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Episode 113. Nothing more chic or classy than archival Bette Bentley, founder of Skimpies, recorded back when it was Bette's first ever podcast interview. We follow Bette's path from theater kid in Houston to comedy writer and producer working with Will Ferrell's Funny or Die team, through a cross-country move to Minnesota, a double mastectomy, and the moment she decided her next chapter would be a 'strapless' underwear company solving a problem nobody else wanted to touch. Since this episode first aired, Skimpies has grown from Bette hand-delivering product to ten Venmo subscribers into an enterprise, including a deal on this season's Shark Tank premiere and a new product line for women in perimenopause and menopause. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Music by: Ronen Landa

Episode 112. Kari sits down with Jordana Edelstein, host of The Diet Diaries and a body image coach who spent over a decade deep in disordered eating before turning her own mess into her message. They trace it all: getting bullied over her nose in middle school, a PCOS diagnosis in college that kicked off a cycle of crash diets and binge eating, a mom whose face would tell her she'd gained weight before a word was said, and the slow, hard-won shift into the work she does now helping women (mostly in their 30s through 60s) stop treating food like a moral test. Jordana breaks down her "jobs of food" framework, the one that's reshaped how she talks to her 14-year-old son about eating, and both moms get into the particular tightrope of raising kids to feel good in their bodies when you're still working on your own relationship with yours. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Music by: Ronen Landa

Episode 111. Kari recaps a wild few weeks: back-to-back kid birthday parties, hosting a big dinner, and finally hitting her limit (cold and all). She unpacks the "plastic plates vs. glass plates" framework she's using to figure out what's actually okay to let drop as a parent, and the lesson she learned throwing an IRL meetup with Dr. Aegean Chan of More Than Nine: hire the help. Then she gets into it: why she loves being a mom and hates "the mom space," the Pete Davidson comments about female creators and what they reveal about how society values women's work on the internet, a BBC piece on parenting-advice overload, and a quick reflection on last week's Luke Cook episode and what positive masculinity sounds like in practice. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Music by: Ronen Landa

EPISODE 110. Actor Luke Cook (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) sits down to talk about growing up the youngest of five in a Presbyterian family in Sydney, the panic attacks that hit right as his career and his relationship with his now-wife Kara both took off, and why he's packing up his family of five and moving to Australia's Gold Coast (they're already there and loving it). We get into the entrepreneurial side of his life, the conundrum of being both "hot and funny" in Hollywood, and what division of labor (and your sex life) really looks like raising three boys under five. Funny, unfiltered, and surprisingly tender. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Music by: Ronen Landa

EPISODE 109. It's Archival Erin Lim Rhodes. Erin is the golf and wrestling-loving host of E!'s "The Rundown," and long before that, a broadcast journalism grad who moved to Singapore with $500 and a hunch. We get into growing up the "peacekeeper" middle child of a Filipino father and multi-generational Mexican LA mother, meeting her husband through prolonged eye contact at church (he later baptized her), a pregnancy timed almost too perfectly for her producers' comfort, and the postpartum depression that hit after a rocky breastfeeding wean. Also: how golf became her hobby and her belated Disney adult conversion. More than 2000 episodes - 10 years - in to E!'s The Rundown and she's just getting started BABY! Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Music by: Ronen Landa

EPISODE 108.  Two years ago, Brittany Ishibashi sat in this chair and told me she was only taking jobs close to home, two or three days at most, because she couldn't picture being away from her kids. This week she's back, and she just spent a year in Austin playing Joy, wife to Woody Harrelson's character, in Apple TV's Brothers, opposite Matthew McConaughey and Holland Taylor. We get into what it actually took to say yes: loosening her grip on the house, letting her husband run things his way, being seen as more than someone's mom, and not missing a single recital across a year of flights. Plus the set stories (fake cake with McConaughey, Woody being Woody), and learning mahjong between takes. Brothers premieres September 23 on Apple TV. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

EPISODE 107. It's a solo episode babyyyyy. We're back in the school year swing, and I'm ramping up to my first ever Mutha Life in real life event, plus some incremental facelift changes to the show you may have noticed. Also: a tribute to my favorite ever camp counselor, a rant about skincare ads applied to fruit, a nostalgia detour into the white pages and yellow pages, and a genuine ask for your thoughts on tin can phones and smartwatches. Then, a new segment: Parent Conversations in Pop Culture, covering Michelle Obama's refreshingly honest take on not missing the baby years, and why Emma Grede saying she's a "three hours a day" mom deserves way less backlash than it got.  Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

