**Special note to our listeners**
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THANK YOU to our super awesome listeners who have already signed up!
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When you're a high-achieving 22 year old coming out of college, you have all kinds of assumptions about your future work life that you don't even know. You think you will follow your passions (because, of course you know what they are). You will make tons of money (because that just automatically happens to everyone who goes to a great school). You will always be able to devote yourself to your work (because you know, kids don't need any of your time, energy and attention). You and your partner will always agree on how income-earning responsibilities, family responsibilities, and your personal preferences should balance out (because there's a simple equation for that - didn't you know?)
In this 2-part episode, we unpack our reflections about our work life at 40, what we did, why we think we did what we did, what we regret, what surprised us, what we learned and how we are looking forward.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
THANK YOU to our super awesome listeners who have already signed up!
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When you're a high-achieving 22 year old coming out of college, you have all kinds of assumptions about your future work life that you don't even know. You think you will follow your passions (because, of course you know what they are). You will make tons of money (because that just automatically happens to everyone who goes to a great school). You will always be able to devote yourself to your work (because you know, kids don't need any of your time, energy and attention). You and your partner will always agree on how income-earning responsibilities, family responsibilities, and your personal preferences should balance out (because there's a simple equation for that - didn't you know?)
In this 2-part episode, we unpack our reflections about our work life at 40, what we did, why we think we did what we did, what we regret, what surprised us, what we learned and how we are looking forward.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
THANK YOU to our super awesome listeners who have already signed up!
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Peeing yourself. Hair loss. Boob deflation. Hokas. Turning grey. To Spanx or not to spanx? Yeah we're not spring chickens anymore but we're also not.... quite... old? We give the real talk on what's going on with our bodies as we hit 40... the weird, the beautiful, the ugly, the contradictory and the funny... in true MMM fashion.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
THANK YOU to our super awesome listeners who have already signed up!
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One learning from getting older is that you realize that just because people age, doesn't mean they continue to mature or evolve. This can be especially true for issues tied to our families of origin. We might be 14, 40 or 80 but when those old dynamics are triggered, we can be right back where we were as a kid, being shamed, scared, alone and we revert back to old coping behaviors. In this episode, we talk through where we are with our families of origin and how it has (or hasn't changed) in the last 20 years.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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Let us explain. No, we haven't bought a red convertible, had an affair or gotten a divorce. But reaching this stage of life, what we once looked as a somewhat baffling, even humorous, stereotype of modern American life... makes a little more sense to us. Or at least we feel like we could see how someone landed there. We take a deep-dive into what we think counts as a mid-life crisis, what we think causes it and how maybe, just maybe, we can channel it into more productive ends. Or to justify that basement pottery studio that you've been dreaming of :)
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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As we turn the corner into mid-life, we're talking about the questions we're wrestling with at 40 - Am I living a "successful" life? How am I doing with my complicated family of origin? What the f is going on with my body? Midlife crises, anyone?
In the first of our series, we tackle a big question: what does it mean to live, and die, successfully? It leads us to some weird places - Gene Hackman, Bryan Johnson who wants to live forever, Lady Gaga and how "success", contentment and happiness might be closer than we think.
**Special note to our listeners**
Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our Substack. Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience.
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Kindergarten…you think it's far away until it's not. All of a sudden you're faced with a myriad of decisions that you have to research. You may also experience intense anxiety as you worry if you're setting your kid on the right path. What makes for a good elementary school anyway? Is it a warm environment? Diversity? Test scores? How selective it is? Bilingual? Convenient? A PTA vibe that jives? Is this really about your kid or about you?
We're going through it now and whether it's pretty or not, we give you the real talk on where we are landing on the big K-question.
For some of us, we always knew we wanted kids, no matter what. For others, that was never in our vision for life but nearing the end of the biological clock, we're revisiting that question. For still others, we may have started one way but ended up another because of relationships, biology, logistics, costs, better understanding of what parenthood entails, the-world-is-ending-feeling, etc.
In this episode, we bring back Justine Ang Fonte because she and her partner went through a long journey of trying to decide if they wanted to try to become parents or not. But beyond just the normal internal wrestling, she kind of took it to the nth degree by building massive spreadsheets and even going through a structured decision-making process with a psychotherapist who specializes in helping people make this decision.
If you or someone you know is wrestling with this decision, this episode is for you. If you're already a parent and thinking about more, this may be helpful too.
