Something Else Was Born: On War, Grief, and the Chaos Lottery

Processing the war in Iran, the grace of the Hughes family, and why we're team Supernanny forever

A Note from Beth

Sarah and I have spent the last week or so gathering information about the war in Iran — talking with Kerry Anderson, talking with Congressman Landsman, reading everything we can get our hands on. Today we stopped gathering and started processing. We talk about how we’re feeling, what the Strait of Hormuz means for global commerce and daily life, why the long-term consequences feel so staggering.

Then we come closer to home. The story out of Gainesville, Georgia — a group of kids TPing their teacher’s house, a terrible accident, and a family showing breathtaking grace — leads us to the Hyacinth Fellowship, the first national organization helping people who have unintentionally killed or seriously injured someone. This story is personal for me, and I’m so grateful for the grace of the Hughes family and the work of the Hyacinth Fellowship.

Outside of politics, we discussed authoritative parenting — the sweet spot between authoritarian and permissive — inspired by an excellent Substack essay from Dorota Talalay .

Tickets for our live show and Spice Conference in Minneapolis are on sale now. We’d love to spend time with you in person in August for more wide-ranging conversations about the global, the political, and the very, very personal.

A Note from Sarah

I’ve been hard on The West Wing over the years. Make no mistake, I watched all 156 episodes over the course of the show’s history. I adored Josiah Bartlett and his entire team. The show felt both real and aspirational in a way that spoke to my young, politically obsessed heart.

When I rewatched it several years later, it seemed silly and naive, and I sneered at those who found comfort in its vision of American governance. Now, I find myself wondering if all along I was just angry at myself for being duped, for believing in that vision, for being young and thinking change was possible.

And yet, here I am, another ten years on, thinking I was too hard on young, idealistic Sarah. Of course, something dies over the course of your life as a citizen, much like something dies when we encounter tragedy and loss in our personal lives. We lose elections. We lose hope. We grieve lost opportunities and failed leaders. We witness war and tragedy and fear what will come next. And we share that with every other citizen today and everyone who has come before us over the past 250 years.

It is impossibly hard to be an American citizen right now. And yet, the lessons we’ve learned as human beings navigating life are as applicable as they have ever been to our existence as citizens. The chaos lottery will pull our ticket eventually as a person, as a parent, as a nation. We must face it as best we can, grieve it together, and integrate it into who we are.

I’m grateful to be able to do that work with Beth and with all of you…and even the occasional episode of The West Wing.

Topics Discussed

• Iran: The Costs We Can’t Undo

• Fatal Car Accidents: The Trauma Nobody Talks About

• Outside of Politics: Why Your Kids Need Rules, Not Just Love

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Join us in Minneapolis this August! Tickets are on sale now!

Intro Block Resources (Title Section)

• This War’s Economic Crisis Could Get Much Worse – For the U.S. and the Whole World (Derek Thompson)

• EuroIntelligence (Briefing)

• I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War (The Ezra Klein Show | The New York Times)

• Each year, Tens of Thousands of Americans Accidentally Kill (The Economist)

• The Hyacinth Fellowship

• Not everyone can pull off authoritative parenting (Parenting Through)

• Opinion | There’s a Reason American Kids Are Such Picky Eaters (The New York Times)

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit of Politics. Today, we’ve gathered a lot of information. We’ve gotten our facts straight. We’re going to now process the war in Iran and just talk about how we’re seeing it, why we’re doing it, how we get out of it, what the consequences look like, how we are feeling about all of it. And then we’re going come much closer to home, especially for me, and talk about car accidents. Why we have so many in the United States and this fantastic organization called the Hyacinth Fellowship, who’s out there helping people who like me have accidentally killed another person on the road. And then Outside of Politics, we’re talking about permissive, authoritarian and authoritative parenting and how we can get to that Goldilocks authoritative posture. And there’s just a lot of supernanny love in this segment. So if you also think Jo Frost is like the model, you’re probably going to be here for this conversation.

Sarah [00:01:06] I would just like to say a couple of things. One, there should be a trigger warning because Beth cries in this episode. And I just feel like people need a heads up about that, that it’s going to be.

Beth [00:01:16] You’ll see why I don’t do it regularly, because guys I don’t bounce back. It happens and I’m stuck. And it’s not great.

Sarah [00:01:23] Another trigger warning It’s the parenting discussion. I am unleashed and finally saying how I really feel about gentle parenting, which is not great, guys. So just heads up about that too. If you’re really locked in on gentle parenting maybe skip that Outside of Politics.

Beth [00:01:39] This is a roller coaster, this thing today. For you I hope that it feels like classic Pantsuit Politics in that way, that you get a lot out of it, but it is a journey.

Sarah [00:01:48] Okay, before we get started, tickets are now available for everyone to our live show in Minneapolis at the end of August. That show will also be a roller coaster. I predict there will be crying. There will be singing. It’s going to be really, really fun and intense. So don’t miss your chance to get a ticket to the live show, the after party, the Spice Conference, all of it. Now we talked a little bit yesterday on our Spicy Bonus episode about the Spice Conference. We’ve never done anything like this before and we’re really excited. If you join us for the Spice Conference, you don’t just get access to the live show and the after party on Saturday night, you get a full day of activities and community. Friday night, we’ll kick things off with a welcome party. Saturday morning, we are lining up these amazing sessions with tracks. So there will be a civic track, a politics track, and an outside of politics track. If for example you want to just play Mahjong with my Mahjong group, which is coming up from Paducah. Saturday afternoon, there will be a mix of local activities. So you’ll get to go out into the Twin Cities and explore them with other listeners. And then to top it off, Saturday before the live show, Spice Conference members only will be able to organize and coordinate with other listeners to go to dinner before the live show. It’s going to be really, really fun. So if you get a ticket to the Spice conference, your ticket to the live show and the after party are included. So if any of that sounds fun, you want to hang out with other listeners, make some friends. We talked about on the Spicy Live that you can definitely come alone, lots and lots of people do. Tickets for the Spice Conference and for the live show and after party are on sale now. Head to the show notes for links to buy and we can’t wait to see all of you in Minneapolis.

Beth [00:03:23] Up next, let’s talk about the war in Iran. Sarah, we have been gathering information about this war. Today, I was hoping we could actually process it. I just wondered how are you thinking about the administration’s actions in Iran?

