0:00

even if you're perfectly healthy and your kids are perfectly

0:02

healthy, I don't believe people are meant to do

0:04

this, you know, two parents plus

0:08

kids. It's too few people.

0:10

I'm going to say nothing of one parent

0:12

plus kids.

0:17

This is Death, Sex, and

0:19

Money. The

0:22

show from WNYC about

0:24

the things we think about a lot and

0:27

need to talk about more. I'm

0:30

Anna Sale. Journalist

0:38

Ezra Klein explores a wide-ranging

0:40

beat on his podcast and in his column

0:42

at The New York Times. He's interested

0:45

in how policy systems interact

0:47

with Americans' political identities

0:50

and how all that trickles down in each

0:52

of our lives. And like

0:54

many of us, the past few years have

0:56

been characterized by a lot of upheaval

0:58

in his life. The year before the pandemic,

1:01

he and his wife had moved across the country,

1:04

from Washington, D.C., to the San Francisco

1:06

Bay Area.

1:07

And what kicks off then is a

1:12

four- to five-year period, depending on how you count it, where

1:15

my partner got very sick

1:18

in very mysterious ways, interacted

1:22

with two pregnancies in fundamentally disastrous

1:24

ways.

1:26

Their workplaces shut down, they

1:28

didn't have family locally, and earlier

1:30

this year, they decided they couldn't stay.

1:34

It really was because that was just too

1:36

hard. It was

1:38

too hard to be there with young kids

1:41

and one of us being sick, without

1:44

family support,

1:45

without a kind of deeper,

1:48

more connected community. There's

1:51

a lot I love about California, but it wasn't, it

1:53

did not work

1:54

well enough for the entire family. And they moved to New York

1:57

City, not far from where he was.

1:59

a place I think of when I think,

2:02

how do I add more ease to my life? But

2:05

it worked for both his job and his wife's job,

2:07

and there was more extended family nearby. You

2:10

know, everybody's life is complicated. I

2:13

think one thing I'll be honest, I'm uncomfortable

2:16

even talking about this with you. And

2:19

one reason I'm uncomfortable talking

2:22

about all these decisions through the lens

2:24

of my experience of them.

2:26

And one reason I also want

2:28

to be careful about how much of this story I'm the one

2:30

telling is that they make it

2:33

sound like I'm the protagonist of all of it. But

2:36

the truth of the, like the beautiful truth

2:38

of being in a marriage, of being in a family, is that it's

2:40

not that, you know, there's no one protagonist.

2:44

That's

2:44

the thing about being a family,

2:46

he told me. Your story is made

2:49

up of a lot of different people's needs. I'm

2:51

a listener to Ezra's podcast, the

2:54

Ezra Klein Show, and I've picked

2:56

up on how he's been wrestling with some of these

2:58

big transitions. He'll offer

3:00

asides about how it doesn't feel like

3:02

the architecture of American life sufficiently

3:05

supports families of young kids. Or

3:08

he'll wonder out loud about the big forces

3:11

undermining our ability to live in community

3:14

and what makes

3:14

us feel less alone. He

3:16

told me, as they considered where to move, Ezra

3:19

realized his sense of community

3:21

is less about place and

3:24

more about where his people are gathered. Like

3:27

his hometown, it's not somewhere he ever

3:29

felt particularly rooted.

3:31

So I grew up in Irvine, which

3:33

is very suburban. Both

3:36

of my parents moved there

3:38

as adults and well

3:41

into their adulthood. My father is

3:43

a Brazilian immigrant. My

3:45

immediate and extended family

3:47

in the United States is very small. And

3:51

Irvine

3:52

has, well, I don't want to speak

3:55

for suburbs, but my experience

3:57

of it was not highly communal.

4:00

very car-oriented,

4:02

very single-family home-oriented. And

4:07

so it's actually a real delight

4:09

of

4:11

being in Washington, D.C., which is, I think, a

4:13

place really well-built for community, where

4:15

the built environment does foster it, where

4:18

when I was there, I was part of its

4:21

dominant industry, so to speak. I mean,

4:23

people often say as a way

4:25

of maligning Washington that

4:27

it's a one-company town. But

4:29

if you're part of the company, that can actually

4:31

be quite wonderful, because

4:34

there are so many people who do something of relevance

4:36

to you or you of relevance to them, and it

4:39

creates a lot of space in which to get to know people.

