S3E1 - The Mother’s Name

Season 3 opens with host Chauncey Zalkin talking burnout, perfectionism in grad school, and finally giving her kids her last name. She then sits down with publishing veteran and writer Cindy DiTiberio (The Mother Lode) who talks reclaiming competence after divorce, the “math of motherhood,” the portal of 40, and what it's like to undergo MDMA therapy.

Highlights:

• The cost of motherhood—money, labor, identity
• Renaissance after divorce
• Flipping the playbook on patriarchal milestones
• Cindy’s journey from ghostwriting to her own voice

Guest:

Cindy DiTiberio — writer, former HarperCollins editor, pens the popular newsletter The Mother Lode, on Substack.

Other Mentions and Resources :

• The House of Mirth (book) by Edith Wharton
• Nightbitch (novel & film) 
• Fresh Starts Registry, support for divorce and major life resets
• Ambition Monster (book) 
• MDMA-assisted therapy (trauma processing in a therapeutic setting)

(Amazon links are affiliate links and a great way to support this podcast!)

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Actual People, a Podcast
www.chaunceyzalkin.com

Transcript

I am at the tail end of a two-week break from my studies in grad school for my mental health counseling degree and I apologize for taking so long to get a single episode out the door for season three, but the reason is I really just needed the time.

I was really burnt out from the term. I worked really, really hard. I am keeping up a 4.0 average and I'm having a really hard time letting my tight grip on perfectionism go. I'm always trying to read every single word and absorb every single word and. Do my absolute best on papers as though it's me publishing my novel and I just realized that since I have not published a novel, maybe I put all of my energy into these academic papers because somehow that will replace having published a novel. that's my own self-analysis right now.

But anyway, that's what's been going on. I just worked so hard and so I really needed a break. It took me several days just to calm down and unwind a little bit. sometimes I take things a little bit too seriously. I can be quite intense and go what did my therapist say that I go like 300% and that maybe I could scale it back down to 60%. She's like can, you give grad school 60% effort and I was just like, that sounds like absolutely impossible. Why would I give it 60% effort? And I haven't at all, but I think in the coming term, I'm going to try, really try not to overdo it. Because it's so expensive, I feel like I need to like, extract every single ounce of information out of the course, which I mostly should, but then there's a point where it can become detrimental.

So I needed to relax. All that's to say I needed to relax. This guest I am starting this season with is somebody whose interview I recorded before the summer, she is a single mother who is more recently divorced than I am, and she talks a lot about this new freedom that she has in her life. it's important for her to own her parenting experience for herself and make her own decisions. That was super relevant to something that's going on with me right now, which is that I am in the process of changing my kids' last name to my own. And it's so interesting for me to watch myself fight this internalized misogyny 

I'm pushing against this kind of weird guilt. I don't want to erase my kid's father's name. In fact, it's going to be just absorbed as a second middle name but I feel sort of bad, which is so bizarre and absolutely connected to internalized misogyny, because I am raising these children alone. They're now 11 years old, so it's pretty official that I am the one doing all of this. He doesn't live in the state. He sees them twice a year. It was part of our divorce decree that I was going to be able to change their name to a hyphenated version of our names, which would start with mine, but hyphen to his when I did this I'm sure I was in a heightened state and I was angry and I said, well, I, I want my name in there and he signed off on that. , it's interesting how all these years have gone by and I've done nothing about it. And my kids will go to school and they will write my last name is Zalkin they'll write Zalkin on their papers. I did not tell them to do that. I never wanted to displace their father in fact, I really like that they have a father and whenever he does come to town or we have a conversation or they're with him, there's a sense of relief in that because I get to share some of the emotion and, and thoughts about my kids with somebody who also cares about their wellbeing and is also their parent. I embrace him coming into the fold whenever he can but the reality is I am raising these kids. I'm not co-parenting, I am raising them alone. There's nothing hostile in saying that it's literally just a fact. So it's so interesting that it's taken me so long, but I decided now they're in middle school that I should no longer be writing their father's name as their last name. Somebody who is not present for most of their upbringing. It should be my last name, and that it's actually really misogynistic that we've tacked on the patrilineal name as opposed to the mother. And there isn't an added part of this that my kid's father, he was adopted. So that name is also handed down to him through adoption. His lovely father passed away a month before my own father passed away. And I really liked his father and I do want to honor it. So the name will still be in the name, but it will be my last name as the one that's, book ending their name. and the mother who the father was divorced from my ex father-in-law was divorced from my ex-mother-in-law. She doesn't send cards. She doesn't have anything to do with her life.

So I feel no real, no loyalty towards her, to be honest, but I do feel a sense of loyalty towards my children's father. So he, his name will be in there. But it's interesting, I'm doing this it's something that I really want to celebrate. 'cause what I'm doing, and it's uncomfortable sometimes for women to do this, but I'm honoring myself.

