Bad Mothers Podcast

This is the final episode of Season 1 of the Bad Mothers podcast. I want to thank everyone for listening and engaging with the show over the past six months, and for supporting this endeavour. I specially want to thank my guests who generously shared themselves and their experiences with all of us. For this last episode, I decided to bring my sister Gina back, from Episode 1 , to interview me. Sin...

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged , an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to running TE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community. This episode includes Angel’s own experiences of estrangement and motherhood. Last week I...

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged , an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to runningTE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community. I’ve divided our conversation into two parts. Today’s episode is focused on the practicali...

Elizabeth Austin is a writer whose work has appeared in TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, Narratively, and many others -- some of it focused on how she considers herself to be a ‘bad’ mom. As a memoirist she explores the intricacies of relationships and often self-interrogates -- something that anyone who is estranged knows can be a complicated process. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Root Cau...

Maggie Frank-Hsu is a writer based in San Diego. She is the author of a poetry chapbook “A Drop in the Dry Season,” and the Estranged newsletter on Substack. Estranged features essays, interviews, news, and reviews all about parent, child, and sibling estrangement with a focus on understanding, not blame. Our conversation covers Maggie’s limited relationship with her mother, her research on estran...

Please be aware that this episode includes discussion of suicide attempt, addiction and alcoholism. Kari Bentley-Quinn is an award winning playwright whose work has been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other places in the US and Canada. Kari got her BA in Theater Arts at Pace University and her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College, where she studied with Tina Howe. She was a co–fou...

This episode is a bit different, which is why I’m calling it a bonus. It’s a much shorter interview, and it’s with an academic scholar, Dr. Katie Gaddini . She is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. From 20...

I'm excited to share this new episode of Bad Mothers, because it's my first speaking to a fellow child-free person. I've noticed that many people assume that the reason I don't have children is due to my fraught relationship with my mother. It's a reasonable thing to think, so I wanted to meet more women who are child-free and estranged. Were they, like me, never really inclined to have children,...

For the second episode of the podcast, I spoke to an anonymous Substacker called Your Own Mother . In her newsletter, she offers beautiful and insightful essays about her personal experience with estrangement, recovery from an abusive and traumatic childhood, and some of the overlooked but equally painful repercussions of estrangement. She has two children, and like Gina in episode 1 , becoming a...

On the Bad Mothers podcast, we’ll dive deep into our maternal urges, or lack thereof. We’ll talk about the mothers we left, or who left us, and whether they haunt our own choices about having children. Why? I created Bad Mothers to give women space to be whatever they want to be, even if that is a “bad” mom – a woman who is frustrated, or doesn’t love being a mom, or decided not to have kids, or i...