4:42

Ezra arrived in Washington at 21,

4:45

just after graduating from UCLA. He lived there

4:47

for 13 years. So

4:50

Washington, and living there as I did

4:52

for a long time, was the first place

4:54

I felt embedded in

4:56

a deep and wide community. And

4:59

that was a really beautiful feeling. And

5:02

did you immediately move into a housing situation

5:05

where you were living with other people? Yeah,

5:08

they're not people I knew. So I immediately

5:11

moved into a housing situation with somebody I met on Craigslist,

5:14

because you don't make a ton of money as a writing fellow at

5:16

the American Prospect. And

5:19

that was not an ideal

5:21

situation. And I was lucky

5:23

to meet

5:24

other young journalists over the months after

5:26

that, such that I don't

5:29

remember exactly how long it was after, but

5:31

I moved into a group house of

5:34

two other journalists and

5:36

an education policy wonk

5:40

for years, which was just

5:42

a real joy of a home. And that

5:45

for me really was

5:47

a beautiful experience that formed me in many ways. And

5:50

I remember the easy

5:53

intimacy and the atmospherics of that,

5:55

right? The way in which

5:57

you would come downstairs.

5:59

there who you liked. And

6:02

it was okay if you didn't hang out, but you also could.

6:04

And that was

6:06

great. So I was

6:08

lucky to fall into, not just

6:11

fall into, I mean helped create was one of the, you

6:13

know, it was, we found a house together, but it

6:15

was really lucky to fall into a

6:18

situation that was much more intentional pretty quickly.

6:21

Uh-huh. Is this, the

6:23

New Republic wrote a piece about you some years

6:26

ago where they described this phase of your life as

6:29

they rented houses together where they sat and boyish

6:31

semi-filth and blogged. Is

6:34

that that life phase

6:34

you're describing? Yeah, I mean, I

6:36

would say it was... Like your boyish semi-filth. I would

6:39

say it was filth, but sure.

6:41

And you described it

6:43

as group housing as opposed to

6:45

like getting a place with roommates who you

6:48

knew. Like did it have a, was there sort of an

6:50

ethos around we

6:53

are living together in a group with these sorts

6:55

of intentional

6:57

expectations? Like, did

6:59

it have like a co-op feel? Were there

7:02

like meal, you know, did you prepare

7:04

meals for each other or was it more

7:06

like you shared rent and signed a lease

7:08

together?

7:09

Look, you can be in a home, as

7:11

you say, where you live with people or you live with

7:14

people you know, or you get to know, but what's happened

7:16

is you're sharing rent.

7:18

And that wasn't really the way of it,

7:20

but it wasn't like we had a family dinner on Tuesday nights

7:23

either. We just,

7:24

we had a great rapport with each other. We

7:26

were friends. We were in similar industries.

7:29

Our friends outside of that home were

7:31

the same friends. I mean, not, you

7:33

know, a hundred percent, but to a large extent. So

7:36

it isn't just that we saw each other at home, but we saw each

7:38

other when we went out too. And

7:41

so it had a quality of

7:44

living shared lives

7:47

that,

7:48

again, was not something that, you know,

7:50

we all went out for

7:52

a dinner before we moved in together and said, how do

7:54

we want this to look? Well, you know, we're, we're,

7:56

we're making a commitment to each other.

8:00

all of us just trying to find some housing at that point.

8:02

But it grew in a beautiful way. How

8:05

many years was it the same group of people? Four,

8:08

I believe. And when

8:10

you left that living situation,

8:14

why did you leave? I moved in with

8:16

my now wife. And when you

8:18

left, did you kind of acknowledge

8:20

that there was a loss that

8:23

was happening? I

8:25

don't think when I left, I understood

8:28

the loss that was happening. It's

8:30

funny, I have thought a

8:33

lot in later

8:36

years, these years, but before

8:38

now, that

8:41

that what a punctuated

8:43

period of time that was

8:46

to live with a bunch of friends in that

8:48

way.

8:49

And when I

8:52

think about the

8:55

arrow of time in my own life,

8:57

one of the places

9:00

where that really pierces for me is

9:03

a recognition that you won't relive

9:06

your early 20s,

9:08

trying to make it

9:09

alongside a bunch of your friends in

9:11

a filthy house where the back porch might

9:14

collapse during any one of the parties you hold. I

9:16

mean, honestly, it's a wonder nobody died. And

9:20

that you'll have that kind of easy camaraderie

9:22

and that your problems will be small and largely

9:25

self-created. I mean, we were lucky, right?

