I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen

Kate Strickler is the creator of Naptime Kitchen, an Instagram account and blog she has run for nearly a decade, covering recipes, motherhood, and household tips. The book draws on her platform's community and her own experiences to address a persistent, low-grade discontentment she believes affects women who, on paper, have good lives. Organized around 10 common "I just wish" statements, each chapter pairs personal stories with practical steps and a mindset shift written as a first-person affirmation. Strickler opens with a contented Saturday morning: Her husband, Nate, an attorney, brought her coffee, and the kids played outside. Then she opened Instagram, saw a lifestyle blogger's seemingly superior home and wardrobe, and within 45 seconds a spiral of comparison robbed the moment of its goodness. She introduces the documentary Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold's ropeless ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, as a governing metaphor: Life is the mountain, with people, experiences, mindsets, and faith serving as footholds for the climb.

The first chapter treats the wish for a bigger kitchen as a stand-in for the comfort and belonging people seek from their homes. Strickler traces her family's three homes over 10 years, from a $500-per-month duplex near Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where she started posting food photos and brought home her firstborn, John Robert, to their current home in West Ashley, Charleston, South Carolina. A turning point came when she visited Meg, a church friend whose tiny, chaotic kitchen radiated warmth without a single apology. She concludes that a home must be loved to feel lovable and used to feel like a home.

The second chapter addresses the wish to be a better mother. Strickler catalogs the pressures mothers face and identifies her deepest fear as looking back and regretting not being present enough. When Nate left his firm and began sharing household duties, she panicked about losing her identity as the primary parent, eventually realizing her framework for motherhood, modeled on her own stay-at-home mother, had never been examined. She concludes that the best approach is to focus on who she is as a person and let that flow into parenting rather than treating motherhood as her sole identity.

The chapter on marriage opens with a fight over a smoothie cup left in the sink. Strickler introduces the concept of "the presumption of innocence" through friends Grady and Tiffany, who made a pact to always assume the best about each other, and realizes she habitually assumes the worst about Nate despite evidence of his good intentions. She shares a dark season of intrusive thoughts that Nate would leave her; her friend Molly helped her see that Nate could be "an agent of healing," loving her apart from what she achieved. She recounts how her high expectations for elaborate dates were crushing Nate until she began planning simpler outings herself, and argues that the qualities one loves about a spouse are inseparable from those that frustrate, with each year of patience compounding like interest.

Friendship is the subject of the fourth chapter. Strickler recounts starting over socially after moving to Charleston after law school, aggressively pursuing mom friends at parks. After her fourth child, Alberta, was born and postpartum anxiety peaked, friends Kristen and Lindsay began driving her children to school daily. The one-sided help made her uncomfortable, but the daily contact became the foundation for real friendships. She confesses to manipulating her post-baby meal train, a sign-up schedule where friends volunteer to bring meals, so that all slots appeared filled, revealing how the list had become a barometer of her worth. She concludes that the deeper need beneath wanting more friends is belonging.

The chapter on body image begins with Strickler's daughter Scout, six years old, in tears over a recess game that names the best-dressed girl captain. Strickler traces her own history of calorie restriction triggered by a high school incident and describes two experiences that shifted her perspective: reading The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, which chronicles how women's exposure to their own reflections expanded over centuries, and spending a summer in a Washington, DC, apartment with only one small mirror, during which she felt markedly happier. She tells the story of Nate's incremental approach to fitness after his father died suddenly at 60 and addresses her own ambivalence about Botox, which she once opposed but has started receiving. She concludes that the day her body stops aging is the day she stops living.

The chapter on money traces Strickler's relationship with wealth to an affluent Charleston upbringing where she spent an entire birthday budget on one pair of designer jeans for the status they conveyed. She introduces the concept of the moving goalpost: As earnings grew, spending expanded without a proportional increase in happiness. She cites Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money and identifies the law of diminishing marginal utility from her own experience: A $100 check from her grandmother thrilled her during their broke newlywed days but held far less excitement once their income grew. She argues that contentment comes from living off less and giving more.

The seventh chapter confronts Strickler's compulsive busyness. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as emergency brakes on her packed schedule, and she adopted the mantra "Nothing but time," watching her children flourish at a slower pace. When Nate left his law firm in May 2022 to work with her on Naptime Kitchen, she filled the new margin with more tasks rather than rest, revealing busyness itself as her core struggle. She presents the mental shift that helped: seeing time as a precious resource rather than an abundant one and making daily decisions about what is worth the cost.

The chapter on anxiety opens with the sudden death of Strickler's uncle in a car accident one week before she left for college, an event that seeded a lifelong anticipation of tragedy. Air travel became her greatest arena of fear; before a family trip to Italy, she texted end-of-life videos to friends. A small-group friend named Maggie offered a reframe: What if Strickler stayed home and got in a car wreck the same week? Beginning in early 2022, she booked flight after flight and discovered that repetition was a form of exposure therapy. She reframes control by cataloging the good things that happened outside her control and concludes there are far more of those than bad.

The ninth chapter uses the 2023 film Barbie and Warren Buffett's distinction between inner and outer scorecards to address comparison. Strickler draws a parallel between the movie's Barbie Land, where no one compares but no one ages or has children, and social media's highlight reels. She defines her inner scorecard: loving her family, having time for her children, and maintaining financial margin to be generous. She argues that happiness is not zero-sum and that the real danger is leaning one's ladder against a wall one never wanted to climb.

The 10th chapter addresses disappointment as distinct from tragedy. Strickler contrasts her euphoric postpartum experience with her third child, Millie, against the devastating one with Alberta: undiagnosed anxiety, erratic moods, and a nursing crisis caused by a prior breast surgery that left one breast nonfunctional. She parallels her story with her sister Anna's two C-sections, both women carrying scars from bodies that did not perform as expected. She argues that welcoming disappointment deepens gratitude and cultivates empathy, citing C.S. Lewis's observation in A Grief Observed that suffering was always promised.

The final chapter returns to the climbing metaphor and to a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit in which the Skin Horse explains that becoming "Real" happens only after being loved for a long time. Strickler describes scrolling through old photos and noticing that what stands out is never the outdated appliances but the people. She acknowledges changing the book's subtitle from past tense to present because these struggles remain active at 35, and declares she wants a life like the Skin Horse's: worn, well-loved, and real.