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Nancy Reddy is the author of The Good Mother Myth on learning our bad ideas about how to be a good mom.

Nancy is the author of The Good Mother Myth, as I said, and her previous books include

the poetry collections, Pocket Universe, and Double Jinks, a winner of the National Poetry Series.

With Emily Perez, she's co-editor of The Long Devotion, Poets Writing, Motherhood. Her essays have

appeared in Slate, Poets and Writersper, the millions, and elsewhere, the recipient

of grants from the New Jersey State Council and the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation,

and a Walker E. Dakin Fellowship from the Suwannee Writers Conference, she teaches writing at Stockton

University and writes the newsletter, Write More, Be Less Careful. Welcome, Nancy. Thanks for coming on the show to talk about the

good mother myth on learning our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. Thank you for having me.

Of course. Okay. So how did we think about being a good mom and how should we be thinking about

being a good mom? Oh my God. I mean, so you're starting with an easy question. Yeah. Just a layup for you this morning. Exactly. I mean, I think the biggest thing that we've gotten

wrong is this idea that a good mom can kind of do it all on her own, this idea of the super mom,

right, who can, when she's got a baby, she can, like, nurse and be up in the middle of the night and make

the homemade baby food and dress the baby in a cute outfit and, you know, kind of carry it all in her

own. And then I think that carries through to older kids, right? The idea that, like, moms create

the magic in the family and, you know, take the kids to the dentist appointments and remember to sign them up for

soccer, all of that kind of stuff. I think that's the biggest thing we've gotten wrong. And what I've

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