The Mothers with Sara Brown

We all say we want a village. But are we willing to accept the inconvenience that comes with belonging to one? Tracy Skelly grew up inside a culture of collective responsibility – one in which children belonged to everyone, help was expected and someone else’s needs sometimes came before your own. That foundation helped carry her through a formidable career spanning Teach for America, Harvard, an...

Rachel Hochhauser was a writer for years. It took becoming a mother to make her an author. After earning a master’s degree in fiction, Rachel wrote the novel she believed would launch her career. Instead, she spent years rewriting it, collecting encouraging rejections and eventually putting the manuscript in a drawer. She stopped writing and directed her creative energy elsewhere – building a care...

“I don’t care about what I don’t care about.” That may be the secret to how Julie Cole built a thriving business while raising six children – not by doing everything, but by becoming exceptionally clear about what actually mattered. Julie is a recovered lawyer, award-winning entrepreneur, bestselling author and co-founder of Mabel’s Labels . More than 20 years ago, after her oldest son was diagnos...

What happens when a lifetime of high achievement runs headfirst into motherhood? Nafeesa Remtilla knows the high-achiever playbook well. Before becoming CEO of Poppins Payroll , she built a career across Goldman Sachs, Bain & Company, and Robinhood, where she served as Vice President of Product & Operations. She is also the mother of two young children. In this episode, Nafeesa joins Sara...

For our final replay of the summer, we're revisiting one of our most thought-provoking conversations—with psychologist, author, and maternal mental health expert Dr. Jessica Zucker. It's a conversation about the stories we inherit, the ones we tell ourselves, and the courage it takes to rewrite them. Enjoy! ******* Dr. Jessica Zucker has spent her career helping women tell the stories they've been...

Attention, women in your 30's and 40's: have you ever looked at your body in the mirror and thought, “What...is....happening?” If so, we'd like to cordially welcome you to perimenopause. But don't worry - it's not the beginning of the end. Think of it as a recalibration, a years-long hormonal shuffle that can make your workouts feel weird and your sleep impossible (even without...

Note: We are revisiting some of our favorite conversations from the archives this summer. Enjoy the wisdom of Jennifer Wallace this week! And pick up her latest NYT bestseller ‘ Mattering .’ Jennifer Breheny Wallace – NYT bestselling author of ‘ Mattering ’ and ‘ Never Enough ,’ journalist, and mother of three – joins The Mothers for a conversation about achievement, worth, identity, and what it r...

Note: One year ago we recorded our very first LIVE episode featuring three remarkable mothers of Nantucket: Elin Hilderbrand, Bess Clarke and Wendy Rouillard. This was a huge moment for us worth revisiting, and doesn’t hurt that the anniversary coincides with the release of the TV-adaptation of Elin’s ‘The Five-Star Weekend’ on Peacock starring Jennifer Garner! Is there anything mothers cannot do!...

Editor’s note: We’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations from the archive this summer . Enjoy! Drumroll for greatness – Lexi Reese joins the pod this week! Lexi is the co-founder and CEO of Lanai , an AI Empowerment Platform that helps enterprises transform AI experiments into systematic success. Before Lanai, she led the Global Programmatic Ad Business at Google and then jumped to be th...

Patrice Meagher is the founder and CEO of MilkMate and a former Executive Vice President at CBRE, where she spent nearly 15 years shaping the commercial real estate landscape in Manhattan – while becoming a mother of four. She was, by almost any measure, succeeding. And she was also, by her own account, quietly losing the plot. Not because she wasn't capable. But because the system around her...

What happens when motherhood asks you to do work you never imagined? For Nasha Fitter, it meant stepping into a world of rare disease, medical research, caregiving, and advocacy – not because she chose it, but because her daughter needed her to. After her daughter Amara was diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that affects brain development, movement, speech, and cognition,...

What happens when toxic productivity reaches childhood? As parents, many of us feel pressure to enrich, entertain, supervise, and optimize every moment of our children's lives – all while navigating the demands of work, family, and everything else competing for our attention. In this episode, Sara sits down with parenting coach, educator, founder of The Workspace for Children , and writer behi...