I'm honoring myself as my children's primary parent and the one who's actually raising them bringing them to adulthood. I tie the shoes, I pack the lunches, I have the conversations I spend all the time other than, you know, a couple times a year when they see their father, so anyway, I had some things I wanted to get done while I was on this little break from school. And one of the things was to read something for pleasure And I am reading House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. I've never read Edith Wharton. In the last few decades, I have been reading contemporary fiction. Like usually people who win literary awards, like pick up those kinds of books to see what's out there in contemporary fiction. And when I was in college I was reading a lot of black writers a lot of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston um , a lot of critical race theory immigrant literature so I never read Edith Wharton, but I'm starting to read it and I find it to be kind of a page turner. What I think is super interesting is the self-awareness of this tyranny of marriage, even in the 1900s in New York, among the upper classes this person knows that they're trapped in the situation where they have to marry somebody for money as a way of surviving. It wasn't like you're a social climber it's a fight for your existence to find a man because there were not a lot of options for women. It's interesting how much the House of Mirth foreshadowed female emancipation that sense of unease Lily Bart had in house of Mirth feeling like she wants her freedom and she wants to explore, but also this very, very serious pressure. And I actually remember feeling that pressure when I was in my late twenties to find a husband and whoever I was dating when I turned 30, I, I thought, oh my God, this is the love of my life. I need to marry this guy. And then when it didn't work out and he was like a complete mama's boy absolutely not marriage material. But I had been clinging like I must get married. I don't feel that sense of desperation and need. I've already been married and divorced I have kids, I'm past the childbearing years, but there's still now this sense like we have freedom but we're a little bit like the bird in the cage with the door open. The bird doesn't fly out of the cage because we're afraid of what's out there.

And we'd rather just stay in this gilded cage of marriage and customs rather than fly out of the cage and find ourselves not knowing because freedom can really mean loneliness. I've stayed in many relationships because I was really scared of being alone like this was my only shot. I had this scarcity mindset, like I need to make this work because I'll never love again. And it's funny because I'm somebody who hasn't loved a man in a very long time, and I don't feel that sense of anxiety now at all but being in that state of being captured. But thinking about freedom or being cut loose or cut out from your current circumstance can feel like an abyss freedom, can sometimes feel like another cage but the truth is captivity is worse. Being captive in a situation where you have to answer to somebody else explain all of your choices and answer to someone else's dictates of what you should and shouldn't do is just the worst, most stifling way to live.

So anyway, I told my mother that I was going through this name change thing and she said in a very breathy sorrowful tone. Why? Why Chauncey? Why are you going to do this? And I heard myself defend my choice. It's unbelievable how indelible our own self-denial it can be. I'm like, well, I don't think it's so bad because they're my kids. And I'm like, I'm explaining. I'm like, why am I even explaining to this woman why I, it's so obvious I'm raising these kids. Of course they should take my last name. Why would they have this person's last name they see twice a year all these years I've had to write his last name on the medical forms or anything having to do with permission or school, and it feels like this weird captive state. Like I'm still captured in a man's world that has a very little to do with our lives still their father, but really like not a major player in the day-to-day life in this family. And it felt like I was some sort of captive to it, and it was like another way of being controlled. it was weird that I had to reassure myself that I'm not selfish and I'm not being vindictive, I'm honoring myself and I'm honoring the truth and the reality of our lives, and I'm giving my children their mother's name. 

I mean, mind you, of course it's still patrilineal comes from my father, but it's a start and it's a name that I have grown up with and is a big part of my identity. It's also a Jewish last name, and I do want to pass that on because, otherwise, like the Morrisey song, it's kind of the end of the line if I don't pass on that name, I don't have brothers and my sisters don't have children. One of them might still have children but they're daughters and so they might not pass on the Jewish last name. So I get to pass that on to my children. So I'm very, very happy and that's something that I am coming to terms with and feeling like it's a. Something to celebrate in our lives. So when this finally does happen, I think I'm going to feel like I've really accomplished something and I've really honored myself and I find it, it's interesting how hard it is for women to honor themselves and to honor the world that they have built for themselves. Actually this guest, I'm not going to spoil it for you, she says something about women not celebrating themselves, and she's encouraging me in this episode to celebrate myself in a different way. She's a really insightful person she's very passionate and very loving, and you're going to love what she has to say, I really encourage you to follow her on Substack. 

I'll give you all the information in the show notes.

Another thing I just want to quickly say about raising my kids in Raleigh, North Carolina. So in order for me to take on this role of matriarch of my family raising my children in this town, I had to uproot myself from my own cultural comfort, which was New York City and cities like Paris and Barcelona, living in big global cities, because I found a place that has great schools, that is safe, that is comfortable, and that creates community in a way that I think is good for my children. 

And I'm very comfortable here, but it does not make it a cultural soulful home for myself. I am not southern. I will never be Southern. I genuinely like it, but I feel like my heart and my soul is in places closer to cities like Boston or you know, closer to New York I feel a real connection for Vermont and just the Northeast in general so I'm living in this sort of dichotomy where I feel safe and secure I have good friends. I've met people that I genuinely really like here. There's like so many reasons to love living where I live, but my need for lots of interaction with strangers and cultural diversity that's not met by living here. Um, it's, it's hard to kind of get like deep in the mix of things, and I'm somebody who really loves that.

But I've had to make a grownup adult choice in order to raise my kids in a way that Is best for them. That's kind of what being a parent is. So I have made that choice and I live here, so I'm honoring myself with this last name. So start starting season three. I just wanted to tell that story. 