Sarah [00:03:49] I’m furious. I was listening to a discussion of wrath because I’m on this journey with the seven deadly sins and an understanding of anger was this great question of what is your anger protecting? And I think my rage with this administration is just protecting the devastation I feel. I don’t want to be the citizen of a country that bombs a school full of little girls because they were too lazy to update their intelligence and too driven by some sort of macho bullshit to say we don’t really care about killing civilians. That’s not our priority. Our priority is to get the job done. And now we have killed more civilians and not just civilians, little girls, then what? In 35 years because the military was making progress around a careful process that prevented the loss of innocent lives. I am devastated at the environmental fallout from these massive strikes on oil facilities. I am so heartbroken at the loss of life. Both Iranian and American, and the way this has swept up by some counts, 20 countries, it has made us less safe. It has made our economy that was already showing signs of strain less stable. So I am so sad and heartbroken and frustrated, but also my anger is not just protecting the devastation I feel, but I think I just feel righteous anger. This is wrong. This is just wrong. I don’t know how to say it anymore plainly.

Beth [00:05:55] I think I’ve been in a really desperate place all week. This is what I have always feared from a Trump administration. This is what I feared in the first administration that he would get us into a war that he’d be in way over his head. That’s obviously what’s going on here. These folks are in way over their heads. They fired all the people who knew what they were doing. There’s reporting that Kash Patel in February, this February, fired people who were Iranian specialists because they had ties to an investigation into Donald Trump. We have let go of the competence and gotten into this war that is killing people and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. This administration that says they want people to stop moving around the world is causing hundreds of thousands of people to have to move around the word. So they will make the problem that they claim that they were elected to solve even worse. They will feel no sense of responsibility about what they’ve done here. The casual way that Trump talks about this war is almost unbelievable to me. I find myself replaying videos now and staring at photos for a long time because it all seems so surreal. It was so predictable that it coming to pass almost seems like it has to be fake. And so I have just felt really desperate and I tried to do what I do to cope, which is collect information. I wanted to talk to Kerry Anderson, give me all of the facts, help me understand. I wanted talk to Greg Landsman. Give me your rationale, help me understand, help me see a strategy underlying this because it all feels so senseless and overwhelming to me. And it is so obviously leading to generational consequences. And collecting that information has only made me feel worse.

Sarah [00:07:59] It feels to me like COVID, but worse because COVID he actually couldn’t have completely prevented. But that sense during COVID that like, oh, there’s no one competent in charge to help us or protect us. Like, I feel that very profoundly. There’s sort of two modes inside a Trump presidency. And this does have like the overlap of both, but there’s modes where he’s like creating the chaos. And then there’s the mode where chaos comes to his doorstep and you realize he has no plan, capacity to shepherd us through it. And so, he created this chaos. I think he thought despite mountains of evidence that we have collected over many presidencies since the Iranian revolution in the 70s, that he was just going to come in with airstrikes just like Venezuela and it was going to be easy peasy. And the fact that no one said to him, as far as I can tell, based on the reporting, the Iranians have one really good Trump card and it’s the Strait of Hormuz. And they have to do very little and would have the capacity to do this for as long as they wanted to, to cause a shutdown that would have global consequences. We have to protect it. Because that’s what’s frustrating to me right now. I read a summary of a Euro intelligence briefing because I think there’s so much conversation around like a lot of aspects of this war.

[00:09:41] There’s the nuclear component, there’s the ballistic missile component, there’s a regime change component, the confusion wrought by his just scatter shot articulations of the justifications for this war. And so then people are trying to read from the justification of the action, what that means as far as an end. How do we get out of this. And I think all of that muddies the water. I think that, sure, he can say that we’re running out of things to strike. Yeah, from the air. From the air there’s limited impact. No one’s really ever won a conflict like this using just air power. Someone should have said that to him, but I don’t think that they did. Or maybe they did because he is sort of walking a line between boots on the ground and using a freaking sports metaphor like the yips to talk about sending American soldiers into dangerous territory. I mean, it’s galling. But I think all of this discussion around well have we eliminated their capacity to take nuclear weapons? Would that be a victory? I mean, they’re just trying to grasp at straws here so they can say we’ve done it, but it won’t matter if the Strait of Hormuz is not secure. That is the thing. That is what matters. And the Iranians need to do very little to disrupt that shipping channel. And we have to do so much to secure it.

Beth [00:11:16] The Strait of Hormuz, if you are not tracking this discussion, is a really narrow waterway through which an unbelievable amount of global commerce moves. It’s not just oil, it’s fertilizer, it’s goods, it is just regular goods. This is a connection to COVID, right? When we all had to get right with remembering how much stuff gets put in shipping containers and routed around the world all day, every day for us to be able to go to Walmart, or order something on Amazon. And so with Iran saying, hey, we are going to place bombs effectively in the Strait of Hormuz, we are going to threaten ships, we’re not talking about navies moving through the Strait of Hormuz. The president muddied these waters, too, when he said that oil tankers should show some guts and just go through anyway. They’re not soldiers. These are just people working their jobs in shipping logistics and transit, moving stuff around the world for ordinary people to use every day. They should not be threatened by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in the middle of their day. And this was entirely foreseeable. And the fact that according to Senator Chris Murphy, the administration has no plan whatsoever to make it safe for commercial goods and oil to move through the Strait of Hormuz again is shocking. It is shocking on a level almost that this school bombing is shocking. There is emotionally no equivalent to that many children being killed in a mistake. And yet a lot of people throughout the world will suffer if fuel prices skyrocket and become unaffordable, if food cannot be grown. I mean, we’re talking about extremely serious long-term consequences, even if this goes on for just a few weeks.

Sarah [00:13:27] I mean, the thing is, when you hear them talk about crude oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz, that’s crude oil, not gas. It gets turned into so many things. Derek Thompson did a really great write-up of this. He’s like it’s fertilizer. The oil is a component of so many essential pieces of our economy. And to the gas of it all, I was reading that even if let’s say he ends it tomorrow, it’s going to be 2027 before they can get all this back to where it was. This is not something that turns on a dime like his whims. My husband has a former coworker who works for a big aluminum factory. And they warned him, like, you got to shut it down. It takes weeks to shut it down and months to get it back online. These are not switches we flip because Donald Trump changed his mind. I just think that there is no one telling him the truth. I just don’t think there’s any conversation in these rooms where there’s actual debate. Pete Hegseth seems...

Beth [00:14:32] Unhinged.

Sarah [00:14:33] Unhinge. Mentally ill? Like, where is his soul? Like, what is this? This macho bullshit pursuit. It’s not a Fox News briefing, dude. And you’re kicking reporters out because you don’t like the way you look in pictures and we’re talking about dead children? What is wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?

