Our unofficial mother's day episode with Double Shift podcast host Katherine Goldstein. Ep 93

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode ninety three. We'll be interviewing the founder of the new podcast called The Double Shift. That's Catherine Goldstein. This episode is airing close to Mother's Day, so, of course, various issues related to motherhood and working on everyone's mind this week, and so we're looking forward to hearing from Catherine about how she is approaching covering this topic and the things she's coming up with. Her phrase, the double Shift, of course, generally refers to the extra work, the domestic work that women do on top of their paid work. Related to Arlei Houschild's book The Second Shift that came out several decades ago. I know that Sarah and I have sort of spent a lot of time thinking about how to minimize certain aspects of the second shift, although we do a different sort of second shift, more of a split shift sometimes in terms of work, split shift meaning the paid work you do, namely after your kids go to bed, for instance, which is when I would often do it. But Sarah, you split your shift differently. Well, it's kind of funny because I think I sent you the Q and as last night and I realized, wow, I just said. I never work at night, and clearly sometimes if I have a deadline approaching, I will do something later at night. But I am much more commonly doing my second shift in the morning. For example, if I have residents coming to interview, it's usually the morning of at like five am, when I am reviewing all of the CBS, or I may be writing a blog post or a podcast note. So some of that work is related to my side hustle stuff, and some of it may be related to my actual job. But my double shift is rarely, rarely in the evening, which I feel like is the more more common setup. Yeah, I'm probably better in the evening. I would naturally work more at night, I think, but I've gotten better about you know, I mean, email expands to fill the available space, so a lot of it can write until later. The issue is that I've realized it's going to wait till later, till like three or four in the afternoon, because I'm trying also not to do email in the morning when I have the ability to do more sort of focused work, and so this starts pushing forward my response times. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but you have to choose that that's what you're what you're doing, trying not to get back online and then just do social media. How's your how's your social media break going, Sarah, It's going pretty well. I decided to spend a month off of Instagram. Now. I do make a plan and exception for my best of both worlds posts, which come up every Tuesday in time for our episode, and then I do try to check back in because I feel like it's not very nice to post something and then you know, not see what people are writing back that doesn't seem particularly interactive. So I do jump back in and I do, Like last night, I ended up like almost accidentally switching to my personal account was like, no, I'm not supposed to be in here, but actually I've been pretty well behaved with respect to that. In some ways, it's been refreshing. However, you know, just like email expanding to fill a vacuum, your desire to do vacuous things online also can expand to fill an available vacuum. So I will find myself like reading a number of Amazon book reviews that I didn't need to read, like I'll find some other rabbit hole. So my conclusion maybe that Instagram is fine. I actually do enjoy it. I do think I need to have limits set, and the little reminders on my phone with Apple screen time feature are helpful for that. But I don't necessarily feel that I'm going to want to cut it out of my life forever. I did do that with Facebook, and actually that was a healthy breakup. But yeah, yeah, well I think we, I mean, we just do have this like low energy time, and the question is what you do with it. And I mean, if I have a good book, I'll try to read that. But sometimes the book I'm reading is more challenging or something, and then you don't really feel like doing that, right, You do want to do something completely mindless. Answer the question is, well, what is that mindless stuff? And you know, Instagram can be very good for that. To reading Twitter, there's always something new there. If you follow enough people, there's going to be new things, and some of it could be interesting, some of it also not interesting. But yeah, I don't know. I don't feel any compulsion to do a social media fast. I guess I'll just continue with me. Instagram is best when I consolidate it to a period where I'm just like, oh, I'm going to like just zone out and scroll and it's kind of nice versus like thinking about checking into something I've posted, like intrusive thoughts, perhaps about like ooh like did someone else I don't like that? So I guess maybe instead of just a fast, the right thing to do is to confine it to a specific period of time. And maybe this was helpful because I don't find myself rushing to Amazon to you know, randomly look at something the way that maybe I did with Instagram. All right, well that's good. Well we're we're excited about the Katherine Goldstein interview, so let's go to that. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Katheryne Goldstein to the program today. I know many of our listeners are also listening to her podcast, The Double Shift, and she's going to tell us more about that. So, Catherine, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Thanks so much for having me. So I'm Katherine Goldstein, and I'm the creator and host of a podcast called The Double Shift, which is about a new generation of working mothers. And the thing that one of the things that I think makes it different is that it's not about parenting or kids. It's actually about the mothers themselves, our professional experiences, how you know, social forces influence our lives, how you know, dealing with gender roles issues at work. And we're profiling a really, really wide range of women, from politicians to musicians, to sex workers to executives. So I'm very interested in having a very multifaceted, diverse view of what working motherhood in America is. Like, that's great, And you know you've been in journalism. What drew you to podcasting as the medium to share this story through? Yeah, I really felt like that there wasn't enough in depth reporting and actual journalism on the experience of being a working mother So we see a lot of op eds, and we see a lot of personal essays, but not a lot of resources are really devoted to the complexities of working motherhood in America. And so I was interested in a podcast because I wanted to have a much longer and more in depth conversation about some of those issues rather than just here's one article in one place, here another article in another place. But I thought it would be really amazing to engage people in a much more involved experience in trying to get at and redefine some of how we think about working motherhood in America. And I'm also interested in the conversation and community that that sort of naturally evolves around podcasting. I know that when we started, we felt like there was a major gap. And you know, definitely we are not the same type of podcast. Yours has much more Our focus is on mothers kind of working more full time corporate or traditional jobs, and yours focuses on all kinds of really fascinating experiences, which is one reason that I actually love your podcast as well. But we also felt like there was this major gap. Yes, and I know you had an interesting story of how you ended up having to pitch your podcast a few times that you talk about on the podcast. Yeah, so I'm actually our March at March. Our May sixth episode is actually talks even more about the podcast journey of the Double Shift, but which gives a lot of detail into sort of what it took to get this show made. So basically, you know, I've been a journalist for over a decade. I had a really solid career and reputation as a journalist, and I kind of thought this is an obvious gap that is missing in the podcast landscape and that you know, once I could really put together something compelling and really show people that this was something that was missing from from the world and that there was so many great stories and so much great journalism to do on this. Like obviously, podcast companies would be interested because it's a growing space. And so my experience was basically all the major podcast companies turned me down, and you know, probably like ten to twelve rejections. There's some podcast companies I managed to not pitch, but I definitely I talked to all the big ones. If you can think of a big one, I probably talked to them. Then they probably said no. And you know what was interesting about the feedback. You know, I got a really what the range of feedback. I think a lot of it was really tinged with some sexism. So I was told by podcast executives, if there's not enough that's interesting about being a working mother to make an entire show about it out Also, yeah, but likescinating, like such the embedded sexism of our culture, that there's nothing about moms that's that's interesting. Moms are boring, Like that's basically what our media messages, and that all we care about is the same three conversations about like work life balance, and once we've had those conversations, there's literally nothing else to say. And I just totally disagree with that, And so that was one piece of feedback I got. Also, people had a really hard time understanding that you could have a podcast about mothers that wasn't about parenting, So like people did not understand that mothers are more than parents, and that like we have complex, rich inner lives and experiences that touch all sorts of you know, public policy and health care and gender roles, and people like had a hard time getting that you could talk to mothers about anything other than parenting. So those were some of the some of the kinds of feedback that I got. And also I think people were like hesitant to think that mothers were worth doing journalism on and spending resources to do real journalism about mothers, because again, there's the stereotype that we're boring and there's nothing interesting to say journalistically about us, So screw them. A data shift you did, and you're doing fantastic And I can tell from the amount of engagement you're getting that it must be blowing up, which is great. What is a listener demographic? Like, aren't many listeners mothers? Many podcasts listeners? Yeah, podcasts in general. Yeah, So well do you think you know, people are really interested in the idea of more women listening to podcasts and more mothers listening to podcasts, but they're interested in it from like a marketing perspective and an ad