Model Minority Moms

When you have your first kid, your discretionary time goes from 100 pre-kid to 50. When you have a second, it goes from 50 to 5 (but it feels like -50). When the options go from "do you want to take our kid or go for a run?" to "do you want to take our 2 year old to sing-along or watch our infant?", the challenges of life (and sanity) management increase to a whole new level. Join Kate, Susan and Jeanette as we share how we try to manage life after having the second child, and of course, all the emotional/cultural/mental hang-ups that make a challenging situation even harder.

We're only half-kidding. There's no actual PhD in infant feeding that you can get (that we are aware of). But after having learned about the intricacies of latches, lip ties, tongue ties, lipase, craniosacral therapy, breast milk banks, pumps, flanges, let-down, expression, just to name a few topics in infant feeding... don't you think we deserve at least a master's degree? :) Send this episode to an expecting friend or someone who recently gave birth just so that they don't feel alone in this strange and confusing universe of infant feeding.

'Nap when your baby is napping' they say to exhausted moms... but what if this is your second baby and you have a toddler running around 24x7? What if your baby is sleeping fine but your toddler is suddenly experiencing a sleep 'regression'? Or God help you if both of your children are waking up multiple times a night.  With Kate five months into being a mom of two, we re-visit the sleep question... do we still believe in sleep training? What if our child was sleep trained but is now un-trained? Did we damage our kids for life by sleep training them? Will Susan ever have a decent night of sleep ever again? Join us as we try to answer these questions and more with clarity and hilarity that only comes from being sleep deprived for months.

Thinking about having a second kid? Or already have more than one? (or you have none but just curious?) A newly minted mom-of-two, Kate shares how her experience with her second baby has been so different from the first... and how a lot of common advice for transitioning to life with two children just hasn't worked thus far :( Take it as inspiration, birth control, commiseration -- these stories are the unvarnished, hard and hilarious truths about becoming a mom of two.

In the final episode of our food series, we try to get to the bottom of this question: Why does 'fusion' food make us so mad? Is it because it's bad? Is it because it's ignorant? Not authentic? Not respectful? Is it ever good? Isn't all food fusion anyway?? Susan, Kate and Jeanette have a frank conversation about why 'fusion' food provokes so many strong feelings.

As Asian-American first-generation women, we were marinated in all the unspoken rules of food throughout our childhoods. And even though almost nothing was taught explicitly, those food rules are still very much alive and well within us, kicking us to do certain things in a certain way, holding others to certain expectations, taking us on guilt trips when we opt out. We feel this doubly as we operate in a world where many others don't share (or even know about) those unspoken expectations, which can lead to disappointment, resentment and dare we say occasional rage? Join us on this episode where we get explicit about the unspoken rules of the last bite rule, and other things to know about eating with Asian ladies

Did you know that you have to feed kids (and adults) every day? Multiple times a day, it turns out. And each meal made at home involves some sort of plan, grocery shopping, prep (washing, chopping, measuring, mixing), cooking and clean up. Though it might have been a hobby or an afterthought in pre-kid life, the logistics around feeding the family becomes a whole system of tasks in and of itself post-kids. 75% of American women report being their household's primary food preparer and they spend an average of 1 hour per day just making and cleaning up the food, which doesn't include grocery shopping, meal planning and cleaning out the fridge. If you have a full-time job, that's 12% of your outside-of-home work, non-sleeping hours. So realistically, how does this work? The three of us lay out the current realities of managing the feeding of our families, day in and day out.

We are starting an episode series on food and looking at it through the lens of our families, Asian-American culture, our situation as working moms, gender and everything else. For all three of us, we grew up with food as our 'sixth love language'. But it also came loaded with its own baggage of gender expectations and time costs. And now we're operating in a completely different context than our parents' and grandparents' generation in terms of how we want to spend our time, how we want to relate to our spouse, our own ambitions and the cultural context. How do we navigate all of this? Listen in as we unpack our love/frustration, joy/tiredness, and devotion/confusion around that central pillar of Asian-American life: food.

What does "American" mean in "Asian-American"? Does it mean legal status, shared culture, shared language, shared benefits, shared commitment and sacrifice? How does that differ for our parents' generation vs ours? How do we reconcile that with the fact that despite being Americans, we as people of Asian descent still face discrimination and more recently even violence at the hands of other Americans? Take a listen as Susan, Jeanette and Kate all bring their different perspectives and personalities to this sometimes uncomfortable but important question of what being American means to each of us.

So how do you really really feel about abortion? And do you have anywhere you can talk about it? With Roe v Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, we dig into where we stand with respect to abortion rights and how we got there. Wherever you are on the issue, we can all agree that it's important, especially for women. At the same time, our cultural and political environment feels super-polarized right now, eliminating spaces to voice different views in a civil and safe space. In this podcast episode, we seek to reclaim that in our own way... by creating a space for three smart but supportive friends to talk openly about this critical, timely and sensitive issue.