897: Intergenerational Space Travel

People braving the true final frontier — the gap between people born at slightly different times. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners https://thisamericanlife.supercast.com?utm_id=lifepartners&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=shownotes to sign up for our premium subscription. (00:00:00) Prologue: Last fall, some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code. (11 minutes) (00:12:00) Act One: When Courtney Maum was eighteen, her mother married a guy she despised. At their wedding, Courtney read a poem she wrote – a pretty dark poem! – which made her mother furious. More than 30 years later, they finally talk about it. (27 minutes) (00:41:53) Act Two: When Ike Sriskandarajah was a teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, he thought he had the greatest job. He worked at the movie theater, wore a cummerbund, and snuck friends in through the back door! It was magical. That was more than 20 years ago. Is it still as great as he remembers? Ike goes back to find out. (8 minutes) (00:50:27) Act Three: Every morning, Myra Flynn finds herself in a standoff with her daughter over her hair. Recently, to understand why these hair sessions are so fraught, Myra started recording them. What she heard sent her on a quest to get answers from her own mother. (11 minutes) Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org https://www.thisamericanlife.org/897/transcript / This American Life privacy policy https://www.thisamericanlife.org/page/privacy-policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Glass?

  Hey, it's Ira with a quick word before the show starts. So I have this video that I want to show you. Maybe you heard, because we did so many promos, actually, that we just did this live show onstage in Los Angeles where I told stories and then Vic McAlister and these really talented comedians did improvised scenes based on those stories on the spot. And we livestreamed video of this show. And I'm just here to say that if you missed the livestream, you can now see the show. We have posted the video online. It's a really fun show. And to watch this for absolutely free, sign up for a free trial This American Life Partners subscription. And our hope is, you know, you'll stick around after the trial and that you'll love all

• 0:42Ira Glass?

  the bonus episodes and listening ad-free and all the other stuff we give you. Plus, we hope you'll like helping us make the show by sending us this money. But if you don't, if you just want the free trial, watch the video, try it out for a couple of days, quit, no foul, fine with us, and I think you're really going to enjoy watching the show we did. Go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners and use the, this is a very, very original promo code we came up with, VIDEO. That's right. The promo code is VIDEO. That link is also in the show notes. OK, here's this week's show.

• 1:21Speaker 01

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• 1:37Speaker 02

  A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

• 1:48Ira Glass?

  Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wild Card. And one of the less exciting, and in fact, rather tedious, parts of his job is that he has to keep an eye on the comments that people post about the show online. And one day last fall on Spotify, he saw all this activity about this episode they did with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. And Dave thought, oh, her book was controversial, it must have struck a nerve, this episode. And then he looked at the comments.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  And it was just like gibberish. Like, I just, there was, there's a bunch of new comments, but I couldn't make heads or tail of, of any of them. They're just kind of these like clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like, it screamed bots, just because like any time that I see just kind of gibberish and like a comment on the internet, I assume it's a bot. But the fact that it was all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be like interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.

• 2:47Ira Glass?

  Can I ask you to read some of those comments?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I've got some from a later batch. We've got some where it's like, you know, someone says, ah, OK, MH. And two people have hearted that. Someone says, Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying. Last Friday, I broke up with my GF. Your cats are so cute. You're gorgeous in that dress. OML. Pink heart.

• 3:13Ira Glass?

  So, OK, bots, he thought, some new-fangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  And I went back to the Spotify comments again, and there was a new comment, and it said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that felt not body. That felt very strange, that a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it letting people know that it had been deleted.

• 3:42Ira Glass?

  And then there were other responses to that.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  So someone says, username cotton slash Amity, parentheses, I'm back, bitches, commented weird. Aubrey commented, that's weirds, two S's.

• 3:58Ira Glass?

  This is really not looking like any bot behavior he'd ever seen. So he goes to NPR Slack channels, posts some screenshots, describes what these comments are. And one of the higher-ups, Matilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They're 10 years younger than Dave, Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chin.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  And I click into the screenshots and almost immediately, I'm like, oh, my conclusion is really, really different than Dave's and Matilde's. Because I'm like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, right? Like posting on forums and stuff. And so I look at their display names. Their display names are like Ella with like five emojis, and they're like the special character emojis. They're like the ones that you have to like go onto the internet and type your name into like a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to like special paste it into your profile.

• 5:06Ira Glass?

  The profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah's never seen before. And then there's the way that they're commenting back and forth with each other. Short little phrases, I'm sorry, that's weird, lots of highs, lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet, not as they were originally designed, to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then like type things, and then like make them invisible by like making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.

• 5:50Ira Glass?

  So Hannah writes out a comment to post on Slack, shows it to their housemate before posting because they're worried about coming off maybe too harsh with these much higher-ranking, older NPR bosses who Hannah had never met in person.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  And I say, OK, maybe I'm wrong, but I think these are just kids hanging out, and we shouldn't report them as bots. My guess is that they're just kind of using Spotify comment threads as their group chat, maybe because other apps and their friends are blocked, who knows? And they happen to have chosen a Wild Card episode to do it. Lol. Like, these are middle schoolers.

• 6:23Ira Glass?

  Middle schoolers specifically, not high schoolers.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, these are people who are new to chatting with each other on the internet and in real life. Like, they're kids who are excited to talk to other people on the internet. The goal is just to connect with people. Like, you have nothing, you have nothing to talk about, you don't know each other very well, you're just like seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence in the chat.

• 6:50Ira Glass?

  Dave reads Hannah's Slack message, and, well, he is not convinced. He posts.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  That's an interesting theory.

• 6:59Ira Glass?

  Yeah, that's an interesting theory, there's an exclamation point at the end of it, at least to give it that much credit.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yes, and I, like admittedly, I was still like, really? Like, again, this is Wild Card with Rachel Martin on NPR. Not our target demo to have a bunch of like middle schoolers in our comment section. It just felt so completely implausible that these people would have found like this particular episode as their place to chat.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Dave is like, that's an interesting theory. And I, at this point, sorry, Dave, I don't know you in real life, I'm like a little bit annoyed because I'm like, I know that I said, maybe I'm wrong, but I was so sure that I was right.