perspective. So it's kind of like, what's the show we can make for a small amount of money that we could put mom oriented ads on, Like there's not sort of a larger journalistic interest and like diving into the issues we face as mothers. I think there's an interest in producing low cost content for you know that moms that can be where moms can be advertised to. And I have advertisers on my show, and I think that they're really important partners. I have nothing against advertisers. I just think that and I you know, I think advertisers can be absolutely beneficial to listeners. But it's just a question of like this idea that you know, there's there's I don't know, one hundred and thirty shows about technology and society. There's like you know, there's countless talk shows about sports and politics, and they keep launching new ones. Like I just it's just the idea that this is still a niche thing that's really about getting advertising dollars then about doing real journalism. Well, so, and do you sp And I was going to say you specifically focus on working motherhood because I also feel like there's a large genre of sort of how do I put that, like feminine oriented podcasts that are about the home or crafting or you know, other or even just parenting in general, but they're really not seem to be much content for those that are pulling the double shift. Yeah, yeah, and that's why I was so excited to explore this. And again, you know, we're talking to people in ways large and small that some of I hope that every episode has something that, even if the subject is super different from the listener's life experience, that there's something that's very relatable about each of the subjects. And I think a lot about that. Well. So with that, so some of our listeners who haven't listened to The Double Shift, perhaps maybe you could talk about one or two of those topics that you've chosen to cover and the angle you came at, and sort of your most interesting stories that you've told so far. Sure, so picking a favorite episode is like taking a favorite child. So I will never say one episode is my favorite, but I will I'm happy to talk about a few. So one episode I'm really proud of is we did. The second episode of the show is called The Night Shift in Sin City, and it's about twenty four hour daycare in Las Vegas and it all about this woman who runs it, and it really focuses on the people who use the twenty four hour daycare. A lot of them are single mothers, a lot of them are shift workers, and a lot of them go to school all day and work overnight. And so I was very excited to do this story because I think We're in an absolute childcare crisis in America, and unfortunately, I don't feel like there's a lot of new and exciting ideas being introduced. Like there's definitely some new conversations around the twenty twenty presidential candidates and some policy ideas which I'm super excited about, but a lot of times I feel like the conversation sort of starts and ends from a middle class perspective of like, Wow, childcare is expensive, that's too bad, and then there's just not a lot of other perspective and research and reporting. So I was really excited to really take listeners into this daycare and this woman is running at Nidia Sanchez as a business that is profitable, which is I think surprising to a lot of people, and really how the business works and what she offers and what the parents who go there say, and what the you know, sort of feeling like you're in the experience of going to the daycare, and I just feel like we need more creative solutions to these big, big problems we face, and so that's why I want to do these kinds of real reporting, Like Nidia Sanchez is not a public figure, she doesn't have a pr agent pitching me to be on the podcast. We had to go out and find her. So I think that it's important to find those kinds of interesting stories because they can really inform everyone's experience. So that's one episode and then another one I think that has gotten a lot of really positive feedback is we did an episode on Ashton Clemens, who ran for a state house seat in North Carolina, and she didn't have any political experiences. She had three little kids, and we really spent time with her and what it's like to be a mom with young kids running for office. And one particularly interesting moment of that was she during our interview, her daughter got left at ballet, like the babies that are have to pick up her daughter. So like we captured this whole experience, this whole thing on tape, and people really related to that because one we don't really talk about what it means to run for office as a mom with young kids, because this is a brand new phenomenon. Everyone everyone has had those logistical family professional you know, snaff fu mishaps, and I think it's just really important to have really much more honest conversations and not sort of project these ideas of perfection even for a politician who's supposed to be perfect all the time. So we had a really interesting conversation with her about the mental load that mothers Carrie that I think I've heard that many listeners really related to. So, Catherine, I mean, you're you're deeply interested in these issues of working motherhood, but you're you're relatively new to the working mother life yourself. Right, Your your child is three years old. Now, he's three and a half. Yeah, he's three and a half. Yeah, So were you