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Should I Have Kids?

2023/2/28
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Terrible, Thanks For Asking

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Claire McInerney
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Joellen Russell
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Nora McInerney
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Nora McInerney: 探讨了人们对生育的不同态度,并引出Claire McInerney的生育焦虑。 Claire McInerney: 详细描述了她对生育的矛盾心理,一方面喜欢孩子,另一方面又担心气候变化对孩子未来的影响,以及生育带来的经济和社会压力。她经历了2021年德克萨斯州的极端天气事件,这加剧了她对气候变化的担忧,让她开始质疑自己是否应该将孩子带到这个充满不确定性的世界。她与男友Brit讨论了生育问题,Brit的态度比较开放,取决于Claire的意愿。在与气候科学家Joellen Russell的对话中,她开始重新审视自己的焦虑,并逐渐意识到自己应该关注内心的真实感受,而不是被外部因素所左右。最终,她决定跟随自己的内心,去拥抱希望和未来。 Brit: 表达了对Claire的理解和支持,他认为生育的决定应该取决于Claire的意愿,并表示如果Claire想要孩子,他会支持她。 Joellen Russell: 作为一名气候科学家和母亲,她表达了对气候变化的担忧,但也强调了人类应对气候变化的能力和希望。她鼓励Claire不要被恐惧所束缚,要相信人类能够克服挑战,创造一个美好的未来。 Claire McInerney: 在与气候科学家Joellen Russell的对话中,她开始重新审视自己的焦虑,并逐渐意识到自己应该关注内心的真实感受,而不是被外部因素所左右。她意识到自己一直在寻找规则来指导自己的选择,而不是关注自己的内心感受。她最终决定跟随自己的内心,去拥抱希望和未来。

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Claire McInerney discusses her anxiety about having kids due to concerns about climate change and the future of the planet.

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Whenever we've done call-outs to our listeners for the kinds of stories you want to hear or subjects you want us to explore, there is one topic that comes up again and again.

As we talked about it amongst our team, among our team, as we talked about it as a team, one of our producers and, if you are wondering, my second cousin, which is not language I would use, I would just say cousin. She would say second cousin. Her dad's my cousin. Her name is Claire McInerney. And Claire said that she is also very interested in this same topic because it has been top of mind for her for almost a year now.

Today, Claire is going to share her anxiety around the idea of having kids. And she's going to walk us through one of the major hangups she has, and many of you have told us you have, as she makes this decision. The fear around bringing children into a world where climate change is here, baby, and here, and approaching, and, you know...

a world where climate change is. I'm Nora McInerney, and this is Terrible Thanks for Asking. Should I have kids? In my experience, there's three ways people respond to the question, do you want kids? The first I hear is something like, yes, I've always wanted them. I've always envisioned myself as a parent.

These are the people who already have names picked out and love imagining their partner in the role of parent. They daydream about making pancakes on Saturday mornings and creating Christmas traditions unique to their future little family. The second response is, nah, that's not for me. These people are either not interested in parenting or have different goals for their time and money.

They might consider it briefly, but then they adopt three dogs and go to Italy every two years because they can. And they're good with that. The third response doesn't have a pithy summary. There might be a desire to have a family or a love of children, but there's also big hang-ups. Those might have to do with biology, health, their partner or lack of partner, money, politics, or really a million other reasons.

I have this third response, and it's fairly new to me. See, I love kids. My friend's 10-year-old and I have regular dates where I pick him up from school, and we come back to my apartment and bake until his mom is done with work. As a teenager, my after-school job was as a teaching assistant at a daycare.

While all my friends worked at smoothie shops or car washes, I was wrestling sunscreen onto three-year-olds and teaching toddlers how to say "All done" in sign language. I love the energy of kids. I love how they see the world and remind me to be more playful, more goofy, and less serious. Because I've always loved being around kids, I always assumed I would have my own.

