Her whole life, Lucy Knisley wanted to be a mother, but when it was finally the perfect time for conceiving, it turned out to be harder than anything she’d ever attempted. Fertility problems were followed by miscarriages and her eventual successful pregnancy was plagued by health issues and led to a dramatic near-death experience during labor and delivery. She chronicled this experience and more in the book that she recently wrote called “Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos.” The book is funny and terrifying and informative and useful and real and raw, just like our conversation with Lucy today.

To be a working parent is to constantly feel like you’re missing out on one piece of your life: your work or your family. Or is it? Playfully co-founder Sonia Chang created a company with another mother and intentionally changed their workdays away from the normal 9-5 to be present with her children throughout the week while simultaneously pursuing a highly ambitious business plan for their startup.

What happens when someone who has always known that they wanted to be a mother—that they were born to be a to mother—has a deeply traumatic birth? How does it impact how she views herself, her child, and processes her new role as mother? For Kari Azuma this led to postpartum depression and “a full blown identity crisis.”

What happens when you find out that you are pregnant as you are trying to launch a podcast about how mothers experience bias and discrimination in the workplace? Why do we force women to wrap their miscarriage and fertility traumas into a bow—“But now I have a baby, so it’s all okay”—to make it palatable to the public? Why should you look around for mothers in a workplace before accepting a new job? Award-winning journalist and podcast creator Katherine Goldstein goes deep with us on so many of the most pressing topics for working mothers and holds nothing back. Between her research, the data, her own experience, and her reported experience of hundreds of moms, Katherine is a wealth of knowledge and a truth bomb dropper. She is waging war against cultural forces holding mothers back from being their fullest, most ambitious, most rage-filled selves and we are so grateful to have her on the podcast today.

Reina began life as a Social Worker and side hustler with an entrepreneurial spirit. Quickly after giving birth to her first child, she realized that her time and energy were too precious to spend on work that was not aligned with her heart and soul. After founding her thriving business, Reina and her partner decided to have another child only to be diagnosed with unexplained secondary infertility. After years on that journey, we speak to her now, on the precipice of delivering her second child and preparing her business for her maternity leave.

Esther Wojcicki is considered the most influential educator in contemporary times. She is the pioneer of Moonshot Thinking and her pedagogical philosophy is being adapted by national and global education programs. On top of this, she is the mother to three astonishingly accomplished adult daughters, including a medical professor at UCSF, the founder of 23andMe and the CEO of YouTube. Yet, her framework for promoting strong, independent, capable young people is surprisingly simple and straightforward. What can we learn from Dr. Woj and implement in our own lives to benefit the young people among us?

Why is the United States the only developed nation without any guaranteed family leave? How did we fall so far behind Europe, Canada, and South America? And who is suffering the brunt of the impact from this lack of policy?

After disrupting the fear-based pregnancy advice space with her first book “Expecting Better”, Economist Emily Oster is back, applying her data-driven decision making to parenting with her second book, “Cribsheet”. Many of her conclusions will surprise you: like who is the biggest beneficiary of breast-feeding, who is correct in the sleep train or not debate, and how to understand the full body of research around vaccinations. If you’re like me, you’ll appreciate Oster’s warmth and candor about her own parenting experiences and you’ll leave this interview feeling informed, empowered, and confident in your own parenting choices.