For many millennials, sex education was about awkwardly passing around a banana with a condom on it in PE class or carrying around a sack of flour pretending it was a baby. We want to do it better for our kids, OBVIOUSLY, but... do we really know how to do it better?
We are excited to welcome Justine Ang Fonte on the show. She was featured in the New York Times about her work bringing sex ed to New York City's private schools (as well as the controversy she encountered with some parents). She is also the voice and author of the Audible Original How to Talk to Your Kids about Sex. Drawing on her 15 years of experience teaching kids about safety, affirmation and joy in their emotional and physical relationships, she offers some tangible tips for parents who are dreading "the talk" (psst - one tip is that it actually turns out it's not just one big talk, it's a series of mini talks over time).
In true MMM fashion, we are releasing our look-back conversation on releasing our 100th episode... on episode 108 X_X. We talk about what keeps us going with the show (psst - its not the big bucks), what our partners think of it, what topics we've considered but decided NOT to do, what our listeners have shared with us, our favorite episodes (it's so hard to choose!), our controversial name, what our pie-in-the-sky dreams for the show would be, and more. Hope you enjoy and sending <3 <3 <3
Trying to keep career momentum as a mom of young kids can be really tough. On top of all the demands of being a parent, wife, and daughter, going hard at the office can start to feel like a slog. Moreover, being a parent and approaching middle life can surface a lot of questions about your priorities and your choices, including about work. And of course, all your baggage from being a women, Asian-American, child of immigrants is still showing up at the office and not helping you get to the next level in your career.
We discuss these issues and more with Minal Mehta, the founder of the executive coaching firm The Ineffable Leader. Educated at Stanford and HBS, Minal worked as a product leader across several leading tech companies such as Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and others. She was born and raised in India and Singapore and is a mother of two tweens in the Bay Area. In her words, Minal’s mission is "to empower leaders who’ve achieved external success from a place of exhaustion and burnout to achieve even greater success from a place of flow."
We're so excited to share with you our first collab with another podcast - Add to Cart! Susan was a guest on the show to discuss her book, her love of Costco and her grumblings about the rising price of matcha lattes :)
Listen to the trifecta of the Asian Aunties as Susan Lieu joins SuChin Pak and Kulap Vilaysack on this episode of Add to Cart. Susan talks about writing her first memoir, “The Manicurist’s Daughter,” which chronicles her search for answers after losing her mother to a botched tummy tuck. It’s an emotionally raw conversation that will leave you hopeful that generational healing is just as real as the trauma. Then, the Aunties dive into her cart, which is truly an ode to Costco and its generous return policy. Susan also shares her solution to inflating matcha latte prices.
Lemonada has teamed up with Apple Books to bring you the Lemonada Book Club. “The Manicurist’s Daughter” by Susan Lieu is our audiobook of the month! Listen here.
To hear more episodes, follow Add to Cart wherever you get your podcasts or head to: https://lemonada.lnk.to/atcfd
If you've been with your partner for awhile now, you may realize that there are certain conflict patterns that happen over and over. He does something that pisses you off, you bring it up, he does X, you do Y, so on and so on, over and over again. Or vice versa :p Or you guys are just so tired from parenthood, work, continued disappointment or dealing with things from the past that you have just settled into a pattern of burying feelings. Have you ever considered marriage counseling? :/
On today's show, we talk to Jessica Sather who is a Filipina-American mom and licensed marriage and family therapist trained in the Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) modality. We talk through the common issues she sees in couples and the EFT approach in trying to get a little deeper into the reasons underlying our conflict patterns and reformulate them for (hopefully) a better relationship with our partner where we feel mutually seen, understood and supported.
To contact Jessica, please see her website: www.mabuhaytherapy.com She is a fully-licensed MA, LMFT therapist who can see patients in Washington State and California.
Do you remember watching MTV as a teenager and noticing that one of the hosts was kick-ass Asian-American young woman named Suchin Pak? Well, guess what - WE HAVE HER ON OUR SHOW TODAY and we go deep on her unexpected path to MTV, what it was like to work that job for over a decade, what life is like for her now as a mother of two, and the winding journey she's been on with her husband who has been battling a severe and mysterious auto immune disease for the past several years. It's a doozy of a conversation and we hope that you enjoy it and that it brings back memories of seeing Suchin rocking so many cute outfits on MTV in the early aughts.
