On Motherhood
I
2023
I
Podcast
Telling the Truth About Marriage with Young Kids
Emily Oster and me, on the part of parenthood nobody puts on the birth announcement: what young kids do to a marriage.
Emily Oster looks at parenting through data. I wrote More from the inside of it. She had me on ParentData for the conversation most people have in the car and never out loud: the anger, the scorekeeping, when a marriage breaks instead of bonds.
We got into the hardest stretch, when the twins were two and a half and full of big feelings, and I realized I was trying to teach them how to handle anger without ever having been taught myself. When I realized that was the age I was when my parents split. When I was furious, when I was furious for being furious, and why none of the parents at boob group talked about this Venn diagram of hell.
"A really raw, gripping book... 'Parenthood: even more terrifying than ice climbing.' I will still never ice climb."
—
Emily Oster
What if instead we could be two people running the thing as co-CEOs, splitting the mental load and not just the dishes? What if instead we could see the other person trying?
Most importantly, talked about why any of this is worth saying out loud. More is written to my twins. That was the whole point from the start. Someone told me early on, you can't write this, your kids will read it. That's exactly why I wrote it. In my family we say the hard thing, we sit on the bench through it together, and we come out the other side. So yes, when they are ready, this book is theirs.
