The Mothers with Sara Brown

This week, Sara & Vee talk with Jarret Zafran, attorney, father through surrogacy and egg donation, and Founder & Executive Director of Brownstone Surrogacy . After navigating his own journey to parenthood, Jarret left WilmerHale and “Big Law” to launch what he wished he'd had: a surrogacy agency rooted in compassion and personal connection for everyone involved. It’s a conversation about...

This week we have a life-long creative, tech executive and Mother who is doing it all while navigating life with OCD & anxiety — Corrie Pappas! This was, as Brené Brown would say, a wholehearted discussion. So many parents will see and hear their truest selves in Corrie’s experience that she was bravely willing to share with us.   In this episode: 🎭 Walking the non-linear path from acting to...

It’s here! Season 2! And school! And heightened work expectations. 😬 To help us feel grounded and more purposefully motivated this time of year, we have executive coach, author AND Mother of three Arivee Vargas . Arivee, like so many of us, has grappled with ambition & success alongside just wanting to be fulfilled & happy (too much to ask!?). Thankfully she is here to tell us how she’s f...

Sara & Vee reflect on what they’re loosely calling “Season 1” – all 28 episodes and 25 incredible Mothers they’ve interviewed – as they gear up for Season 2. Thank you for being a part of this journey and growing community of badass Mothers making dents in the universe AND raising the next generation! In this episode: ✨ Lessons from season 1 (and all 25 Mothers!) 🙅‍♀️ Sara’s crusade to end m...

Milestone episode out today with Elin Hilderbrand (NYT Bestselling Author & Producer), Bess Clarke (CEO of Nantucket Looms) and Wendy Rouillard (Author & Owner of Barnaby’s). On July 22 we hosted our sold out and very first live recording at Sister Ship Nantucket and we are thrilled to share the conversation with the world, featuring the incredible Mothers behind some of Nantucket’s most i...

We have another tech star on the pod this week! Tamara Hinckley is a former Director of Product at Pinterest, where she spent nearly a decade leading teams at the intersection of tech and business. She’s the author of Half Moon Hustle , a newsletter about motherhood, ambition, and living with intention, which has grown into her new venture Momentum Rising, designed to help ambitious women navigate...

This week Sara & Vee are joined by Dr. Lindsay Gittens, an anesthesiologist at Tufts Medical Center and the Director of Anesthesia for Orthopedic Surgery. A Boston native and former competitive soccer player, Lindsay now balances medicine, investing, and single motherhood with intention and on her own terms. After separating from the father of her children, Lindsay wanted to find more freedom...

Jenny Rossman , a distinguished attorney for victims of sexual abuse, joins the podcast this week to explain to all of us how she does this work while raising two young kids. Jenny is currently the lead trial attorney at Herman Law, but was previously the Bureau Chief of the Sex Crimes & Child Abuse Unit of the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 9th Judicial Circuit (Orlando) and served as...

Katherine Jetter is a gemologist, jewelry designer, and the founder of The Vault Nantucket — a curated boutique spotlighting designers from around the globe. She’s known for reintroducing opals to the luxury market, blending bold design with deep expertise, and building a brand that’s as innovative as it is elegant. She’s also the mother of one daughter and three stepdaughters — and the kind of wo...

Rebecca Love of Rebecca Love Photography is a portrait and wedding photographer on Nantucket and Mother of three. She and her husband Jonathan also produce ACK & Beyond . Rebecca’s work has been featured in Town & Country , The Wall Street Journal , Boston Magazine and Forbes Travel Guide, but the journey behind it is just as striking. In this conversation, Rebecca talks: 🍼 Launching what...

Nicky Bandera built a mission-driven brand out of her kitchen in the middle of a pandemic to set an example for her young daughter and hasn’t stopped opening doors since. In this episode, the founder of Project Paulie gets real about invisible labor, pandemic pivots, and the myth of doing it all – and shares how motherhood turned her passion into a purpose-driven movement. You’ll hear: 🤯 Why she...

The unstoppable and ever-joyful Meghan Joyce joins Sara & Vee on the pod this week! Meghan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Duckbill , pioneering a hybrid AI-human personal assistant model. Previously, she was COO at Oscar Health and held key leadership roles at Uber. Meghan serves on the boards of The Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health. She is also a Henry Crown Fellow and member of the Aspe...