Beth [00:14:56] Well, look, it’s annoying to even have to talk about no one told the president these things. He should have learned these lessons from COVID. We are just starting to feel normal again in global commerce after the disruptions that COVID created. So he knows, he should know better than anybody what shipping disruption does to an economy, but he refuses to learn anything. And honestly, I worry that as a nation, we refuse to learn anything. This endeavor, even if it had been done under a more careful and competent administration, surely we can look at the past 25 years and realize even if we were doing it 100% because we want the people of Iran to be free of their repressive regime, we have 25 years of history telling us that when we get involved, we make it worse and we lose a lot on our end in the process.

Sarah [00:15:54] It’s a bright spot for me, actually. I do feel like the American people have learned because the draw, once this stuff starts to wrap yourself in the flag, has in the past been pretty strong, but it doesn’t seem to be working now. Like there does not seem to this desire to be the good guys and justify the force. And the fact that the story around this school bombing just keeps growing is very encouraging to me. People don’t care. People have learned like we don’t want to do this. And that to me is very encouraging.

Beth [00:16:29] I mean the people making the decisions.

Sarah [00:16:32] You mean our democratically elected leaders completely disconnected from the democratic will of the American people. Is that what you’re talking about?

Beth [00:16:37] Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

Sarah [00:16:39] Cool. Yeah, I think that the complete disconnect from the will of the populace and the complete-- I was so annoyed by the former deputy national security advisor to the Trump administration on the Ezra Klein show and the fact that she was like, well, they’re talking, they are doing press conferences. And I’m like you cannot be serious with me and think that that’s enough. Americans have died and there are, according to reports, hundreds that were injured really badly that are not getting the attention of the seven service members that have died. So it’s like, this is worse and I think they’re actively trying to cover it up because that’s all they know how to do. There’s no long-term planning. We act, we make mistakes, we cover it up. We take big ol’ donations from whoever wants to give them to us and do what they want. We don’t really care how that affects the populace. We don’t really care about the long- term policy or strategy. It’s what he wants at the moment, we’ll make it happen. And if he talks to somebody on the phone that just gave him a big donation and they want this to happen, and maybe they’re a military contractor (I’m sure we’ll find that out later) then that sounds great, we’ll just do that. Like there’s just the complete disregard for public service. You serve the American people. It’s just absent. It does not exist. He doesn’t serve anybody but himself.

Beth [00:18:09] The people don’t want this and the people bear all the consequences of it. The people send their loved ones and go to the Middle East to serve. The people are on those ships that have to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. The people in California, which today the FBI is telling their police to prepare because Iran is talking about counter-strikes off the West Coast of the United States. The people have to pay the higher prices that result from this. The people will be the ones dealing with it at the grocery store if crops cannot be grown and harvested in the normal order of things. Like it’s just really sad to me that this is where we are and I don’t see a path for stopping it. This can’t be undone. Even if they pulled everything today, I’m fearful that we have undone a lot of the work that was done in the war on terror, that there will be new efforts at recruitment to do terrorism against the United States because of this.

Sarah [00:19:07] We’ve already seen the shooting in Austin and the bomb thrower at Gracie Mansion in New York City.

Beth [00:19:12] That’s right, and we’ll see more of that. That the efforts to rebuild Gaza are going to be where if the whole Middle East is torn up. It’s just, I don’t know. I just feel pretty desperate about it.

Sarah [00:19:26] Even to the economic costs, he is bankrupting us. He is running us into the ground like he has every other company he’s ever been in charge of. The cost of this war the first week was $11.3 billion. They are spending and spending and spending. We’re going to have to pay back the freaking tariffs that already put enormous strain on the global economy. So we have to pay those back. We have this incredibly expensive war that is not only costing us money, but running down the weapon reserves we need to actually defend our national security. We can’t just make more missile defenders in a day. And it’s so much money and they just spend and spend and spend and it seems no desire to actually pay attention. This is going to cause interest rates to go up, which means our interest rates are going to go up as a nation, which means we’re going to spend even more of our GDP on paying back debt. I just feel like he’s destroying the future for my children. That’s why I’m so angry. Like, there is no building, there’s no care, there no strategy to make this country better. And I have a kid that’s about to go to college. Like, he’s going to be out there in this world, And it’s just so heartbreaking and I’m not in Iran. God, what if I had children in Iran or Ukraine or Sudan. Mr. President of Peace, the world is worse. It is worse. The country is worse off, and the world is worse off because you’ve been president since last year.

Beth [00:21:13] And he hasn’t done anything to secure alliances around this action. It’s the opposite. We’re just offending the countries that typically work with us when something really difficult is happening in the world. To the tariffs, he is continuing to look for ways to impose tariffs. They’ve just announced a wave of investigations this week of countries that are our friends, looking for unfair trade practices that would justify slapping tariffs back on them. We have access to run up all this debt because we’ve had friends in the world, because we’d been a reliable partner on the world stage. There was testimony in Congress that’s been clipped all over social media in the past couple of days of an expert explaining to Congress that America is not guaranteed to forever be able to borrow in the word. And she put it in great terms. She said,

Clip: Martha Gimbel [00:22:11] We are currently the boyfriend at the beginning of the Hallmark movie in the big city where the girlfriend is still going out with him even though she knows that it’s wrong. But at some point, she’s going to go home to the small town and find the nice firefighter and realize that there’s another option.

Beth [00:22:30] And so, again, just the long-term widespread hitting every sector and hitting people extremely personally, all of those consequences of this action that the administration seems to not have given a moment of consideration to really troubles me. The complete ineptitude in Congress to be able to get their arms around something. And the longer this goes on, the harder and more dangerous it will be to try to unwind things. One of the reasons I was interested in talking with Representative Landsman, who I think is a very thoughtful person, is that I know part of what’s on his mind is our responsibility to troops in the region. That once you strike, the whole landscape has changed because we already have people there just doing jobs that they’ve been there doing for years, and they are suddenly at risk. And so every move has to be really carefully calibrated to all of those risks that have just been created. And I just feel like who in the White House cares about that right now?