• 7:40Ira Glass?

  Hannah does more digging, which makes them even more convinced than before. What the kids seemed to be doing was, one kid would create a playlist on Spotify with a name like, let's chat here. And inside that playlist would be one podcast episode. And you know how you can see other people's playlists on Spotify? If they make them public. Other kids would see that playlist, they'd see the episode, and then they would go to the podcast episode and start posting in the comments. Hannah got back on Slack and pointed out that the kids were using a playlist that was named New Chat. The kids had also posted a Google form with some kind of quiz on it and said, fill this out, only cool people can fill this out.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Bots don't really spam Google forms, in my experience, whereas Gen Alpha might use them in the same way that my generation would use, like YouQuiz or the Buzzfeed Make Your Own Personality Quiz feature.

• 8:32Ira Glass?

  And reading that was the turning point for Dave.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  When they were like, this is something that I did, like, that's what unlocked it. I think it was, it was so implausible to me. And then when Hannah was like, no, I did this, I was like, oh, wow. Like, that, I guess it makes sense. And then, and then it was like, I could like go back and look at it again, and it was like I had like the lens on to see it, and I was like, oh, my god, they are kids. Like, in retrospect, it looks so obvious.

• 9:06Ira Glass?

  So how exactly did those commenters end up in the comments section of an NPR podcast? What exactly happened here? Well, we reached out to a bunch of the commenters. Only one of them agreed to talk to us. As suspected, she is not a bot. She's a 14-year-old girl who talked to me from the car with her parents' permission and her dad at the wheel. Her name's Ella. When I asked her to describe herself, she said this.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Uh, I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm like a pretty cool person.

• 9:44Ira Glass?

  Ella says this all started with a video podcast that played TikTok videos. Ella thinks a kid started it. The videos seemed to be chosen specifically for kids who weren't allowed on TikTok, but were allowed on Spotify. That was Ella. She was allowed on Spotify, but on no social media. And she and the other kids would watch this girl's podcast on Spotify and then chat in the comments of the podcast.

• 10:08Speaker 05

  And her podcast ended up getting banned. And we wanted kids talking to each other. So people would like make playlists.

• 10:17Ira Glass?

  She described exactly the system that Hannah figured out. Kids would name their playlists, chat here, or something like that. And then there'd be some podcast, and everybody would go to that podcast and talk in the comments. She says it was maybe 20 kids in the core group. Lots of theater kids, she says, mostly girls. Most of them with strict parents who didn't let them on regular social media. And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?

• 10:45Speaker 05

  Um, I think we just like looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments.

• 10:52Ira Glass?

  I see. So you picked NPR because it didn't seem very popular?

• 10:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that we wouldn't like get caught up in other people's comments.

• 11:02Ira Glass?

  I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 11:10Ira Glass?

  That's OK. Are your parents NPR listeners?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, my mom is. She listens to those podcasts all the time.

• 11:19Ira Glass?

  Was any of this that like your parents were NPR listeners? And this felt like this is the perfect cover? Like, if they catch you doing this, you can be like, look, I'm just doing this for an NPR show?

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:30Ira Glass?

  Is that true? Did you think about that?

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 11:35Ira Glass?

  It's funny, there was this guy named Dave who works for NPR, and he's in his 30s. And he saw the comments that you guys were doing, and they made no sense to him at all. He really had no idea what they were. And he thought you guys were all bots.

• 11:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, some of them were really young, like 11 years old and stuff. So some of them definitely were a little bit not good at talking English that well. Or using slang.

• 12:07Ira Glass?

  I gotta say, I thought it was a very generous answer. Dave thought they were bots. And she was like, yeah, well, some of us kind of talk like bots. Ella told me that she's sure someday she'll be clueless, like Dave is now. Which was isn't much comfort of your day. Dave says that, once he understood that it was kids writing all those comments, it didn't feel great.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Well, I felt bad for having reported them. Like, I definitely felt guilty. And too old. It just felt like very old, very dumb, very out of touch. I literally needed Hannah to be my generational translator. It was just like, it was such a clarifying, like, realization of my age and obsolescence.

• 12:54Ira Glass?

  Well, today on our program, people from one generation trying to cross the vast, vast distance that divides the young and the old with a message that they hope will get heard by the people on the other side. We have stories today of a wedding toast, and of childhood hair care, and of the greatest job in the world, if seen from the eyes of a teenager, anyway. Intergenerational space travel this hour. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Climb aboard this rocket with us if you dare, and stay with us.

• 13:38Speaker 06

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• 13:57Ira Glass?

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• 14:24Speaker 02

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• 14:57Ira Glass?

  It's This American Life, Act One, The Wedding Zinger. So let's start today with a story that is both intergenerational space and time travel. When Courtney's mom was 18, her mom got remarried. Courtney despised the guy, did not want the marriage to go through. But she was her mom's maid of honor, and she gave a speech at her mother's request. And the speech she gave at 18 years old, her mom never forgave her for it, brought it up for years after. And then, recently, after three tumultuous decades, her mom's relationship with this man fell apart. For Courtney, this was the opening, the chance to finally ask her mom, across the

• 15:41Ira Glass?

  divide between them, about this marriage she never understood. And to try one more time to lay this infamous wedding speech to rest. Here's Courtney.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  At 18, I thought I was kind of hot shit. A writer in the making, a diehard feminist, a student capable of bringing freedom to Tibet. Here's how my mom, Linda, saw me.

