Today, we’re kicking off our summer bonus episodes with a little ode to sidewalk art installations! We’re not just talking about little free libraries (though those are awesome!) we’re talking about the weird, wild and creative ways people express themselves and spread joy through artistic, playful, interactive installations on their sidewalks, stoops and fences, and the unique, important role these little joy blips have in building stronger communities.

I first stumbled across the PDX Dinorama Instagram account, run by Portland’s Rachael Harms Malant, during the pandemic. The account didn’t just promote the little Dinorama she built in front of her house, it was more like a record of all the little fun and funky sidewalk installations that are speckled around the city. From PDX Sidewalk Ducks to a 6-hole golf course that someone built in their front yard, the installations Rachael was highlighting on her account went way above and beyond anything I’d seen, and with little kids to get out of the house and little money to spend, I was so grateful for every last one of them. I’ve been wanting to have her on the show for ages to talk about her passion for these little expressions of joy and welcome that pepper our city (and are popping up around the world now), and I am so thrilled to have her episode kick off some summer MOFITA fun.

Chatting with Rachael was seriously heart-warming summer fun, and we hope you’ll tune in! In in the episode, she shares tips for creating your own little sidewalk joy invitation, and she has tons of examples and tutorials on her Instagram page, too.

But, all you really need to do to get inspired is head outside on a walk, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in a town with folks on the sidewalk joy map. As Rachael explains in the episode:

“People are craving community, and community is — and is going to continue to be — so very important for all of us. So this kind of connecting and sharing that Sidewalk Joy helps promote in different communities is going to continue to be vital.”

If you walk around your neighborhood and don’t see any little mini-fig galleries, dinoramas or take-a-car-leave-a-cars, maybe your could be the first!

LINKS

* The Portland Sidewalk Joy map

* The Worldwide Sidewalk Joy map

* Rachael’s sidewalk joy creation tips + ideas

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

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It’s a just-the-two-of-us episode for our beautiful paid subscribers. We chat about the parenting books currently in our TBR piles (so many good books on motherhood lately, so little time) and the ones we’re most obsessed with, the pitfalls of comparing ourselves to Ursula K. LeGuin, making peace with not being a person who writes a slew of culture-chan…

“You're going to spend, if you're lucky, a quarter or a third of your life ‘in menopause.’ And we need dialogue about it. We need to talk about it.”

Angela Garbes returns to explore the pains and delights of middle age. Angela schools us on the sex lives of menopausal orcas, why Carl Jung wants us all to become more selfish as we age, and her pitch for a rebrand of the “crone” stage.

Links:

* Angela in Romper on The Morning Rush

* Angela’s Guardian column, Halfway There

* Angela’s great books, Essential Labor and Like a Mother

* Angela on Substack

* ESPRIT nostalgia

* Courtney Martin on aging parents

* Katie Kitamura’s Audition

* Jung and Aging

* All Fours

* Flash Count Diary

* Dying For Sex

* Watch Angela’s Guest-Curated series on Mid-life at the Seattle Public Library

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)

Did you know that Sarah Wheeler is actually a real live professional educational psychologist and parent coach? Today, Miranda asks Sarah to put on her Dr. hat and give some professional advice about changing schools. When you start to think about sending your kid to a different school, how can you know that you’re making the right choice? What if the new school isn…

It’s Friday and we’re taking it easy & talking it through! All of it. It’s just the two of us, Miranda and Sarah, checking in about our parenting lives and LIFE lives. We’re talking about everything that’s been going on for us lately, from teaching our kids tongue twisters, checking Reddit for each other, adventures in toddler asthma, motherhood and vig…

Journalist Frankie de la Cretaz joins us to talk women’s sports and all things WNBA! We dig into player and WAG fashion, the visibility of queer families on and off the court, the truth about trans athletes, and mother-athletes past, present and future.

Links:

* Frankie De La Cretaz on Substack

* Frankie’s book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League

* Molly Dickens’ the Maternal Stress Project

* WNBA Documentaries 144 and The Power of the Dream

* Basketball Wives

* Angel Reese on Insta

* Woxer

* WNBA x Skims campaign

* TBOY Wrestling

* So You Think You Know A Lot About The Titanic by Janet Manley

* Oh Mary!

