Minibabble: Shaped by Motherhood
How does becoming a mother—or choosing not to—shape women’s lives? Time and again, mothering is fundamental to how women do their work. Whether women choose to be mothers or not,….
How does becoming a mother—or choosing not to—shape women’s lives? Time and again, mothering is fundamental to how women do their work. Whether women choose to be mothers or not,….
Enid Baxter Ryce is an artist who is a writer, she’s a professor who tells her students to put the computers away, she’s a mom who asks her kids to go dig a hole. In this wide-ranging conversation, we learn how Enid moved from a “feral” childhood to a life of the mind, never forgetting to keep her hands in the dirt and her self open to possibility.
Dr. Eve V. Clark has spent a career in academia pursuing one seemingly simple question: How do children learn to talk? The theory in vogue at the beginning of her….
Brooke Berman is a first-time film director. She’s also a middle-aged woman, a mom, and a wife with a full writing career under her belt. In this episode of The Babblery Radio Show & Podcast, we explore how she got to the point of directing her film, Ramona at Midlife, and what she learned in the process.
A couple of months ago, my fellow K-Squid programmer, Debra Sloss, asked me to help with an episode of her show, State of Mind. She’d received some beautiful, thoughtful pieces….
“Every time I danced, I thought about the gratitude I had to move my body when simultaneously my mother was bound to a wheelchair. It shifted my perspective on the gift of life.”….
How do we talk to people on the other side of the political divide? It used to be commonplace—Americans lived, worked, and went to school with people from a mixture….
When there’s something wrong with a young child but there’s no easy diagnosis, where do you turn for an answer? Often, we blame the mom. From professionals to teachers to other parents, when a child’s behavior is baffling, the mom is suspect. Historically, disorders from autism to depression were blamed on mothers. Cold mothers, smothering mothers, inattentive mothers. In this short episode, two moms of young adult children talk about the struggles they went through in the early years getting appropriate diagnosis and treatment of their children’s disabilities. What they learned sends a message to everyone about where to look when an easy answer isn’t available.
What is it like for mothers raising neuroatypical children? Host Suki Wessling reflects on how creating an episode on that topic led her back down Memory Lane.
“What to Expect”-style books are very popular amongst moms, and for good reason. Most children follow relatively closely to what we expect from them. But some children deviate from the norm in ways that create great struggle: for caregivers, educators, medical professionals, and most of all, the parents raising them. In this episode, Wendy and Rebecca detail the struggle to get support for their children, the toll it took on their own sense of self, and finally, the growth and understanding that they achieved in the process of helping them to adulthood.