To get more about Suchin, check out:
- Add to Cart podcast, which she co-hosts with Kulap Vilaysack who we also recently had on the show
- IG: @suchinpak
- Men's Health article penned by Suchin's husband Mike Bender about his health journey
Do you ever wonder why it's so hard for you or your partner to stick to a budget? Or organize your finances? Or even talk about money? Do you read tons of financial advice but struggle to actually do it? Or do you tend to stick your head in the sand and hope it will all work out?
In this episode (our first *video* episode!), we talk to Shang Saavedra, the author of the recently released book called Wealth Is A Mindset. She has coached over 200 households into a dignified retirement and taught over 8,000 individuals on how to achieve financial freedom through her courses. We talk about how our upbringing and our mental health are so intrinsically tied in with how we manage (or don't manage) our finances.
To learn more about Shang's work, please check out the following:
- Book: Wealth Is A Mindset
- IG: @savemycents
- savemycents.com
We talk a lot about mental health and we thought it was about time to bring on a real mental health expert on the show, preferably someone who also has personal familiarity with the Asian American experience. What do you think of psychiatric medication? Do you ever see any Asian-Americans who are our parents generation (and what is THAT like???) What do your parents think about what you do? How do you deal with the stigma of mental health treatment in the Asian community?
We discussed these questions and more with Grace Liu, a Stanford-trained psychiatrist and Chinese-American mom. She brought a very thoughtful and frank take on all of these questions and we loved having her on the show! If you are interested in following up with her after listening to the episode, she can be found here:
Have you ever wondered why the term "hysterectomy" sounds so similar to the word "hysteria"? Well it turns out it's because the ancient Greeks thought that the root of all of emotional troubles for women were due to a uterus that just wandered around the woman's body if it wasn't kept busy with enough sex and pregnancies. Tune into this hysterical (pun intended) interview with author and OBGYN expert Dr. Karen Tang as we discuss her new book "It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (but were never told)". We ask her about the OBGYN questions we still don't have answers to, the challenges facing women's health research and care, and why all of us know the word for penis in our mother tongue but none of us know the word for vagina. To learn more about Dr. Karen Tang's work:
- Get her book at Amazon
- Follow her on IG @karentangmd
Kulap Vilaysack is a bit of a unicorn. She's a Laotian-American actress, comedian and show creator who has directed and produced hit shows like Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. She even has a real DC Comics superhero inspired by her, Katharsis! She also created a documentary about her family called Origin Story, where she tells the story of her father who she learned wasn't her biological dad when she was 14, her complicated mother who fled Laos as a refugee, and her biological dad whom she does not remember.
She's also a mom who went through a long and arduous fertility journey. If you can't tell yet, she's a bad-ass 2nd generation Asian-American woman who tells it like it is. We are so honored to have her on the show to talk about what it was like to face her family's secrets and how that has connected to her journey of becoming a mother herself.
To learn more about Kulap and follow her work, check out the following:
- Watch Origin Story on Amazon Prime
- Check out the Add to Cart podcast, where Kulap and her co-host give their "subversive take on consumerism."
If you weren't worried about climate change already, don't worry! Becoming parents will surely increase your climate change anxiety. From the very real concern of leaving behind a burning and unlivable planet to your children, to the very real concerns now of protecting your young ones from excessive heat, wildfire smoke, floods and storms, parenthood is **guaranteed** to give you greater climate anxiety.
But in all seriousness, we break down this very real, very concerning issue through the lens of parenthood. We also recorded this episode back in the summer so... there might be some summer references.. sorry/ not sorry?
Most of our listeners (and us) grew up in a pretty traditional education system. There were lessons, there was a lot of practice, there were tests and if you got a A, someone asked why it wasn't an A+. For many of us, it also was layered with a ton of stress and constant anxiety. It was all supposed to lead one day to admission to a top tier college and then a rather hazy happily-ever-after. Now raising our own kids, we are often conflicted on how to approach education - how much should we care about test scores? Should we just let kids do whatever they want because it should be all kid-led? What if they don't learn how to read or do math?
We break it down with Susan Yao, a veteran educator, school leader, mom of two, and founder of the Vermont Village School, an independent experimental school centered around the UnSchooling movement. We get real about the benefits and concerns of traditional and less-traditional schooling approaches, and what questions parents can ask themselves to form an educational approach that best serves their family.