interested in this before he came around? Or did this interest or arise after that? Like many people, I really had no idea the challenges I would face as a working mother until I became one. So in my own personal experience, I had a tough first year of motherhood, which was basically he my son was born with some serious health problems. But he's doing great now, but it was a very stressful and traumatic sort of early entrance to motherhood. And then I lost my job when he was six months old. So the combination of those two things just like completely challenged everything about my identity and really made me feel like a failure. And I think, you know, I think that basically from there, I started to get more and more interested because I was personally having such a hard time. I started to get interested in turning my journalistic lens on was what was going on in this crazy experience of being a work mother, And I came to see that. You know, I basically thought I was a failure and everybody else had this working mother thing figured out. It was just me and I was defective. But as I started to turn my journalistic curiosity and lens towards being a working mother, I started to realize nobody had it all figured out, and so many women felt like failures. But really, I think it's our society. America is failing us as mothers. We have terrible public policy, we don't have paid family leave, anti mom bias and pregnancy discrimination are rampant in workplaces. So I'm much more interested in talking about how society needs to change rather than how mothers need to change. I love that you, You know, the fact that you did have a little bit of a rocky start definitely comes through in your episodes, and it is kind of nice sometimes to hear about the journey from someone who is sort of freshly into it and remembers how it was before, So I actually think that's been an asset that you were a relative newcomer. Yeah. Now, so you sort of I mean, you know, not that mothers need to change, but you changed some interesting things about your life in order to get this podcast off ground, and Turre and I were both fascinating to hear this part. So you wound up leaving New York moving to North Carolina. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so that was a huge life change. So I'd been in New York about twelve years and my husband maybe about ten, and you know, we decided that we were I was very fortunate to do a one year journalism fellowship at Harvard, so we like left New York for on a temporary basis for one year. And it kind of like broke the seal because when you live in New York, you just like, I don't understand how anyone doesn't live in New York. This is the entire world. There are ways to live that don't involve that, you know, you get you really feel like you're you're the norm and the only way to live. So it kind of showed us a little bit of a different way that we could live, and we just decided that we were ready for an easier and less expensive life, and part of having an easier and less expensive life would mean some professional freedom. So mostly in New York I had sort of like high powered and high paying media jobs, and I realized that the kind of work I wanted to do was less about being high powered and high paying and more about having a high impact. And so it was just didn't feel like financially sustainable to say, like, I'm going to do that living in the most expensive city in the country. And so we you know, it was a big decision, but I think we were really happy with it, and in some ways, I feel like we've never looked back. And sometimes I feel like when we try to talk about how to make our lives better from on, you know, our personal lives better as working mothers, sometimes we get really into the micro and sometimes it's the biggest piece. Changing the biggest piece changes all the sizes of all the other pieces of the puzzle. So so we moved to Durham, North Carolina, and we got an easier and less expensive life well for sure, and we also moved closer to family. My parents live about twenty minutes away, and then my husband's mother actually followed us here and she lives five blocks away. So now we have like this roster of grandparents and it has like profoundly changed our lives. And I like to joke that, so the subway is called the MTA in New York, and I like to joke that now that I don't have to fight the MTA, I can spend all my energy fighting the patriarchy. Well, if the answer to everyone's issues is to move to Durham, that might be actually partially true, because it is a very magical place, having been there for over a decade, and it sounds like a fantastic move for you. We have definitely found that our listeners who write in and have grandparents participating in the care, that that can be super helpful. Have you found challenges embedded in that, like is it harder to rely on family members versus employed or well, so our son goes to like a full time preschool, so we're not relying on them for like daily care, which I think would be a totally different story, and I think comes with a lot of politics and family dynamics, et cetera. But sounds like a good double shift episode. But the thing that has been I think one of the most life changing things. And we didn't live near family until this movie year ago, and the one of the life changing things I think has been so my mother in law lives close by and she has offered she takes our sun every Friday