9:28

And I

9:29

don't really look back

9:32

on college fondly and

9:34

I don't look back on high school fondly, but

9:36

I do look back on that very fondly. I mean, that was

9:39

a real chosen community, chosen

9:41

family situation. And I mean, it endures.

9:43

I just moved to New

9:45

York and, you know, who did I see last weekend, but one of my

9:48

roommates from that house.

9:49

I know this feeling of

9:51

loss, of

9:58

having

9:58

found a community with easy... camaraderie,

10:01

and then you leave it and miss it when

10:03

it's gone. For me, that

10:06

didn't happen in a post-college group house.

10:09

It's been in smaller cities and rural

10:11

communities, where I grew up in West Virginia

10:14

or in Wyoming, where I spend a lot of time

10:16

now because my husband studies wildlife

10:18

around Yellowstone. In those

10:21

places, I've felt that connectedness

10:24

that comes from knowing it matters you're there.

10:27

And also, like I'm known, even

10:29

if

10:29

it's just from spontaneous chats in the grocery

10:32

store aisle. But most

10:34

of the time, I live now with my family

10:37

in a big metropolitan area in the San

10:39

Francisco Bay Area, where

10:41

I usually get my groceries delivered. There

10:44

are a lot more economic opportunities

10:46

and diverse communities to tap

10:48

into, but that takes more effort,

10:51

more time, and generally more money.

10:54

It can be confusing, this tension

10:57

between stimulation and opportunity

10:59

on one side and on the other, that

11:02

feeling of interconnected care. And

11:04

like Ezra, it's made me curious

11:07

about other ways of building community.

11:10

For him, that meant heading to the

11:12

desert. At what point

11:14

did you start going to Burning Man? I

11:20

went to Burning Man for the first time in 2015. Oh,

11:26

so you were married, you

11:28

had long passed this sort of early 20s phase. I

11:32

was a much more serious, respectable person

11:35

in my 20s than I am now. I

11:38

don't think there's any doubt about that.

11:42

Burning Man, of course, is the gathering in

11:44

the Nevada desert that started in the

11:46

mid 80s as a pop-up campout

11:48

of artists and bohemians and

11:50

is now a ticketed event that attracts upwards

11:53

of 80,000 people a year.

11:54

Still artists and bohemians and

11:57

also celebrities, tech workers, and

11:59

the Silicon Valley. Why

12:01

did you decide to go to the desert in 2015? What were you curious

12:03

about? I don't

12:06

think you could have found anybody who is further away

12:08

from the kind of person who would go to Burning Man than me.

12:12

But my best

12:14

friend from childhood, a

12:16

guy named Grant, had been going for some years

12:19

at that point. Not that many, but a couple of years. And

12:23

Grant, in every part of her life, has

12:25

been cooler, more farsighted, and more interesting

12:27

than me. And

12:29

I trust him completely. And

12:32

even so, when he was telling me I should go to this, I did not

12:34

trust him. I was like, that's ridiculous. I

12:37

know what that is. You know, I've

12:39

seen the pictures. But I

12:41

was starting Vox at

12:43

that time, the sort of explanatory news

12:45

site. And I

12:47

was stressed out in

12:50

a way I couldn't seem to come down from.

12:53

So my ability to

12:56

phase out of my work

12:58

and rest on a weekend or at

13:01

night had evaporated.

13:04

But what made it... what

13:07

got me to say yes was I came

13:10

to realize I needed to take

13:12

time off. That was going to be such

13:14

a shock to my system.

13:16

So different than what I did day to day. That

13:19

it would stop me from thinking about work. That's

13:22

what got me to go. When you landed

13:24

there, did

13:27

you recognize it as an experiment

13:29

in different ways of forming community? I

13:35

think... people have a lot of ideas about parting man. I

13:39

want to admit that upfront. And

13:41

I think

13:42

that first

13:45

it's a very overwhelming place to be. Particularly

13:48

if you've never experienced anything like it. I was not a festival goer before

13:50

that. I hadn't been

13:52

to Coachella or really

13:55

anything. And so I

13:57

would say the first time I didn't...