Sarah [00:23:35] I appreciate your conversation with Representative Landsman. I felt like he was trying to thread a needle that existed only in his own mind. But I heard glimmers of it in the conversation on Ezra Klein’s show with the former Deputy National Security Advisor. And here’s the thing, I am sympathetic to the argument. I was sympathetic to the call out in Mark Carney’s speech about the global order. The idea of like it wasn’t perfect, there was a lot of hypocrisy. No, the United Nations, even with the backing of the United States, didn’t fix Iran. It was still an authoritative, repressive regime that was a threat to the region and the world. But I thought Ezra’s answer was really good. Yeah, but we don’t know what could have been otherwise. It wasn’t fixed, but it wasn’t this. You know what I mean? I think that it’s so hard to see what you’ve prevented. And it’s hard in the face of Afghanistan, in Iraq and the war in Ukraine, to say like, well, we didn’t prevent these and this was a quagmire and all this. We don’t know how much worse it could be with global instability, but we’re about to find out. We’re about find out how much worst it could, how much shock we can absorb both the American economy and the global order because however hypocritical, problematic, imperfect, what we had before was it’s gone. And now there’s nothing to prevent exactly what Iran is doing. Fine, let’s just all put our cards on the table. And our card is the Strait of Hormuz. And if we are going to secure the Strait of Hormuz forever, I don’t know. Like, perhaps we can bring on some partners in the Gulf. I sure hope so. But this is not an easy in and out. This is something that is going to require an enormous amount of money, military power, weaponry that has to come from somewhere. It’s not an infinite supply. And I don’t think they have a plan. I think we’re stuck now. The only thing that I cling to is that this is obvious for everyone to see. And that even if we’re not leading, maybe even if we are not a partner, there will be nations in the world, organizations in the world that say, like, this cannot continue and we will find a path forward to securing order, even if the United States is not a part of that.

Beth [00:26:39] Sarah, we’re going to come much closer to home now, even though I’m fearful that the war in Iran is going to be very close to home in a huge variety of ways soon, and talk about something that is ongoing in society. It’s in the headlines in part because of this really tragic situation in Georgia that we’ll talk about. But we’re going to discuss car accidents and the number of people who are involved in car accidents every year. And as we get into that, long time listeners know this about me, but if you’re new, this is very personal to me. When I was a junior in high school, I was in an accident. I was driving on a two lane highway and a car pulled out to turn left in front of me and I hit it broadside and a passenger in that car was killed in that accident. And it changed everything about my life forever. A part of me died there, too. And we decided to talk about this because there is an organization that’s trying to help people who live with having been accidental killers as I am. And because sadly a lot of families in Gainesville, Georgia are contending with this too common but really undiscussed reality of knowing that you were a part of another person’s death.

Sarah [00:28:10] I think it is easy for people to say, well, it wasn’t your fault. Harder in this situation in Georgia, I think, because they initiated behavior that led to this terrible accident. And if you haven’t been following this, I don’t know how it’s been everywhere every time I opened the internet. But there was a high school teacher, Jason Hughes, who knew that students were coming to his house to participate in TP. They were going to TP his trees about as all-American basic teenager behavior as you can get. Five kids went to his house at about 11:30. He came outside to like run them off.

Beth [00:28:50] Like in good fun. Like he was excited about it.

Sarah [00:28:53] Yes, but he fell and tripped and one of the kids ran over him. From the reporting I’ve read, the kids immediately figured out what’s going on, tried to administer aid, but he died from his injuries. The family knew these kids and law enforcement has charged all five of them with a range of from criminal trespassing to vehicular homicide. And I think the really beautiful part of this story is that the family of Jason Hughes has come out and said, we don’t want this, please drop the criminal charges. That he loved them and that he didn’t want this, he wouldn’t want their lives ruined. Like, enough has happened. That is terrible, we don’t need to extend this. Now, I haven’t seen that they’ve dropped the charges yet, but the statement from the family has been everywhere.

Beth [00:29:48] I read that the district attorney said he’s reviewing the case and that he will give a lot of deference to the family’s wishes and I hope he does because what I know is that they will be punished by this for the rest of their lives. They will live with this forever. I was 17, these kids were 18. A part of me was gone and has never come back. And I just hate this for them. And I hate this for the family. And I hate this for all of the people who go through it. And it’s so, so many people because we drive a lot in the United States. If you look at our data, the number of accidents that take place, 40,000 people a year die in the United States in car crashes. And that’s a whole lot of people who were involved in those deaths and have to live with those deaths. And for this family to come out and say like there is enough tragedy here, don’t compound it, really touches me.

Sarah [00:30:53] I got into it about this with my husband this morning because he was like, well, you have to discourage risky behavior. And I’m like TPing is not risky behavior! And he’s like, well, they drove away fast. And I was like that’s just fight or flight, man. Like nobody’s going to not do this if this kid goes to college. First of all, I was so sad. Before we get to the driving of it because, obviously, I have lots of thoughts on roads and cars and the size of American’s cars and all kinds of aspects of this. Because I hold a lot of anxiety about driving and my children driving. Anyway, the TPing of it all just made me so sad because I thought this is exactly what kids should be doing. This is what I want my kids doing. Teenagers need risk. It is very, very important. They have to engage in risky boundary pushing behavior to differentiate, to individualize, like it has to happen. I don’t love it, but it has to happen. And they’re not doing it. They’re not doing anything. They’re not having sex. They’re not drinking. Like godspeed, I wish they were out there TPing instead of sitting in their rooms on their screens. This is exactly what they should be in a group. And they should be going out and doing silly things. And look, there is inherent risk in life. Accidents happen. They just do they happen all the time. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish it wasn’t true. Laura Tremaine and I just had a long conversation about death that’s going to be on slow read. I mean, this exact conversation, because I was like you don’t want to face the reality that we all think we are good people and we deserve something, right?

[00:32:38] But that’s not... You’re living. It’s risky. You could fall down the stairs. You could choke on a chicken bone. You could slip and fall. Like it is what it is. It sucks. I hate it too. The risk of death is ever present all the time for all of us. Now, to the driving of it all, there is so much we could do to reduce that risk and prevent not only the tragedy of lost life, but the tragedy of another human being crossing paths in a way that they have to carry for the rest of their lives that we don’t do. First of all, we drive too big of cars. Our cars are stupid, stupid big. I hate all of them. I hate the giant cars, just so you know. If you drive some big stupid pickup truck and you don’t haul hay, then I don’t think you should have it. I hate all those cars. Our cars are so much bigger than everybody, everywhere else. And that’s a huge component of this. Because if you hit somebody like my sweet baby in his Mini Cooper, in some giant ass suburban, well, what do you think is going to happen? Our car culture is so fucked up. And I think the way we just tell people it wasn’t your fault move on is our refusal to reckon with the cost of this car culture.

Beth [00:33:53] Fault is a very unhelpful word when you talk about something like this. We drive big cars. Our roads are designed in this patchwork system. Sometimes the states own them, sometimes the federal government. The sunbelt states are especially dangerous in the way the roads are constructed. There have just been studies showing that a lot of state governments are responsible for those roads and they’ve been designed for efficiency, not for safety.

Sarah [00:34:23] That’s what makes me so mad. In the United States, you can see like we don’t have to guess at what works. Some states do things and drop the road desk. And so everybody else should do that too. This is not hard.