I have many other little stories that I want to share with you over the coming weeks and months, and I will do that, but I think this is a good place to start and I want to share with you this idea for yourself that you should accept the success that you've had in life it's so easy to think about the things that didn't happen for us or things that we wish could be different or our crumbling country in AI taking over every single job, there's a lot of stuff to be afraid of, but I think it's important also to stop and think about how you've succeeded and to celebrate the life that you've made for yourself and all the positive things that have gone along with the life that you're living right now. It's hard sometimes, especially for women, I find to accept their successes and adding this last name to my children's name is a way of.

 Accepting the fact that I'm raising my kids, which is an awesome, amazing thing that I'm like, yeah, yeah, I do that, but this is going wrong and I haven't done this yet. I often wave away the success and the accomplishment of what raising my kids, which is a huge accomplishment. It hasn't been without bumps, especially financially, but it's happening and I'm doing it, and they're safe and healthy and, uh, knock on wood so far, so. That's my success. Like what is it in your life that you find that you have accomplished that feels good to you, that is more of a personal success and not like, necessarily like a financial success, or maybe it is, you know, a financial success.

 Maybe it's a personal victory over a challenge that you didn't know you could overcome or whatever it is, like wherever you're at, like there's something that has happened in your life, because of a strength that you have, and that might be a good thing for you to reflect on, and celebrate in your own life. 

So without further ado, I bring you Cindy DiTiberio author of the newsletter, the mother load, take a listen. 

Once I stopped writing other people's books, they weren't in my brain anymore. All of a sudden, I was the only one in there. And so I did hear myself. So that was the moment. It was like if I just kept on ghostwriting, I don't even know if I'd be divorced. I think I'd just be like, do, do, do. 'cause I wasn't in touch with myself. I look back and I realize that I have been trying to hide my whole life and so then I'm like, why? Why did I go into hiding?

Now that I'm officially divorced, this is my year where I'm completely single, unattached this is the year where I get to just be my own authority, I was already feeling that, but again, the processes is still very entwined with your ex, you're still freaking forever. 

 Spoiler alert forever we've had really bad times. The dissolution of the marriage wasn't pretty, it was pretty bad.

Right, right. Yeah. And the reasons why I left were pretty bad, but I like a lot of things about him. Mm-hmm. , we've had some tough times, but I always tell him he's always going to be my family.

Yeah. Yeah.

I do care what happens to him. There's never Right. It's not like an ex-boyfriend. I, no, I, I am invested in this person. He's the father of my kids. That's it. Yes. And I told him this too, I think to his relief, I will never really bad mouth him on my podcast I'll talk about ex-boyfriends and 

Yeah, 

I have another ex-boyfriend in particular I will say anything I want about him, but I will protect my ex-husband 'cause he is my kid's 

yeah 

father. And that's it. 

 Yeah. I am not protecting my ex-husband because in the book I am being clear about what happened 'because it's my story. 

who was the one who said, you, 

 Ann Lamont, I think who like don't, if you don't want to be written about don't do shitty things or whatever.

Yeah. Like don't, 

 yeah. Don't behave badly or something like that's, well, I definitely do that with my, with my parents. Anyway, I feel like because my kids are so young that 

Yeah. 

 I'm not going to just sit there and say terrible things about my ex. 

Yeah. And you want to protect like their, do you feel like, I, I wanted to say you want to protect their, like, esteem of him.

Do they still have like good thoughts about him and like They do, 

but I am also clear like, your dad is irascible 

yeah, 

it was bad. So I had to leave. 

Yeah. 

 I put that out there, but that's it. 

Yeah. 

And also I say good things like he's a great photographer. He's very creative. Yeah. He actually does really awesome things with them when he comes to town, he's reading at eight o'clock. He's very regimented. 

Almost. Your custody split allows that a little bit more. 

 We're still in a very messy, 

you're still in 

My kids were 14 months when I left. They don't remember. Oh. 

My God. Yeah. Okay. Twins. 

Wow. Still nursing. 

14 months. 

 You have this section on your Substack where you talk about the math of 

Yes, the math of motherhood. Yeah. 

Will you tell me a little bit about what that is? Is it about money? 

I have four different ones. It's about what motherhood takes from us. One of them is about, it is somewhat about money. Like the first one I think I wrote was about the unpaid labor of pregnancy. We become hosts for another being. We have all these medical issues, birth is a trauma. No one pays us for it and our jobs take a hit. 

Our careers, our goals, our writing, 

all of these things. So like, let's talk about all of the, like what pregnancy actually takes from us. That kind of math. And then I do the unpaid labor of the home, how much mothers do at home that if we had to hire someone else, this is what we would pay them. It's a lot of freaking money. Let's stop pretending that we don't earn anything, even if we're not out there. And then one was about the math of motherhood, the school edition, which is about the math of having to pick up a kid at two 30 every day, having all the half days and the snow days the math of trying to be a full-time working parent without additional childcare. So one's on that. And then the other one is about the motherhood penalty, and it's all about this is how much money we lose it's really a motherhood gap. Not a gender gap in pay. It's mothers, right? I go into all of that. 

I'm 51 years old. 

Yeah. 

I just got into Northwestern in this MA program in mental health counseling. Wow. To, to make a and it's very expensive.

Mm-hmm. Um, 

 I have to make a career change I took a precipitous fall a decade ago when I left my ex-husband, and I've been underemployed since then.

Yeah. Yeah. Starting to reach my peak. We were really making good money. We had big clients. We did brand documentaries. 

