“Two-career couples have the assumption going into having a family, ‘Of course this is equal co-parenting. It’s 2019. What else would we do?’ But it so rarely plays out that way.” Despite the hope for equal partnership, it’s often mothers who are still doing the lion’s share of the unpaid, invisible labor of managing children and the home. Why is this?

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.

Katherine Goldstein found our she was pregnant as she was trying to launch a podcast about how mothers experience bias and discrimination in the workplace—making the issue front and center in her life. Yet she experienced trauma and blowback despite the knowledge. Today we still 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. 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 waging war against cultural forces holding mothers back from being their fullest, most ambitious, most rage-filled selves.

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.

In our culture, mothers are divided into two camps: the “Perfect Mother” or the “Bad Mom.” This false dichotomy robs women of a shared language to speak about motherhood as it really is: an expansive, grey emotional zone of swirling, conflicting feelings. Dr. Alexandra Sacks guides us a through a new way of looking at motherhood through the lens of “matrescence” — or the natural psychological experience that is the identity transition into motherhood.

We place a lot of emphasis on planning for the perfect birth and making sure that our bodies are healthy during pregnancy. But what do we need to recover after the baby arrives? Lily Nichols shares her postpartum journey, discussing her extreme caution around physical exertion and the nutrients new moms need to heal damaged tissue and meet the energy demands of breastfeeding.

The first few days and weeks postpartum are challenging. Not only are you resting and recovering from the massive feat of bringing a baby into the world— but you’re also transforming in your relationships. Alongside this, I found that communicating clearly to others and setting good boundaries was also quite hard. How do you communicate to those around you what you need and want? How do you tell them how to help, and when it’s too much? In this post I want to share a strategy I love for preparing for your postpartum period: writing out to-do lists for other people ahead of time. Here are three lists you can use in your own planning.

Most of us are taking on an insane amount of work, and we’re stressed, burned out, and over-tired from it. This year, I decided to plan ahead and find a way to do WAY less, but do it strategically. But what would I leave off the plate, and what would I keep? Here’s the three-part strategy I used to evaluate my time and my energy, and the surprising insights that came as a result of the exercise. Also: heads up, this is a lengthy post (4,500 words and counting).