Beth [00:34:34] And I drive really frequently where I live on an interstate system that is fantastic for semis. And it’s really tough to think about my new driver in our house getting out on that interstate. And she will have to, almost immediately. We also drink a lot and drive. 37 people a day still die in drunk driving crashes. There is one alcohol impaired driving fatality every 39 minutes in the United States. So moving into something a little bit more hopeful, like understanding that so many people are affected, I really appreciated The Economist summing this up by saying the result of this culture around driving is a high share of Americans nursing trauma, typically in silence. Because so many people are involved in these accidents and there’s nowhere to go. And the results of that are really bad. People have nightmares. They have post-traumatic stress disorder. People kill themselves. People have relationships that are just totally destroyed by these wrecks. A lot of people are sued over it because sometimes the only way that the family of someone who’s lost can get closure is by suing the other person involved in the accident. So you sent me this article Sarah about the Hyacinth Fellowship, which is the first and really only national global organization that tries to help people who lived through a fatal car crash. And I am so touched by this focus on people who have unintentionally killed or seriously harmed other people because I can’t think of a more pervasive problem that goes almost entirely unaddressed.

Sarah [00:36:22] Yeah, it’s named after the Greek myth, Apollo, accidentally killed the Spartan princess, Hyacinthus, with a discus as Apollo mourned a flower bloom from the drops of the princess’ blood. And so that’s what it’s named after, which I think is really beautiful. And they do calls and spiritual counseling and writing workshops and legal seminars and all kinds of stuff for people. And I just think it’s so beautiful because, look, it is the chaos lottery. If we had the safest roads, like Europe, people would still cross paths with one another. Accidents will continue to happen as long as there are human beings on planet Earth. And what I’ve learned from my own trips through the chaos lottery, the most powerful thing that can happen is someone walking alongside of you and saying, this is who you are now. I would say that, yes, perhaps something died that day, but something else was born. Something else was born for you when that accident happened. A new Beth was born. That’s how I feel about the school shooting that I lived through. That’s I feel like about Felix’s diagnosis. I wouldn’t go back. To integrate something terrible that happens to you into who you are is one of the most beautiful pursuits I think humanity undertakes. And when you don’t, just as a little callback, you get a Pete Hegseth. You get someone who just cannot see the reality that everything is fragile and beautiful and we are not owed an easy path. And we can’t earn one either. You didn’t do anything wrong when your ticket gets pulled. And so to see people putting some process and framework around that... There’s like so many pieces of Felix’s diabetes management that reminds me of this. I think that’s why everyone we talked to when he was diagnosed was like send him to camp, send him the camp, send him to camp. Like to have a place to go where people understand so you don’t feel so alone. So you’re given tools to put some understanding and grace and forgiveness around this thing that’s happened to you. I just think it is so beautiful.

Beth [00:38:52] It’s really needed. I feel very, very lucky that I have such a wonderful life on the other side of this. There were definitely times when I did not think that could be so. Maybe I’m just not at peace with it enough yet, but like would you run it back and choose a different path if you could? Is a very difficult question to answer when someone else died. And so I’m really grateful that this exists and that it’s available for people. Would have been very, very valuable to me in 1997 for many years after. And if you are a first responder, part of what the Hyacinth Fellowship wants is for people to know that they’re doing this work for people on scene. They want to be known the way that organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are known. That you’re not alone, that help is right there, that people have walked this path before and you don’t have to do it by yourself and you have to put it away the way that we with good intentions ask each other to put it away. Their information in the show notes and hope that you all will help spread the word about this good and important work. And I do think that the grace that the Hughes family in Georgia is showing is also a contribution to this massive pain that exists in our country.

Sarah [00:40:26] I love America, I do. I love America. I love Americans, but man, do we try to get away from pain. Do we try get away from just the inevitable journey we all walk. That this is unavoidable. Maybe it won’t look like this. Maybe yours won’t show up in People magazine and have all of America discussing it-- or maybe it will. I think it’s the individuality, I think it’s the Capitalism, this siren song of you can go through life and avoid tragedy or accidents or pain or loss or grief it’s so powerful that you feel like you’ve done something wrong if you can’t and it catches up with you. And I think that hearing someone say, you didn’t do anything wrong. You stepped out the door you lived. It’s inevitable that that journey is filled with risk. And maybe saying like would I change at all is not what I mean. I was just acknowledging like, you can’t. Maybe you could go back and change it different, but you wouldn’t avoid pain or heartbreak. I think that when I look back on my own life and all the things that have caused enormous grief, maybe I could have stopped those. Maybe I could’ve done something different, but something else would have knocked at my door. I think that’s what’s so hard about being a human, but when people can look that openly in the face and transform it into something beautiful, that’s what I was thinking about that incredible storyline on The Pit with the rape victim and the way that the people showed up in support. And even in those moments, it’s so hard to hear it. And just to hold onto it and remember and maybe months from now you’ll remember what the first responder told you.

Beth [00:42:30] Yeah, I hope these kids in Georgia are surrounded by people who tell them you can still have a wonderful life. Your life is still meaningful. You can still love and be loved. This will always be with you, but it will be okay. I hope that their community really says that clearly. And I’m so blown away by the grace of the Hughes family to be the first people telling them that.

Sarah [00:42:58] I think back to the school shooting and I think what I internalized was not be afraid because something terrible can happen. See, look, something terrible happened. Be really afraid. What I centralized was instead of survivor’s guilt, what I described as like survivor responsibility or duty. Like I just felt like what I learned was everything can change in a second, so don’t take a second for granted. And I don’t know where that came from. I can’t really tell you one moment where I like internalized that and took that away as opposed to be afraid something terrible can happen to you when you’re young and you can die. But I did and I’m really glad I did because I think about my classmates and I take my beautiful life seriously. Not because they didn’t have a beautiful life, but just because I feel an enormous sense of grace and gratitude. I was reading this really incredible thing, I don’t know where, Substack somewhere, that talked about like what an incredible, lucky accident you are just to be born. Like all the sperm that go and the one that makes it and then you make it through the pregnancy and like it’s the paradox of what we’re talking about. The second you take a breath and engage in this life; you are inevitably in the path of suffering. And also the stars that had to align to set you on that path, to experience joy and gratitude and have this beautiful life. Like, I have this little slip of paper that my friend Laura gave me, and on one side it says to ashes you will return. And on the other side it says, for you the world was created. Both things are true. Like that incredible intersection of luck and love and fate that got you here, but that is inextricably tied up with suffering and pain and choices and accidents and tragedy. It’s a lot.