Hmm, 

It I had to walk away from all of that. 

yes. And 

since that decade, I have made less and less and less money. Mm-hmm. And I know it is not recoverable. That is what I finally came to terms with. I've had marketing leadership roles. Right. But it's not sustainable. They don't last. That's a industry thing too, right? Them being a woman. But really it's motherhood. Yeah mm-hmm. 

But I'm just locked into all the things that motherhood, like what you're saying entails. Yeah. I will never make the money I could have made had I not had them. Yeah. And I, I have to switch careers. Yeah. So thinking about doing a GoFundMe. Mm-hmm. Which feels really vulnerable and also a little bit humbling or a lot humbling. Mm-hmm. I want to become a therapist and there's a lot of other things driving me to that. It's not like I miss my career in marketing, but if you're divorced. Unless you're married to someone very rich, 

right. You 

 You're going to lose a lot of money. yeah, , it's something I had to come to terms with, I will never have a amount of money that I might've had because of it.

Yeah. 

Yeah. No, and even like with the GoFundMe, if you could think about it like when we reach certain milestones in our lives, sadly, we only celebrate the patriarchal ones, which is like getting married and having a child, keeping women in their roles.

But yeah, and you pay and you spend money on your loved ones when they do that, you buy them a gift for their wedding. You spend money to go to their wedding. You get them a gift for their baby shower. There are other threshold moments that deserve recognition and gifts. This would be one of them. And who. 

And divorce. Right? If you know the Fresh Starts Registry

no. 

They're . . You should have her on. Olivia's the founder of it. And they have, they argue that like divorce is a time when you need a registry more than you did at a marriage because you're splitting homes and you need all this stuff.

Right? Yeah. it's just as big of a moment as getting married. It's a big decision. You're charting the rest of your life. That 

makes complete sense. 

 It is okay to say, I'm doing something big and if you love me and want to help support me in this, this is a way to do that.

So that's how I would frame it for you. If you think about the GoFundMe, that it's just like a, Hey, listen, but this is my next big move. And if you are proud of me and you love me, and you want to help me through this new transition to becoming a therapist, this is your opportunity.

That's how I would phrase it. 

Oh, I really like that. Because you know, as a woman you're always like, oh, my kids have to go to college. Yeah. So I should just, but I'm like, I have to put the oxygen mask on myself because this is just not, I mean, they have another eight years to go. 

Yes. And you're also, you're investing in the rest of your life.

'cause then they go to college and then what are you doing? You're then going to be a therapist and you have this thriving career that's very fulfilling and earning you money. Right. Like it's just so Yeah. I think you should do it and not feel any shame about it. 

 What do we need to do to feel like we're worthy of investment? 

Help. Help. Yes. 

Investment, right? Help investment. As somebody who's going through a divorce you're probably very independent and headed towards more independence.

Yes. No, it feels uncomfortable to ask for help. 

We have been socialized to think that that is wrong, needy, all the bad things. But if we're leaving patriarchal marriage as the foundation of our society, then we need other forms of support.

 I talk a lot about the mom union and like communal living what does that actually look like? If we're going to change the calculus of our systems and not be like, well just get married and then you'll have your dual income again. We have to learn to ask for support in, in other ways. I think we're not there yet. I think we're very early on to these conversations of what does it mean to find a network of support and ask for help when we need it. You just opened up like eight or nine things that I had literally never thought about and I mm-hmm. I came to the epiphany this year that my whole career has been about talking about transitions. 

Yeah. 

Evolution, not just personal evolution, but the world. That's what it is. That's what actually people's about. That's what I write about every stage of life is completely different than it used to be. And women are not relying on, oh, I just want to meet the guy, like all the romcoms it's not, I don't want to get married again. I don't need to get married. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

 My big moment of what am I doing here happened? It was, I just turned 40 and then the pandemic hit so I quit working and all of a sudden I was a stay-at-home mom, which wasn't what I ever intended for my life. I'm a ghost writer, I also realized that ghost writing had allowed me to kind of escape myself because I had other people's voices in my head instead of my own and all of a sudden I could hear my own voice and I was like, oh, I'm not really very happy with my life. 

 What was that trigger that made you think about your own voice?

 no one else was in my head. When I'm writing someone's book, they kind of live in my psyche. Yes, writing is writing words on the page, but it's also a lot of that unconscious stuff writing is a full body experience it really takes a lot. And so when someone hires me to write their book, either with them or for them, I take all of that and I put it in my body and my brain and I'm constantly working on it. And so once I stopped writing other people's books, they weren't in my brain anymore. All of a sudden I was the only one in there. And so I did hear myself. So that was the moment. It was like if I just kept on ghostwriting, I don't even know if I'd be divorced. I think I'd just be like, do, do, do. 'cause I wasn't in touch with myself. somebody else was blocking me from access to myself. That was my big epiphany. I look back and I realize that I have been trying to hide my whole life and so then I'm like, why? Why did I go into hiding? I'm an identical twin, which means in my childhood there was always someone else there who I could kind of hide behind.

I became an evangelical Christian in high school and like all of evangelical Christianity is it is not about you. It's about reflecting Jesus. I met my I ex-husband at 23. I was very young. I was focused on marrying him. And then, you know, marriage and motherhood just kind of erases you. The whole system is you go dark. Yeah. And it's not about you anymore. So it's just an interrogation of how did I lose myself? And then it's my work of getting myself back as I wrote about in my Substack recently. 

