Reshma Saujani

Kate Bowler: When did being a good mom start requiring a degree in logistics, emotional regulation, school portals, and apparently seventh grade math? This is the work of loving our kids and raising them into, we hope, good, kind, hard-working people. And then there’s this other job we’ve invented, anticipating every need, smoothing every disappointment, remembering every permission slip, making core memories, and somehow ensuring that everyone is happy. It’s completely exhausting, and maybe more importantly, it was never supposed to be a one-person job. I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. My guest today is Reshma Sujani, someone who has spent a lot of time asking why mothers are struggling and why we keep treating that like one person’s problem to solve. Reshma is the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First. She’s a New York Times bestselling author, the podcast host of My So-Called Midlife–which, yes, gives me all my Claire Danes feelings–and the force behind the new documentary, No Country for Mothers. And today we’re talking about what happens when motherhood becomes an impossible job description, the pressure to do it all, the weird fantasy that if we could just manage our time, our children would turn out perfectly and everything would be okay. What might change if we stopped asking mothers to become more efficient and started asking why they were expected to carry so much alone? Reshma I am just so excited that you’re here. I can’t wait to ask you about it.
Reshma Saujani: Oh my god, I’m so, so, so thrilled to be here.
Kate Bowler: It’s my enormous pleasure. I was noticing how much mothers have sort of become the designated adults for absolutely everything in life. And I wonder just from a cultural perspective, when you think motherhood became an absolutely impossible job description.
Reshma Saujani: Well, I mean, I think it really happened–I mean it’s always been that way. I think it’s gotten worse and worse and worse. Like I always think about, like my parents came here as refugees. My mother had no idea what the name of my teachers were or what I was studying. She didn’t proofread my college application. She was just, you know, didn’t force me to, like I was on my own, you know? And so now we’re in this moment of intensive parenting also at a time where people are just drowning. You know, like Over 40% of Americans just can’t afford the basics, right? 50% of the Americans live in child care deserts. 55% of America’s are going into debt because of the cost of childcare. It’s like, so people are just drowning. You know, they’re one bad day away from financial ruin. And that’s happening at the same time when there’s an expectation that your kids have to take gymnastics and learn Chinese. And like, you know what I mean? Like, I don’t know, cap of where or wherever I’m like having to sign my son up for and it’s too much. It’s too much!
Kate Bowler: I totally agree. I would only add to that with, and something I’m sure we both love in some way, like the rise of our therapeutic generation where we have a lot of language for feelings and concern for mental health. But then also I’ve noticed how motherhood is one other new role is professional happiness manager, but we can swap out the word happy for, I would very much like my child to live in emotional ease most of the time.
Reshma Saujani: Right, exactly. Like I need you to be comfortable all the time. An that’s bad like I think about the fact I remember a friend told me that her father every morning would she go to bed and he’d come in the room and he’d just take the pillow away from her because he’s like, oh I’m gonna make you brave. No pillow for you. Yeah, and it was just like it’s Desiree, it was funny to me and I feel like I do the opposite, right? Like I’m constantly trying to make my children comfortable, I mean happy, not too anxious or stressed. And so there are moments, because I was raised with no pillow, right? There are just moments where I’m just like, you are not gonna survive in this world without you feeling some pain, you know what I mean? Some real kind of gritty resiliency. You’re not gonna get everything that you want.
Kate Bowler: Yes. I remember my friend Jeff’s mom being like, you’re probably not going to achieve your dreams. I was like, oh, immigrant parenting. It’s my very favorite.
Reshma Saujani: Oh my God, of course, of course, it’s true. It’s, yeah, there’s pluses and minuses. Listen, I was raised, you know, when I lost my, I ran for Congress and I lost spectacularly. And I remember the next day, my father sent me like a long email of all the 20 things that I did wrong, right? No care package. You know what I mean? No hug, nothing, right. Like he was not picking me up off the floor. But, you know, and, and I would say like so much of what I’ve accomplished in my life is because I was raised and told that I ain’t shit, you know what I mean? And so I’m like, I’m not going to prove you wrong, but there’s a cost to that too because especially as I enter mid-life and I’m working on my next book about this, I’ve been in this constant path of trying to strive and accomplish and do, and I don’t know for what anymore? Or for who anymore? So, I think there is like a lot of the benefits of that kind of parenting, but there’s some real costs too.
