The Mother Of It All

One last summer check-in to tide us all over until Season 3! Sarah and Miranda dive into the chaos and comedy of back-to-school season, teen babysitter economics, toy gun ethics, and of course, the emotional calculus of modern parenting (and Miranda accidentally makes Sarah cry). We unpack whether Stepbrothers is misogyny at its most insidious, why we are selling kids pink AK-47s, our crone fantas...

Hi! We’re alive out here! (Whether we are truly more alive than usual or merely feeling like we should be because it’s summer remains unclear.) Tune in for a meandering summer catch up between seasons in which we cover vacation nonsense (like asking for an hour to yourself and then waiting for someone to offer it to you), summer illness, whether or not it’s a good idea to throw your phone into the...

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 the...

“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: * Ange...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit motherofitall.substack.com 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 y...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit motherofitall.substack.com 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, adve...

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’...

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...

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 Makin...

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 familie...

We reunite with author and parent Jessica's Slice ahead of the release of her tremendous book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World , to learn how her life with a second child has taught her to throw out the milestones and ask for help (even when it involves a dead possum!). Then, you get to listen to Sarah’s initial interview with Jessica, which remains one of our all...

Debbie Reber, the host of the Tilt Parenting podcast, talks to us about what she’s learned from having hundreds of conversations on raising differently-wired kids. We discuss independence versus self-determination, low-demand parenting, how to find your parenting integrity, and whether even having these conversations is a parenting privilege. Links: * Miranda is So Busy So Bored * The Woman Who Th...

“I remember the bizarre feeling of my baby kicking inside me while taking care of patients dying of COVID in the hospital.” Brett was a doctor in a small town when the pandemic hit, with a toddler at home and a baby on the way. In this episode, she and Miranda (who are childhood friends) talk through her experience as a parent, spouse, and physician during those intense years, and the way they con...

“Coming into parenthood for the second time, I knew a lot. And I think I had this vision of what I would do differently, and I was going to plug into the local mom's groups, or plug into the play dates and take the yoga classes with the kids and things like that. And it became not that. It became just very, very isolating.” Sarah talks to Marta, who had a fresh professional and parenting start pla...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit motherofitall.substack.com

Sarah speaks with Arianne, who gave birth just days into the pandemic lockdown. They discuss how birth trauma and isolation led Arianne to doubt her attachment to her daughter, tricky family relationships, and how she’s healed and found what they call “heart family.” Links: * Our pandemic parenting survey (you can still take it if you want to) * The first episode of our pandemic parenting survey I...

One of The Cut’s parenting columnists and official friend-of-the-pod, Amil Niazi, joins us to talk about her recent essay on weaning her kids off YouTube. We’ve covered screen time , but this time we’re talking about algorithmic content . Is the algorithm as unavoidable as it feels to many of us? Or is it worth it for parents to push back — even when it makes for some awkward moments with other fa...

“I truly believe in the power of policy, and I have been like radicalized by that, since becoming a mom and living here.” Sarah chats with Ariana, a mom in Norway, about how it felt to be a fresh ex-pat when the world shut down. They discuss the overlap and many differences between parenting in the U.S. and Norway during covid, the impact that financial support makes, and how hard it can be to nav...

“Our foster daughter was doing virtual school. My partner was doing virtual school in the other room. My foster daughter couldn't really stay in virtual school unless I was right next to her, and I was often also on a video call with her social worker ,whose daughter was in virtual school. So it was just like, infinity schools in our house.” Ashleigh had recently quit her job to become a foster pa...

“I had already formed an identity as a parent, which made it easier for me to make decisions in the best interest of my family and kids during that time without heightened fear of judgment. I continue to be grateful for that. If I had had my first child during Covid I know it would have been different.” As part of our pandemic parenting series, Christine, a parent in Brooklyn, joins Miranda to sha...

About 500 parents poured their hearts out in the pandemic parenting survey that we sent out into the world last fall. We’ve been reading your words for a few months (THANK YOU) , and now, here we are in March of 2025. Somehow, it’s been five years since the world shut down , and we’re ready to talk through our own pandemic experiences, share some of our favorite quotes from those responses, and we...

Sarah is joined by Garrett Bucks, founder of The Barnraisers Project and author of the The White Pages and The Right Kind of White , to talk about the movies of 2024 and what they say about gender, parenting, sex, and more. Find out which of the 24 and 39 movies Garrett and Sarah watched (respectively) are their best and worst. Also — why Dune is a boymom movie, why Garrett had to fast-forward The...

The Double Shift’ s Katherine Goldstein joins Sarah and Miranda to talk about her creative solution to the problem that is American summer, why parents are set up to fail in finding summer care, and how to actively create the kind of community we need to build something better. Links: * The Incredible Things You Can Do Instead of Paying For American Summer Camp * How Other Countries Handle Summer...

We’re continuing to focus on the experience of trans children and their parents this week with this reading of the exquisite essay As They Like It: Learning To Follow My Child’s Lead , by the author, Nicole Graev Lipson. The piece — about gender in Shakespeare and Nicole’s journey of watching her child let go of girlhood — was originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and then included...

Today Marlo Mack, of the How To Be A Girl podcast, and her friend, “Kay,” join us to talk about their experiences of raising transgender kids in America today. We also dig into what families with transgender kids expect to be dealing with under Trump’s second term, and how those of us with trans kids in our lives and hearts can step up and become more active allies in an increasingly unsafe landsc...