 I ended up having to do MDMA therapy.

Mm-hmm. Nice to really get in touch with myself. I, I already 

want to read, I already want to read this book for sure. 

Yeah. And m therapy, like MDMA therapy it gets you underneath all the protective layers. You take a pill, you lay down and you're like, oh wait, I want what? I did three MD ma journeys and the whole last part of the book is about that work and really realizing I want to leave my marriage and all this other stuff that I had hidden from myself. It's a story of reclamation of self. How we lose ourselves as women especially in marriage and motherhood, you just you, you become a ghost, you become a, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to tell you two things that, that for you to react to.

One is it brings up for me I lived in New York City for a very long time, so I didn't drive, even though I grew up driving. I had to drive and I, I drive again. I grew up in Miami, but when I moved to New York, a decade or two went by without driving. I went lived in Europe. I didn't drive, and my ex-husband drove, and I noticed whenever I rented a car living in New York, not just my ex-husband, but boyfriends before that, I would be driving, I'd get , panic attacks driving with a man watching them watch me. I'm independent confident and strong definitely more since my divorce. But I would be so conscious of the way I was driving, and I feel like it's almost like a good metaphor for being with a man.

He'd be like, why are you driving so slow? Why are you driving so fast? Why are you passing that guy, on the Jersey turnpike had a panic attack and had to pull I was like I can't be watched anymore and judged by this man.

Like I can't handle it. 

Yeah. 

 I couldn't drive cars around men. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of trauma to unpack there.

We are watched as women. We’re watched and people try and keep us in line. I think we hit 40 and some people like call it the portal I don't know what happens to us, but we stop caring so much about what others think.

Yeah. And we start to be like, what do I think? And that, I think is a question that most women have not asked themselves because it hasn't been important. No one cares what we think. We're always orienting to others and we get tired of that and that's why we lose ourselves but at some point we're like where did I go? I want myself back. 

It's a loss to society for women to do that. Even strong personalities do this. Strong conscientious and conscious women do this 

They’re like, oh, I don't, I don't, my husband does that. I don't do that. There's no question I'm going to do, who else? No one else is going to do it. And I feel so glad that that's not my reality. 

We give our competence away we've been socialized, be like, no, they'll be better at doing that. It's not every marriage, but what we lose is that feeling of competence so that, yeah, when you get divorced and you do have to do it all and then you're like, I'm actually really good at this. Like, why did I sacrifice my ability to learn and be involved in all these things that I could have handled?

 One of my moments was pretty early on, I'd moved out. We were early in the divorce process. Maybe a year into the divorce process. 'cause you know how long it takes, but my car lease was about to be up. So I needed to get a new car my ex-husband he had been in charge of all the cars so here I was, I was like, well, I'm going to do it. And I went to this dealer, and I figured out what I wanted and I negotiated the lease, and then all of a sudden, I had a new car, and I'd done it all myself and it was such a feeling of competence and power that I had done that it's, 

 You can't buy that. That is 

Yes. It's priceless. That's feeling it. Like, oh, 

you're a single mom. I always get , oh, that must be so tough. Having a loving partner could be great, but the secret is I have a happy, loving, peaceful home. 

Mm-hmm. 

Yeah. 

 It's not worth my freedom.

Yeah, no, no. I feel the same way there's something very gratifying of just having my life be mine when you're in a bad marriage and there's a lot of, what do we owe each other and this tit for tat and like, oh my God, it's exhausting. It's exhausting and I don't want to be part of that.

I just want to do my stuff my way. This is really my first go in a lot of years managing my taxes on my own, but I'm also like well, thank God I was so boxed out of that and now I'm like, I didn't know anything that didn't serve me. Why didn't I, you know, I'm like feeling all the things.

You can also hire and delegate. 

Yes, yes. Certain things. 

Yes. 

 You said something about a cleaner. I have a cleaner come once a week. Yes. It just makes me feel sane to have that sort of support. 

Yeah, and I, I have high standards for cleanliness.

This was in issue in my marriage, I like a clean house. So I pay to have cleaners come every two weeks because they spend two hours cleaning that then I'm not, listen, also, I'm a contract worker, so I get paid lots of times hourly, so it makes more sense to have them clean for that hour I'm making those choices of what's most important to me and Right. You're 

making those choices and that's the great liberation. Yes. So you're, you're trying to get this book published and, but you also worked in publishing for a long time. 

Yeah, so I got my start in publishing. I was 23 years old.

It was my second job out of college, and it was just happenstance, honestly. Um, I was working, so again, getting back to my Christian roots. So I was an evangelical Christian. I would say from like age 15 to like 24 ish. It's a little fuzzy as to like when I officially. Uh, set it aside, but so my first job out of college was at a church out here in California.

I was part of their college ministry, and so I worked there for a year and then the person, my boss there, had gotten this email about a job description and forwarded it to me, even though I was his employee, and said, this sounds like your dream job. And I read it, and I was like, oh my gosh, it is. And it was an editorial assistant to this division of Harper Collins up in San Francisco.