13:59

It was a little hard to

14:01

think about anything at all, which was to be fair the

14:03

point. And what was really

14:05

beautiful and

14:07

unusual for me about the experience was

14:09

to exist for a week without

14:12

any referent at all to

14:14

my public personality, to my professional

14:16

personality.

14:18

It's interesting for being a place in

14:20

which you have a

14:23

set of social mores that tilts like 15 degrees

14:25

on its axis. So it's very coherent.

14:28

You can't give anybody money for anything. You can't

14:30

trade things. It's gifting. It's

14:33

very emotionally open

14:35

with people you don't know really at all. It's very

14:37

participatory. Yeah.

14:39

Did you wear different clothes?

14:42

Yeah, it would have been quite weird if I had wandered. I mean,

14:44

actually, in a way, it would have been amazing

14:46

costuming if I had gone just sort of wandering

14:49

around like I was about to appear on hardball. And

14:52

it would have been like that for me to go. You

14:55

know, in jeans, a blazer,

14:58

a tie, a button down. In

15:01

some ways now, I regret that I didn't.

15:03

How many times have you been now? More

15:06

than I'm prepared to admit. I

15:10

think the reason I ask about Burning Man

15:12

is to me, it's just

15:14

like, I

15:18

wonder if you've thought about it as like

15:20

an example of like, if you come

15:22

up with a totally

15:25

different way of scaffolding your life, there's a way

15:27

you can like

15:28

pop something up that feels really different. Yeah,

15:32

you asked about that. Yeah,

15:34

you asked about the first time, which

15:37

was a different kind of experience. Over time, yeah,

15:40

it does force you to think about some of those questions.

15:42

I mean, you might go, people's, I think,

15:44

impression of it is a big party in the desert. Not a wrong

15:46

impression. The way

15:49

I tell people to think about it is it's adult summer

15:51

camp. It's an amazing space for a building

15:54

community. I mean, and that is fundamentally

15:56

what it is designed for. People who go back year

15:58

after year, I think, are not.

17:59

This is Death, Sex, and Money from WNYC.

18:02

I'm Anna Sale. Ezra

18:04

Klein's first child was born in 2019. Their

18:08

second was born two years later in the midst

18:10

of pandemic chaos. Both

18:13

times, his wife, Annie Lowry, had

18:15

really difficult pregnancies with dangerous

18:18

and mysterious complications that

18:20

took some time for doctors to figure

18:22

out and treat. Annie's also

18:25

a journalist, a staff writer for The Atlantic,

18:28

and she's written quite beautifully

18:30

about beginning motherhood with her own health

18:32

crises and life-threatening

18:34

complications. This

18:36

happened to her, with Ezra beside

18:39

her,

18:39

unable to share those costs or

18:42

fix any of them.

18:44

I want to ask you about your

18:47

experience as a father. And

18:50

I want to ask you about your

18:53

earliest experiences of fatherhood, because

18:55

it

18:58

was really hard. Your wife,

19:00

Annie Lowry, has written about the very difficult

19:03

pregnancies she experienced, dangerous

19:05

childbirth. There's a piece we'll

19:07

put in our show notes that she wrote in The Atlantic, where

19:09

she's a staff writer. And

19:12

I don't want to ask you necessarily to

19:15

tell her experience of it, but I just,

19:18

when you think about how

19:22

that affected your

19:26

earliest sense of what it was to be a father

19:30

and a co-parent, that you had a partner

19:33

who was recovering, was having health

19:36

difficulties, where there were really

19:38

scary things happening,

19:42

how do you think that shaped the way you thought about what

19:44

fatherhood was

19:46

going to do to you, was going to change you? I'm

19:51

not sure that what it changed for me was

19:53

so much my sense of being a father than being a husband. The

19:58

person who suffered the most,

19:59

most in all of this was Annie. And

20:04

that it was

20:06

the worst thing I have gone through to watch

20:08

her go through it does

20:10

not like make what I went through equal to what

20:13

she went through. And

20:15

the birth of particularly our older son was very scary

20:17

and we were in the NICU for some time and

20:20

he was very premature and very small. And

20:23

so there was a tremendous amount of fear early

20:25

on.

20:26

We're

20:30

unbelievably lucky and blessed that he's

20:33

beyond healthy.

