The Mother of it All

Author and editor Kaitlyn Teer (you may know her as the editor of Joanna Goddard’s Big Salad newsletter ) joins Sarah and Miranda to chat about how weirdly hard and wonderful it is to have hobbies as a mom, and the unique joy of being new (even bad!) at something. We get into such pressing questions as: What is “contaminated leisure time,” and how can we carve out ‘uncontaminated’ time to explore who we are beyond work and caregiving? If modern motherhood is defined by a sense of pressure to optimize our every decision, what does it mean to chase ‘beginners mind,’ uncertainty, and inefficient uses of time? Are our hobbies an expression of millennial economic dread, and an effort to detach our sense of self-regard from the capitalistic value systems that have left us in the lurch? Are we totally overthinking this? We also touch on: Kaitlyn’s amazing hair, Doggy Land, and Sarah’s recent swimming pool cannonball-ing achievements. Plus culture recs, moving as a mom (hard!), and more.

This episode is sponsored by Freeya, a marketplace for free stuff.

Links

* Anne Helen Petersen on quality leisure time vs. ‘contaminated leisure time’

* Follow Kaitlyn on Instagram

* Kaitlyn Teer on Mountain Biking In New Motherhood

* ‘Popsicles Can’t Fix This New Heat’, Kaitlyn Teer over at Electric Lit

* Big Salad, Joanna Goddard’s newsletter (edited by Kaitlyn!)

* Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

* The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham

* Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World By Christian Cooper

* Hike Clerb

* Family-oriented family (brene brown pod— sarah can you add?)

* Crayola Air-Dry Clay & how to make a clay flower frog

* Doggy Lands affirmations

* Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker 

* Skull King

Sarah and Miranda check in on Miranda’s daughter’s very first day of big kid school (even though she claims she’s “still little”), watch the just-dropped Nightbitch trailer in real time, discuss Sarah’s impending move after 15 years in the same apartment, and talk hetero-exceptionalism and Sarah Manguso’s “Liars,” family camp and “Get S**t Done Days.”

Links:

* Nightbitch Trailer

* Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst

* How to Manage Back to School Feelings by Sarah

* Liars by Sarah Manguso

* Tracy Clark-Flory

on hetero-exceptionalism

* Kathryn Jezer-Morton on affirmation culture in Brooding

* Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the S**t Out of Each Other in the Onion

* Berenstain Bears Moving Day

We are thrilled to kick off season 2(!) with a bang in the form of a meaty, rich conversation with Eloise Rickman, author of It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time For A Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children. We hadn’t thought about children’s rights much before reading Eloise’s book (have you?) and now it’s all we want to think about. What are children’s rights? How can we think about them in the context of parenting? What is adultism? Should kids vote? What even is a child and who gets to decide? Why hasn’t the U.S. ratified the UN Convention on the Rights Of The Child? (anyone, anyone?) If it’s our goal to respect the rights of our children at all times, how do we get our kids to go to bed?Also: Random TMI about Sarah & Miranda’s exercise habits.

Tune in, and share your thoughts below.

Links:

* It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time For A Grown-Up Conversation About How Adults Treat Children.

* The UN Convention on the Rights Of The Child

* Download a poster of the CRC here

Sarah & Miranda shoot the breeze, talk about some back-to-school feelings, drop some hints about what we'll cover in season 2, and nerd out about THAT EPISODE of The Bear. We had so much fun with Phil Maciak on our Screen Time episode (our most-listened to episode, BTW! thanks for that, friends) that we had to bring him back to talk about *crunch crunch crunch* : the 39 minutes of prestige TV that we call “Ice Chips.”

This episode of the podcast will spoil Season 3 of The Bear for you, but it will also cover “Napkins,” and “Fishes” quite extensively. In other words, you may want to catch up on The Bear and then listen. TL;DR: Donna Berzatto — discuss!

Phil’s Romper Q&A With Abby Elliott “It’s Abby Elliot Who Makes It Real”Irish President Says Homework Should Be BannedAll About Love by bell hooksCulture recs: The Bear (FX)Slow Horses (Apple TV)Industry (HBO)Baskets (FX)

It’s summer, which means Sarah’s rocking a 3-cone-per-day ice cream lifestyle, and Miranda is guzzling $1 slushies by the pool. And work is …. still kind of happening. The brilliant, hilarious Claire Zulkey of the Evil Witches newsletter (which you need to subscribe to, if you don’t already) joins us to talk about the various joys and perils of summertime parenting and yes, of course, the perpetually fraught, exhausting question of the whole camp thing. This episode of Mother of it All is sponsored by our friends at Freeya, a new marketplace for giving and getting free stuff! Links:

Summer Camp and Parenting Panics at The New YorkerSummer Child Care Is a Special Kind of Hell on The Cut“Feral Mom Summer” on RomperMelinda Wenner Moyer: “We Don’t Need To Make The Most Of Summer”

Canadian writer and The Cut columnist Amil Niazi joins us to discuss what happens when an entire generation follows their dreams, whether our feelings of economic instability are real or imagined, and having children (even a third!) while fighting against upgrade culture. Also, we stan Better Things, and we ask: Even if it’s not really OK, what if it is all going to be OK?