At the time I was living in Menlo Park it was the religious and spiritual division of Harper Collins. They published CS Lewis and Richard Foster, Brennan Manning, a lot of these writers that I was reading anyway, I also was a religion major in college. So I will note, like I've always been drawn to the spiritual, I guess I will say I'm still drawn to the spiritual, I mean MDMA work is very, very spiritual work. So it's just, it's morphed. It's not Christian anymore. anyway, I applied for the job. They hired me. I worked there, for nine years, I started as editorial assistant. I ended as a senior editor, first, I was helping the editorial director, but then I was reading the proposals, going to the ED meetings, what are we going to publish? Once we decided to publish , I would edit the manuscripts.

I helped with book cover titles, all the things. It was fabulous. I mean, I'm, I've always been a reader. It was like the best job ever except that publishing really does not pay a living wage, which is why there's a lot of discussion about how, you know, it filters out people of color. You have to have privilege to work in that job because it literally does not pay your bills. and so anyway, I did that for nine years and then I had my daughter and at the time I was living in Palo Alto and commuting up to San Francisco, which is challenging even without a child.

And so once I had my daughter, I went back for about five months and tried to do it. And they let me work from home one day to start, but then they were like, yeah, no, now it's time to come back to the office five days a week and I just decided that I couldn't do it. 

 I quit, but I still wanted to keep working and I was like, I'll just work part-time. My daughter went to my mom's three mornings a week. And then I just tried to squeeze the rest of my work in during her naps which worked for a time, but then I had a second kid. All of this time I kept on saying I worked part-time, but I took on full-time work.

So this is also the trap we say, we work part-time, but we really don't. So then you're just running on empty 'cause you're not, you know, motherhood is endless with its needs and then you're not getting enough to your job. I just didn't set up motherhood in the way that worked best for me, and I didn't realize that 

you are making it sound like you can set it up. It's kind of figure out, figure out as you go, 

You can figure it out as you go. Only really wealthy people can just kind of get all the help they need. The early days of motherhood are so all-encompassing that you can't actually see things clearly until you're through it. No way. You're in survival mode for a very long time, and then you get out of survival mode and you're like, she, how the heck did I just do that? 

It's a lot like having the flu or just being very sick and you're Yes. 

It kind of is. Feel like a mother is like having the flu. 

You're like, uh, let me get to the fridge 

 I saw that you had a post about Night Bitch I don't know if the movie's successful at doing this, but I remember when I had, when I gave birth, I was like, no one told me. I'm like, all women do this. This is completely crazy like some kind of alien force, it's so supernatural.

Yes. And weird and no one talks about it. 

Yes. and I think what night Bitch does very well in the book, a little bit in the movie is we don't talk about the animal of it all, you do become kind of feral, in the pain and the gushing of the blood and all the things. But she also talks about a night bitch about how. Freaking powerful we are that we do this. Yeah. Like, oh my God, no wonder men are afraid of us. 'cause this shit that we do is holy. They should be bowing down , Absolutely. 

 We fucking give life. We are the masters of the universe.

Yes, we are. We are. I mean, there's no other way around it. Yes, we need them for semen, but that's about it. I think if you're too in it, you can't read Night Bitch 'cause it's too hard.

'cause you're like, this is my life. Ew. I don't want to read this. I read it enough years away from the toddlerdom of goldfish and trains and story times. You should read it. It's really, really powerful and weird and amazing and all the things we try to look so pretty and put together for men to mate and then we transform utterly into some sort of alien creature, which is actually the most human you can be. 

 Yes. , which is why they kept men out of the birthing room for so long. Because you know, back in the day, the fathers were never in there. And I'm sure it's because there was still this idea of like, we can't let them see us like this um, I did not love childbirth.

I also, like, I really wanted. I mean, so maybe I don't know that that many people do. I wanted to do it without drugs, and I just couldn't. I just couldn't. the pain was so great. I remember the moment that I asked for the epidural my body was very slow with labor. With my first, I was in labor for like 36 hours and I don't even remember with my second, but I remember, I wasn't that fully dilated, but I was still having really bad contractions, and they were trying to decide whether to send me home, right? Because I either had to go home or I had to get an epidural, but I couldn't. I wasn't far enough to just stay without one of those things. And one of the contractions, I was actually on the phone with my twin sister, if you can believe it, because she's still like, I mean, I'm very close with my twin.

And I was trying to be like, what do I do, Annie? What do I do? And in the middle of that contraction, it was so painful that I vomited. And I was like, okay, I'm done. I forgot 

that I was giving birth at a certain point that that's what was going on.

I was like, I want someone to like take a frying pan and hit me over the head and kill me out of this misery. Put me out of my misery. And my ex-husband was like, just think in a couple hours you're going to have your babies. I'm like. What, like, I completely forgot story on you were 

like completely dissociated from the actual act of what was happening.

You were just like getting out. So extremely 

painful. 

The pain. Yeah. Anyway, this is what we go through and again, that's why I have one of those posts about the math of motherhood, the pregnancy edition. , we act as if pregnancy doesn't take anything from us and it does your body is never the same.

Some people have wounds from birth that like don't ever heal not to mention the pounds that we put on. Right. . 

