Model Minority Moms

As a mom, it can feel like you're running 24/7 and sometimes even that's not enough. If you can afford it or have people in your life who are available, many moms need help - help with childcare, help with cleaning, help with meals, help with laundry... heck, sometimes just an extra pair of hands to go get towels while your child is throwing up is invaluable. But getting help - whether paid or unpaid - is often more complicated and loaded than is generally acknowledged. Here, we deliver our honest take on getting help that we all desperately need.

Taking forever to put on shoes. Leaving toys on the floor. Refusing to come to dinner. Fighting with siblings. Sneaking a piece of forbidden candy. When the inevitable need for discipline crops up with our children, how do we react? As is frequently the case, so much of it is informed by how we ourselves were parented. Join us for a discussion of how we were (or weren't) disciplined growing up, how we are (trying) to approach discipline with our own children, and the struggle to reprogram our brains to react in a better way when the inevitable misbehaving happens.

What makes a good husband, a good boyfriend, can be a little different from what makes a good baby daddy, in our opinion. Combining our 15 years of child-rearing experience (don't ask us how we calculated that!), we share our highly non-expert opinion on what's important in a baby daddy.

Bloody, leaky, crampy, moody, inconvenient, embarrassing, painful... yet it's what allows us to create new human life. Yes, we are talking about our periods - what has been our relationship to Aunt Flo throughout our childhood, our teenage years, our young adulthood, trying to get pregnant, being pregnant, post-partum, up until now. How have we interacted with our parents, friends, partners, society at large and now, our kids with this messy yet vital part of life?

Invites, venue, food, cake, activities, goody bags. Presents or no presents? Invite whole class or just a select few? What's the budget for a three-year-old's birthday? Yup, we're talking about the thing that at a certain point in your parenthood journey, starts taking over your social calendar - kids' birthdays.

Providing better for our children than we had is a no-brainer. But how much is too much when it comes to the endless types of activities we can sign up for? How much of our intention to provide exposure and opportunities is more of a projection of our own insecurities? Are we talking about T-Ball or are we talking about trauma? And what’s even the point of all of these activities? All that juice and more.

If you were an overachieving child/ young adult, does it ever leave you entirely? What are the costs (and benefits) of being a perpetual overachiever? Do we secretly want our kids to overachieve though we're trying our best to present a chill demeanor? We bring the honest talk at a live recording at our beloved alma mater and poster child of overachievement, Harvard.

Ok, we are going there. You’re a working mom who is highly competent, driven, ambitious, well-credentialed and… you’re going to switch to a more flexible, lower-intensity career? Whaaat? It's a common and significant shift among many moms we know, but glossed over with shrugs, shame and a little chip on the shoulder. In MMM style, we unpack all the feelings around choosing to downshift your career as the lead parent–without gaslighting you.

Language is loaded. Preserving our mother tongue with ourselves and the decision (and labor!) of passing it down to our children is super complicated. We talk about what it means to feel like a “cultural orphan,” our aspirations for our kids when we were first pregnant, and the honest reality of how it’s going. 

How do we actually know if a school is a “good” school for our kids? How do we actually get a spot? (spoiler: banana bread yields mixed results). How to manage transitions from a situation you and your kids know to something that is new?  What if we feel like we made a mistake moving our kids to the new school at the first dropoff :( Here are the real stories and the real feels behind the happy first-day-of-school pics on IG.