overnight and so every like once a week we can like have a date night and sleep in and it has completely changed our lives. And that I mean, I'm sure many people I feel like what I tell people, there's like this, like they get this like far away look of like resentment and jealousy in their eyes like when I tell them about this, But I feel so good about this it is I think it's also allowed us to recharge to be more present parents for the rest of the weekend, and then also connect my husband and I connect to each other because I think that for a lot of working parents gets put down on priority level number twenty seven to actually like connect with your partner in some kind of meaningful way that it doesn't feel like could you tell me really quickly? There's a child screaming in the background, like what is like what happened in your day? Okay, I can't even hear you tell me later, So I think that that's allowed me to actually give more to my career and give more to my family having that like one night and basically my work days are so stressful. By Friday, I feel like a released caged animal. So it's like a very It just like comes every week at like a rhythm that is really life changing. And that sounds wonderful because then you can enter into the kid part of your weekend all refreshed and having had that nice connection time with your partner life. That's wonderful. No, rest he who love it? Resentment? I mean jealousy, sure, but is it not resentment? No? You should you should run with that all all the way. And no, it's it's it's so true. And I think, you know, living near extended family, I mean it's like the equivalent of I don't know, it would be like one hundred thousand dollars raise in terms of you know, what you are able to because having sort of that immediate backup care if you need dif for instance, having the overnight care or all things that are very expensive and you know, my husband and I both travel for work, so we've had to approximate that through other ways. But you know, having grandparents who could do it would be awesome. So yeah, that's and and speak of your husband, you had mentioned that you guys work to split things sort of as equitably as you can, and so what does that look like a as a practical matter, My husband has really supported me in this project, and sort of, like I think a lot of times when we talk about supportive partners, like we sort of gloss over what that really means and what that looks like, because a supportive partner can be like, oh hey, good job, or a supportive partner can be like, I'm willing to change my life and change like what I have to do in order for you to do what you need to do. And so I feel extremely lucky that I have a partner that has been very willing to change his life to support what I'm trying to do. And so like some of the ways that's looked like is that basically I'm very productive in the mornings, so we sort of have switched our responsibility. Like we would sort of take turns with like who was taking our son to school and who was getting him ready, But basically now he does everything in the morning, so like I can basically go to my office as soon as I wake up and just don't have to do anything in the morning and can get like hours of more work in rather than being like, oh, let's see if I can get some emails. Oh my son woke up. Oh I have to do the school thing or whatever. And then I pick my son up. And that's like a good sort of mental way for me to try to like unwind from the day, to have like a cap of like I have to leave to do pick up rather than sort of like working frantically until dinner. And so that has been really great, and I think, you know, I talk to mothers a lot about the mental load, and a lot of women, I think, feel like they have certain things that there's just no way that they can entrust their perfectly capable, professional, competent partner to. They couldn't trust them to pass see things off. And of course not everyone has that partner. It's a lot of people don't have any partner. A lot of people don't have a trustworthy partner, but a lot of people do, and a lot of people feel like they can't really let go of certain things. And so I feel like that I have also allowed myself to let go of the micromanagement control of certain things, like sometimes my son goes to school in an outfit that I think might not be perfectly weather appropriate and I'm just gonna like not get involved, or you know, sometimes my husband has taken over, Like he did a bunch of stuff on our taxes this year, and I had done that in the past, and like, maybe he didn't do it at the pace that I thought he should have been starting earlier on doing that, but he did get it done, and like me like standing over his shoulder being like, are you doing it? Are you doing it? Are you doing it? It's not actually going to like help our family. So I think like a lot of these conversations are wound around like women feeling like they need to be in charge of certain things. And that's not to say that's not to blame women. I think we're socially conditioned to think that, and I think we're judged when things aren't. Like no one judges a father when a kid like you know, doesn't have his permission slip sign, like people judge the mother. So I think, like, oh, was that part of this episode. We actually just had a discussion of this on one of our very recent podcasts. I can't remember if it's part of this episode or