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: shitty 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