• 16:04Speaker 07

  What I remember is, at that point in your life, you were extremely selfish, and you didn't want anybody else in my life. You asked me not to even date until after you went off to college, and certainly not even think of getting married before that.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Is that true? I'm sure it's true. The thing is, I loved being with my mother. Everybody did. I didn't want to share her. She was fun, beautiful, stylish, like a woman out of Knight Rider. She had a Harley Davidson and a boating license. We were always on adventures. In the summer, I loved to watch her steer our little Boston Whaler, wearing these massive dangly earrings that sparkled in the sun. It was a fairy tale existence, a childhood of privilege, growing up like this in Greenwich, Connecticut, with parents I adored. But when I was eight and my brother Brennan was three, my father asked my mom for a divorce. My mother was devastated.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  But like I said, she was a hot item, so the suitors came a-callin'. I can't say I was a fan. One laughed like a hyena. One was so heartsick with love for her, his longing made everyone embarrassed for him, my mother included. There were others, also memorable.

• 17:25Speaker 07

  Do you remember the man who whipped out a ventriloquist doll at the Benihana's? Yeah, who the hell was that? That was like one date. We go into the Benihana's, and he's already seated. And you know, this is family-style seating, right? So we're sitting with like strangers. And we sit down, and course number one, you know, when they do the little...

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Joke and they flipped the shrimp into people's mouths. This guy pulls a ventriloquist doll from out under the table and he's like, "Give me some of that shrimp." You remember, Brendan was what, six years old? We were dying. The whole table was like, "No, no, this isn't it."

• 18:07Speaker 07

  Brendan liked it. He liked it.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, he probably stopped liking it once I rained on everyone's parade. But, you know, and I remember going to the parking lot with you and I was like, "Never again, Mom, that guy, never again."

• 18:18Speaker 07

  And it was. Never again, never again.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  There was one final suitor, the man my mom would marry when I was a senior in high school. My mother has asked me to refer to him as Mr. X in this story. I didn't trust Mr. X from the start. He seemed to show up out of nowhere with no comprehensible backstory, like he was born out of the ether. One day, he pulled into our driveway in a rundown car and never left again. The old suitors had been annoying, but they were innocent. Mr. X was different. He put me on edge. He claimed he was an architect, but he never seemed to have any work and he appeared to have no friends. I bugged my mom about his past. She explained she'd met him years before when she was pregnant with me,

• 19:05Speaker 01

  that he'd been part of a crew working on a renovation to the house my parents lived in. Whenever she told this story, I imagined my unborn self kicking from within her body, kicking in his direction, saying, "No, not him, no." But I'd never heard the full story of their meeting until now. It happened back when my mother was still married to my father, Bob.

• 19:28Speaker 07

  So I was just redoing the house and I hired him as an architect or builder or whatever I thought it was. So here I was, I was pregnant and he came into the driveway for me to interview him. He drove in in an old beat up car, but he was so adorable and he was also six years younger than I was. So at that point, you know, that's a big difference between 30 and 24. That's a huge difference. And I interviewed other people and I decided, because he was cheaper, for one.

• 20:10Speaker 07

  And I had a little, you know, he's so cute. Never in my life ever thinking I'd ever cheat on Bob, but you know, imagining. So I remember in this one, one point, there was a bathroom in one of the guest rooms and we were bathing, putting a skylight in it. And I got in the bathtub to show where, how high the ceiling had to go and he got in behind me.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. You're gonna have a ghost movement here.

• 20:42Speaker 07

  No, and I just remember thinking, "Why did he get in so close to me?" You know, I don't remember. Why did he do that? Anyway, the end of the story is that he got in a, a car accident. A car hit him. He almost lost his leg. So obviously he took off with the money.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  The money she'd already paid him. Oh, God. I didn't know this part of the story.

• 21:09Speaker 07

  So I had to go to court and prove that he had indeed been paid. So that put a very bad taste in my mouth.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  When my producers contacted him, Mr. X remembered the story differently. He said the car accident happened before he met my mom and that he didn't run off with the money, that he doesn't know what happened to it. There was no financial grift. He also said he didn't do anything untoward in the bathtub. Still, my mom got a bad feeling from their first interaction. There shouldn't have been a second one, but there was. After she was divorced and had all these suitors peacocking around. It was 15 years after the bathtub incident. She was picking up my brother from summer camp. Mr. X was picking up his son. She didn't recognize him at first.

• 22:03Speaker 07

  I had seen Mr. X in the distance and thought, "Oh, he's so good looking."

• 22:07Speaker 01

  She learned from a mutual friend that he was going through a divorce. Still, she didn't recognize him as the man from the botched Reno. He was just some handsome stranger.

• 22:18Speaker 07

  I was so excited. He was going to be available. And so when I left, I gave my phone number. And I said, "If you ever want to talk, because it is a very difficult thing to go through, call me." Of course, it's a line. And he did indeed call me, probably within a week. And that's how we started dating. But I didn't know who he was at the beginning. I mean.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  You didn't know that it was the same guy who snuck up behind you in the bathtub?

• 22:50Speaker 07

  No.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Did a little flirtage?

• 22:52Speaker 07

  And you know why I didn't know? This is horrible to admit, because he had a toupee on. And when.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  He had a toupee at the camp?

• 23:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. So he had much more hair than I remember him having. And it was darker. He was blonde when I knew him. And then he came over to me and said, "I know who you are." And I said, "You look familiar, but I don't know you." And he said, "A Mr. X." And I slammed him in the chest and said, "Jesus Christ, I don't want to talk. I shouldn't want to talk to you." But that's what happened.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  My mom told me that on their first real date, she did ask Mr. X why he never paid the subcontractors at my parents' house. She said he told her he'd been in a car accident, was on heavy drugs and hospitalized. She decided to forgive him. I'd never heard about that moment in the bathtub or the missing money. Listen, what's surprising to me about hearing this full story, you remembered that and thought, "You know what? This is the guy to pursue."

• 24:04Speaker 07

  I'm gonna let it go. I just forget about it. Yep.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  No red flags were waving around?

