Model Minority Moms

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We're interrupting our series on Power, Money and Marriage to talk about... Vegas. And the Backstreet Boys. Yeah - moms gotta go a little wild sometimes (just kidding, more like moms gone mild). Anyhow, we talk about mom fun trips, how we chose Vegas, our BSB teenage nostalgia, and how we're fretting about what to wear. We're posting this pre-trip recording with our post-trip thoughts as a two-fer and we're taking a short break in releasing more episodes until September 4th! We hope you enjoy this lighter episode and we will see you in the fall!

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Post-trip recording where we dish about the BSB show (TLDR: It was amazing), share tips about going to concerts at the Sphere and argue about NSYNC vs BSB. We also talk about what else we enjoyed in our whirlwind Las Vegas mommy weekend, from where to eat and cool non-gambling fun to be found in Vegas. We're posting this pre-trip recording with our pre-trip thoughts as a two-fer and we're taking a short break in releasing more episodes until September 4th! We hope you enjoy this lighter episode and we will see you in the fall!

**Special note to our listeners** Love the show? Help us keep the conversation going! Become a paid subscriber through our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your contributions help us continue to make content on issues related to the Asian-American, immigrant, modern parent experience. THANK YOU to our super awesome listeners who have already signed up!
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Our millennial well-educated woman fantasy: We would be running a major company/organization, calling the shots, showing people how brilliant and capable we are. But then we come home, slip into our A-line dress and go harvest zucchini from our weed-free garden. And we're so well rested and our children come in and say, "Hello, Mother." Everybody's emotionally regulated and connected and the children go and practice their piano and everybody sits down for dinner, and then the dishes magically disappear, clean themselves, and go into the cupboards.

In this episode, we talk about what's been held up as cultural norms and expectations that promise women value and power in relationships and society, what it was like to go through the Lean In era of the 2010s as young, child-free professional women and then encountering the tradwife memes of the last few years.

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Susan complained that the last episode sounded like everything is totally peachy with all of us when it comes to Power, Money and Marriage in each of our lives. Of course, the reality is more complicated than that. In the big picture, things might be fine but in the reality of daily life, there is friction and... resentments. A good healthy dose for each of us apparently. This series is supposed to be about power and money in the context of marriage and parenting but when we tried to put the spotlight on the problems around money and power, we got to... resentments. But why? Maybe it's because we feel that the level of power afforded to moms is unfair. Maybe the low value placed on the work of mothering is unfair (and we equate having value with having power). Maybe the expectation around earning income and being a good parent is unfair and wildly unrealistic (and we equate meeting others' expectations to having value to having power). So the chain is: unrealistic expectations that cannot be met --> feeling devalued in others' eyes --> feeling like we get less respect and power --> feelings of unfairness and resentment. Capiche?
Maybe some of those resentments are justified. Maybe some are within our control to mitigate and reclaim that power. Anyhow, we dissect in our usual style on this episode.

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We cringe even as we write this title. Should we use the word "downshift"? Is that a betrayal of generations of feminists who fought for our right to equal opportunity in the classroom and workplace? To current and future women who work so hard for their place in society? Should we use a more neutral word like "renegotiate" instead? But at the exact same time, the question is so obvious to any mom who lives between the paid working world and the child-rearing world. We downshift/change/renegotiate our careers (or don't) because of financial considerations, the emotional weight of going either way and the power that is lost or gained. 
For the three of us, we are seeing it happen to mom friends all around us. Quietly shifting to something less than full-time. Moving to a related but lower-stress field. Leaving the industry altogether and building something more flexible and maybe more personally meaningful. But it doesn't mean that these women aren't working. On the contrary, many are working more than ever across family and outside of family. At the same time, the specter of expectations of still contributing half of the family income still hangs over many of us. We process it out loud on this second episode of our series.