20:37

But you know, there was always a sense that it could have

20:39

gone the other way. And

20:41

I mean,

20:45

I have a lot of thoughts following

20:47

from this. It did something strange to me, which

20:49

is it may be I was pro-choice politically,

20:52

but I'm much more, much more fundamentally

20:54

pro-choice emotionally now than I used to be. What

20:57

I've watched my wife go through, it

20:59

is no

21:00

person's right to make

21:02

a person go through what she went through. It

21:05

would not be safe for her to be pregnant again. The idea that

21:07

there are states that would say, well, because

21:09

you can't necessarily prove that you'll die, you got

21:12

to roll the dice on that one. I

21:14

find it repulsive.

21:20

Not that I don't respect the

21:25

thinking that goes there, but I

21:27

think it's often very abstract. The abstract

21:31

question of fetal personhood

21:34

versus the actual personhood of the parent of the mother. It's

21:39

sometimes hard for me to see these conversations. I've seen people in these

21:43

conversations say, oh, it's, you know, most pregnancies

21:45

are fine. Something that happens when

21:47

you're near, when you're the

21:49

partner in a pregnancy that isn't fine is

21:53

that people come out of the woodwork to tell you about what

21:55

happened to them.

22:00

At least around me, a lot of pregnancies

22:02

were not fine.

22:05

And a lot of people suffer tremendously and

22:07

carry those scars. And I mean, sometimes I don't,

22:10

that's not just psychological. Sometimes it is lifelong

22:12

physical scarring.

22:15

And, you know,

22:17

and we had young kids, I mean, a

22:19

young kid, and then young kids during

22:21

this period. And so

22:24

there's also a certain set of difficulties

22:26

being, you know, the parent who's healthy in that situation.

22:31

In Ezra's life, it was a health crisis

22:33

that brought this all into relief. For

22:36

other families, it can be any kind

22:38

of stress or breakdown in routine that

22:40

reveal the limits of relying on

22:43

just parents when you're raising a family.

22:46

This is not how human beings raise children.

22:48

And if you

22:50

end up in a kind of extreme version of it, as we did,

22:53

you know, unwittingly, you really

22:55

realize that. And you realize also for

22:57

the kids, like, they need more

22:59

people around. They need people who aren't exhausted

23:02

all the time around. They need people who have their heads

23:04

above water. And so,

23:06

like, that's a deep part of my thinking about parenting too, not just

23:08

parenting my children but

23:11

wanting to be there for friends.

23:14

I don't think we're meant to do this alone. I

23:17

think too much, too

23:19

much can go wrong. And even when nothing has gone wrong, too

23:22

much goes wrong for that to

23:24

be a reasonable ask. I

23:27

just believe we're living through a mistake. And

23:30

I think you see the consequences of that all over. I

23:33

mean, I think you see it in loneliness statistics, but

23:35

it's become, I mean, you know, I hear these debates

23:37

sometimes, but they seem to me sometimes

23:39

to be mystified. It's something completely

23:42

obvious. People don't have more kids because

23:44

it becomes at a sort of an unimaginable how

23:46

you would do that again, how

23:48

you would pay for that again, how you would,

23:50

you know, build your relationship

23:52

through that again. And

23:55

that isn't just a policy problem. It's

23:57

a cultural question. But

24:00

I think it should also be understood to some degree

24:02

as a cultural mistake. Like I don't think you should look

24:04

at a society where we have epidemic

24:07

level loneliness,

24:08

terrible levels of teenage depression, anxiety,

24:11

suicidality, and

24:13

a sharply declining birth rate.

24:16

And a lot of people saying they're having fewer kids

24:18

than they wanna have.

24:20

While it is the richest society the

24:22

world has ever known and think, huh, we really nailed that

24:25

one. Like something here is going wrong.

24:28

Mm-hmm. I think this is

24:30

a societal problem that has become individualized

24:32

onto families.

24:34

And the reason it can be individualized onto

24:36

families

24:38

is that the acute period of it passes.

24:41

You know, when the kids become, you know, everybody's

24:43

over five years old or something, you know, different

24:45

families put the age at a different point.

24:48

It gets a lot easier.

24:50

And so then the pressure people might have

24:52

to say, something's wrong here, we need to fix it, goes

24:54

away.

24:55

It just, but it doesn't really pass, right? It just moved

24:57

onto the next people.

24:58

Yeah. I mean, I guess, when

25:03

I think about the miscalculation, like the way I

25:05

think about it often is like

25:09

the communities I've chosen to like

25:11

live in and raise my family in.