Kate Bowler: I think one of the messages that I really appreciated you highlighting in your movie in particular is the messaging for moms that if they had somehow disciplined time itself, they would have solved the problem of both like parenthood and ambition. I remember seeing one of those like kind of bougie social media accounts where they sell really nice clothes and skincare. And they were highlighting morning routines and it was giving a list of like this one really successful woman who began her day with the green smoothie, then the apple cider vinegar, then she was red lighting, then she was in a sauna. By the time she was pushing her twins while rollerblading, I was like, what time is it? Like how do we, what stories do you think you need to stop telling moms about how they really should have conquered their lives by now?
Reshma Saujani: Well, I think we have to stop at this idea that we can do it all and we should do it all. And that means that we get the mom of the year tier for doing that, and we’re doing it at our cost. This idea that moms don’t break, right? And the surgeon general had a report that the two groups that are suffering the most are teenage girls and moms, and that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s like part of how motherhood has never been designed for us. The fact that. The school day ends at 2:35 and the work day ends at 6, it’s immediately structured to make us feel like we suck right before we’ve even had a cup of our coffee. And the anxiety and stress that you feel from that constant sense of failure, especially when you feel like you’re failing the people that you love the most, your children. It is just something that I think like the vast majority of moms in America feel. It’s a collective sense. I mean, when I go to school pick up and I have that look on my face because my kids jumped in my bed and I fed them lucky charms and we still got into an argument. I know I’m going to have to apologize for it later and I just and I’m already late for something, right? We know exactly the kind of morning…and so there’s also like a powerful sense of sisterhood in that that we want to tap into. So Country of Our Mothers, the first thing is like you’re not broken, the system is. And second, part of how the system operates is by dividing us, by making, by attacking us, by having us spend so much damn time on the comment section and in Instagram, defending our choices, rather than basically being like, I don’t know, let her do, you do you, right? And like, let’s all create a system where we’re not focused on the binary of either being a girl boss or a trad wife. Because no one can afford to be either one of those. But we’re actually just trying to create a society where we can simply have choice. I love my kids. I love being a mom and I love being a nonprofit leader and an activist. I want both, and I am not gonna settle, you know what I mean, for either one. But the society as it’s structured doesn’t set me up to actually succeed and it’s one of the reasons why you know, Kate, you can’t watch this film on a streamer or you know what I mean, on YouTube. And that’s intentional. Because the only way you can watch this film is in a community, grassroots screening and if that community is you, your sister and your dog, that’s fine. There’s been 800 screenings that are happening all across the country. We’ve broken the Guinness Book of World Records for the most amount of associate producers and the most amount of community grassroots screening for any film. That’s intention because when I asked moms like, Hey, if this was on Netflix, would you be watching it while you’re doing your laundry? Every hand is up. Because we don’t want anything for ourselves–I’m sorry–We’re not allowed to have anything for ourselves, including watching a frickin’ movie, right? And so I think there’s this kind of sense of when you watch something that’s so powerfully reflective of the life that you live and the pain that you feel, and you watch it in a community of others who are laughing and crying at the same time, you realize, I’m not crazy. And I’m the only one. I didn’t make a mistake. The system has conned me, and that awakening, I think, is what leads us to the promised land of affordable child care and paid leave.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, I totally agree. I spent about 10 years ago, I was working on a book about the rise of conservative Christian female celebrities, and one of the things that really struck me writing that book was that so much of the power that they were allowed to have in measure was around the messaging of like culture warrior. We will allow her out in order to show that we are going to win a war. And this kind of win a war against, you know, this is why I like focus on the family and then the anti focus on your own damn family bumper stickers always like highlights for me that like women were never going to win in a situation…
Reshma Saujani: And men don’t have culture wars, right? Like even the manosphere, the manosphere is not like a culture war of manosphere against another manosphere. Right? Like it’s against, it’s gender, it is men against women. Right? Whereas everything about women is working mom versus stay at home mom. Right? Mom who breastfeeds versus mom who doesn’t. Right? Like Republican mom, Democrat. It is always us pitted against one another. And often when we actually don’t have that much that divides us. But we are so much more alike. In this film, we taped at Turning Point for three years. I could have made the film that was like, look at that, look at that but when we went there, I was like wow, we’re saying similar things. Some things were not agreed on or aligned on. I don’t believe we should be one family, one vote. But there’s some ways in terms of what we want for our children that is the same. What we even want for ourselves is the same, right? And so we are not encouraged because there are so many people that profit off of our division. Politicians, I mean, you saw this recently with the administration’s announcement that they were gonna take money from single moms and give it to stay-at-home moms only in families where one person wasn’t working. If that is not a culture war, an intentionally made up culture war to create division between two groups of moms, I don’t know what is. Because you didn’t have to do it that way. You could’ve took money from the ballroom. You could take money from these wars that we’re in. You could have money from anywhere, why take it from there? And so when I want people to see even that, policy decision as a decision by politicians to make us fight so that they can win elections and not take the bait.