I grew up in Kansas in a big religious family, so I never saw anyone make a different choice. I assumed I would also be a mom and have a life that looked like everyone else around me. But now I'm 32 and I've learned that there are a million ways to live life. All the shoulds I grew up with are not binding laws. They're just norms and I don't have to fit into any norm.

I also live in a time where I have access to birth control and I don't have a farm I need to staff or whatever people in the 1800s had 15 kids for. So I have choices and being privileged enough to have a choice caused me to develop some of the hangups I mentioned earlier. For me, I've now watched close friends and family become parents and seen the reality of this huge life change unfold. I've seen postpartum depression up close and

I've listened to one parent talk about the tension in their relationship caused by two adults having to manage literally everything about a small human or human's life. I'm also alive at this particular point in history, where extreme weather events are getting bigger, scarier, and more frequent. Let me be clear. In Williamson County, we are preparing for blizzard conditions.

And those are not ever words that I've heard in my lifetime here in Williamson County. I live in Texas and experienced one of these in 2021 when a winter storm hit the state and caused a five-day electricity blackout that the state's infrastructure could not handle. Millions of us were trapped in our homes with no heat, some without running water, waiting for someone to fix it. When I emerged from that experience, I was deeply shaken.

I had finally seen the realities of climate change up close, and I realized we're all going to experience some sort of climate disaster in our lives. Before that, I had always associated climate change disasters with wildfires out west or the longer hurricane season for places along the Gulf. But after that storm, I realized colder winters or hotter summers and places that aren't prepared for it are devastating.

And I started to feel a lot of anxiety about the future. I felt unsafe thinking about staying in Texas long term. I saw the response from state leaders and it was not good, but I also started having existential anxiety. Would the rest of my life be plagued with crazy weather and political fighting over how to adapt to it? This also started to cloud my thoughts around whether or not I want to have kids.

One of the intrusive thoughts I kept having was, if I have kids now, will I be setting them up to be soldiers in the water wars? Will they ask one day, why did my mother have me when she knew humanity was going in such a bad direction? I was in this position of, I kind of want kids, but should I have them? Is it responsible to have children with the knowledge I have? Is it selfish to have kids if their lived experiences will certainly be worse than mine?

These questions became so consuming because of where I'm at in life. For one, I'm 32, which means I'm closer to the end of my fertility window than the beginning. So I really feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids before it's too late. And the second, I finally met someone I would actually want to parent with. I'm going to have you introduce yourself. Say your name and title. Title? Just say who you are in relation to me.

I'm Brit. I'm your boyfriend. And we live together. I met Brit in February 2021. At the time, the one-year anniversary of the COVID lockdown was approaching. I had just endured that bad winter storm in Texas, and I was having a mental breakdown that I would score a six on a scale of one to ten. When the snow and ice finally thawed, I decided I had enough.

I needed to escape my home, which was now associated with so much trauma. And I needed something new in my life. Like I had watched every season of Grey's Anatomy, which is a lot of television, in three months. So it was clearly time for me to go talk to people in person again. So I downloaded a dating app.

I had literally zero expectations for this. I had been chronically single with short relationships lasting no more than a couple months for like six years. So I was very familiar with online dating and the ups and downs of it. This was the first time I ventured into dating with this attitude of, hey, I'm not trying to find anything specific. I just want to meet some new people, have some small talk. Yes, I was craving small talk after a year of Zoom calls as my main social interaction. And I was

and just bring variety to my life. I found Britt on the app and sent him a message. I liked that he featured some of his art in his profile. He didn't look like a beefcake tech bro, which is very common in Austin. And I don't know, he wasn't trying so hard. He seemed genuine. And that translated to our first few dates. It was easy. We were both ourselves. We wanted to keep talking and getting to know each other. After a month, I fell in love with him.