25:14

Because that's where

25:16

I have thought about it. It's not only

25:19

that it's like really hard to have kids

25:21

who are under five, and that's an

25:23

acute period. Like I

25:25

have no doubt that as I move into my mid-40s,

25:29

50s, 60s, as I like

25:31

struggle to build a friendship network away

25:34

from, you know, where I spent a lot of my

25:36

early adult life, like, I think it's

25:38

gonna take different forms, this lack

25:40

of

25:41

communal support. I

25:44

think it feels really acute when you have little kids, but

25:46

I think about it more like, huh,

25:50

what

25:52

do I want to try to DIY

25:54

for my family to

25:57

sort of, I don't know, like.

26:00

be some sort of, to

26:04

help us make it through this gauntlet of

26:06

big structural forces that are leading to these

26:08

strains and the sense of isolation and

26:12

lack of support.

26:13

And does

26:16

that make sense? It does.

26:20

And I don't disagree with it. I think

26:23

the thing I respond to or react to is

26:25

the idea of it as a miscalculation. That

26:27

sometimes there

26:30

isn't a good answer to a problem because

26:32

the good answer isn't there.

26:34

And that's more

26:36

how I see it.

26:38

I don't think people have just done

26:41

the equation and forgot to carry the two. I think

26:44

that what's happened is that there

26:47

isn't space to,

26:50

as I said, I think that, I

26:52

think basically there are kind of two options right now

26:55

that are easily on the table for a lot

26:57

of families. One

26:59

is to move near parents,

27:02

if the parents are well. And a lot

27:04

of us who are having kids a bit older, their parents

27:06

are getting frailer and sicker, and

27:08

if they're God willing, still around.

27:12

But one is if you have a kind of kin

27:14

network, you can be near to try to be near your network.

27:17

Co-living structures for families, a place

27:21

where you and your friends, you and your

27:23

chosen family can go through this phase of life together

27:25

or

27:25

a later phase of life together. It is

27:28

possible to do.

27:29

And I know people who have done it and I've

27:31

talked to them for many hours about

27:34

how they've done it. And

27:36

the

27:37

problem is it's really hard.

27:39

And when I hear about what it takes, I

27:44

both, there's a part of me that wants to do it and doesn't

27:46

see how I would have at this phase of my life. And

27:49

it's something I think about doing at another phase of my life

27:51

when maybe there is more space.

27:54

What were the methods you tried to bring

27:57

in more support? What were the different

27:59

things? things you tried. I

28:02

mean, the main thing that we did and do is we

28:05

paid for help. And

28:10

we had a wonderful, we had wonderful

28:12

nannies with both of our children. And

28:16

I mean, that was the help we got, right? It doesn't

28:18

do all that much for you on nights and weekends and mornings.

28:22

It really, I mean, it's really just making it possible to work.

28:25

Yeah.

28:25

Right. That's the kind of help

28:28

you have. But there's nothing if somebody's

28:30

sick at night or it's just a really

28:32

hard week. That's

28:34

what I began to think a lot about. I mean, and also

28:36

what Annie thinks a lot about when we

28:38

were in San Francisco was that total

28:41

lack of flow. We

28:43

could schedule

28:45

paid care and it's worth saying very

28:48

loudly that that itself is

28:50

a huge privilege that a lot of people don't

28:52

have access to. Paid

28:56

childcare is really expensive

28:58

so that you just have a

29:00

little bit of time. I mean, every couple

29:03

of weeks to be in your

29:05

relationship just with each other.

29:09

That's something that a lot of people just basically can't afford.

29:12

I mean, that alone is expensive, right? You're not just

29:14

paying for the date, you're paying for the care.

29:17

And

29:19

it just doesn't work. They

29:21

don't work then. It doesn't work now. It

29:24

doesn't work for

29:24

a lot

29:28

of people. Is

29:37

there a way that your life after

29:39

this move that you've rejiggered

29:43

your routine or your bench

29:46

of available care on a regular basis

29:48

that is

29:49

adding some relief? Absolutely.

29:51

I mean, absolutely. Right? You

29:54

know, Amy's parents, my children's

29:56

grandparents are wonderful, wonderful

29:59

grandparents.

29:59

And there is just

30:02

a little bit more backup from the family. I mean, we're not

30:04

all that close to each other, even so. We're still about

30:06

an hour from the parents, like about

30:09

that from the siblings or more. So

30:12

even when you move closer, it

30:14

doesn't mean you're actually close. But

30:17

it is a lot of help and it is more

30:19

help.