Jessica Gelman is a trailblazer in sports, data, and leadership — and one of a few women at the helm of the business side of professional sports. As CEO & co-founder of Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR), co-founder & co-chair of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and investor in women's sports, Jessica has spent her career changing how the sports industry thinks about fans, data, an...

Tufts University Field Hockey Head Coach Tina McDavitt Mattera joins the pod to share her unfiltered experience building one of the most dominant programs in the country AND raising kids – and finding time to hang with her husband and friends at the beach. Tina is entering her 21st year with Tufts. Under her leadership, they won the NCAA championship in 2012 – the first NCAA title won by a women’s...

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 the COO of Gusto (a unicorn, but don’t call it a unicorn as you’ll hear Lexi explain in our interview). Alw...

Get ready to fill up your cup! Tracy Skelly, founder of Little Cocoa Bean Co. , joins Sara & Vee on the pod this week. Tracy is a Boston-based entrepreneur, educator, and advocate for health equity & food access. Forever committed to service, Tracy started her career in education with Teach for America before getting her Masters in Education at Harvard and jumping into the private sector w...

Laura Green, perhaps better known as @lauramcgreen , joins Sara & Vee this week. And honestly thank goodness because it’s been a cold & dark few days in New England and we need some sunshine and levity! Laura is a comedic content creator in the run space, producing reels that make fun of herself as a lifelong runner and all the quirks that come with that. She loves writing and producing sh...

We dreamed about this on episode 3 and now here she is! Today we’re talking to Dr. Kate White, Chief of OB/GYN at Boston Medical Center and Professor & Chair of the Department of OB/GYN at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Dr. Kate completed her residency in OB/GYN at Tufts/Baystate Medical Center and her Fellowship in Family Planning at Columbia University (w...

Swehl Co-Founder Betsy Riley is here! Betsy started Swehl with Elizabeth Myer to create the one-stop-shop for navigating the modern day breastfeeding experience through education, community and products. Before Swehl, Betsy founded Doyenne, a women’s club where she grew the membership to over 3000 execs nationally in just two years before it was acquired by AllBright. AND Betsy is a mother of two...

Bagelsaurus owner + baker and Cambridge celebrity Mary Ting Hyatt stops by the pod this week! Launched in 2013 as a pop-up at Cutty’s sandwich shop, Bagelsaurus – a handmade bagel shop (yum) – took greater Boston by storm when Mary opened her own location in 2014. And the lines for weekend bagels have not stopped since!  Alongside growing her bagel biz, Mary has also been growing her family. Now a...

This week, Sara & Vee sit down with Rana Foroohar , Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN’s global economic analyst, a regular feature on NPR and no stranger to any smart economic/business outlet, having also worked at TIME and Newsweek. If you have ever consumed news or found yourself at the World Economic Forum in Davos, you’ve probably see...

Sara & Vee are joined by Dr. Jessica Zucker a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the author of the award-winning book I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, a Movement . Jessica is also the creator of the viral #IHadaMiscarriage campaign. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , New York Magazine , Vogue , and Harvard Business Review ,...

Grab your “second” cup of coffee, it’s Gilmore Girls time on The Mothers! But first, Sara & Vee reflect on themes from their interviews with Meghan Joyce, Megan Marshall and Erica Dambach. Then they take a moment to unpack Chappell Roan’s “Call Her Daddy” comments re: Motherhood and Sara of course asks the existential question of “Why DO we have kids?” Not to worry - they wrap it up with a dis...

Women’s soccer coaching legend Erica Dambach (aka Walshy) joins Sara & Vee on the pod this week! Erica is the head women’s soccer coach at Penn State. She is a two-time National Coach of the Year and five-time Big Ten Coach of the Year. She has led her teams to 17 consecutive NCAA Tournaments, 11 Big Ten regular season titles, five Big Ten Tournament titles and the 2015 NCAA National Champions...

Sara’s very own mother Megan Marshall joins the pod this week! Megan is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as well as Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast and The Peabody Sisters, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor of nonfiction writing at Emerson College. Her most recent book, the essay collection After Li...