Our relationship felt like a safe space in my life where we enjoyed the quiet moments like cooking dinner and playing music for one another. And eventually it turned into traveling and having new experiences together. He's an artist and introduced me to collage, an art form that I now love. He brought joy and peace and comfort to my life. And for the first time in my adult life, I felt like

I could share my entire life with this person. So this question of, do I want kids, became very real. Because if I wanted him forever, I had to know if his version of forever included being a parent. We'll be right back. ♪

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It's been seven years since I had my last baby. Seven years, which doesn't feel possible because it feels like I just had him. It goes really fast, except when you're in it, every decision you make feels like a huge one because it is. This is a whole human being and you're responsible for keeping them safe and loved and growing and thriving. By heart gets it.

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I mean, before I ran and got my recorder, we were just talking about like, I'm feeling overwhelmed today. Why? I don't know yet. But I think one of them was we needed to record this conversation and we've only scratched the surface of this topic. Like...

The first time I brought it up, I mean, the timing was horrible. What was it? It was like we were brushing our teeth before. We were like laying in bed about to fall asleep. And then by the end of the conversation, I was like wide awake. This is Britt and I in August of 2022. We had just moved in together and I had just started working on this piece.

One of the first things I wanted to talk to him about on tape was recapping the first time we talked about kids. It was maybe six months into our relationship, and yes, like a psycho, I just blurted it out as we were falling asleep one night. I don't know. Months. Can you accurately recap it? Okay, so the thing I remember was feeling a little surprised at how timid you were about the idea of having your own kids.

because those weren't the context clues I had gotten before. So that was just the takeaway I got. Besides my timing, what was your takeaway from that conversation? I don't know if timid is the word that I would use. Okay. I'm not sure. I don't know. I guess I get what you're saying. Apprehensive.

Sure. Apprehensive. And I kind of early on recognized in you maternal qualities that I liked. And I told you that. And so that makes it sound like I want you to be a mother a little bit. I know. I mean, like literally it was like the first month we were dating. Yeah.

One of the things he said was like, you would be such a good mother. And I think that was the thing I filed away because my whole life I've been like, I assume I'll be a mom one day. So when you said that, I was like, okay, he's on the same page. So then we had this talk and you were sharing more apprehensive feelings. And so that's what surprised me. Well, I feel like I did always say I wasn't sure if I wanted to have kids, but

I can understand me saying that might not have felt underscored for you. So, and both things were true to me. And I guess I've also dated women that didn't give off the quote unquote maternal vibe as I imagined it. Of course, I'm sure that's like what is, we don't have to get into that. And, but I didn't, I didn't like it.

I didn't like perceiving a lack of whatever that quality is. What do you feel, because I don't have nieces and nephews, but you do, and I love them all. I think they're fun. They're all different ages. How do you feel when I'm playing with them or playing with the baby or playing with the little kids? Do you have any sort of reaction? Yeah.

The way we've talked about kids, like the way you talk about your friend, Jess is like loving her kids and not liking anybody else's kids. I find that a little bit relatable. And I think if I had kids, I might be that way. I mean, I don't dislike kids. And I think it's cute when you play with my nieces and nephews. But I'm also just like...

I'm glad somebody wants to do that. So that's one difference between Brit and I on this subject. I've always felt comfortable around kids, so I'm not as intimidated by the day-to-day realities. That first night I brought it up, he told me he always assumed he'd make the decision when he met someone he wanted to be with. If they were passionate about having kids, he would consider it. If they didn't want them, he'd be fine too.

Instead, he met me, who's had a different answer every day. I would say that I'm less apprehensive than when we had this conversation. Was it like eight months ago? It was a while ago. It was a while ago. What do you think has changed? Do you think it's our partnership and feeling like we would have someone to rely on? Yeah, I think it's definitely that our partnership has grown stronger. It's...

Yeah, I think eight months ago I would have still had plenty more questions about our relationship just because it was so fresh. That is a big part of it. But the apprehensions, which I didn't answer your question, it feels like the world is getting more insane every day. And I do understand that for most of human history, having a child was like rollercoaster

Rolling the dice anyway. I understand that things for most of human history have been rough and tumble, but at the same time, it just feels like things are ratcheting it up and...

