other moms’ stories

Exquisite Insanity: Moms Who Write

by Katrina on August 4, 2015

I spoke on a panel a few weeks ago at the Bay Area Book Festival. The panel was moderated by local literary icon, Michelle Tea. (If you need an escape, her latest book, “How to Grow Up” will make you laugh out loud.) The authors on the panel represented a range of genres (from children’s books to literary fiction to non-fiction) but we […]

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Book giveaway: “The Sweet Spot”

by Katrina on January 20, 2015

* We’re giving away 5 copies of Christine Carter’s new book, The Sweet Spot. * * Enter to win by leaving a comment at the end of this blog post. * When we don’t have the support we need from family, coworkers, and friends, (and policymakers), trying to work and raise kids can be impossible. But when we […]

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Making Work Work: Sliced Bread Design

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by Katrina on June 23, 2014

About six years ago, while I was busy “maxing out” at my full-time job in San Francisco, a friend of mine started freelancing for a company that sounded like a working mom nirvana. It was a small web design firm in Silicon Valley called Sliced Bread. The owners (Julie Stanford and Ellen Siminoff) were good […]

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In Maxed Out, I pepper you with statistics about how the U.S. lags behind most of the developed world when it comes to support for working parents. But that doesn’t mean life is perfect in those other places, either. The letter below is from a mom of two named Susana. She works in Human Resources […]

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It’s one thing to know that the most developed countries do a better job of supporting working families than the U.S. does. It’s a whole other thing to hear what it’s really like to live in one of these countries. Today’s guest post is from Lea Singh, a former attorney and mother of three living […]

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Many of us find a traditional career path to be stifling, especially after we have kids, and the number of hours we can toil away at the office becomes more limited. The happiest women I know are the ones who either work part-time or are self-employed. My friend Laura Scholes is no exception. Laura is […]

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I get a lot of emails from women who are frustrated with their husbands. These emails are almost always prefaced with a disclaimer about how great their husbands are. Then they go on to say all the ways their husbands let them down. We are living a cultural double standard, and it’s a recipe for frustration. […]

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The things you can’t control

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by Katrina on September 10, 2012

I’ve hit one of those weird rough patches. In the last two months… The radiator hose on our car exploded in a steaming mess while driving our daughter to a camping trip. The day Car #1 got back from the shop, Car #2 blew a tire. A week later, on my way to an important […]

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Letter from Connecticut: “I hate my job!”

by Katrina on September 19, 2011

Many of the parents I know spend 99 percent of their time divided between working and taking care of their family. If you really love your job, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. Work becomes your social outlet, your creative outlet, your intellectual challenge, etc. But what if you hate what you do? I […]

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The myth of part time

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by Katrina on April 13, 2011

My last full time job was leading a team of designers for a web agency. I used to hire a lot of freelancers when we had more work than our staff could handle. Some of these freelancers were moms who limited their hours so they could pick their kids up from daycare. They were exceptionally […]

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