• 24:11Speaker 07

  Of course they were.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  No further comments. Before Mr. X, my mom was super social. When my parents were married, our house was like Studio frickin' 54. They had these awesome dinner parties where everybody looked nice and my mom would serve this Martha Stewart level cuisine with ease and panache that really impressed me as a kid. I remember going to sleep to the sound of people clinking glasses, enjoying each other's company. When she got together with Mr. X, though, her life started to narrow. People didn't really come by our house much anymore. My sense is that Mr. X made people uncomfortable, though he presented okay.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  In conversation, he was gruff and socially awkward, a wild animal in deck shorts. In public, he treated strangers badly, barking at waiters, yelling at gas station attendants. In private, it was worse. He was clingy and possessive with my mother, cutting her down with hurtful comments. The drinking stopped being social. Dinners were served on a tray in front of Fox News, the volume blaring, with him hollering for more. I graduated college still not understanding what the hell my mom saw in this man or why she'd let him come between us. What were other positive things that drew you to Mr. X in the beginning?

• 25:40Speaker 07

  I had a partner. I was up at Candlewood Lake and everything was husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Candlewood Lake is where my mom was living at this point.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  I had somebody that I was proud to go be seen with and he was a so-called architect.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so he was handsome. He was available as a partner.

• 26:06Speaker 07

  You're a good sex partner, good sex partner.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 26:11Speaker 07

  That's true.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Let me just digest that. Okay, but you just really didn't want to be alone, it sounds like.

• 26:20Speaker 07

  I didn't like being alone, but I don't think I got married so I wouldn't be alone.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I drilled into my mom about this. She said it was as simple as her wanting someone handsome on her arm. Everyone was coupled. She wanted something for herself. Why him, though? Because you had all these other offers. Why him?

• 26:40Speaker 07

  I guess because he didn't offer.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Well, how did you get engaged?

• 26:46Speaker 07

  I told him we were getting married.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Oh, God, it was you? You were the motor behind this? My life is coming undone right here in the living room. You, you asked for his hand in marriage?

• 26:58Speaker 07

  No, I did not ask. I told him that we might just as well get married, period.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Romantic. And what did he say?

• 27:10Speaker 07

  Yay.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  So this speech I gave at my mother's wedding that made her so upset, I remember her complaining about it to strangers, people at the grocery store, airline stewards. For over a decade, if a waitress said something nice about mothers and daughters spending time together, she'd be like, "Huh, you should have heard how she talked about me at my wedding."

• 27:36Speaker 07

  I thought I was going to get a wonderful, you know, how wonderful my mother was growing up and how happy I was to see her happy. But what I remember about that speech is it was more about the negative things that I did in my life, like, i.e. smoking. At my wedding, and I remember standing there and my heart just sunk and I just thought, "Oh, my God, she really hates me."

• 28:06Speaker 01

  That's what she heard, but it's not what I remember saying. Here's where I admit that my speech was actually a poem written by me. I was super into poetry as a teenager, poetry as homage. When my best friend moved away. For example, I wrote her an ode that her mother had professionally calligraphied in frames and that our school asked me to set to music and perform at assembly. For better, for worse, my visions of myself as a great American writer were clearly being indulged. So when my mom asked me to say something at her wedding, I cracked open my diary and set about writing something major, something so revealing it would cause the ground to

• 28:51Speaker 01

  crack beneath the altar, or inspire someone to rise from the pews and speak out against their marriage, to make the whole thing stop there and then. I really wanted that. In preparation for this conversation with my mom, I dug the poem out. Neither of us had seen it in 30 years. I am looking at a piece of paper that has one, two, three, like seven stanzas on it. Wedding Day Poem for My Mother. She walks through realms of habituated darkness, and can you see the tumblestones that mar her rocky path? She is pushing, she is pulling, she is moving through the darkness, and oh, the road is

• 29:34Speaker 01

  long and every breath feels like her last. Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, behind my lids I see you, smiling at the bow within a boat above the sea. In retrospect, there's no chance anyone understood this fucking poem. I'll skip ahead a bit. Other times I see you, and often you are lonely, standing by our counter with a cigarette in hand. There it is, the cigarette of my mother's discontent. And in my head I hear you wishing, body beyond boundaries, somewhere, another place, another time, another land. Mother, the time has come for laying down roots. Right here, halfway through the poem, something weird occurs.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  My tone shifts in a way I don't remember at all. No longer do I see you glancing out beyond our window, wishing yourself other places very far from here. I think you've found contentment, I think you've found belonging, I think you have found a refuge where safety subdues fear. Why had my mom given me such hell over this thing? The poem wasn't incendiary, nor was it damning of my mother. If anything, it seemed to wish her well. Here are the last lines. Look no more out the window, look no more through the door, look not beyond horizon, it's not foreign anymore. You've found what you've been wanting, your roots grow deep and true, you've found a

• 31:03Speaker 01

  soul to worship and someone who loves you too.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  Okay, the ending was good. But I will say that at that point, I probably wasn't listening anymore. And that's why I didn't hear the positiveness of it. You know, you no longer have to look, you have, you can go out and be happy with this person that's going to smoke with you, that's, you know, like I wasn't going to be alone in this dark age of sin. It's negative to me.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Still?

• 31:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, the beginning's definitely negative, still.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Okay, so for me, that's painful to hear because I was really acknowledging how much you were struggling. And to me, that was what I was trying to do with the beginning, was acknowledge everything that you were going through that was so, so hard.

• 32:03Speaker 07

  I can see that. You know, you tell me that and I can understand it. I'm sorry that I didn't hear the positiveness in it.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  I accept your apology.

• 32:18Speaker 07

  [sighs] You.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I probably owe my mom an apology as well. I mean, now that I'm rereading it for the first time since the wedding, I get why she was so upset and hurt. It's a pretty dark picture to present of someone on their wedding day. I also get how she couldn't hear the nice things I was saying. Frankly, I didn't remember at all writing the end with that much compassion toward my mom and graciousness toward Mr. X, but hearing it, I do remember feeling that way. We were dealing with hard things as a family before my mom got remarried. My brother Brennan had gotten really sick. He basically moved into the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital when he was 10 years old because he was seizing uncontrollably.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  His heart would stop out of nowhere. It was a terrifying time. Mr. X was intolerant of everyone, but he was gentle with my brother, kind. He helped calm my mom down. I know this meant a lot to her and also to Brennan, especially because our father was sort of checked out emotionally from what was going on. I do remember thinking, this is a thing to hold on to here. This is his saving grace. I wish I'd made things simpler for my mom back then. I wish I could have said more clearly, I'm worried about you.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  But anger is the teenage version of worry, and I was very angry. My mom wouldn't tolerate me saying negative things about her partner, so I bottled them inside, which made me snippy and resentful. I stopped being nice to my mom, I stopped being light and silly with her. And as it turns out, I had reason to be worried. Two days after the wedding, at the age of 49, my mom had a massive stroke. There had been signs she wasn't well on her wedding day already, and in the days following her hospitalization, I developed a theory that her body, not her mind, knew that the marriage was a mistake. I ran this by my mom.