* No Taste Like Home

* North of North

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)

British author Helen Jukes joins us to talk about motherhood in the animal kingdom, and what human mothers can learn from mothers from other species. What is “natural” about motherhood, what is the true nature of motherhood across species? What can we learn by allowing ourselves to truly see and examine the many roles of the mother in nature? At one poetic and rigorous, Helen Jukes’ beautiful new book, Mother / Animal, is an illuminating exploration of her own matrescence through the lens of motherhood in the animal world.

Note: Helen’s book is not available in the U.S. yet, so Blackwell’s (a UK based bookseller) has made some signed copies of Mother / Animal by Helen Jukes available to our listeners via this link.

LINKS:

* Buy Mother/Animal

* Follow Helen Jukes on Instagram

* How To Catch A Mole by Marc Hamer

* The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush

* Revolutionary Mothering

* Anne Helen Peterson essay on What Makes Women Clean

* Amanda Hess on Mother of it All

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)

MAHA (or “Make America Healthy Again”) motherhood is a bit of a mindf*uck. What, one asks oneself, unites “crunchy” hippie-leaning momfluencers (like Rudy Jude & her wannabes) of the world with someone as spray-tanned Marjorie Taylor Green? One looks like a sentient carcinogen, and one looks like she's never even heard of food dye! So how do we understand their alliance under the umbrella of Making American Healthy Again?

For many of us, there are some points of connection with these MAHA moms, which where this conversation gets juicy and frankly a little disconcerting. As Sara Petersen wrote, most moms probably would agree with the MAHA moms in that we prefer that our kids’ treats came without red dye #6, a food dye associated with behavioral side effects. But, unlike a MAHA mom, we’re proud to be up-to-date on our Covid boosters instead of guzzling raw milk and curing our own cancer with red light therapy (or something, tbh we couldn’t bear to go too deep into that one).

At the same time that motherhood taps us into our need to give and receive care, the conditions of modern millennial motherhood seem to have stoked a fear-driven and anxiety-ridden individualism. It’s a confusing time, and it’s getting more baffling by the minute. If MAHA mothers care so much about banning food additives like red dye, why have they aligned themselves with an administration that has effectively gutted the FDA? How did we get to a place where expertise is up for grabs and there is so much mistrust in our public health systems? Can we recover?

OG motherhood writer and New York Times opinion columnist Jessica Grose joins us to talk through all this and more.

LINKS:

* Jessica Grose, The Kind of Moms Who Fall for ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (New York Times, Oct 2024)

* Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose

* Sara Petersen: “MAHA Moms Are Wrong About Wellness”

* Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst

* Ariana Hendrix

* Katie Beck On Child-Friendly City Design

* Eloise Rickman on Children’s Rights

* Sprawl Is A Parenting Problem by Erin Sagan

* Noah Wylie being hot again on The Pitt

* John Early bit

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes, book reviews and more. If you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)

Some people have told us that this podcast is for “literary mom nerds” and we’re into that! So, today for our beloved die-hard paid subscribers we’re leaning into that! (Please consider becoming one of those, if you aren’t already!) We decided to make an episode about what we’re reading and loving right now, and what’s in our TBR piles. We’re still in t…

New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess joins us to talk about the convergence of parenthood and technology. We dig in to everything from freebirthers to prenatal testing, and from “complicated” pregnancies to the many anxieties (and joys, too) of raising a child in a world where a $1600 Snoo has become a newborn must-have and corporations know about our pregnancies before our immediate families do. Hess’s much anticipated memoir, Second Life: Having A Child In The Digital Age (which we both LOVED), is out May 6th.

Links:

* Prenatal Testing Offers Pregnant Women More Information Than Ever — But No Support To Deal With It (Romper)

* Unfit Parent by Jessica Slice

* Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

* Happiest Baby On The Block

If you love the work we do on Mother Of It All, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which you can do at motherofitall.substack.com. Paid subscribers get access to everything behind the paywall, like subscriber-only episodes and if you subscribe at the founding member level, we’ll send you one of our awesome tote bags. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, that’s OK! It’s always free and helpful to follow, share, rate and review our show here and everywhere else you listen to podcasts you love. Thank you!

* Visit our Bookshop storefront to find all the books we’ve mentioned here and in previous episodes. When you shop there, we get a small affiliate fee (yay, thank you!).

* Visit motherofitall.com to send us ideas for a future episode or learn more about the show.

* Follow the podcast on Instagram (@themotherofitall) or Bluesky (@motherofitallpod.bsky.social)