Beth [00:45:17] What I learned is that we are so bound up together that I will never have road rage because I didn’t know the person who died in this accident. I didn’t know the family of the person who died this accident, they were from another community visiting where I lived and it didn’t matter. I grieve him every single day and I grieved for his family every single day. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. And there’s just nothing worth being so pissed off about out there that you create the opportunity for something like this to happen. And you’re not a terrible person if you do, like that happens too, we’re all human. But what I learned is that there’s nothing worth this, nothing. I can be late, I can be offended, I could be cut off, someone can flip me off, there’s is nothing, nothing worth being reckless on the road if you can help it. And in every aspect of my life, I just constantly feel that sense that I am one thread in the tapestry, and when another thread is pulled or cut, it affects me and when I am pulled or cut it affects other people. And here we all are together and that’s what we’ve got.

Sarah [00:46:41] Yeah, and to our previous conversation, I think that’s what’s so hard about a moment like this in the world. It’s not a video game. I don’t want to see your stupid social media posts set to music, hard rock music. These are real lives. Those little girls, they’re gone. They’re gone! And I think that affects all of us. And not just because our gas prices are going to go up.

Beth [00:47:06] That’s right.

Sarah [00:47:07] I thought when Turkey had that terrible earthquake, you might just read one headline around about 30,000 people dying in a day, but trust me, it affects you.

Beth [00:47:18] You might not read it and it affects you. The things we never even know about, I deeply believe are still working on us all the time.

Sarah [00:47:31] And so I think that’s what’s so heavy about this particular moment. And I do think it is worth clinging to those moments of light from the Hughes family, from the Hyacinth Fellowship, from people out in the world doing what they can in the face of all that darkness.

Beth [00:47:58] Well, do we ever need Outside of Politics? I read this piece by Dorada Tleile (I hope I’m saying that correctly) on Substack, about authoritative parenting.

Sarah [00:48:10] So we picked a real light one for Outside of Politics. We picked a light one. We should have done nail polish color like somebody asked us.

Beth [00:48:18] No, this was really helpful to me though. I read all the parenting stuff, okay? I read of the gentle parenting and then the critiques of the general parenting and the critiques of the critique and all of that stuff. And I feel like this one nailed it because she talked about how authoritative parenting is really what we all want. We want to be highly responsive to our kids. We want to warm and we want to have clear boundaries and consistent enforcement of those boundaries and predictable consequences. That is how we get the kinds of people that we want to be raising.

Sarah [00:48:50] Well, let me just put on the internet in the year of our Lord, 2026, that I hate gentle parenting. I think it’s an epic failure and only works when kids are little and you can pick them up and move them to another room. Now, I do have that with dogs for what it’s worth. That’s why I get small dogs because I’m too lazy to fully train them and so I got to be able to pick them up when they’re being bad. But with kids, they don’t stay small. And the idea that you can just lovingly support their decision making is bananas because they don’t have any decision making. They don’t know how to make decisions That’s your job to teach them. My mother Lisa famously says that you have until about three to call their bluff and if you don’t your life gets exponentially harder from that point on. So I do want to own that my mom was a great parent. My mom, my stepdad, my dad, all the people in my family for sure I’ve never heard this word put around it, were authoritative parents. There was authoritative parenting happening to me, from the people I love, and my community broadly. I read something on Substack they talked about like the rough point right now as parenting is we don’t correct other people’s kids. And there’s just only so much two people can give you.

[00:50:01] They’re limited in their scope and impact. That’s why it takes a village, but it can’t just take a village of everybody praising your child. The village also needs to correct your child. I think that’s a huge reason I probably couldn’t have articulated to you, but that I moved back to Paducah. Because I was raised in a community that corrected you. Like, anybody would tell you, cut it out, we don’t do that. And I do that. I correct other people’s children all the time. And I hope they’re correcting mine because I do think that that’s very, very valuable. So I think the hardest thing in parenting, before your child is even born, is if you are correcting your own parenting. That is a really hard thing. So like if you had an authoritarian parent and you don’t have a good example of authoritative parenting, or you had permissive parenting and you’re starting from scratch, I do not envy that journey. So I have strong feelings about parenting because I had a really, really good upbringing. My parents were and continue to be really good. I had unconditional love. I had very strict boundaries. I had consequences. It’s about as good as you can get. So I’m not having to undo anything. I think that’s what’s so hard.

Beth [00:51:15] I have great parents too. If you are new to this framework, which I was when I read this piece, because gentle parenting is out there everywhere, but this piece says, look, what we’re really talking about is authoritarian, where you are not very responsive to your kids, you are just very demanding of them. Or permissive parenting, where you’re like wholly responsive to you kids. And your goal is to just be warm and loving and not expect much from them. And the quote that really captured this for me was the parent is there to lovingly support from the sidelines while the child freely explores and develops on the pitch of life. So that’s the permissive side, which I would just argue is an overcorrection from authoritarian parenting. But that just right place is authoritative where you are high in both responsiveness and demandingness that you say I expect a lot of you and I give a lot to you as well. And what this piece says is that we have a hard time doing that because you need the conditions around it to be right. You need rest. You need energy. You need to have seen other people do it and to be willing to learn from them and to ask them questions and draw on their experiences, you need a predictable family rhythm. She’s like you need to be outside a lot as a family. Like you just need an active, busy, fun family life. And because those things are in pretty short supply in our modern family structures, a lot of people end up thinking that their kids are just unmanageable. That they have kids who for whatever reason cannot be parented authoritatively. And she says that the challenge is not that your kid can’t be managed this way and that you can’t build your family this way. It’s that getting those conditions in our society is really hard and we got to help each other with it.

Sarah [00:53:09] Well, this is a perfect example. Did you read the piece in the New York Times about picky eaters?

Beth [00:53:14] No.

Sarah [00:53:14] Okay, it’s so good. And the woman was basically like, look, what we’ve decided is that this is about the kids. Exactly what you’re just describing. That there’s something wrong with the kids and that kids really have unexplored palates and that they have a lower tolerance for risk in food. But she was like, but that’s not true. And we have lots of historical documents to prove, that a hundred years ago kids ate oysters and strongly flavored vinegar stuff and sauerkraut. I don’t even like sauerkraut. Like they ate all kinds of stuff. There is no indication in the historical record that kids have different palates. There just isn’t. But this is the narrative we’ve created around children and eating to say, well, because my child won’t try these strong flavors, it just must be how kids are. But this one was like it’s not how kids are. It’s certainly not how kids were 100 years ago or less. And I think that’s like a really good application and definitely the authoritative conditions that like my family applied. Now, one of those which is huge and I think a big piece of this puzzle, just because I think the picky eating is a really excellent application, is like we sat down as a family and my husband cooks. So the taste on display or like that they were trying were wide and varied. Because once you get into it-- I’ve just been eating restaurant food for like five days since I was traveling, and it’s just a different universe, man. Like it’s a different university of taste. Everything is so salty or so sweet and that’s your choices. And so I think it was that we expected them to eat. That was the expectation. And that’s how I was raised.

