Momma Stories

Momma Stories is a motherhood conversation show from Sarah Baker, and her intro states its premise plainly: she is where she is today because of other mothers' stories, and she wants to pass them on. The show's promise is that listeners will laugh, cry and come away empowered. In practice that means a friendly back-and-forth, with Sarah quick to affirm what her guests share. Guest episodes open with Sarah inviting the guest to introduce themselves. The guests come from two directions. Some speak as mothers. Noelle Boyer, a mother of two boys under four who joins from the East Coast after a recent move, talks about the toddler season: small children are not meant to be perfect, and squashing all their fun keeps them from being kids. That conversation also lands on a very particular bind, wanting to laugh at a two-and-a-half-year-old's potty jokes while keeping some order at the dinner table. Others arrive under the EXPERTS ON MOMMAS label and bring professional practice to the same everyday problems. Ahuva Magder Hershkop, a registered dietitian with a pediatric-based practice in Toronto, gets two episodes. In one she says she explains everything through analogies, and uses one to show that nobody can tell from the outside whether another person is hungry or full. In the other she walks through numbered tips for a less stressful dinner. Celebrate things that have nothing to do with food, such as a child staying seated or holding a cup with two hands. Let kids make a mess. The aim, as she frames it, is a table children actually want to sit at. Cynthia Klein, who describes herself as a parenting expert, works with parents one on one, and her message is about timing: too many parents wait until a relationship has been strained for years and the child is thirteen, when six, seven, eight and nine are the years to lay the foundation. She also admits she went to her own parenting coach while raising her daughter. Vienna, a holistic reproductive health practitioner in San Diego, brings a more clinical subject, explaining why she regards the synthetic hormones in birth control as close to the body's own but not the same. In her telling, the pill, the patch, the hormonal IUD and the implant are variations on one method. The Mother's Day episode takes a different shape. It first acknowledges that the day can be a first, a fiftieth, a hope or a reminder of someone lost, then hands the floor to children describing their moms as kind, funny and caring, the one who cuddles them at dinner time. Their favorite memories range from a hammock after getting chickens to simply taking walks together, and the episode closes with a thank-you to a mother for always doing the best she can with what she has. The dinner table comes up again and again, and so does the outro's last line: 'mamas, I love you.'