You have to at least consider that things are becoming less stable. And sure, things, again, throughout history have not been stable. But historically, in our recent history, that is what we were taught to believe, that progress and relative stability is sort of normal when it's really actually very abnormal. Yeah.

And it feels like we're going back to instability. And I don't know what that means. And because I don't know what that means, it really scares me. And, you know, we're in an apartment that we rent that we're going to get priced out of next year. And I'm in a job I don't like. Like, I can't underscore enough. We both work in industries, especially when I was working in a newsroom, that underpay you. And yet...

In your case, you took out so much money in student debt because you needed a master's degree to do architecture, and then they pay you so little. And so the finances are such a real part of that, like societal instability. We work professional jobs. If we had a kid, things would get so tight so fast financially, or savings would be really hard to do and stuff like that. Right. They would be. And I...

I think we're already like taking some of the first steps in thinking about this, even whether or not we had a kid moving to a cheaper city as we're discussing. Something I know you've thought a lot about that I'm trying to learn more about is the climate change of it all. So will you talk a little bit about what you've read a lot? I know a lot of books and stuff about climate change and how that's factoring into your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny, that's not like the first thing I say because it's so extremely...

a part of everything now that it's like feels so obvious. I don't even bring it up first as like a reason not to have children. I think like for a long time, and I'm, I'm obviously not going to be like the climate change expert here and get all into it. There was a time I didn't know anything about climate change except what everybody knows. And I thought, Oh, I'd like to read some books about this. And I came out the other side feeling very strange because I,

You suddenly see that... I don't know how to put it into words.

You come out the other side feeling like we're kind of insane, obviously, for the way we're living, but also that even if you read it all, you really can't grasp the enormity of it. And it's just people think it's just rising seas and crazier weather. But it's just the fact that there's going to be more famine that's going to cause more wars. It's going to be more countries with nukes that their people are hungry. What is it all going to mean?

We don't really know. We really don't know. At least I sure don't. But climate change is one of the hangups I have. I get very stressed out when I think about how my life is going to look different as I age because of it. And then I kind of lose my breath when I think about what the world is going to look like decades from now. When we come back, I'm going to explore a little bit more about my climate anxiety. We're back. A couple months ago, I was walking our dogs in the morning and listening to NPR.

And I heard a story about new homes being built out West in Arizona or Utah or somewhere like that. Even though there are concerns about getting enough water to these new subdivisions, like the city in question wasn't positive. They could get water to this location, but still the homes were being built. I thought about that story all day. I thought about how stupid it is that developers have more of a say than the water department, but

I thought about how things like this are probably happening in other places too. Because the desire to make money often wins over us being a little bit uncomfortable. And by uncomfortable, I mean we can't buy a four-bedroom house in a state where there is a massive drought. It's stuff like that that causes me so much anxiety. I don't feel super hopeful. I look around and I see greed overtaking common sense.

And part of me wonders if it's downright dangerous to have a kid. I know this is very doom and gloom, but I know so many people who have similar outlooks when it comes to climate change. Personally, I feel like I'm giving climate change the drama it deserves. I feel like I'm being smart and cautious by recognizing the poor choices we are making as a society. But my mindset really shifted when I talked to Joellen Russell.

I'm a distinguished professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and I am an oceanographer and climate modeler. I use robot floats, supercomputers, and satellites to try and tell the future. And studying the ocean's role in climate change is super important, as I learned from her.

Burning fossil fuels like we have for decades puts more CO2 in the atmosphere. When you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you're basically putting, thickening the blankets around the earth, like you're down sleeping bags. The more down, the more loft, the warmer the bag is. And that's what's happening. About the same amount of radiation is coming in from the sun every year, but less is getting out.

And that less is getting out is basically the whole planetary system warming. Now, a fraction of that, about 3%, goes into warming our atmosphere, which is what we feel.

A fraction of that goes into melting ice, like in Antarctica or Greenland or Glacier National Park. And most of it, 93%, is warming our ocean. But the big thing is, and this affects every nation, well, it will affect everybody, but anybody with a coast, is sea level rise. The warmer the water is, it literally makes the molecules more excited and they take up more room. The warmer it gets.