Kate Bowler: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, I think so many of us have had a moment where we thought, well, I could choose the wholeness of my life and my loves, or I can pay my bills and not struggle under medical debt, not have to…In Canada, for example, if you have a federal job, for the most part, you can put a pin in your job until your child reaches the age of five and come back, expect to come back at the same promotion level that you left at. Because not every mom always wants to feel behind every time that they wanted to find a season. Because so many of us are trying to manage seasons of dramatic interruption. And as you so powerfully argued, the pandemic was a real wasteland. And don’t want to be telling women to have any kind of wholeness between their loves and their ambition.
Reshma Saujani: But it was also the first time people saw that we were two selves, that we didn’t have to hide ourselves, that we don’t have put networking breakfast when we were doing drop-off or taking kids to a, or that our children did invade our Zoom screen, like that we have children, that we’re mothers. Because the whole thing you’re talking about, Kate, is like other countries have done this, they’ve redesigned workplaces, damn restaurants, malls, you know what I mean? Doctor’s offices? To basically represent the reality of most women’s lives is that they are mothers. You know what I mean? They have to put food on the table. And we, the wealthiest nation in the world, can’t do that. We don’t have on-ramps and off-ramps. Most women suffer a penalty. They lose their promotion and their income, 6% for every child that they have. We’re fighting over 12 weeks of paid leave. We don’t recognize that it’s unconscionable that so many women who work, who are your nurses or your teachers or the people at the grocery store bagging your groceries, that they put their kids in night-day care so that they can support you. Or that I walk down here in New York City and see little six-week-old babies in strollers being taken care of by someone who’s not their mother. That is all unconscionable, right? And we have gotten so used to fighting for scrap that we don’t even see how insane it is.
Kate Bowler: Yeah. Do you think it’s because in part so much of our framework for feminism or equality or any sort of category of equality and wholeness has become so hyper-individualistic, like we’re taught over and over again, we just have to think of our own needs, largely feel guilty for drowning in them and not…have we just lost most of our like corporate and social imagination for how this is supposed to work?
Reshma Saujani: Yeah, I mean, actually we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that we’re the problem, that we are not multitasking, right? That we’re not taking care of it. So we can’t ask anybody. Our employer, you know what I mean? The government. Even for me, like I have never asked a friend of mine to babysit our kid. It’s like, I don’t want to put anybody out. We’re not told that there actually even is a village or a community. I always say, I was part of the problem. People would ask me when I was running girls, Ms.Saujani, Ms.Saujani, how do you balance it all? And I may have just left the green room breastfeeding Sean. And I’d be like, don’t worry about it. Just work hard. See, I think second-wave feminism was so…In the 1970s, we were so fighting for the rights that men had, and that was the right to work, the right to a professional career, the right, you know what I mean, like get the corner office. That was the moment we should have fought for paid leave and childcare. And Betty Friedan talks about this, that we missed that opportunity to talk about family and work. And that is, to me right now, that is the, like…Feminism today is a movement of mothers. Like this is our fight. Our fight is child care paid leave. Our fight is flexibility, you I mean? Our fight is, you know, to really not have 12 weeks of baby, but it should be 18 months, right? Like our fight is for on-ramps and off-ramps Our fact is the right that our teachers shouldn’t have to plan their pregnancies during the summer. Do you know what I mean? How crazy is that?
Kate Bowler: You know, I could just think of so many people right now who are really scared about what the gate economy is going to mean for all of us. And I think this, like what you were saying, fighting for scraps kind of desperation…it’s really easy to lose the sense that other people are as scared. Other people are then as motivated as we are to start to put our humanity and our families forward. You are an activist who is consistently mobilizing. Where can they find action steps and just like ways to connect with you? Especially ongoing policy issues.
Reshma Saujani: So first of all I’m so damn hopeful. Like this film was such a gift for me because I’ve never seen anything in my life, right? Thousands of my moms like signed up to host screens. I mean, we’re the busiest people in the world and they’re open up their homes and their churches and you know what I mean? Renting out theaters and then inviting their family to say, look what I, like we know that, we know it’s broken and that we can fix it. And so I have been so moved, you know, I mean, screenings across the country, and I think in Canada here, right? So to me, I think like go to nocountryformothers.com, go to momsfirst.com. You know, follow us, follow me on social, follow us on social, and like be part of, I think, this movement of love and hope that we’re building.