If men had to put on 70 pounds that you never are guaranteed to get rid of, I don't, they would be like, heck no, I'm not doing that. You know, we just are expected to take on all of the side effects of pregnancy as if it's nothing to us and I just wanted to bring to light the like, yeah, no, it takes a toll what started me on that post was that somebody, you know that on Reddit, they have the, are you the asshole? Um, yeah. Anyway, some man, he was in a committed relationship, but they were not married and they both had high powered careers, and they were talking about having a kid and his partner. Wanted him to compensate her for lost wages from having their child because she was going to have to take time off work and whatever, and he was like, what? She wants me to pay her to have our child? And it's like, yeah, dude.

Yeah, because again, like if you don't have an agreement, you're not married. Even in a marriage, it does cost something. And I'm also on this big kick about postnuptial agreements, and how I think we should all have one. If someone takes, if their career takes a back burner due to care, we need to codify how she, that person is going to be compensated for that work, which is labor if they get divorced. Because otherwise, as you probably know, right, because you're both pro, because you're producing the child for the two people, it's their, yeah, it's both in your child. 

Yeah. Anyway, that 

That makes sense. Sense. It makes a lot more sense than alimony 

my ex-husband is not like, not feminist. Mm-hmm. But it's so ingrained that I am the one raising the kids that he doesn't even notice. Like he had never like, thank you so much for raising my child. Mm-hmm. He never would think that. It's sort of understood that he wouldn't be that one to do that work. That's almost fundamental in that division of Labor that we do more 

yes, my big question is how do we change that? How do we change how we socialize boys and men? We see it in almost every marriage. There's such an unequal division of labor. It's just a pattern. Some of it is that the men, quite frankly, don't value what is required of keeping a house or raising children. 

Don't care about the dust. They, they don't see it, don't care the food in the fridge. . My daughter sent me a TikTok of like divorced dad fridge and it's like diet coke and a jar of pasta sauce and it had gone viral 'cause like yep.

My parents were divorced too, I remember we did Hanukkah on a pizza box. He wasn't very religious, but he was like, let's keep up the Hanukkah thing. One Hanukkah put like the candles on a pizza. On a, like a pizza box.

Yeah. Whereas again, I also think women are socialized to go above and beyond what is necessary. And yet what I do think is important for children in particular is how your house feels, what food is in the fridge? The traditions that you have that's like the network of your childhood. That's the stuff that makes home feel like home . It's family culture, right? It's not nothing. Women are the makers of like, what are our traditions around Santa or Easter and what are we doing? Do we do Saturday morning pancakes or not? Like, you know, we create home. And what I would like is to men also doing that and also valuing it so that when parents do split, the man is also doing the work of creating home and not just like ticking boxes. Well, this 

leads me to my next question too. Okay. Which is about creativity. Yeah. So there is a lot. In the, in the conversations around divorce and parenting and motherhood that, oh, we have to do all this stuff.

Mm-hmm. But I say I, it's a creative act for me to do the Santa stuff and the elf on the shelf also my kids' birthday is on Christmas day and their twin. Oh 

wow. So you got the double whammy. So, but it's on the production, there's a scene 

change and there's all these things that happen around it that I. 

Beyond. Enjoy. I love it. , how I painted my house and where things go to make it comfortable and safe. That's an act of creativity for me. I had an ice cream party for them, we handmade sprinkles. That was a fun thing for me to do. It's a fun thing that I got to do. And so what are your thoughts on motherhood and creativity. 

Yeah. And how do you talk about your work, you're in the creative industries , how do you share that with your kids, that you're a creative person and how do you encourage their own creativity?

Yeah. No, I love the idea that creating home is a creative act and I do think it is you're thinking about. How you want to feel in your home and the experience people have, like it's magic making, which is creativity, right? Like creativity is just making magic, in my opinion, whether it's music or art or writing, it's 

absolutely, yeah.

Taking 

from nothing and making a unicorn. I think it's, that's in my 

trailer of my podcast, . Making magic. Really? Yeah. , yeah, I love it. How to make magic out of our lives. That's the little intro. 

That's the core of it. And I think that's what really feeds us as creatives. My kids, they know what I do. I think they really value what I do. I mean, every kid thinks it's cool if you're a writer. I get a lot of questions from people being like, well, how, how do you do it?

 How do you make sure you sit down and write? For me, it's literally my job. So I don't have an option not to write. I think for lots of people, writing is a, a bonus, a hobby, um, or something 

people think, people think it's so hard, and yet they act like it's so easy.

Yes. Does that make sense? It's It does, it does. 

. I haven't made my living as a writer, frankly, because it didn't pay enough money. Yes. I started off in editorial in magazines. It was like $22,000 a year, and I eventually made my way into advertising.

Not on purpose, but because I need the money. Yes. Like just write that thing that we're not going to pay a lot. Like. That's the work you cannot do. Yeah. A lot of people cannot write, and yet it's so underpaid.

It's weird. 

It is, it is very weird. Well, and I mean, again, I also found a way around it because you can make a decent living in ghostwriting everyone thinks they can write their own book just like everyone can take care of their own children.

But it's like if you're choosing not to spend those hours taking care of your children to do something else, if you're choosing not to spend those hours. Writing your book so you can do something else. You have to hire someone. I take on all of that time that you're off doing your other job.

I'm doing your second job that you don't really have time for. 'cause you have the first one. So I've been able to make a decent living ghostwriting. I think a lot of editors and writers pivot into it because it's one way to actually get paid for your craft I don't think I will make as much money for my own book that I sell as I will make writing someone else's, which is sad, but that's just the mechanics of our trade. 