30:22

And it still feels day to day like

30:24

we are either struggling our

30:28

way through a lot of problems or buying our way out of a lot

30:30

of problems. But I don't, again, like

30:32

I don't consider my situation like

30:34

a policy problem that needs to be solved because

30:37

I have a lot of flexibility. I mean, I don't think my problem

30:39

is that bad, but I do think there

30:41

is a problem.

30:42

Yeah, yeah. And I certainly

30:44

think there's many problems. The

30:47

way I've thought about it is kind of like,

30:52

I'm not sure there's a policy prescription for this.

30:54

I think this is a result of the

30:56

kinds of frayed communities

30:59

that I've found myself living in as I'm raising

31:02

my kids. And so I have, I

31:04

think something that I'd turn around in my head a lot

31:06

is like,

31:08

what are the

31:10

ways that I can sort

31:12

of strengthen these informal networks

31:15

of mutual support?

31:19

And it's like a weird retraining

31:22

of my type A brain that for

31:24

so much of my pre-parenthood life was very

31:27

focused on work outcomes

31:30

and kind of relationship outcomes,

31:32

but really work outcomes because my husband and I

31:34

were kind of doing it in tandem. And now I

31:36

think,

31:38

what do I wanna spend time doing in

31:42

order to create the kind of like family culture

31:45

for my kids that I want

31:47

them to have? And

31:49

I don't always know what to do, but that's what

31:51

I, I'm like, huh, should we

31:53

be going to church? And then I sleep in

31:55

on Sunday, and I don't wanna go

31:58

to church, that sort of thing.

31:59

No, I agree with that. I mean, the

32:02

thing that has been on my mind a lot in the last

32:05

year is

32:07

how important it

32:09

is to a community, to community building,

32:12

to ask other people for help.

32:14

I'm really influenced by

32:17

something that Alison Gopnik, who is at UC

32:19

Berkeley, not far from view, says,

32:22

and she's a great philosopher and

32:24

psychologist and has written beautiful books on

32:26

parenting, but she's written something that I

32:28

think is like the wisest thing I have read on

32:30

just relationships, which is, she

32:33

says that we don't

32:35

care for people because we love them, we

32:38

love people because we care for them. And

32:40

her point is that love is really built out of

32:42

the performance of acts of care. Right?

32:46

Any parent knows

32:49

how connecting it is to change your child's

32:51

diapers, to comfort them through a night of sickness,

32:54

right? It's not necessarily pleasant at

32:56

every moment, but it is what builds that

32:58

deep kind of love. And

33:00

I

33:02

think it's natural certainly for me to like have a ledger

33:04

of relationships

33:05

in my head and never want to be asking for

33:08

more than I'm offering. And

33:14

that's still most

33:16

natural for me, except in the deepest

33:20

relationships in my life, the ones that have gone far beyond that

33:22

point. But I've also come to

33:24

think of that as a way

33:27

anyone

33:29

impedes closeness. There

33:32

aren't

33:32

really profound relationships for me that

33:34

haven't at some point required people to ask a lot of me. And

33:36

I think that's a really important thing to think about.

33:38

I've actually come to think that people asked more

33:41

than I would have been comfortable asking of them. We're pretty

33:43

brave for doing so. And in many cases,

33:45

it created a profound kind of closeness.

33:49

And so

33:50

when I, this has just become more important

33:52

for me because on some level, like you're not going to have a community

33:55

of people watch each other's kids

33:57

where that community doesn't already exist unless you

33:59

go to somebody and say, will you watch my kids?

34:02

Because I have found trying this a bunch of times

34:04

that going to them and saying, I will watch your kids

34:07

doesn't work.

34:08

Like they will not give you their

34:10

kids because they don't wanna

34:12

ask that, but

34:14

they might watch your kids. And

34:16

even so, like knowing that, believing that I don't do it as much as

34:18

I would like to. But in terms

34:21

of like how to build this kind of community of care,

34:23

I've come to realize like, you have to actually ask for

34:25

care.

34:26

And I also think it's like, there's like

34:28

a vulnerability in asking for help, but there's

34:30

also kind of a, you

34:34

surrender a little bit of privacy, especially

34:39

when it comes to like, whether it's paid

34:41

care or care of people who are in your

34:43

kids' lives, whether you're inviting your grandparents

34:46

over into the household, you are surrendering

34:49

a little bit of your private space.