[00:55:07] My mom was like if you don’t eat what I put on the table, you can make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after a certain age. But like that’s it. I’m not making you a different meal. My mom and stepdad and grandmother joke about like all the Sunday dinners we had where it was like you have to have one bite. You can’t have dessert. It took a long time. Like it was a lot of application and effort, but it worked. I never had picky eaters, I have three. I feel pretty confident that it was something I did and not just luck of the draw because all three of them eat everything. And that’s where I see a lot of what you’re saying like about the boundaries and the consequences and also how freaking hard it is. It’s just monotonous application where you want to just be like, fine, eat bag of cheese. I maybe would have caged, but Nicholas was not going to. No, absolutely not.

Beth [00:56:02] Yeah, it is very hard. It is exhausting. And I constantly try to tell people like it is harder when they’re little. This will wear you out and parenting littles is so physically exhausting. I have done a tremendous amount of emotional work with one of my daughters this week. And it’s tiring. Like it leaves me really wiped out, it hurts my heart sometimes. There’s nothing easy about it. But I will take it over when they were two and three, I was changing diapers. It is a different thing as they get older, but this piece where you’re trying to establish how we operate in our house and who’s in charge, you are asked to do it at the moment that you have the least rest in your body. And that’s a design flaw I wish that we could fix it. And I think what’s helpful when I read a piece like this is it reminds me, hey, I’m in a stage where I can help people now. I’ve been through this. I am on the other side of a lot of the most difficult moments in it. I’m at a different place in terms of my girl’s comprehension of what I’m saying. Now, I still need the advice of like when you ask them to do something, believe that they both should do it and that they will do it. That’s still really useful advice to me, to tell myself don’t get in your own head. Like you got to be confident as you say, I need you to unload the dishwasher or whatever it is. And you need to give them more and more and more ownership of chores. They need to feel useful. They need learn to be cooperative. They need to have that sense of like I’m responsible to the people around me. So I still need a lot of this advice, but some of the other stuff I can be the person who helps. And even in that sense of like correcting other people’s kids and helping them hold those boundaries and standards, I want to do that because this is all very hard.

Sarah [00:58:02] Well, I have many things to say. To the believing they can do it, this wears me out. This is what I get a lot when I would travel with the boys and I would post all these family pictures from all the national parks we went to. And I would get, “How do you get them to take a picture?” Excuse me? The three freeloaders I flew across the country and feed and take to all these fabulous places? What do you mean how do I get them do it? I tell them to do it. I say, stand there and smile. Do it now. Like I’m just so confused by that framework. And, look, I think we have had to, as they’ve gotten older, realize we can’t just demand. Like we are proud. Listen, we’re definitely on the more authoritarian, authoritative end of the spectrum. Especially my husband, he grew up in a house of five, four boys and a girl. His mother had tight control, okay? Godspeed to her with four boys. So I think that he is very much still, and I’m like, okay, but now they’re teenagers and we have to like do more gardening than controlling. And it’s hard, but I think that this idea of like you’re not going to do what I asked you to do, no, that’s not an option. Like you live here, there are expectations placed on you. I think people’s expectations of their kids are so low. I remember when we had the conversation about laundry and I was like you just give them a Tide cold pod and a mesh laundry thing, they can do it at like second grade, man. They can do their own laundry. Like, I just think people... But it’s not because something’s wrong. It’s just like where would you see that? Where would you learn that? Now, you and I have called out a source where we learned a lot of this and I’m internally great before, which is Jo Frost, the Supernanny, which I watched a shit ton of before I had kids. And I learned an enormous amount. Listen, they’re all on YouTube. If you’re like, oh my God, where do I start? How do I started thinking about this? Go watch you some Supernannies, guys. It is like the, I would argue-- except for maybe 16 and Pregnant, which did actually drop teen pregnancy rates, backed up by science-- one of the most valuable reality shows ever created. It’s so good. She’s so good, guys. She’s so good.

Beth [01:00:16] Well, and like you, I had great parents. My parents are still great parents to me. They’re wonderful parents. It’s helpful to see somebody else do it. It’s helpful to see it happening in a bunch of different contexts. It’s helpful to see her confront issues that maybe weren’t issues when we were kids. I wish that she were still on my TV every single week. I could use Supernanny on TikTok, you know what I mean? I just think she nails this balance of I’m warm and loving and fun and silly and we have a great time together. And also we have rules here that you are expected to follow because it’s good for you because you’re unhappy when there aren’t rules here.

Sarah [01:00:59] Yeah, that’s what I tell people. I’m like, the kids are miserable. I see the children of the gentle parents. They do not seem like happy children. That’s all I’m saying. I see them out in the world. They are crying. They are dysregulated. They are freaking out. Like, that’s what I always tell people, listen, my stance on toddlers is clear. I don’t like them, okay? They’re not my favorite. But what I would always tell you about toddlers is like, first of all, you’re a third of everyone’s size. So everyone’s towering over you. You understand what maybe let’s say 30 to 40% of what’s happening, that’s probably aggressive. So you’re confused, you’re small, and someone’s telling you you’re in control? How the hell are you going to be in control, you don’t understand anything. You have no basic knowledge.

Beth [01:01:41] And your basic needs are overwhelming. You’re hungry, it’s overwhelming. If you’re sleepy, it’s overwhelming. If you have to go to the bathroom, that’s all you can think about. It is a hard way to be a person.

Sarah [01:01:52] Yeah. And so it’s an unkindness to put them in control because they’re not in control. They don’t have the regulation. They don’t know. It’s like all the valuable things Supernanny teaches. Like you have to teach them how to sleep. That’s not something people instinctually know how to do. You have to teach him how to eat. That’s something we instinctively know how do either. I think there’s this narrative that I can hear. I can hear the chorus of 10,000 voices. Well, how will they ever learn to trust themselves? That’s the authoritarian, right? You don’t trust yourself; you trust me. But what you’re doing when you teach them the skills is giving them a path to trust themselves, not just their feelings, where the feeling is the subjective feeling is that’s the only tool they have? Oh Lord, no. I’m a better person when I stopped trusting my feelings as the only data I had to decide if something I was doing was right or wrong.

Beth [01:02:45] Well, I also think that you do give them a lot of ownership. It’s just a different kind of ownership. I don’t make their homework my business.