• 34:29Speaker 07

  I think that's true. I mean, why was I sweating so much? Why was I, you know, I think it's true.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 07

  I knew, I knew, I knew when I was buying my dress, I knew when I was, you know, I wasn't as happy. I do believe that I anticipated this awfulness ahead of time.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  In your body?

• 34:56Speaker 07

  In every fiber.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, to me, that's heartbreaking to hear because that's what I thought was happening.

• 35:05Speaker 07

  [laughing] I'm just gonna start crying.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  That's all right. You can cry, Mom, it's all right.

• 35:13Speaker 07

  Okay, I'm crying, so put that in. Okay, so I should have called off the wedding, and I knew that, because I was just overwhelmed with everything. End of story.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  I entered this conversation with a bunch of questions for my mother, but it was coming down to one. How come you didn't listen to your guts? I think there were a lot of moments where you could have, and you didn't. Were you sort of raised to defer to men, or?

• 35:43Speaker 07

  I was raised, I knew nothing. I mean, I was always wrong.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  You were raised to believe you knew nothing?

• 35:50Speaker 07

  Right. I was, I was.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Because you were a woman?

• 35:53Speaker 07

  My mother told me this. So my mother was very domineering, and she made me believe that I was worthless and everything else. And so when I married Mr. X, I think that came back to haunt me, all my negativity against myself. And I think I didn't listen to myself because I couldn't be right, you know, I couldn't be right.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  It's so wild to hear because when I was little, my mom was the most capable person, physically, socially, financially, like a total financial whiz, the best dress, the best looking, the best driver, the most fun, all of these fantastic things. And she had a real reputation still among, among my friends in school. That's so emotional to think of. Among my friends in school, it was just like, everyone looked up to Linda mom.

• 36:51Speaker 07

  Well, to me, this is all very sad because, again, it goes back to my mother, and I hate, I hate doing this, going back to my mother and blaming my mother for some of the things I became.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And she was a huge smoker, if I'm remembering correctly.

• 37:10Speaker 07

  Giant, giant. I was so angry at myself for being a smoker. I just did more smoke and then made it up.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  So I hit a nerve.

• 37:20Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yep.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  My mom also had one main question for me.

• 37:29Speaker 07

  Why did you dislike me so much as a teenager? And you kind of have answered that, really, with all the things that were going on.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  But do you want to stop there and let me answer it?

• 37:41Speaker 07

  Sure, if you have, yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I have additional. I, I, I'm gonna bristle at the word dislike because I actually liked you a lot, and I looked up to you in a lot of ways. What I could not stand was that you let yourself be kind of walked all over by lesser men, by men specifically, but also men that either didn't seem to deserve you, or were actually bad people, you know, that weren't respected. You really were such a strong, you want to say something?

• 38:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, I want to know what men they were. I thought it was just Mr. X. I mean, I don't remember anybody walking.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  You know, out of, out of respect for my father, I'm still grieving, he just passed. I don't want to talk too much about my dad, but my father did not always treat you with a great amount of respect. So, you know, I do include him in some of the men that I feel you were subservient to. What I saw growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the 80s and 90s, when Greenwich was truly the bedroom town of Wall Street, what I saw was a lot of vivacious men who got to go somewhere else all day long.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  And come home to children that were bathed and these beautiful women that were their wives, put out fresh flowers, had dinner out, and the man just came and, you know, put his feet under the table, ate the food, and then got to go kind of take a load off in a study. And so, growing up, I was like, well, I'll be my dad. I'll be the man. You know, I, I want to come home and have dinner at the table. I want to drive a cool car to work. And so, something I bristled against with you is that at a certain point, you

• 39:49Speaker 01

  were taking on so much, and it didn't necessarily seem to be bringing you joy. And Mr. X came into the picture. And in the beginning, I think he did, he seemed to really worship you. And, but certainly, as the years went by, I saw a man who demanded to be served and did not fetch as much as his own ice cubes. And that made me really angry at you. I wanted you to stand up for yourself.

• 40:21Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's, in my mind, it was dislike of me because of the way you talked to me and the way you avoided me. I could never see it any other way. Your tone of voice, I mean, I don't know how I could understand that that was because of my lack of respect for myself.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't think you could have. I mean, I was a B.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  My mom's got a point here. I was sending mixed signals. I loved her. I was mean to her. I wanted her to be a feminist baddie who kicked out Mr. X, but I also benefited from her commitment to homemaking, the awesome dinners, her driving me around. It was confusing. I was confusing. But I was clear on one thing, Mom. You chose him over us. You kept on choosing him. But one night last October, she made a different choice. In the kitchen of the house that Mr. X had designed to look Art Deco in style, but instead came out looking like a White Castle burger joint, my mom fell and broke her back. Though it was early

• 41:33Speaker 01

  in the evening, Mr. X was too drunk to help her. She lay on the floor for hours. Finally, he brought her her cellphone so she could call an ambulance herself.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  When I was on that floor, I swore I was going to do everything I could to get, get rid of him.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  She was hospitalized for months, unable to walk. Before the accident, I'd almost given up on my mom. But now she told me that she'd reached a turning point. She gave me power of attorney to fight in court on her behalf, to evict Mr. X. For months, I went everywhere with legal paperwork in case I was called into court. It was hard, and it was ugly. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, actually. But we won. Mr. X left the house in an unholy state. I spent weeks cleaning up after him, boxing up his possessions. My mom came home from the hospital. My brother and his wife moved in with their cat, who took a particular liking to my mom.

