About The Mother Lode
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 in motherhood, 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 has several recurring series.
The Divorce Diaries is a series 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.
The Math of Motherhood 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.
Things I Wish I’d Known Before Going Through a Divorce is pretty self explanatory including mistakes I made along the way. 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.
Women Talking is my series where I interview other women, including
, Minna Dubin, , Olivia March Howell, and more.
Paid subscribers get access to Things I Wished I’d Known and The Divorce Diaries, as well as special posts like Behind the Scenes, which provides personal glances into my life behind the writing of this newsletter, and Cultural Cliff Notes, which collates the most urgent reading/viewing/listening on motherhood, marriage, and divorce in our culture today. They also gain access to The Mother Lode Chat and the ability to comment on posts.
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 eleven books. I’m the former publisher of Literary Mama, and my published writing can be found on Scary Mommy, The Lily, Isele Magazine, Mutha Magazine, The Brevity Blog, and The Voices Project. I had an essay included in the
anthology Labor of Love. 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.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.
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