My writing and my creativity has been very instrumental in my own life. When I started to write in my own voice for the first time is when I could finally name some things I hadn't said out loud, going to the page you see things clearly and that is a huge gift. If I hadn't stopped ghost writing. Would I be divorced? I don't know. Because it was stopping that that led me to hear myself, which led me to the page in my own voice, which led me to realize a lot of things, which made me realize I was still kind of blocked from what I really wanted, which led me to MDMA therapy, right?

Like it's all this, 

Tell me about MDMA therapy as opposed to like, go doing ayahuasca. 

Yeah. 

Right now. So, yeah. So given my Evangelical Christian background, I had not done any drugs.

I've still never even smoked pot I didn't have any experience with drugs at all and MDMA was what this practitioner started with this was very much in a therapeutic setting. There was a therapist I met with ahead of time to kind of establish a sense of safety with her.

'cause she was who's, who's going to sit with me through these journeys. they call it a journey. It's like a four to six hour experience. and then I also was working with her to kind of figure out what my intention was. Like why am I doing this? Like, what's called me to this? Not just like, let's see what happens.

It's like, why? Why are you doing this? Like, um, and so ayahuasca, I get the senses done a little bit more in a group setting. Yeah. Um, whereas this was just me and a therapist eye shade music 

Did you, did you feel scared during it? 

Um, no, I didn't. I mean, I think I was very ready. So I had done regular therapy, like talk therapy for probably three years before I did this MDMA stuff.

 What was happening was I felt stuck. The answers I needed weren't here, they were not in my brain. They were in my body, which I had been disconnected to my entire life. I think as women we were taught to disconnect. As a Christian, I was taught, my body was sinful. So I lived as a head for most of my life in my brain. Nothing below here. And so this work gets you into your body. It's like your body knows the answers. So I think I had such a successful run with it because I'd done the brain work everything was kind of tilled and ready to come to the surface.

And so I wasn't afraid. I was just really curious and like, let's see what happens and it was so deeply powerful. I did three journeys. They require that you do more than one because it needs to take its own time. You don't want to rush it and be like, well, I'm just going to do one and I hope everything gets solved. You commit to three, it's like this gets a little uncovered. And then the next one a little bit more. And then by the third one it was like, 

it's also like a pleasurable experience where, from what I hear about ayahuasca sounds absolutely terrifying. Like you throw up a lot.

Yes. You're like. It, it sounds like a horrible nightmare to me. 

No MDMA gets you feeling good. it's like the good juices. It's euphoric. 

Yeah, 

it's euphoric and so the beautiful thing about MDMA therapy is throughout all of it, you have this really lovely sense of self-compassion no matter what comes up. And so they use MDMA therapy often with trauma because you can go back and look at your trauma and have some distance and not all the activation.

You can see it and still feel a little distant from it which allows you to process it in a different way than if you're triggered and you're panicking. It was almost cinematic 

 I'm writing a book about finding my voice, I gave up my voice to other people, and I think I'm still finding my voice on the page. Stepping into my voice, my authority, what I want to say? 

I think in some ways, in early drafts, I was still being a good girl, a little bit like being a good girl on the page. what is my voice? I've written a million of other people's voices, but like what is my truest voice? 

That journey of you figuring that out is the story it makes me think of this book that I'm a third of the way through called Ambition Monster.

Oh yeah, I read it this year. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. 

It's really good. 

It is really good. 

This is the linking thing for me always becoming self-actualization realizing what you are over time. True. If you're writing for someone else and you are like having these original thoughts does any part of you go, God, I just want to save that for my own book?

Because that's my thought. 

Yes. Right before I hit pause on Ghost writing, there was this story that I wanted to put in there and he didn't like it and now I look at it and I'm like, oh, that was me resonating with that story. And I've even thought about putting it in my own book, that was my voice trying to poke its way through , that was me. That was me. But that was one of the only times that had ever happened. I think it's because it was the book right before I started to write in my own voice. You're developing also a posterity in your life. You have children, you've had a career, you know things. 

Yes. 

 and they're crystallized so now you're going into this other phase which is a natural progression in life

you get to a point where you are able to, you have something to give back. 

Yeah. , so often people when they would hear that I was a ghost writer, they would be like, well, are you ever going to write your own book? And I was like, no. I don't have a book in me I even think I would say I don't have anything to say, which I just think is sad. 

It's so obvious in this conversation. You have so much to say. 

I have so much to say.

I know. Maybe I 

wasn't ready. You're incubating. I wasn't 

ready. Also now officially being divorced, it's like there's no one holding me back now, and I feel like I'm able to say. What I want to say and share what I want to say without any repercussions. This is the work that I'm doing now is being like, what is my voice? How can I drill it down? I was writing this book as I was going through it, as I was leaving my marriage, I wrote it in real time it's so hard. 

What do you think the future of publishing is, I think there are always readers, like they're maybe getting smaller. Our work is to make sure our next generation still become readers. I think the core readers are always buying books and reading books and there are a lot of us and we also buy a lot of books. Yes. I even think like there are so many, and most of book talk is like romance, but like those people are buying a lot of books. They are. There are so many avid readers out there and I think for women's stories there's a hunger for true, honest, vulnerable women's stories