Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - November 10, 2023


You Are a Good Mom

Topics
friend connections
Are Trad Wives Happier Than You？ Fear and Finance with Farnoosh Torabi

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

185.11

Word count

1,798

Sentence count

133

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 so this is just a little bonus episode for whoever needs to hear it today you are a good mom or a
00:00:15.020 good parent or a good caretaker you are good you are good at taking care of your children
00:00:21.660 Back in the early days of being a new mom, back in just the crazy muck of having a newborn for
00:00:30.420 the first time, someone much older and wiser who had already raised three children and sent them
00:00:35.820 off to college gave me some advice that I think about a lot. She said, if you're worried that
00:00:42.880 you're not a good enough parent, then you're already doing a good job because bad parents
00:00:47.920 don't worry about it. And so if you're questioning yourself, if you're saying, I feel guilty, I feel
00:00:53.580 shame, I feel like I'm not doing enough, you're definitely doing enough. You're good at this.
00:00:59.500 And you know what? There are hundreds of thousands of ways of being good at this, whether you are a
00:01:04.780 mom who stays at home and works in the home, or whether you are a mom who works outside of the
00:01:09.520 home. We're all doing it in our own way. And, and it is hard in different ways. The only truth that
00:01:17.080 I know about raising children is that it takes a village. No one can do it on their own. I don't
00:01:24.280 do it on my own. I know that yesterday's podcast made some people uncomfortable because it was a
00:01:31.200 view that you might not have been used to hearing. It was someone talking about why they chose to be
00:01:37.640 dependent on their husbands, why they chose to stay home and raise their kids. And I did that
00:01:44.280 episode because I think that we need to hear other opinions and we need to hear other voices.
00:01:49.100 Social media has made us too siloed in hearing voices that are just like our own. And it's time
00:01:56.020 for us to listen to other people because listening and hearing stories is the only way that we can
00:02:02.100 all connect, that we can all understand each other, that we can all make the world just a
00:02:08.380 little bit better by realizing that not everyone has to be just like you or just like me.
00:02:14.280 What I didn't talk enough about in that episode is that all of our choices come with a certain amount of privilege.
00:02:22.680 The ability to stay home is not available to the majority of mothers.
00:02:27.820 The ability to go and work in a meaningful job that you actually love, that you don't hate as much as one of the women yesterday said,
00:02:37.340 I would rather scrub toilets than be a teacher again, which made me enormously sad because
00:02:41.880 Jesus Christ, we need teachers. We need teachers and we need to value them and we should pay them
00:02:47.000 all the money. And I can say that because I volunteered at my son's school last week or the
00:02:52.700 week before for a Halloween party. And I was there for two hours and I wanted to kill myself.
00:02:57.040 That was the hardest job in the goddamn world. I want to pay all the teachers, all the money. 0.99
00:03:03.000 but not everyone has the privilege of having a job that they love that pays enough for them to
00:03:10.620 pay for child care so all of our choices come with a certain amount of privilege and we should
00:03:15.820 acknowledge that but I do want to tell you that whatever choice you're making right now it's the
00:03:22.000 choice that's right for your family or you wouldn't be making it you really wouldn't like you you know
00:03:27.660 what is best for you what is best for your family and sometimes we have to do things that we don't
00:03:32.100 want to do, but we all have our reasons. If it makes anyone feel better, I will be very open
00:03:38.080 and honest and transparent about how I get all of this done. I mean, I have been writing a lot
00:03:44.720 of books. I've actually written more books since having babies than before having babies. I find
00:03:50.620 myself not just creative, but very efficient. If I have an hour, I'm going to sit down and I'm going
00:03:55.980 to write 1600 goddamn words of a book because I don't have more than an hour. I don't have more 0.97
00:04:01.160 than an hour to get that done. I typically get most of my work done in a six hour window,
00:04:08.900 a six hour day. We have three kids. Two of them are in school. One is in a preschool. One is in
00:04:15.500 first grade. And then there's the baby who is home. We have a full time caregiver who usually
00:04:23.160 works from about nine to two or nine to four, who helps with the baby, who helps with pickups
00:04:30.480 and drop-offs and things like that. I have a very involved husband who does drop-offs almost every
00:04:36.300 day at school. The school moms will never, ever see me in the morning because I'm not a morning
00:04:41.040 person. And then everyone shares the pickup times and the shuttling kids around to different
00:04:45.220 activities times, which is so much. And I made another decision and this is the right decision
