She explores this question in her book, Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home and her podcast with Rachel Childs, Equal-ish.

We talked about why it's so hard to form equal partnerships, why we shouldn't throw fathers a parade for doing more than their fathers, and what gives her hope.

Music by Greylock by Blue dot sessions

Poet and author Nancy Reddy struggled through early motherhood, from breastfeeding to sleep schedules. What made it worse was her sense that she was failing at some test of ideal motherhood: she had believed that motherhood should be instinctive and fulfilling, that she should just know what to do. Once Nancy started sleeping nights again, she set out to discover who put those unrealistic ideas in her head. Her book, “The Good Mother Myth,” interrogates how a bunch of mid-20 century men-experts, who probably haven’t changed a single diaper between them, shaped our ideas of mothers as vessels for their children’s needs and nothing more.

I talked to Nancy about the real meaning of the “good enough mother,” what happens when we lack a model of fatherhood, and why some researchers believed a wire frame covered in cloth could raise our children just fine.

Take a listen!