34:51

And

34:53

I think that

34:54

that's also sometimes difficult for me.

34:57

I wanna keep my

34:59

private life kind of protected in a bubble.

35:02

And I would really put a distinction for me

35:04

between paid care and the other

35:06

conditions there, because I think something

35:08

that the people can afford paid care, that they're

35:10

buying their way out of in a way,

35:13

is the reciprocity of that relationship.

35:17

I mean, you described there's a loss of privacy and that's true

35:20

and loss of control and that's true, but it's also

35:22

just a kind of, you're

35:24

putting yourself in,

35:27

debt is too strong a word. But

35:30

if you have

35:31

parents or aunts and uncles or someone

35:33

who's like really an important part of the family, like

35:36

they have a say now,

35:38

right? And they come

35:40

with their own needs and they come with their own

35:42

desires and their own views about how to do

35:44

things. I

35:46

know no end of people who've been very happy to have

35:49

in-laws in for a bit, but then are relieved

35:51

when they head home and they have

35:54

kind of autonomy back, right? These

35:56

things are trade-offs,

35:58

but they also require... there's

36:01

also I think a kind of beauty and I say this is

36:03

somebody who does not have other people

36:05

living my house with my family so take it

36:07

for take my revealed and and

36:11

take the preference that is revealed there for what it's worth

36:14

but

36:15

I have talked to people who say that

36:17

you know the we are

36:20

losing when you choose autonomy

36:22

over and over again you lose the skills of living

36:24

in community

36:26

you lose that kind of

36:28

feel for it when you choose the problems

36:30

of being alone for the problem when when you choose

36:32

the problems of being alone rather than the problems of

36:34

being together you don't always realize

36:37

you're kind of looking to avoid

36:39

the short-term costs of of togetherness

36:42

what in the long run you're you're sacrificing

36:44

like the long-term costs of of aloneness

36:54

that's

36:54

journalist and fellow podcaster

36:56

Ezra Klein. Ezra has a new book

36:58

coming out in April 2024 called

37:01

Abundance What Progress Takes

37:04

that he co-wrote with Derek Thompson you can

37:06

pre-order it now I'm also

37:08

a regular listener of Ezra's interviews

37:10

now with New York Times and at Vox before

37:13

that and we've linked in our show notes to

37:15

some episodes of the Ezra Klein show that I think

37:17

are great one with a scholar

37:19

of communes and intentional communities

37:22

one with an Atlantic journalist about homelessness

37:24

and the deep roots of our current housing

37:27

crisis one about why it's so

37:29

hard to just hang out with friends in America today

37:32

and two interviews he's done with Alison

37:34

Gopnik the child psychologist he mentioned

37:36

in

37:36

our conversation finally

37:39

Annie Lowry's piece in the Atlantic

37:41

about her experiences with pregnancy childbirth

37:44

and early parenting are also linked

37:46

in our show notes her essay is called

37:48

What Counts as the Life of

37:50

the Mother

37:56

Deaf, Sex and Money is a listener

37:58

supported production of Debbie at the UNYC

38:00

Studios in New York. This

38:02

episode was produced by Christian Reedy.

38:05

The rest of our team is Liliana Maria Percy

38:07

Ruiz, Zoe Azoulay, Afi

38:09

Yellow Duke, Lindsay Foster Thomas,

38:12

and Andrew Dunn. The Reverend

38:14

John Delor and Steve Lewis wrote our theme

38:16

music. I'm on Instagram at AnnaSalePics,

38:19

that's P-I-C-S, and the show is at

38:21

DeathSexMoney on Twitter, Facebook,

38:24

and Instagram. Thank

38:26

you to Nancy Bergstrom in Chicago

38:29

for being a member

38:29

of DeathSexMoney and for supporting

38:32

us with a monthly donation. Join

38:34

Nancy and support what we do here

38:37

by going to DeathSexMoney.org slash

38:39

donate.

38:41

And for any future or current

38:43

parents, Ezra has one more

38:45

piece of wisdom to share. Kind

38:47

of every

38:47

phase of parenting has a little bit of the quality of that Mike

38:50

Tyson line that everybody's got to plan until they get punched

38:52

in the face. I'm Anna Sale,

38:54

and this is Death, Sex, and Money from

38:57

WNYC.