Every month for our Patreon members we release a special Movie Club episode where we take on movies through the lense of motherhood, and motherhood through the lense of movies. This month, we discuss the Oscar nominations with Tracy Clark Flory.

Join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month to hear the full episode!

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Author and speaker Jessica Slice talks to Sarah about how disability culture has taught her to reject perfectionism, how internalized ableism makes parenting harder for all of us, and the beauty of building a family where everyone accepts and expresses their needs.

Links:

Jessica’s website and Substack newsletter

Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong

Lucy Webster’s The View From Down Here

Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

We've Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents, edited by Eliza Hull

⁠Join our Patreon!

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Midwife, birth trauma healer, and beloved big sister Rebekah Wheeler breaks down what we get wrong about birth trauma, why there is no wrong way to give birth, and what we can do to truly support people through the birth process. Also, Sarah confronts her about never letting her borrow her Oasis t-shirt in middle school, and Miranda gets some free birth healing. 

Links:

Rebekah’s website

Review of Alison Yarrow’s Birth Control in The Nation

The Body Keeps The Score

Recs for kids:

Half Magic

Wayside School Books

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In which Miranda & Sarah define the many reasons they love Evie Ebert’s motherhood writing, and Evie responds to all the flattery by giving an exceptionally satisfying answer to our “where are your kids right now” question. Then we dig into resolution culture, wondering out loud if maybe (MAYBE) we’re done treating resolution season as the super bowl of self-loathing. Instead, we just might be ready to mess around with stuff like earnestly-selected, loosely-defined slacker-level mind-set aspirations, the kind that help us make peace with who and how we are, as opposed to productivity culture in a “self-care” trench coat. Also: “Punch butt,” the importance of doing stuff we’re bad at, and watching a lot of TV. 

Yer Mates, Evie, Miranda & Sarah

LINKS: 

Evie’s Substack: Everything Happened

Really Good, Actually

This Fool on Hulu

(It’s Great To) Suck At Something

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Miranda and Sarah welcome Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change and Like A Mother, to the show this week to talk about drinking, sobriety, and the fuzzy, fine lines that we trace around substance use in motherhood. Though it feels like sober curiosity — or full on sobriety — is on-trend, a recent CDC study indicated that more women than ever are binge drinking and dying from alcohol-related diseases. How should we think about drinking and self-care? What does my choice say about your choice? With holiday gatherings looming, Angela — and a few brilliant listeners — helps us think deeply about how to manage it all with or without drinking to help (or hinder) us.


Links:
Angela’s Substack
Angela’s Washington Post piece about her sobriety 
CDC Study about women and alcohol-related mortality
Atlantic Article on Wine Moms 
Virginia Sole-Smith on Sugar Highs
Sophie Lucido Johnson on Instagram
Monday N/A Gin
Studio Null N/A Bubble

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It’s the Mother Culture Origin Story! Sarah and Miranda (that’s us) divulge a little more about who we are, what we’re doing here, how we found each other, and why motherhood continues to earn its place as the focal point of our most obsessive curiosities. We talk pregnancy, anxieties, traps, tenderness, and how we think about what happened to us when we became mothers. What should we tell new moms? What would we have told ourselves? And is anyone listening to this motherhood discourse we love so dearly?

LINKS: 

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen

Expecting Better by Emily Oster

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherofitall.substack.com/subscribe

The lovely writer Nancy Reddy joins Miranda and Sarah to talk (and cry a little bit) about the infamous John Hughes Christmas movie extraordinaire, Home Alone. We get into the weeds of Kate McAllister’s power-mom parenting choices, realizing that this bananas plot line actually feels pretty relatable, WTF a “hyper mom” might be, and the gray areas of our collective nostalgia for all things ‘90s.

The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood edited by Nancy Reddy and Emily Perez

Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America by Sarah Menkedick

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman 

Wine Country 

Kid Culture:

Greeking Out

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherofitall.substack.com/subscribe

Switch on the twinkle lights, it’s the Mother Culture Holiday Episode! In which Sara P. (author of Momfluenced and the beloved substack, In Pursuit Of Clean Countertops) shares hot tips for Santa training your kids, Sarah W. finds out about Elf On A Shelf’s Jewish cousin. Then, Miranda tries to make everyone talk about big questions — like who and what the holidays are even for, and what ritual does for human beings — and little nice things, like actually really loving the holidays despite the workload, never, ever doing Elf On A Shelf (unless you want to), and the fact that latkes rule. After lots of goofing around, we wrap it all up with a particularly festive holiday edition of our fan-favorite kid culture segment.

Links: 

Sara’s Book: Momfluenced 

Sara’s newsletter: In Pursuit of Clean Countertops

Ritual: An Ancient Solution To Modern Problems from Hidden Brain

Our Family Christmas Rituals That Have Nothing To Do With Religion

Kid Culture: 

Arthur Christmas

The Christmas Chronicles

Elf 

Join our Patreon!

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherofitall.substack.com/subscribe

What do we really mean when we say capitalist patriarchy, gender politics, or even, feminism? Sarah and Miranda bring on a badass professor of feminist economics to school us on all this, plus the good, bad, and ugly of how this shows up in modern motherhood discourse.

Katherine Moos is a professor of feminist political economy at UMASS Amherst. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research.

Links:

Mevre Emre in the New Yorker

Fair Play

The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

Momfluenced 

Kid Culture:

Blueberries for Sal

Time of Wonder

Brixton Brothers

Spy Versus Spy

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Miranda and Sarah are joined by Amanda Montei, the author of the recently published Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control, to talk about the Britney Spears memoir and what it means for moms. 

Links: 

Amanda Montei in her Substack Newsletter Mad Women

Jessica Grose in the New York Times

Amanda Hess in the New York Times

Lyz in Men Yell at Me

Virginia Sole-Smith in Burnt Toast 

Miranda on Postpartum Mood Disorders’ Exclusion From The DSM

NY Times piece on kids being taken away from mothers on medications

Join us on Patreon!

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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mother-culture-pod/message

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit motherofitall.substack.com/subscribe