• 42:34Speaker 07

  I didn't know how complicated it was going to be to get him out. And at that point, I didn't know you were going to be so instrumental in doing it. Because of the amount of time you spent down here, I realized how much you cared about me. Until then, I really didn't know. I didn't.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Mr. X drove us apart. And kicking him out is what brought us back together. It's a strange thing to rally around, but this is where we are. My mom is 79. I'm nearly 50. We have the rest of our lives to catch up on what we've missed.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Courtney Ma, a latest novelist called Alan Ops Out. Dana Chivvis produced this story. We did reach out to Mr. X, and he told us he's designed hundreds of houses. He had lots of friends. He says he never left any house in any kind of disrepair in his life. Coming up, a man goes back to the job of his teenage dreams to see what is the same and what has gone forever with the passage of time. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

• 43:53Speaker 01

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• 43:58Speaker 02

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• 45:05Speaker 02

  It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, intergenerational space travel, stories of people braving the vast distances that separate young and old, trying to understand life on the other side of the divide. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Cinema of a Very Teen. So when one of our producers, like Sriswara Rajah, was a teenager, he had the greatest job he could humanly imagine. And that was, he worked at a movie theater, wore a cummerbund to work every day, snuck around the managers with secret schemes of his own. This is back in 2003, more than 20 years ago. And I wanted to know, is the job still the best? He traveled back to his hometown in Wisconsin and spent

• 45:49Speaker 02

  some time at his old movie theater, the Marcus Point Cinema in Madison. My friend Mark vouched for me to his manager. That's how I got hired there. And Mark knew how to make the most of the job. He taught me which door was the easiest to let your friends in, how to give away free popcorn by filling up discarded plastic bags so you don't mess up your popcorn tub count, and why volunteering to clean the bathroom was actually secretly a great job, because you got out of the concession stand and you could sneak into a movie for a scene or two on the clock. By senior year, I stacked lunch and study hall together in

• 46:32Speaker 02

  my schedule, and I'd treat friends to a school day matinee with popcorn and soda. I felt like a team god, second to none in the pantheon of high school jobs, except maybe drug dealer.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  When I got back to my old theater, the outside looked the same, classic old Hollywood movie marquee. And inside, there's still busy stain masking carpet and the long tunnel to theaters on either side. It even smelled the same. I had asked to speak to teens, employees who were the same age I was when I started, but the company's comms team and their HR department said no. Instead, I could talk to a 26-year-old assistant manager named Darren Klingerman. He was behind the ticket booth when I arrived, clean shaven, wearing a dress shirt with little flowers and a tie to match. Darren told me he did not apply for the same reasons I did, namely, free movies.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  No, it was just, I just looked out that that was a perk. I didn't know about it until afterwards. Oh, wow. Okay. It was a nice surprise. Darren was just looking for any job. Besides getting to see movies, what about the other things that made the job so fun back in the early aughts? Are they still part of it? I ran all my favorite hijinks we pulled at the movie theater by Darren. Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember, our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny. So basically, if you were the person who rips tickets, you were supposed to say, enjoy your show. But some genius came up with a twist that

• 48:16Speaker 02

  involved referencing male genitalia of specific dimensions. I told Darren about this. We'd mumble under our breaths, enjoy your chode.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  I was wondering if that's still happening. Not that I'm aware of. You've never heard somebody say, enjoy your chode? No, I have not. Do you think that joke's funny?

• 48:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I didn't laugh. I noticed that. In the early aughts, it killed. At least with the kids working at the concession stand. How many people just said, excuse me? I think that was the most common, because we're mumbling. You're mumbling it. Right. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, I think it could use some work. So that's a change. In 2026, chode's over, folks.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Another thing that I thought was so fun was volunteering to flatten boxes out back. If that sounds boring, you don't know the WrestleMania technique that my friend taught me. Basically, you could fill up the industrial dumpster out back with unflattened boxes, pull yourself up to balance on the metal edge, and then launch yourself into the air and drop the people's elbow on a box. Well, I mean, I tell you, that sounds like a very interesting workman's comp issue getting ready, but-- That's Area General Manager Tom Reichelt, who corporate PR asked to join.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  So many things I loved about this job are gone. We wore tuxedos to work, made of this magical material that was impervious to nacho cheese stains. During a tornado, we got evacuated into the manager's office, where we took an ID from the lost and found that looked enough like me to buy malt liquor exactly once. Now, kids are never let anywhere near the lost and found. The mini donut machine burned me, but it made delicious donuts. Back in the day, it burned Area General Manager Tom Reichelt, too. I probably have one here somewhere, maybe there. A little different these days.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  That's gone, too. But what about the big one, my favorite benefit of the job, letting my friends in for free? It really was the coolest thing I could think of, to be able to grant this wish to anybody. A free night at the movies, a drink, popcorn. We were allowed to bring in one guest, but I was always happy to let in more friends through the back door near the dumpster. Darren says that, yes, that perk is still around, but these days, the back door is not necessary. Just have them walk in the front door, come greet them over here, and we'll, we'll hook them up. I always let them all know that there's no, no reason to be sneaky in any way. If, if you want your friends to come see a movie, tell me and I'll get them

• 51:20Speaker 02

  in. I mean, it's a perk. So they're allowed to bring in their friends. But, calling out to an unscientific survey I did of three teens around America who work in movie theaters right now, I learned they don't want to. One 18-year-old in Kansas City says she prefers watching movies at home, where you can talk to your friends during the show, and watch basically any movie ever made. What a waste. Darren, at least, understands that bringing someone in for free has the power to actually change your life. When I first started here, a couple of months later, I met my girlfriend. I