Links:

* MOFITA summer book club

* Should We Expect More From Dads? (and praise for Lucas Mann’s Attachments) (Hua Hsu in The New Yorker)

* Welcome To The Millennial Midlife Crisis (Amil Niazi in The Cut)

* Will I Ever Retire? Millennials Wonder What’s On The Other Side Of Middle Age (Amil Niazi in The Guardian)

* What Are Children For? (Anastasia Berg in The Cut)

* It’s Weird Times To Be A Happy Mother (Elissa Strauss in Slate)

* Follow Amil on X (formerly known as Twitter) here or her Substack Cry, Baby

Culture recs:

* Beach Read

* Pucking Around

* Nightbitch

Sarah and Miranda are joined by Ruth Whippman, author of Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity to talk about how boys need more but get less, the boys who are dying to talk about their feelings, and the radical power of a board book about a boy and his bags. Plus, do we say “no” to toxic-masculinity media or just say “yes” to better things? And a special round of “Marry, F**k, Kill!”

Links:

* Sarah’s piece in the Cut on cross-gender friendships

* Boymom the book

* Sarah’s piece in Romper on Boymom

* Ruth’s Substack:

I Blame Society

Culture recs for boys:

* Cool Runnings

* Wednesday

* Clive Board Books by Jessica Spanyol

A juicy, earnestly silly over-think of Mamma Mia and Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again (Sarah’s preferred Mamma Mia) in which Sarah’s friend Garrett Bucks joins us with a spicy-hot take on the three (three!) dads of Mamma Mia. When Bucks is not thinking about the rich, layered texts that are Mamma Mia and Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again, he keeps busy doing Dad Stuff, as well as working as an anti-racist organizer and educator, and authoring the Substack Newsletter The White Pages. If you like his take on Mamma Mia, you may also love his memoir, The Right Kind of White.

Links:

* Garrett’s new memoir, The Right Kind of White

* Garrett’s great newsletter, , and his “Ten Movies, Ten Stories of Whiteness” series.

* Actually good dad screen-recs:

* Together (the Swedish one)

* The Sandlot

* Interstellar

* Eighth Grade

* How Bluey Made me a Better Dad

* ’s 4000 words on Whiteness and Dirty Dancing

Sarah flew to Iceland, only to be immediately taken down by a stomach flu. Meanwhile, back at home a Covid-like virus knocked Miranda’s family out for 14 days. So we called an emergency recording session of Mother Of It All just to vent about it all together. Why can’t parents have nice things, like occasional vacations or a week or two without absolutely disgusting viruses? Is every virus we get now actually worse since Covid lockdown, or does it just feel that way? What ever happened to the normal cold? Like a nice, 3-5 day stuffy nose? When you s**t your pants on a plane but everyone’s asleep, did it really happen? And is being sick in a hotel room by yourself the only “joy” left for parents??

Links:

* Plane landed by diarrhea (true fact)

* A quick guide to Norse Gods

* Nose sprays are either sketchy or amazing

* Miranda’s doctor lady was right

* -ollow us on Substack! (Summer reading club is coming!)

Sarah and Miranda host their first dad, cultural critic Phillip Maciak, and dig into screen time, shame, nostalgia, hugs, and multi-level marketing for second-graders.

Links:

* Phil’s book, Avidly Reads Screen Time

* Phil on Instagram

* Phil’s review of Season 2 of the Bear in The New Republic

* The NOLA Pelicans’ King Cake Baby mascot

* The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

* Stephanie Murray’s thoughts in the Dispatch

* ’ thoughts in Romper

* Melinda Wenner Moyer’s thoughts in

* ’s The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life

* Sky Guide

* Jessica Grose on Screens in Schools

* The Digital Wealth Divide in Schools

* Phil on Frog and Toad

* on Bluey as the Breaking Bad of family television

Culture Recs:

* She-ra and the Princess of Power 

* Hilda 

* City of Ghosts 

* Harriet the Spy Show 

* Muppet Babies 

* with and