not, but yes, what is it with the the the the unequal judgment? Very and I think a lot of times women don't want to give up control because they're they know they're going to be judged by other people for not doing things for now hopefully not for ye. Well, that actually segues really good into into a question we often ask about day in the life. But we already got the beginning of that. You your husband is the morning parents, and then you go a strange work So why don't you talk to her a little bit about what the work day then looks like for you? What's involved in putting together a reported podcast that you know, at least initially you're doing it yourself, and then I know you'vefully the revenue is coming in more from the advertisements, all that. But as you've been managing all that aspect of it, why don't you talk about that process? Yeah, so this running So I run the podcast. I run it as like a small media company, and that has stretched me. I never set out to be an entrepreneur. I think we glorify entrepreneurship in this culture. And let me just tell you it's really hard, and like I definitely so, I definitely have had moments of being like, what during this process would be like, wouldn't it be fun if I went to an office and someone paid me to sit in front of a computer, Like that would be so great. But for the most part, I'm very happy with how things go. But basically my days can really vary from like this morning, I'm like planning a trip to DC and New York to do a panel, and I'm coordinating like things around that trip, and I'm writing questions for an interview, an expert interview we're going to do, and I'm trying to set up we're actually on May six, we launched a membership program for the Double Shift, so I was looking over all the paperwork and figuring out how to set up a Stripe account and so a lot. A lot of what I found about running the small business has been not just making the podcast, which is very intense and involved, but all the business side of running a small business. And I've I've definitely had moments where like the times I've most wanted to quit, we're like sitting in front of quick books being like I don't understand why this payment won't send, and just like questioning all of my life choices. So so I definitely have many ups and downs like that and sending a lot of emails. And I think it's hard when you're running a business like that to also have time to be creative. And I think part of this podcast like I need to come up with creative ideas and creative thinking. So we're gonna be taking a break over the summer and I'm hoping to think of some new a lot of new creative thinking for season two. Yeah, because you can get so caught up in the sort of task management aspects of it that you realize you never actually took the time to sit and think about new things. Sometimes we get to the point where we're like, yeah, we need a couple of weeks and we're reconvene because there's no we can't just do it on the following totally exactly. Well, this is this is awesome, Catherine. What can we look forward to? What topics are you looking to cover in the future, And we get there may be secrets, but whatever you can give away every day I felt to tease our future episodes. So we have actually, as this is airing, most of the first season is done, but the two episodes we have coming up are a really I think it's going to blow people's minds. I hope episode from a Muslim sex educator about self care that I feel like introduces like some very radical concepts and that really like really challenges a lot about how we think about what self care is it involved sexual empowerment, So stay tuned for that. And then the second, the last episode of the season is also going to be It's going to be about paid family leave because this is like such an incredibly important topic and something that I felt like the Double Shift needed to say something about. And I think we're also going to challenge a bunch of assumptions that people have about what it means to be lucky to have paid family leave and what actual actually appropriate paid family leave looks like and how you change your your company policies. Excellent, Well, I will be looking forward to as a listener, so I'm sure that some of our current listeners here will probably check it out as well well. So we did prepare you ahead of time, Catherine, What is should we go first with our loves the week? Our love the weeks? Because then make sure that Catherine is gone. Time to think about this, Sarah, what do you have? So this is one of those more vague ones. I was just waxing ecstatic that my children have been sleep getting closer to seven lately, and it just I love it. It makes for a much more relaxing start to the day, especially since I do tend to be more productive in the morning. And if this continues into the summer, which I don't know if it will, because I do think a lot of it is very light related, then our mornings will just be lovely because they won't have to rush to camp and we can even have time to hang out before I head to work. But I'll still get that time for myself. Yeah, I would. I would love if all my children were sleeping to seven, but unfortunately that's still not happening. But the good news is Alex, my youngest, is entertained by YouTube still, so we're we're watching a lot of nerf Gune wars on YouTube. There's there's nothing I can do about it. That's been what he clicks on and it's