“The best writing on divorce, ever.” Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
Hi I’m Cindy. Thank you for joining The Mother Lode.
The Mother Lode started as an exploration of the challenges inherent in motherhood. I hoped to help mothers feel seen while doing the invisible yet necessary work of caretaking. It examined why it was so easy to lose ourselves and invited reflection about how we might break free from performing motherhood and marriage in a way that is no longer serving us.
About a year into writing this newsletter, I separated from my husband. I then began to realize that a lot of the “motherhood” confines that I thought I was struggling against were actually marriage confines. I began to interrogate marriage as an institution and opened up about the process of divorce. What it felt like to all of a sudden be a Part Time Mom. The unexpected freedom of Mothering on My Own.
Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and the unequal distribution of labor in marriage is a big theme for me as it was one of the biggest factors in my divorce. My most popular post to date is Our Fair Play Discussion Signaled the End of My Marriage. I’ve also interviewed Rodsky in How to Fair Play Your Divorce, in other words, how to argue that the unpaid labor you did at home has monetary value that you should be compensated for in your divorce.
The Mother Lode is published on Tuesdays. I strive to keep most of my content free. However, paid subscribers gain access to all free content plus:
The Divorce Diaries where I interview women anonymously about their divorces, and they open up about alimony and child support, how much they spent on legal fees, and what they regret about how they handled the process. You can submit your own Divorce Diary here.
Things I Wish I’d Known Before Going Through a Divorce. So much of divorce is kept behind closed doors and I hope by opening up about my own divorce, I can prevent others from making the same mistakes.
My Ultimate Divorce Resource Guide, compiled with Oona Metz, author of Unhitched: Real Divorce Talk.
My new series, Stories I Have Swallowed.
Behind the Scenes, which features a peek into my life behind the writing of this newsletter, and Cultural Cliff Notes, roundups of the most urgent reading/viewing/listening on motherhood, marriage, and divorce in our culture today.
A window into my post-divorce dating life, including my first situationship and the ensuing, heart-shattering breakup.
Access to The Mother Lode chat where we dish about books we’re reading, divorce, dating and more.
Annual paid subscribers also get a one-time, 30-minute Zoom, FaceTime or Google Meet to ask me anything.
I keep other series for all readers including:
Women Talking, my series of interviews with other women (and a few men), including Laura Danger, Amanda Montei, Gemma Hartley, Amy Shearn, Olivia Driezen Howell, and more.
and my Math of Motherhood series examines the financial repercussions of becoming a mother and all the unpaid labor we do, including posts on the unpaid labor of pregnancy, unpaid labor in the home, and a post specifically on The Motherhood Penalty.
What Readers Are Saying:
“I love that you built a platform and place for women to talk about divorce. Thank you.”
“Thank you for making me feel like I’m not alone, that I’m not unreasonable to want out, that there is a different, better way to be.”
“There is a real need for resources like those you are putting together. Thank you!”
“Thank you for writing about divorce, motherhood, and more with honesty, intelligence, whole-heartedness and hopeful curiosity.”
“Your posts always seem to arrive in my inbox at the exact time I need them. Thank you for capturing my own amorphous thoughts and putting them into language that actually makes sense.”
I live in Palo Alto with my two daughters. My previous careers include working as an editor for nine years at HarperOne, and as the ghostwriter of twelve books. I’m the former publisher of Literary Mama, and my published writing can be found there as well as on Yahoo Life, Scary Mommy, The Lily, Isele Magazine, Mutha Magazine, The Brevity Blog, and The Voices Project. I had an essay included in the Literary Mama anthology Labor of Love. I partnered with Eve Rodksy and her Fair Play Policy Institute on The Fair Play Guide to Prenups and Postnups and was the inaugural guest for the Chamber of Mothers Book Club. I was born in Chicago, spent most of my childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, went to college at Wake Forest University, and then moved to California, where I truly feel at home. I’m an identical twin, an exvangelical, and an avid reader of books.
I’ve been interviewed on numerous podcasts. You can find all those here.
Here is the story of the origin of the name, The Mother Lode:
When I came up with the name for this newsletter, I thought I could call it The Mother Load because I was thinking about the weight of motherhood: the expectations of who you will become, as if becoming a mother flips a switch and you are somehow a different person, willing to sacrifice everything for this new being under your care. I was envisioning the amount of work mothers perform each day, work that begs for acknowledgement (but is often only seen when it is not done). Maybe I was thinking of the psychic weight of the ticker tape of to-dos in our heads, or the emotional burdens we hold - tracking how our children are doing, what support our parents might need, the state of our world. These loads sometimes feel like they might bury us.
Alas, I learned that the term is actually “the mother lode,’‘ a mining phrase that originally referred to a region in California where gold was discovered. It means a “principal vein or lode of a region,” in other words, a source of precious gold. It can also be defined as a “principal source or supply.” I realized this phrase is even more appropriate, as mothers are the source of everything. We literally birth new beings into existence. We create people, families, meals, communities, and homes. We also birth new worlds.
That is what I am attempting to do in this newsletter. Give voice to a different way of mothering, a new set of terms, because the old terms frankly, sucked and were steeped in patriarchy. The pandemic was an awakening for many mothers as we were faced with an impossible situation, mothering 24/7, with no breaks, no babysitters, no place to send our kids. But motherhood was never easy even in the Before. I want to explore what is worth returning to, and what parts of American motherhood we should leave in the past.
P.S. I have an affiliate bookshop on Bookshop.org where I have curated lists of my favorite books including Best Books on Motherhood (Fiction), Best Books on Motherhood (Non-fiction), Grief Reads, Divorce Reads, and more. Every purchase that you make using my shop (which means my Mother Lode logo is in the upper left hand corner) not only raises money for independent bookstores but helps me fund my work as well.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