Hi, it's Nora with a little bit of an update. Terrible Things for Asking is on an indefinite hiatus, which means that for the foreseeable future, you won't see new episodes in the main feed. But if you want to support the work that we've done, get access to our entire back catalog with no ads, you can do that by clicking on the link in the description.

You can join us on Patreon at patreon.com slash ttfa or on Apple+. We are still making two episodes a month for subscribers, which is a sustainable workload for us emotionally and financially.

There are still plenty of episodes here for free on the main feed, so no pressure. But if you want to join a community of terribles, come over to Patreon. And if you just want more terrible, join on Apple Plus. So this is what I expected from the interview with a climate scientist. A detailed, scientific look at exactly how we're all going to be screwed. But of all the scientists I found on Google and who responded to my emails...

I interviewed Joellen because she's also a mom. More specifically, I found Joellen through a group called Science Moms, which is a group of climate scientists and mothers from around the country, and they educate the public on solutions to our climate crisis. As I was poking around their website, I noticed it didn't have a tone of impending apocalypse, but instead hope,

And Joellen herself is the most hopeful person I've talked to about climate change. She grew up in rural Alaska and knew early on she wanted to be a scientist, which made her assume that she'd have to make a lot of sacrifices, including her desire to be a mom. I never expected this to be my life. I expected to end up alone. I'd never find a partner who really wanted to hang out with someone so obsessed.

And that that meant I wouldn't really be able to provide for or have sweethearts, babies in my life. I have a great Aunt Mary Ellen who's passed now, but she was a geologist and a mathematician and was the first woman engineer at Boeing. And she never married and never had children. So I had a model for what that might look like. And she had an amazing life.

And I love her so. But I got lucky because the world has more room for women scientists than I thought. And now with these sisters of mine and science moms, as well as all the other colleagues I have, you know, around the world and across the country, it's amazing.

amazing. The world turned out to be a much more amazing place than I thought it was. So when everybody asks, so how can we be a climate scientist and smile and laugh and giggle about all this? I'm like, because it's better than I thought. And her hope extends to the climate crisis. She works in a field with a lot of smart people who have ideas and solutions to this massive problem.

And she truly believes that we can fix it and we can keep planet Earth safe and habitable for humans. Here's the thing about climate change. I bet you didn't know that the U.S. has already gone from over 21 percent of carbon emissions to 13. Not only that, but we've cut our emissions by over 20 percent and we very likely will cut our emissions by 50 percent by about 2034.

So we're in an innovation race. And I just think we need as moms and potential moms, I think we need to keep our eye on the prize, which is better living.

I don't want to just give a bunch of companies money to, you know, rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. I don't want greenwashing. I want real progress. I want measurable metrics that where we can reward companies with our business and our help when they're doing good things. And I want to, I want to boycott the ones that refuse to change for us because

We can engineer our way, right? This adaptation game, we're rich and we're clever and we have all these universities. I mean, everybody's working on how to live that better life. I don't see the US actually suffering much. I don't. I do see that we're going to have to learn to share because there are a lot of other countries that are not going to be able to adapt as quickly as we do.

And I keep thinking, though, that the best thing, the best way to raise all boats at the same time is to accelerate that tech development, which we can then, once it gets cheap, like solar panels, et cetera, then more and more people can take advantage, right? It's that virtuous kind of cycle where you drive the price down by adopting it early here in the U.S. when we can afford to be innovative, and then eventually it gets so cheap that everybody does it. I'm like, whoo!

Now, I live in Texas, where the elected officials have always and still prioritized the oil and gas industry. I spent almost 10 years working in local news, so I was always aware of the conversations happening in state politics. Personally, I hated it because it was so predictable.

There was no willingness to learn and discuss how to make life better for constituents. It was just the same arguments over and over. You either fell on one side of the issue or the other. It felt like there was no nuance, no innovation. Watching state politics up close absolutely contributed to my feeling of hopelessness around whether or not we will save our own planet. Joellen told me about a lot of initiatives and changes happening around the country already.