what he likes, and so that's what entertains him. And I can shower or read or something like that. But I also, I mean, he's reached the stage where he actually just goes to bed when he's supposed to go to bed like a good you know, the nights I'm putting him to bed, go and read a story, put him in his bed, kiss me. He stays in bed like this is. We fought bedtime battles for years. It's it's done. It's like the world has opened up. So that is my love of the week, how about you, Catherine. So I'm gonna pick a non parenting love of the week, which is really on brand for me. But I'm gonna pick so. Since we moved to Durham, we have a yard which we never had in New York, and I planted like an urban vegetable garden and it's doing really well. And it gives me such a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I see this like bursting bin full of like green life of things I can eat. I mean, it's I mean, let's be honest, it's not like, you know, I'm not a farmer here, but I've got like, i got mint, I've got I've got sorel I've got parsley, I've got chives, I've got all the stuff you need to make a really good like green Goddess dressing. So I'm feeling or like a pesto. So I'm feeling a lot of like I definitely I I've discovered that I like gardening and it's fun to be outside and like feel like you're nurturing something that is like can't talk back. I don't know, totally unlike the three year old. Right, yeah, No, the garden is definitely an upside of moving out of New York City. Although we have our vegetable garden in the back and it's you know, it feeds us and it feeds the deer. I think is it's more like a deer salad bar. I might want to make sure you have nice fists around it. I just enjoy it every time you mentioned her. Yeah all right, well, Catherine, thanks so much for coming on. We appreciate it and hopefully our listeners will check out the double show. Thanks so much for having me. So here's our Q and I. We received this question via email, and I love the title of the question. She actually titled it resentment a podcast question, So we'll start with that. So our writer writes, I may stay at home mom with three kids aged six, four and seventeen months. I also have pretty significant work commitments some online classes that I teach. I'm starting a new business, I'm helping a friend with her business, and I have a publishing contract. I also have volunteer commitments on the room parent for my older son's classes. I'm in the PTA at each school, and I teach Sunday school. This will increase during the fall when I pick up another in person class, start learning to be PTA treasurer, and possibly start a running club at the elementary school. I am into distance running and I train five to six mornings per week, with a long run on Saturday morning. I never watch TV or use social media except listening to a few podcasts hopefully that includes ours. She writes, and I put this part in bold because I thought it was important. All of these things are very important to me. I really am proud of my professional accomplishments, particularly the book contract, and I love that I have the flexibility to do things like field trips and story times with my little ones. But I find myself increasingly angry and resentful about well everything. My parents provide one morning of childcare for my little one each week, so I can work, but the rest of my time. My worktime occurs during naptime and my little is not a great napper. Sometimes I work very early in the morning before I run, and an evening and weekend when everyone else is relaxing. I silently see as my entire family sits down to relax and watch the Friday night movie at seven PM, and my workday begins, all the while knowing I have to get up at four or four point thirty the next morning to do my long run. I was so mad when two friends were talking before a school event about shows and movies I like to watch. These are people I generally like, but in that moment I resent to them so much for watching TV when I don't get to I feel angry when anyone wants more of me, whether it's my husband wanting a couple time, the baby wanting a story before bed, my kid wanting me to play, when I'm trying to finish one of the many many household chores, or a coworker or a co volunteer wanting me to take on another responsibility. How do I keep my eyes on the long term goals I've worked for and not be angry and resentful that I feel like a sleep deprived drudge who never has any fun. WHOA Laura, Why don't you go first? Yeah? No, this is a tough one. I mean the thing that I saw in this question, I mean she introduced herself as a stay at home mom with three kids, and like, you're not a stay at home mom. You have all these professional commitments. What you are is a working mom who doesn't have an adequate support system. And I don't know why it's important to her to refer to herself as a stay at home mom, but I think that that is what's really kind of there's this cognitive dissonance here. I can't have regular childcare because I'm a stay at home mom, But she's working, like she has multiple part time gigs in addition to her volunteer commitments. And the key thing, I assume she doesn't think there's anything wrong with childcare, because if she did, she wouldn't be emailing us right like she wouldn't be listening to our podcast and sending in this question. So I think she just needs to shift her mindset here that I am a working mother who needs