Alyssa Tucker built Live From Snack Time into a beloved platform for the brilliant, hilarious things kids say, and along the way went through three miscarriages, years of IVF, and ultimately had one of her children via surrogacy while she carried the other almost simultaneously. We talk about the parts of an infertility story that rarely get airtime once the "happy ending" arrives: the trauma that can live in the body years later, how people process loss completely differently, breastfeeding a baby you didn't carry, and how Alyssa and her husband are explaining surrogacy to her now three-year-old TWIBLINGS. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

An archival re-release. Whitney Wagner Hartley spent her twenties and early thirties as a working commercial model in LA, then pivoted to skincare and wellness content on Instagram, and then, after the last election, into unapologetically political commentary that's cost her brand deals but built her a devoted following. We get into her "Marked Safe" initiative (tracking which brands are quietly funding disinformation), growing up the tomboy eldest daughter of two lifelong activists, meeting her husband as a kid in Idaho over a shared ice cream cone, becoming a mom during the pandemic, and raising a socially aware son in a genuinely scary media landscape. Also: the time she almost took her wedding ring off for Joshua Jackson in a hotel lobby.  Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

Kelly is a feeding therapist and speech pathologist who spent years on a multidisciplinary feeding team at a hospital, working alongside occupational therapists, dieticians, and psychologists to treat kids with severe feeding aversions and ARFID. She was a selective eater herself growing up, something she hid from her own mother for over a decade before finally asking for help at 17. Today she runs a feeding therapy practice and offers courses for families trying to make sense of their kid's relationship with food.  I asked Kelly every question I have had pent up inside about selective eater kids, the internet of feeding experts, and also just subjected her to my general rants about how wild people are. BONUS TOPICS INCLUDE: DISNEY ADULTS, raising two kids with a large age gap in between, and some simple ways to know if it's time for you to seek further support for your family when it comes to eating. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

It's been a busy couple of weeks. This one's a bit of everything: s****y sleep once your kids are "sleep trained," what I actually did with the Lion's Gate portal, an honest check-in on the goals I set after my London trip, and the real headline: what two and a half weeks of borrowing my 14-year-old nephew taught me about parenting, boundaries, and whether three kids is in my future (SPOILER ITS NOT). Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life  Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

Angela Nissel has lived several lives: co-founder of OkayPlayer with Questlove, author of The Broke Diaries, longtime TV writer and executive producer on Scrubs, Ginny & Georgia, Mixed-ish, and The Last O.G. We talk about being pushed out of the community she built, the complicated relationship with her mother that shaped her latest book Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom's Dead, caretaking her mom through the final month of her life, and how she fell in love with a WWE Hall of Famer through a dog-fostering account on Twitter. This one covers grief, race, comedy writers' rooms, and the strange humor that shows up in the hardest moments.  Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life @angelanissel Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

An archival re-release, going all the way back to episode two of the pod. Queensylvia Akuchie is an NAACP-nominated costume designer with over 20 years in the industry, the first costume designer for the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the woman behind the wardrobe on hit show Bel-Air. She's worked with Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Ben Affleck, and Tyler Perry, and she's done it all while raising her daughter Simi on her own. We talk about walking away from a law degree her Nigerian immigrant parents expected, cold emailing her way into the industry, being the only Black woman in rooms for most of her career, the uncanny timing of her mother's death and her daughter's birth, and choosing to leave a relationship because she refused to let her daughter feel what she'd been feeling. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

We made it to 100 episodes, and there was only one way to celebrate: bringing on the two friends who inspired this whole project in the first place. Jenna and Becca and I met in a Brooklyn apartment building through our dogs (yes, a hairball that looked like a piece of poop is genuinely how Jenna and I bonded), and years, weddings, miscarriages, a pandemic, and five kids later, we're still in it together. We get into how we built a friendship without ever merging our friend groups, what it actually looks like to divide labor across three very different marriages, the invisible mental load debate that never quite resolves, and why validation from your people matters more than being told you're right.  Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa

Kurt Braunohler is a prolific comedian, writer, actor, and co-host of the podcast That's Bananas. His stand-up has been featured on The Tonight Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Conan, and The Late Late Show with James Corden, and he had a supporting role in The Big Sick. He grew up an only child in Asbury Park, New Jersey, raised almost entirely by his single mom, a pediatric nurse whose parenting philosophy came down to unconditional love. Now that he's up to bat raising his own two kids with his wife Lauren, he's not wasting a second of it. Full show notes with alll the links: muthalife.substack.com Instagram: @mutha.life Produced by: Mutha Life Music by: Ronen Landa