And she truly believes we will cut our emissions to a point that will keep us from a Mad Max type battle situation over drinking water. Or, you know, maybe we'll avoid those wars Britt mentioned earlier over food. But I'm still skeptical. And I told her this. All these solutions she's excited about from academics and scientists would have to be embraced by political leaders. And I don't know if I have faith in them.

Part of it too is, and I hate saying this because it's a little mean, is age. Most of the folks who are 60 plus never had anything like climate change in school. All the people on TV seem to all they ever talk about is what we're fighting and who we don't like and how wrong everybody is. And I keep thinking,

Why aren't they talking ever about what we got right? What is improving? What's on the way so that everybody will know what the cookie cutter is? Like, I want to apply that to my life. I want to apply that to my town. Like, it's not a miracle. It's just regular people making wise decisions for their prosperity and for their great grandchildren's prosperity. And one of the things I keep thinking is, yes, you should have babies. And the reason is because there are hope.

Nobody should have kids unless they really want them. I am deeply committed to nobody should have children unless they want them. But we're also telling people that they shouldn't have them because it's too ugly and dark and that we're doing bad things to ourselves. And I think...

That's not right. Come be in our village. There's room. And we need those babies because they're the ones that will step over us and up that hill. They will. I see it every day. Our students here at the University of Arizona, just, they're amazing. And I just am so thrilled. Joellen helped me realize I'm giving power to the less innovative people.

I've been standing in front of the politicians and seeing no progress, but I haven't turned around to see the army of people who actually know about this, who are fighting for it, who have come up with solutions and have plans for saving the planet. She chooses to face the direction of hope and progress. And I realized I've been scared to do that.

I used to look at my friends and acquaintances who have kids as slightly naive. I know this is so judgy and rude, but here we are.

I would think, don't you all feel anxiety about this? You're going to personally contribute thousands of dirty diapers to a landfill, send your kids to an education system that is under-resourced, hope you yourself don't suffer mental or physical illness because of birth because our healthcare system does not make it easy for moms, and then maybe, maybe go broke in the process? Have you thought about all of that, pregnant Instagram friends? I do have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and I am a Libra,

So it is exhausting in my head because I'm always considering all sides of an issue. I don't really understand following my gut. I'm often overthinking anything my gut has to say. But I have been thinking about this question for a year now. I've been writing a lot about it and interviewing a lot of people. I talked to my friends with kids and without. I talked to lots of professors. And I realized I was looking for answers. But it was the conversation with Joellen that actually shifted something in me.

And it wasn't her personal experience that convinced me of anything or any facts she shared that swayed me one way or another. It was simply her saying, hey, if you want kids, I think you should have them. I've been asking myself the wrong question. I've been focused on all of the shitty things going on in the world and assuming they would make the life of my potential child worse. So I wanted someone to give me rules to follow. Rules like, hey, if you have a kid, that means you don't care about climate change or

Turns out nobody said that to me. So many things contribute to climate change, things bigger than me and my womb, that people with way more power need to address. But I think I wanted a rule because then I could feel like I made the quote-unquote right decision, that I made a moral choice. I now know there's no rules.

People who study climate change don't feel like not having kids is a solution. Plenty of climate scientists have written about the joy of having kids despite this reality. And it's not just climate change that makes me weary about becoming a parent. It's money, bad systems here in the U.S., and a general lack of passion about having a baby in my arms right now. I constantly go back and forth.

Some days, I can imagine how becoming a mother and having a child would make my life bigger and more meaningful. Other days, it sounds overwhelming and suffocating. I thought this back and forth meant that I wasn't sure about what I wanted. But after talking to so many people, I learned this is normal. My best friend has two kids and has been a mom since she was in her early 20s.

Every time I talk to her on the phone, she expresses how much she's craving a trip, just the two of us, where she doesn't have to be in mom mode. And then every time we're on a trip like that, she tells me she desperately misses her kids. Nothing is great all the time. Nothing is horrible all the time. And nothing lasts forever.