• 52:03Speaker 02

  brought her to a date here after hours. That might not technically be allowed. What do you mean, after hours? Oh, like, everything was closed. We were, we were closed down. I asked her if she wanted to come see a movie. So we watched, we watched Wicked. Well, you brought your girlfriend here because you had the keys to the place? I did. I had the keys. She wasn't actually my girlfriend quite yet. Good first date. I knew Wicked was one of her favorite musicals, so it was like, perfect thing. Wicked just came out. Why don't we watch it? Private showing in the biggest screen we can. Darren ushered her into an empty theater, sat her down in the best seat in the house.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Popcorn, Diet Coke in the cup holder. Brought a sweater, because theaters get chilly. And then he ran up to the projectionist booth, fast-forwarded through the ads, and ran back down to sit with her just in time for the show to start. That was two years ago. Now they're engaged. What other job would let you pull off a first date like that? Honestly, I mean, it was so memorable. We still, we still think about it. Now, tell me if I'm overstating it, but would you guys be getting married if it wasn't for that? I would hope so, but I don't know. It's a, it's a good question because of

• 53:25Speaker 02

  how, how big of a thing it was and how, like, meaningful and unique it was, that it definitely bumped me up some points. So, hopefully, but definitely not as easily. Well, it's really similar to the thing that happened to me. Okay. When I was here-- I told Darren that I also once tried to impress a girl while on the job. When I met her, I filled up a discarded plastic bag with popcorn and slipped it to her. Another time, I let her and her friend in the back. I'm no longer wearing a tuxedo to work, but

• 54:06Speaker 02

  that girl I snuck in were married and have two children. The job today definitely seems less fun, but there's still a little movie magic left.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Act Three's Condorajo is one of the producers of our show. By the way, none of the three teenagers I talked to knew what chode meant, but some of them thought it was funny, anyway.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Act Three, Mama, Can You Hare Me? Myra Flynn's in her 40s, and the person across the divide in this story is six. It's her daughter. The two of them have been in a bit of a standoff when it comes to getting ready for school in the morning. It was going so badly, Myra started recording these morning showdowns, trying to figure out if there was some way to fix things. Here she is.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  My mornings used to look so different. In my younger days, as a touring musician, I'd greet the sunrise on my way home from a gig in some random city and face-plant into my bed. But now, I start my day at 7:10 a.m., engaged in a battle of wills with my daughter Avalon over her hair.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Hey, baby. It's time to do your hair. We're gonna do it because you have to be at school in 10 minutes.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  When I was a kid, my mom and I had a similar hair routine. She would sit me down at the breakfast table every morning, grab a cup of water and a hard bristle brush, and rake through my curls. It hurt like hell, but there was no point in complaining, because my mom made it clear, we didn't have time for any of that. My hair had to get done. That's just how it was. And that's just how it is for Avalon. Black hair is black hair. And look, I'm not doing box braids, or knotless styles, or writing her name in the side of her head with cornrows. I'm just trying to comb through it and put it in a ponytail, so that no one looks at us crazy. So every morning, I take her hair out of whatever shape it's landed in after a night of sleep without a bonnet. I still haven't

• 56:13Speaker 01

  found one that stays on her head. Then I grab three different brushes, a big jar of leave-in conditioner, a spray bottle full of water, and get to work, which Avalon, who's six, hates.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Ow!

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Stop, baby. Abby, it's not that bad. Stop, stop, stop. No, no. I can't use that brush. I have to use this brush.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  You just wanna double hold it?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  No, baby. You need to just, please, can you just look forward and bend your neck for me? Bend your neck down.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  For the record, holding this brush is a stalling tactic for Avalon. She wants to hold it, so I can't use it. And I see straight through you, Avalon Mathis-wills. I know my daughter. Avalon, by all intents and purposes, seems impervious to pain. I've literally watched her face-plant from the top of monkey bars onto the grass, only to bounce up and try it again. This is a kid who doesn't want to wait for her teeth to fall out naturally. As soon as they're loose, she's trying to pull them out of her head. And she won't even let the tooth fairy take her teeth. She wants to make jewelry out of them. She's perfectly weird and brave in all the best ways. So, for her to shake and cry only with me is devastating. But also, and I'm not proud of this, a big part

• 57:33Speaker 01

  of me is like, girl, nobody's dying here. Suck it up.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Baby, I'm sorry. I have to get it.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  You already did it.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  I didn't.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Will it hurt always?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Probably, baby. Sometimes the things that we need are not comfortable. Hold up. Did I just actually say that? I'm not even sure I believe it. You know that moment when you open your mouth to say something and out comes your mother? This is one of the few times I heard that in my life, and it really stuck with me. My mom was the black female dean of a military college. She taught me that sometimes in life, there are things like hair that you just have to tough out. In so much of my parenting, I've tried to

• 58:34Speaker 02

  be a little different, do it my way. I don't know if I totally believe that black kids should just have to tough it out when they're in pain. I also don't want to be a parent that teaches their black kid that everything in life should feel like a lukewarm bath. When it comes to Avalon's hair, I feel so conflicted, like my two parenting styles are at war. And when I heard myself say, "Sometimes the things we need are not comfortable," I felt like I had to talk to my mom about it. I needed her to back me up on this. So I called her, Miss Martha Mathis herself. I walked her through what had been going on with Avalon, the battle with her hair every day right before school. And I asked her, "This is just the way it is, right?" To which she said--

• 59:19Speaker 02

  No. I think I've found that's what you want to avoid, because at some point, if you're rushing and you're trying to do our hair, then it's gonna hurt. If it's gonna sit up there for days without anybody doing anything, then you're gonna get what you get.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  My mom saying pain was something that you should or even could avoid was wild to me. She did my hair up so tightly, I got migraines at school. Mama, do you remember one time when you were doing my hair, and you were doing it and doing it, and I was like, ow, ow, and I was eating breakfast at the breakfast table, and then I threw up?