After leaving a 12-year career at Google, Sara Brown became fascinated by two questions: Who are mothers when nobody is asking about their children? And who are successful women when nobody is asking about their success? On her new podcast, Sara sits down with influential women shaping industries, institutions, communities, and culture (while raising kids!) to explore the person behind the titles,...

Dana Haimoff is a Managing Director in the Private Equity Group at JPMorgan Asset Management in London, where she has spent more than two decades investing on behalf of institutional clients. She is also the co-founder of Level 20 , an organization dedicated to increasing the representation of women in private equity across Europe. In this episode, Dana shares what it was like to build a career in...

Dr. Robyn Riseberg didn't set out to become an entrepreneur. She set out to become a pediatrician. But after years caring for children and families across Boston, she found herself increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the healthcare system around her. So frustrated, in fact, that her daughters eventually told her to stop complaining and build something better. That challenge led Dr. R...

For decades, Trish Walker operated at the highest levels of corporate America – first rising to Senior Managing Director at Accenture, then as President of Home & Services at Best Buy. But beneath the executive titles was a more personal set of questions: What kind of life actually feels sustainable? How do you know when something is no longer working? And how do you separate what you truly wa...

Many high-achieving women believe that if they prepare well enough, work hard enough, and become competent enough, they can prevent things from falling apart. Then they become mothers. Emily Greenberg spent her career working across nearly every layer of the modern childhood ecosystem – from teaching sixth grade to building parenting products and family platforms at companies including Lovevery, A...

Sara Holcomb spent 16 years inside Google before leaving for senior roles at Dentsu and Criteo, where she's now SVP of Strategy. But the more interesting story isn't the resume – it's what happens when the thing you've built your entire identity around is suddenly gone. And then, on top of that: her younger son August started losing his hearing. We talk about the months-long diagno...

Miki Agrawal has built four companies. She has disrupted pizza, periods, bathrooms, and diapers. She has written two books, raised millions, and scaled brands that changed how people think about the most intimate parts of daily life. And she has no interest in building that way again. Miki is the founder of WILD , THINX , TUSHY and most recently HIRO Technologies . She is a serial entrepreneur who...

What does it actually mean to “be yourself” at work – especially as a parent? And is “authenticity” even the right goal anymore? Because for many mothers, the question isn’t just who am I at work? It’s: Which version of me is allowed here? What do I keep in? What do I edit out? And what does it cost to keep performing? Claude Silver has built her career around these questions. As Chief Heart Offic...

What does it mean to live through grief and uncertainty, and still choose joy? In this BEST OF episode, Sara sits down with Marisa Renee Lee (www.marisareneelee.com) – author, advocate, entrepreneur, grief expert, and the brilliant mind behind Grief Is Love and her new book Waiting for Dawn . From Wall Street to the Obama White House, from profound personal loss to becoming a Mother through persis...

What if the real risk isn’t leaving – but staying too long? Christine May, PhD, trained as a psychologist focused on behavior change and was on a tenure-track path in academia when, in early motherhood, she started to question whether the life she’d spent years building still worked. She shares how and why she left academia and moved into industry through Noom, where she led behavioral science and...

After her grandmother passed away, Barrie Farivar found herself returning to something she couldn’t replace – recordings of her voice. Not photos. Not videos. Just her voice. Telling stories. Being herself. Still somehow present. That experience stayed with her. So much so that after a career at Google and YouTube and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Barrie left her “perfect on paper” job to b...

A lot of us are doing an extraordinary amount – at work, at home, emotionally, logistically – and still feel like it’s not enough. In this episode, I talk with clinical psychologist and executive coach Dr. Anne Welsh , who calls this the “ambition paradox” – the impossible standard modern mothers are trying to meet: to be exceptional at work, exceptional at home, and somehow never fall apart in th...

Sarah Kauss is the founder and former CEO of S’well, the category-defining brand she built from $30,000 of her own savings into a company generating over $100M in annual revenue and helping displace billions of single-use plastic bottles. Today, she is a Managing Partner at Avignon Partners and serves as an investor, advisor, and board member, working with leadership teams to build and scale compa...