I've been asking the question, "Should I have kids?" And maybe this is obvious to you all, but after months of working on this essay and talking to dozens of people, I realized the question I've been asking myself is wrong. The question should be, "Do I want them?" And when I ask myself that question, I am flooded with so many different feelings. I love kids. I'm scared of parenthood. I want my life to be filled with love and connection. I also want simplicity and peace.

I have no idea if any of that fits together. But whether or not I have kids, I think life will always be filled with contradictions and complicated feelings. This past Christmas, we spent time with Britt's family, including his nieces and nephews. One night, we were at his sister's house, and for an hour, all the adults sat around the kitchen table talking and watching her 15-month-old play with spoons.

Well, KB is going back and forth between the kitchen island and the dining room table. She has a drawer in the kitchen island that has a bunch of spoons in it, and she's collecting them and bringing them to my mother. Watching a baby play with spoons feels like watching the leaves on a tree blow in a breeze.

It's a bit meditative, and it's a simple joy that I don't often experience. The softness of her little, fragile life makes me feel soft. And that's gotta be why parents feel scared. I guess all my fears about climate change have come down to that. I recognize that being human is so vulnerable, because I live it every day. I see how the world has punctured and deflated me. I don't want to force that onto anyone else. But I've also laughed at a baby handing her grandmother spoons.

I found a stranger on the internet and given him my heart. Being soft has brought me so much joy, despite the danger of it being ruined. So, do I want kids? Yeah, I think I do. Am I ready for kids? Am I ready to lean into hope? Am I ready to have faith? I'm getting there.

This has been terrible. Thanks for asking. That was Claire McInerney, who wants you to know that she is not my first cousin. She is my second cousin. I'm Nora McInerney. I created this podcast and I still make this podcast with our independent production company, Feelings & Co. Our team is Marcel Malakibu, myself, Nora McInerney, Jordan Turgeon, Claire McInerney, Megan Palmer, Larissa Witcher, and Eugene Kidd.

We get support from advertisers. We get support from you listening to this show. We get support from you sharing this show with people, rating and reviewing it. And if you feel like you are capable of doing and are interested in supporting us financially, it really does help. Helps us make this show independently. I'm hearing a lot about the economy, guys. Do I understand it? Absolutely not. I refuse to. Although I really did enjoy economics when I took it in high school. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Supply and demand. You're onto something here. You are onto something here. But if you have a demand for the show and you would like us to supply it, don't ask me to elaborate further on what supply and demand means, but we do have ways that you can contribute to the show financially in a way that makes sense to you so we can keep making it for you. You can find out more at ttfa.org slash premium. We will always link it in our show notes.

Oh, good job, Claire. I'm making this. And actually, I am recording this two minutes before my own children get home from school because I like to procrastinate a task and tell the threat of a six-year-old bursting in a closed door. I got a light-up sign like an old radio station, or I mean just any radio station. The radio station where we used to record this had like on-air signs so you wouldn't open a door.

I opened one once when someone was recording because it just, it was at a weird height. Like, I'm tall. It was at my eye height. I somehow didn't see it. It did not go over well. But I put this at what I think is a conspicuous place for the kids and then I can turn it on. And then, you know, it's supposed to indicate mom's recording. Try not to...

Antagonize the dogs. Antagonize a sibling. Start a brawl. Open the door and ask for a piece of candy. You know that's not an after-school snack. In no way is that an after-school snack. Always ask, though. They always, always, always ask. So the sign is on, and the six-year-old opens the door. I'm like, dude. And he's like, what? And the sign's on. He goes, I can't read. Look, I know that you can't, but...

At least one of those words on air is what the sign says. At least one of those is a sight word. And really just if it's lit up, you can, you know, you should, you know, but it was funny. He's funny. I can't read, you know, good point. Good point. You are in kindergarten, but, uh, okay. Thanks guys. I really love this job. So thank you for, um, making it possible to do it.

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