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  You don't remember that?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  I don't. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Just means I don't remember it. Yeah. Then what did we do? Oh, you went and grabbed the, you went and grabbed the trash can. And just in case I had to again, but yeah, I just, I just remember, I remember it hurting a lot. My mom once described my parenting style as permissive. Sometimes I feel like I have to be firmer when she's around, so she'll be proud of me, or something like that. So I couldn't quite wrap my head around what I was hearing. I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that, no, it doesn't have to hurt. I feel like you're a tough cookie, Mama. I am.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I feel like you kind of raised me to be one. And I can feel that lesson starting as early as my hair, right? Just as I'm, I can feel like I'm doing that with Avalon. Do you think that I should be making her tough for the world? Like, the way I'm talking about hair is kind of a gateway into, like, toughen up? Do you think that- No, I wouldn't use hair as a gateway to, to toughen up. Because it has too many other racist and sexist implications. Did you want me to toughen up in those moments when I was like crying and like, ouch, this hurts? No, no, it hurt. No, why would you, no. You didn't want me to, like, toughen up and just be like, we gotta get used to this

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  because we're on a schedule, we got places to go. What's gonna happen whether you were tough or not? I guess, and at six, I'll use Avalon's age, she's as tough as she's gonna be right now. She, and she can't be any tougher. I think she's, she's the toughest little girl I know.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  So, no, I, I would not have equated doing your hair with tough or not. I always felt bad that for those 10, 15, how many ever minutes it was, that that's how you were starting your day.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  I didn't know that she'd had any feelings about our mornings. My mother told me it was the same for her when she was young. She sat between her mother's knees and out came the hot combs, the hair grease, the brushes, the pain, which she likes to remind me was far worse than mine, as I remind my daughter, and we copy and paste. But instead of giving me the validation I wanted and letting me know that the way she'd done my hair is really the only way, my mom gave me some advice I really wasn't looking for. Give her some of her own hair. Oh, to take care of, yes, I've, I've, I've tried this, we've tried this, yes. Oh, you have? Oh, yeah, we've tried, like, it's, it's do your own hair day.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Do your own hair day in my house means we give Avalon a brush and some bows, and 15 minutes later, absolutely nothing has happened. But it turned out, that wasn't what my mother was suggesting. No, I mean, have her do her own kitchen.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Well- She'll be gentle with herself. If she does her own hair at this age, Mama, she's avoiding her kitchen altogether. Let, okay, so it looks like, I don't know, a rat's nest. Nobody's gonna see it.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if you remind her now, get in there, because you don't want me in there. When you remind her of that, it's gonna be your hand or mine. Yeah. I think if you give her something that she owns, and if it's just this little bit back there, my goodness, let her have, what would happen if you parted that off, though? Seriously? I know, I'm hearing you, I just don't, I'm like, when you're saying, like, why don't you try this, right? Why don't you try giving Avalon a little section for herself? Why didn't you try that with me? Because no one told me that. That, that's, that, that's how messages are passed on.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  The women my age, they were not brought up to even have these kind of conversations. And I don't even know if I had them in my brain, I mean, back then. But I'm saying for you, I would think you do have options. When, when you know better, you do better.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  The next time I did Avalon's hair, I let her do some of it. You ready to get the back, just a little bit right here? Good job, back here.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Look at that. Why are you smiling when ever Mama's doing it, you're crying?

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  What's it feel like to do your own hair? Soft. It feels soft, huh? It doesn't feel hard like a rock, but my mama doesn't feel hard like a rock. Your hair feels hard like a rock, or my brushing feels hard like a rock? The brushing feels hard like a rock. Does this part hurt? No. Oh, good. I don't think I've ever seen, your kitchen looks so good.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Should we show Papa?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Papa Bear? You wanna tell him? You wanna tell him?

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Look at my kitchen.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  What, what about your kitchen?

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  I did it. You did it? Yes. Good job, baby.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  As a parent, you're always looking for your failures. There are so many ways to fall short. But every once in a while, if you're lucky, the evidence is clear. You did something really good for your kid. And with my mom's help, I was able to change this one thing in the wheel of my own motherhood, and maybe one day, Avalon's. I want her to know what my mother knew and her mother before her, that when you're doing your hair, some parts need someone else's hands, and some parts, we can learn to hold ourselves.

• 1:06:24Ira Glass?

  Myra Flynn. She's the host of the podcast Home Goings with Myra Flynn, which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Her story was produced by Emmanuel Jochi.

• 1:06:59Ira Glass?

  Well, our program was produced today by Dana Chivvis and Valerie Kipnis, who, by the way, produced the show across an intergenerational divide. It was edited by David Kestenbaum. The people who put together today's show include Adrian Lilly, Seth Lind, Catherine Rae Mondo, Stone Nelson, Ruthie Petito, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rumbury, Ruby Schwartz, Lilly Sullivan, Alissa Shipp, Frances Swanson, Nancy Updike, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurahman, and our senior editors, David Kestenbaum and Nancy Updike. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Barry. Special thanks today to Diego Ungaro, Brendan Mom, Jamie Ardalino, Eileen and Mark Siven, Rebecca Babcock, Shane Manship, BA Parker, Phil Wills, Sam Yellerhorst Kessler, Megan Kane, Laurie Lazz, Dan Sinican, Ray Tintori, Ben Mossman, Brian Houston, Cora Bruce,

• 1:07:44Ira Glass?

  Ingrid Heftel, and Ellis Retzer. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks also to all of our This American Life partners for helping us make the show with their contributions. Life partners get bonus episodes, they get this newsletter where I and other staffers recommend films and TV shows and other stuff. They listen ad-free. Join at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Charim Alatia. You know, no matter what kind of restaurant we go to, Italian, Mexican, Thai, his order is always, always, always the same.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  Gimme some of that shrimp!

• 1:08:27Ira Glass?

  I'm Myra Glass. I'll be seeing you, of course, in the comments on Spotify. And I will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.

• 1:09:00Ira Glass?

  Next week on the podcast of This American Life, 10 years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote this essay in The New York Times Magazine about how she wasn't gonna try to get her daughter into the very best school, the way that so many other parents do. For principled reasons, she was gonna send her to her local public school, a segregated, low-income school. This article caught a huge stir. 10 years have passed, and you know who has some strong feelings about that decision? Nikole's daughter. They talk about it next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

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