Every week, Macaroni Kid South Shore will introduce you to an amazing, local mom. Nothing makes me happier than supporting incredible women and I am so excited to have the opportunity to introduce you to some of the finest!
I am so excited to introduce you to Mary Catherine Starr this week. Although she is not a South Shore mom, she lives on the Cape which is close enough! Even if she lived half way around the world, I would still be excited to interview her because her Instagram account and comics breathe life into my every day stressors. A recent post highlighting the eerily accurate double standards of parenting, made Mary Catherine's account go viral over night. If you don't already follow her, you must. I look forward to her comics as much as I look forward to my glass of wine at night.
Read on to learn more about Mary Catherine, mom life comics, and all of the other things she juggles while confirming what we all already know, balance is pretty much impossible!
How many kids do you have and how old are they?
I have two kids--a daughter who is 5 and a son who is 2.
Our audience is typically south shore but you live on the cape (which is close enough!). What’s your favorite part about where you live?
I LOVE LIVING BY THE BEACH! I grew up in Atlanta (and lived in Kentucky, New York, and Washington, DC before moving here) so living 5 minutes from the beach has been a total dream. I'll never take it for granted!
What do you do for fun with your kids? Without your kids?
With my kids, I'm all about play-dates, playgrounds, and walks around the neighborhood--anything to get them out of the house (lol!). We also LOVE drawing with chalk on the driveway and if it's above 40 degrees and dry on the ground, you'd better believe we'll be outside with some chalk. When I'm not with my kids I love practicing yoga, going on walks with my husband, drawing comics (of course!), and spending time with my amazing mom-friends.
Please tell us more about Mom life comics! I have been following you from the beginning as your comics are painfully (and comically) relatable. It’s also so exciting to see you go viral!
Thank you so much! I started making these comics back in January 2020 as a fun new creative outlet (I'm also an artist and graphic designer); they were really well-received on my personal IG feed so I kept making them. Over the course of the pandemic they became a way for me to vent and connect with other moms, and I saw that they weren't just therapeutic for me, they were therapeutic for other moms, too, who were sharing them much more widely than I'd expected. Eventually I realized that I should make a separate comic feed and focus on doing more of them, so I made @momlife_comics in July 2021. It's been really exciting to see this account take off and reach women all over the world. I'm honored that my work resonates with so many different kinds of mothers!
This week is International Women's Day and your comics highlight so many of the barriers women and moms face today. Tell us more about your mission with your comics and what this special week means to you:
What started as a way to express my own frustrations about the challenges of motherhood has really morphed into a mission of raising awareness (through relatable comics) about some of the issues almost all mothers deal with--including the mental load/invisible workload of motherhood, anxiety and overwhelm caused by inequality in the home (and in society in general), weaponized incompetence, judgement, guilt, etc. Moms have too much on their plates. I hope that my comics help others understand this and inspire mothers to fight for change!
You teach yoga, have a growing Instagram platform and do so much more with two littles at home. How do you balance it all? Or do you?! :)
I don't, of course! Does anyone? I hope that my comics make that clear--I think it's almost impossible for moms to balance it all because we just have TOO MUCH to balance. In order to do all of the things I love I've had to make lots of compromises: our bedroom is always covered in piles of laundry, our house is way messier than I'd like it to be, my daughter enjoys more screen time than I'd hoped she would (before becoming a working mom during a pandemic), and I say "no" to a lot of opportunities that would be appealing if I weren't stretched so thin...it's a work-in-progress, that's for sure.
Thank you so much, Mary Catherine!