Kate Bowler: Mm-hmm. And is that something people can do, is they can host a movie screening of their own homes?
Reshma Saujani: It’s as easy as baking chocolate chip cookies. Go to our website, there’s a tab that says host a screening, and it’s like, we make it like so easy, right? And there’s no like, invite one friend, invite 10 friends, invite 100 friends, like, you know, but, and have a real conversation because, and I, every Friday, Kate, I call all the hosts and I say thank you, and so I get to kind of see what people are doing and what they’re feeling, and I hear these amazing stories of like these intergenerational conversation, right, of women that are 85 coming and sitting next to someone who’s 20 and talking about motherhood, the joys of motherhood the pains of motherhood. People are staying up till midnight just talking because I think right now people want to feel a sense of community and togetherness. We are fighting for our humanity but our humanity wants to win.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that’s such a lovely invitation. I know that when I got a chance to watch the movie, I watched it with other members of my all-female team and we had a really lovely conversation about what it’s meant to… I mean, some of the sweetest and hardest and scariest questions have been around. When do you work? When do you get to just just just be a mom in the biggest way and like…so I think I mean what I really hope people take you up on that to like watch it have a have a tender conversation with somebody else, maybe even someone who doesn’t agree with you necessarily, about what being a mom means and I think it’s a really beautiful point of connection right now. I love that you’re saying how insanely hopeful you are, so like, what lately is giving you real hope that families can maybe live in a different reality where their families can be as important to them as just their survival?
Reshma Saujani: To me, I think societies are always judged in the way you treat your children and your elderly. And to me, that’s what this is about. And so, not falling in the trap of like, well, how do we pay for that? Why should I pay for you? Right? It’s all about, because we want to be in that kind of world, because we don’t want to be in a world full of jerks. Right? We want to take care of each other and love each other. And people have seasons and moments, and we need to be gracious and have empathy like during those moments in time and like and teaching that to our children and to one another and exercising that muscle of humanity and I do believe that that’s where people want to be. And we got to kind of pull people back from like the edge.
Kate Bowler: Yes. Yes.
Reshma Saujani: Because we’re in a culture that celebrated being selfish and being brash and being mean and like locking people up in cages and taking away their rights and making them feel scared that that made you feel strong. That’s not strength, that’s weakness.
Kate Bowler: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I love when you had the long list of all the kinds of people you wish felt seen, like you’re like from the boss moms to the wine moms, to the trad moms. I think that’s a really beautiful invitation to come back to that like soft, collective, compassionate heart. I just want to say how deeply proud I am of like, I follow your work and I do with like just enormous pride, just know that the Everything Happens community is like so thrilled to be part of your team and we’ll follow you and keep up with you.
Reshma Saujani: We’re huge, huge, fans of you because I think we need more people out there that are keeping us close to our humanity and decency. And you do that every single day with so much grace. And I love following you and I love learning from you. And I think, we just need more. We need more of you and like more of these kinds of conversations. And so, thank you for everything you’re doing.
Kate Bowler: So much of modern motherhood requires that we work hard, anticipate every future problem, and then maybe you can somehow guarantee happy kids or a family that sticks together. As though all of this were a simple equation. But there is just too much road to smooth. Too much life to manage. And maybe some of what mothers need is not another system or morning routine or color-coded calendar. Maybe we need each other. And better systems in place to give us the support we desperately need. So for everyone who is tired of being the designated adult about absolutely everything, here’s a blessing. Blessed are you who are carrying too much, the lunches, the appointments and forums and big feelings, the work that counts and the work nobody sees. May you stop mistaking exhaustion for failure. May something be allowed to be good enough today. May you have people who notice when your hands are full, and may you be allowed to need them. All right, darlings, I will put the link to Reshma’s documentary in the show notes. So grab a friend or your book club or just put some time on the calendar, you are going to love this documentary. It’s a very like warm and understanding and like non-polarizing in the best way. And let’s just have some real conversations about what puts pressure on modern motherhood and what it’s cost us and what we could build together instead. Find more from me over on Substack at KateBowler.Substack.com. Where we talk about the strange and impossible parts about being human, or come find me on Instagram at Kate C. Bowler. And if you’d like to watch these conversations, every episode of Everything Happens is on YouTube and Spotify this season. Everything Happens Studios is made possible through the generous support of Lilly Endowment and the work of my team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.