Sarah [01:02:55] No.

Beth [01:02:56] I very much take the approach that I have done fifth grade before. So it’s Ellen’s turn to do fifth grade, and it’s her responsibility. And I’m okay if there’s some failure in that. My best friend is really great at articulating that you want the failure early, not later. So if your kid is making bad decisions in middle school, let them get caught, let them suffer the consequences of it, let them learn from it and be happy that it happened in middle-school before the stakes got even higher and the consequences more devastating. And so I think that they learn to trust themselves because they learn that you trust them in certain context and with a framework around them.

Sarah [01:03:37] Yeah, my meemaw told me a long time ago that the people who teach their children they’re a center of the earth are doing such a disservice because they’re not. I mean, can we all agree that a little bit of a problem in America is everybody’s walking around thinking that they’re the center of universe, including the president of the United States? And so she’s like it’s an unkindness. And the kindest thing you can do as a person who loves them is teach them that. You want to teach them that. You don’t want their first boss to teach them that. You don’t want to their professors to teach them that. You want to teach them the world doesn’t revolve around you. This household doesn’t revolve around you, there are other people here. And I’m sorry you don’t want to unload the dishwasher, but we used a lot of dishes and it has to be unloaded. So that’s just the reality of the situation of a functioning household is that everyone has to contribute including your precious little butt. So I learned that from Supernanny. I loved how she’d always come into the house and write the rules up on the board. Like, let’s talk about what’s important in this family. And I never really wrote them on the board. Maybe I should have at certain points. I probably did and I just don’t remember it. But there’s always things like my kids don ‘t attack each other. Like even though I have three boys, we don’t have wrestling. We don’t have fights. We don’t have punching. Because I’ve been really clear from the beginning, you don’t put your hands on your brother, period. We’re not going to do that. That’s not something we do.

[01:04:55] And I think people sort of like just expect that as a baseline with boys in a way that it doesn’t have to be. And that we don’t talk about each other’s bodies. We don’t talk about anybody else’s bodies. We are kind. There’s other things I should have worked harder on. I should’ve put something on the board of like we don’t cuss. Really should’ve worked harder on my kid’s language from the beginning. That was a mistake I made as a parent. I wish Supernanny had articulated some more cussing boundaries. But I just think like-- and we go to bed and sleep is important and nutritious meals are important. And I just tried to put down the basics for them and teach them how to navigate all that. The jury’s still out. My kids still live in my house. Who knows if they’ll be actual productive members of society. But I like who they are now. I like to be around them. I like to live in a house with them. I don’t find them like constantly angering or frustrating. And I see the impact when I say Griffin will just make dinner because we’re busy and he’ll do it. And I’ll say Amos will do any chore I ask him to. And Felix is bare minimum learning. But I see people’s face like, oh my God, he cooks dinner. And I’m like, yeah, he’s very helpful. He’s very contributive to our household. Griffin makes my life easier, not harder.

Beth [01:06:11] Well, I love this piece so much that we’ll link again Dorada Tleile on Substack because it named a bunch of things that I think we’ve done well. It contained a bunch of reminders to me that are still extremely useful. And it said, this is hard. I think Supernanny was great at that too. She would always sit the parents down and say, this is hard. It requires a lot of you. You write the rules on the wall in part because you need to see them and remember that you set them and hold yourself to these standards. And I really appreciate this author saying we get a lot of messages that it shouldn’t be this way. And we get very little help along the path. And so go easy on yourself and help each other and also know what you’re aiming for.

Sarah [01:06:59] I also want to say it is hard, but I’m kind of fired up because I read a thing about parenting regret. And I do want to say with the loudest voice possible, I don’t regret having kids. Like this is hard but it’s the best, most rewarding work I’ve done. And we have a really good job that is deeply rewarding and contributive. Like I love Pantsuit Politics. What a gift it is to do this work. And also these children I’m raising are just miracles. I’m obsessed with them. The older they get, the more I’m like, God, this is the coolest thing I have ever done in my life. And I think what’s so powerful as they get older is you get to be less obsessed with your role, like how you are as a parent. Because if you do this work, it’s short-term pain for long-term gain. Like, it’s tough when they’re little but it’s over so quick. And then you just get to watch them start to turn into people that are interesting and funny and kind and empathetic because you sucked it up and put them back in bed 15 times in a row. I love being a parent. I tell anyone who’s on the fence, do it. I think it’s the freaking best. And it is hard, but man, it’s so rewarding. God, I’m just in a phase right now where I am so incredibly obsessed with all three of them. They are funny, they are smart, they say things that I’m like, oh shit, I haven’t thought about that. I’m so, so obsessed with my kids. And not enough that I make the whole world revolve around them, but just that I think they’re the freaking coolest. I love hanging out with them.

Beth [01:08:50] When you get to see a new and improved version of yourself, it’s really amazing. When I watch these girls and I see the connective thread between Chad and me and them, and then see the ways in which they’re taking it to the next level. They are a little smarter, a little funnier, a little more creative. They understand things a little bit better. It’s really awesome. And I love it too. And I never thought that I would have kids. I did not envision my life as a mom as a kid. And it’s great. They are wonderful and it is wonderful. And we should help each other with it. We should help other along and give each other more access to that wonder and greatness.

Sarah [01:09:36] I am happy to play Supernanny in everybody’s lives. I watched enough of it I really think I could do it, Beth. I think I can roll in and help them put the rules on the board and set some little kids happy, but back in time out 15 times like she always does. I could do it. Like I’m up for it. I could be a Supernanny. I really think so.

Beth [01:09:51] All right, we’ll get you a purple suit.

Sarah [01:09:53] God, I love her so much.

Beth [01:09:54] Send you on your way.

Sarah [01:09:55] And also if anybody knows Jo Frost, we would love to have her on Pantsuit Politics. Just going to put that out in the universe. It might just be us fawning over her, but I still think it would be good content.

Beth [01:10:05] I was thinking, I’d just like to be her personal friend. That’d be fine, too. It’s like the opportunity to say thank you so much for your help. Supernanny did it. She did the work.

Sarah [01:10:13] God, she’s the best.

Beth [01:10:14] Well, thank you. Thank you, Jo Frost, for your influence in our lives. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you for spending time with us on a wide range of subjects. Thank you for all of you who have already gotten your tickets to come to hang out with us in Minneapolis. We can’t wait for it.

Sarah [01:10:30] They’re going fast.

Beth [01:10:30] If you haven’t yet, check the show notes, click the link, get your tickets for our fantastic weekend in Minneapolis in August. We’ll be back with you on Tuesday with another new episode. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.