Bad Mothers Podcast

In this week’s episode, I speak to Melissa Fraterrigo, whose new book, The Perils of Girlhood, is a memoir in essays about how we teach girls to live in this world — both from her own perspective through her experiences as a young girl, and as a mother to girls.

Melissa also wrote the novel Glory Days and a short story collection, The Longest Pregnancy. Her work has been nominated twice for Pushcart awards, and she teaches writing at Purdue University and in the MFA Program at Butler University in Indianapolis, and hosts the Lafayette Writers’ Studio, with m...

Bad Mothers refers to mothers who’ve hurt us, from whom we’re estranged.

But it also refers to other kinds of mothers, other kinds of women. I originally meant it as a facetious way to describe myself - I’m a “bad mother” because society thinks motherhood is all women are good for and I’ve decided to not be one.

So this season, in addition to continuing my conversations with women who are estranged from their mothers, I wanted to speak to other kinds of mothers — including step moms.

This week my stepmother...

This week we return to our roots with a discussion of maternal estrangement, with Megan Margherio.

Megan is an author and trauma-informed embodiment coach. Her work is shaped by both lived experience—childhood trauma, estrangement, and complex PTSD—and deep study in nervous system repair and somatic healing. Her debut memoir, Everwoven: A Memoir. A Reckoning., is a raw, lyrical journey through estrangement, emotional survival, and the long, slow return to self.

Megan’s story is harrowing, but her self-awareness and strength is truly an inspiration and I hope this conversation is helpful to others in sim...

I’m kicking off Season 2 with a discussion about being a child-free dog mom. How does having a dog — and especially a puppy — help us frame our ideas about motherhood? For me, it’s been a tough few months with my new puppy Annie, and I’ve thought a lot about how she compares with a baby and why I chose one over the other.

The perfect person to kick off this conversation is Keltie Maguire, a clarity coach who helps women decide whether motherhood or a childfree path is for them. She is also the host of The Kid...

Welcome to season 2 of the Bad Mothers podcast.

Last season, I focused only on strained or estranged mother-daughter relationships.

One of the things that I hope others take away from those conversations, apart from the necessity and validity of choosing estrangement, is that sometimes – perhaps even most of the time – our mothers were doing their best. It just wasn’t enough. I have sympathy for my mother while at the same time knowing that she hurt me and that a relationship between us is not possible for many reasons.

And so I think a natu...

This is the final episode of Season 1 of the Bad Mothers podcast. I want to thank everyone for listening and engaging with the show over the past six months, and for supporting this endeavour. I specially want to thank my guests who generously shared themselves and their experiences with all of us.

For this last episode, I decided to bring my sister Gina back, from Episode 1, to interview me. Since my guests shared so many personal insights about their estrangement journeys, I thought it was only fair that I answer some tough questions, too. She also included...

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged, an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to running TE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community.

This episode includes Angel’s own experiences of estrangement and motherhood. Last week I shared the first half of our conversation about the practicalities of estrangement, alternative ways to frame our emotions around it, and the work of Together Estranged.

Here’s the link to the Surgeon General’s report a...

Angel Cassin is the Chief Executive of Together Estranged, an international non-profit supporting adults who are estranged from their families. With a background in project management, Angel brings a pragmatic approach to runningTE. She’s passionate about creating spaces for unheard voices in the community.

I’ve divided our conversation into two parts. Today’s episode is focused on the practicalities of estrangement, alternative ways to frame our emotions around it, and the work of Together Estranged.

Next week I’ll share the rest of my conversation with Angel, focused on her own experience of estrange...

Elizabeth Austin is a writer whose work has appeared in TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, Narratively, and many others -- some of it focused on how she considers herself to be a ‘bad’ mom. As a memoirist she explores the intricacies of relationships and often self-interrogates -- something that anyone who is estranged knows can be a complicated process. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Root Cause: Stories of health, harm, and reclaiming our humanity in an epidemic of loneliness.

You can find Elizabeth on Substack here.

The book Elizabeth recommends is In The Realm of Hun...

Maggie Frank-Hsu is a writer based in San Diego. She is the author of a poetry chapbook “A Drop in the Dry Season,” and the Estranged newsletter on Substack.

Estranged features essays, interviews, news, and reviews all about parent, child, and sibling estrangement with a focus on understanding, not blame.

Our conversation covers Maggie’s limited relationship with her mother, her research on estrangement, and her thoughts on parenting and how those thoughts evolved thanks to her research.

We also veer a bit into feminism and domestic labor, just for good measure! I hope y...

Please be aware that this episode includes discussion of suicide attempt, addiction and alcoholism.

Kari Bentley-Quinn is an award winning playwright whose work has been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other places in the US and Canada.

Kari got her BA in Theater Arts at Pace University and her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College, where she studied with Tina Howe. She was a co–founder of Mission to Ditmars, a theater company in Queens, NY. Alongside her fellow co-founders, Kari facilitated the development of more than 30 new plays. In addition to he...

This episode is a bit different, which is why I’m calling it a bonus. It’s a much shorter interview, and it’s with an academic scholar, Dr. Katie Gaddini.

She is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. From 2022-2026 she is a United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI) Research Fellow at Stanford University and UCL. Her debut book, The Struggle to Stay, was based on over four years of in-depth ethnog...

I'm excited to share this new episode of Bad Mothers, because it's my first speaking to a fellow child-free person. I've noticed that many people assume that the reason I don't have children is due to my fraught relationship with my mother. It's a reasonable thing to think, so I wanted to meet more women who are child-free and estranged. Were they, like me, never really inclined to have children, or have their mothers played a role in some way?

My guest today, Aarti, has not stopped contact with her mother, but she lives very far away...

For the second episode of the podcast, I spoke to an anonymous Substacker called Your Own Mother. In her newsletter, she offers beautiful and insightful essays about her personal experience with estrangement, recovery from an abusive and traumatic childhood, and some of the overlooked but equally painful repercussions of estrangement.

She has two children, and like Gina in episode 1, becoming a mother was a trigger for seeing and acknowledging the abuse inflicted by her own mother. We get into that, but also the long-lasting effects of emotional and physical abuse, the primal need to have a mother...

My central goal for the Bad Mothers podcast is to remove the guilt and shame many of us feel for creating boundaries with abusive parents. I want to know if fraught relationships with our mothers play a role in our decisions about having children, which of course feeds into a larger cultural narrative about the declining birth rate, family policy and abortion rights.

So, I thought the best place to start was a conversation with my sister, Gina. I decided not to have kids, and Gina has two daughters – but we’re estranged from the same mom, and...

On the Bad Mothers podcast, we’ll dive deep into our maternal urges, or lack thereof. We’ll talk about the mothers we left, or who left us, and whether they haunt our own choices about having children.

Why?

I created Bad Mothers to give women space to be whatever they want to be, even if that is a “bad” mom – a woman who is frustrated, or doesn’t love being a mom, or decided not to have kids, or isn’t sure, or doesn’t work outside the house, or does…

It’s mostly rooted in m...