00:04:50.500 for me. And I said this to my son's teacher and she looked at me like I was an alien and maybe
00:04:56.340 an asshole. But I am not signing them up for a thousand different activities right now. They're 0.99
00:05:03.600 very, very little. They can do maybe one a semester, maybe one a year. But right now they
00:05:10.540 just want to play on the playground. And I don't want to feel like I'm a bad mom or feel shame if
00:05:15.000 I'm not signing them up for a zillion things because they don't really want to do it. They
00:05:20.580 just want to play. And that's right for my family. And also, it's easier for all of us to not be
00:05:26.520 constantly moving them around from place to place. That's just creating extra stress on us. So that
00:05:33.000 is my choice. I don't know who needed to hear that. But again, I'm putting it out there because
00:05:37.420 I think we need to hear more stories about how other moms get this done. And then my husband,
00:05:45.080 our caregiver and I, we just, we kind of just shuffle around to like make it work. I try to
00:05:52.200 give the kids one-on-one time as much as possible because they, they really, they really seem to
00:05:57.880 like that. And also I like it more because three-on-one feels very aggressive sometimes for
00:06:04.180 me. Some people, no, they can totally handle it. Three-on-one is very aggressive for me,
00:06:08.900 especially with my kids who are all like, and I want to touch every part of your body all of the
00:06:13.040 time. I attempt. I attempt to keep my house clean. Real bad at it. Real bad at it. My husband does
00:06:22.760 all of the laundry. He is also in charge of all of the dishes. I don't do dishes because I'm
00:06:27.760 apparently bad at loading the dishwasher. And I told him, I'm like, if you think I'm bad at loading
00:06:32.080 the dishwasher, I just won't load the dishwasher. I make the beds. I do the picking up of the things
00:06:38.140 around the house all day. You know, I'll just the things that are just left like trails of
00:06:42.100 breadcrumbs all over the house. I do that. That's what I do. And we still argue about it all the
00:06:48.800 time. I'm still like, am I doing more than you? Why? Why? And then he's like, let me, I do so
00:06:55.560 much too. And I'm also exhausted. That's an ongoing conversation. And again, not easy. Not
00:07:01.660 easy. Like I said, I try to get my work done between nine and two. I also try to put my phone
00:07:07.700 away. And I fail at this a lot, but I try to put my phone away as often as possible
00:07:12.640 when it's dinner time, kid time in the late afternoon, early evening. And again,
00:07:20.020 not always succeeding at that, but trying because it's good for my brain and it's good for my kids
00:07:25.940 not to just see me staring at a weird black box that I hold in my hand. That's got to be weird
00:07:31.180 for them, right? Right. And it freaks me out that my baby grabs it all the time. It's her favorite
00:07:36.180 toy. She just wants to grab my phone. I'm like, oh, God, no, I hate myself. Oh, I'm very lucky.
00:07:43.540 My mother lives very close by. We moved home to Philadelphia because of that. We'd been living in
00:07:48.700 New York and San Francisco, and those seem like very fancy, lovely places to live. They're also
00:07:53.900 very expensive places to live. And I didn't want to do the amount of work that I would have to do
00:07:59.700 just to pay for a smaller apartment in one of those cities. We moved back to Philadelphia
00:08:05.040 because my mom is here. My friends are here. Also, it's the greatest city on the planet.
00:08:09.440 But my mom helps out a lot. So she takes my big kids for one overnight, almost every weekend.
00:08:15.300 She comes down to Philadelphia. She lives outside the city whenever my husband is out of town.
00:08:23.880 And, you know, it's just, like I said, it takes a village. We also moved to a neighborhood where
00:08:29.340 a lot of my longtime friends live. And so we call them up. We're like, hey, could you do pick up
00:08:35.760 today? Could you do drop off today? Hey, can the kids just come over to your house for dinner
00:08:39.400 because I need a minute. And I think that those friend connections are so important and I will
00:08:44.160 value them forever and ever over a lot of other things. And that's it. That's mostly how I get it
00:08:52.720 done. And it's constantly in flux. It's constantly changing. And some days I feel awesome. And
00:08:57.720 sometimes I some days I feel like a failure. But again, whatever way you are getting this done
00:09:04.820 is the right way for you. And so we've been talking so much about trad wives and wives that
00:09:11.280 stay at home and wives that believe that the mother is the only person who can take care of 0.68
00:09:16.400 the child or women who say if they didn't work outside the home, they would be completely
00:09:21.660 miserable. Those are all valid choices for you. They are. You get it done how you're going to get 0.99
00:09:28.800 it done. And you are amazing. And you're a good mother, a good parent. You're doing it. You're
00:09:34.580 just doing it. You're fucking doing it. Okay? I'm sending all of the love. Go have a great weekend. 1.00
00:09:40.400 Do you. You fucking deserve it. 1.00