised eight kids in L.A. in the 1950s and 1960s, after she and her husband, David, fled a lynch mob in rural Arkansas in 1951.

Mildred's philosophy of life: Keep your hand open in order to give.

Dr. Weber, a retired San Diego State University professor, became a member of the California State Assembly in 2012, and was  the head of the Legislative Black Caucus.

On Tues., Nov. 8, 2022, Dr. Weber handily beat her Republican opponent, with 58% of the vote.

A wide-ranging Q&A with Dr. Weber ran  in The New York Times, in which she talked about her childhood in Arkansas, and her thoughts on being part of the democratic process: “I continue to be amazed at being able to participate in the process at this level.”

See the blog post about the Mildred Nash episode on  ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.

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

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.