From Mom Guilt to Mom Life Comics: with Mary Catherine Starr

Modern motherhood has a way of rewriting the rules you thought your family would live by. In this episode of Moms Like Me Jordan sits down with illustrator, author, and Mom Life Comics creator Mary Catherine Starr for a refreshingly candid conversation about the parts of motherhood that are often hardest to put into words. Mary Catherine opens up about a traumatic birth, postpartum anxiety, extreme sleep deprivation, and how she and her husband went from an intentionally equal partnership to unexpectedly falling into more traditional parenting roles. Together, they unpack the invisible mental load, resentment between partners, the pressure moms feel to "do it all," and what it actually takes to begin redistributing that responsibility. Mary Catherine also shares how drawing became a therapeutic outlet during the pandemic, how one viral comic about the double standards of parenting transformed her creative career, and how those experiences inspired her comic memoir, Mama Needs a Minute. It's an honest, funny, and deeply relatable conversation about loving your children fiercely while admitting that motherhood can still be exhausting, complicated, lonely—and nothing like the version you expected.