the support in order to meet my professional and so my volunteer commitments. So you know, the question is how she can put that into her life. Now, I'm not saying she needs forty hours a week. I mean, she's not reporting to an office somewhere, but she still does have to do this stuff. So I mean, the most obvious idea for me was to ask if her parents could extend that one morning that they're watching her baby to maybe like at least mid afternoon, like three thirty or so, because that would accompliss that would encompass nap time, Like, they'd still get the naptimes, so it wouldn't be that many more hours she was asking them to do, but it would be for sure hours she could have. If she could then also get two other mornings per week, for instance, then she'd probably get the nap times too. Maybe maybe not, but having you know, knowing for sure she'd get like seven hours on Monday, four hours Wednesday, four hours on Friday, I think that would help her immensely in terms of feeling like she had enough time to devote to these things without working all weekend, working all night, being up at four thirty to work after working into the wee hours as well. So you know, could she get a sitter to come for those eight hours a week, or are there is there a home based daycare near her that she could go to for eight to ten hours per week. A lot of commercial daycare centers that won't work. They really want you there for the forty hours or at least paying for the forty hours because that's their structure. But maybe there's you know, a friend who runs an in home daycare that might be willing to take a child for less time, or or a sitter that she could get for you know, ten hours a week or something like that, or you know, as she could decide that I'm going all in and let me go someplace that I'm you know, dropping my kid off at eight and picking them up at three thirty, and that would help for you know, then having school hours for her older too to work. But yeah, this this system sounds unsustainable and you know you can hear that, and she titled the question resentment, like you can't do this, like it does doesn't work in terms of time. You're gonna resent everyone like the kid wants stuff because of course you're their primary caregiver with them, but you're also trying to do the work, like just because you can do stuff from home doesn't mean you can without childcare. That's that's my take, one hundred percent think. I mean, when I actually had a very emotional reaction to this, I was sort of horrified, like, I feel so bad for this person, and it doesn't seem like the family and marriage would even last honestly if she continues to do this. And the picture of everybody watching a movie on Friday, and you know, I picturing her husband kicking back with the kids and they've all got popcorn and she's like scrubbing the floor and then going on to deal with her online class while being angry at all of them, Like that, there is something very wrong there with that picture, and I think that something needs to change. And I agree that the biggest missing ingredient here is childcare. And even if she does find some kind of a part time solution, I think she needs to take her work seriously, just like you said, and you sort of admit to herself that she's in this place where what she's contributing on that side is just as valuable and she can't just be living a double life. It's not working. I think, you know, she actually wrote back to us and you know, mention and that costs was a bit of a concern, but she does have a number of things that are bringing in income, and at one point she sort of described all these things as optional. So in my mind, literally every dollar that she's earning, if you added that all up, I'm guessing probably is going to pay for at least some part time childcare for one child. And I think for the benefit of their overall situation and her mental health, she should absolutely go for it. And hopefully that will compound upon itself as her business grows and her you know, services become even more valued, then that may kind of it may more than pay for itself. Yeah. Yeah, the childcare is an investment in your long term earning potential. So hopefully our listener will have that mindset shift there and realize that, you know, to succeed professionally, you need adequate support and making sure that that's a priority in her life. And I also do hope that she really fleshes this out and how she's feeling with her husband, and she admits what her feelings are and how she feels when they go to sit down and relax, and she's not part of that. You know, so maybe there needs to be a little bit more equitable distribution of household tasks that she mentions as well. That an yeah, but I think again, if she's been constantly saying I must stay at home mom, like, he's probably got that at said mindset too. Well, of course she's focused on the home I'm doing work and not realizing that the situation has changed, and she is in fact working multiple part time jobs and so the home situation needs to change as well. All right, Well, this has been Best of Both Worlds episode ninety three, talking with Catherine Goldstein about the double shift. Our listener, of course with this question doing maybe a triple or quadruple shift or something like that too. But we'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the Best of Both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.