Birth Rates, Marriage, and the Lie That You Have to Earn the Life You Want

On why we've turned family into a luxury good, plus gerrymandering, Iran, and Mother's Day

This weekend, my daughter, Ellen, was an extra (an extremely adorable giraffe) in a production of Children of Eden. The most advanced students at her arts studio performed and were incredible. I didn’t know the show, so I did not expect to sob through most of the second performance (I had to get my bearings at 1:00; the waterworks came at 7:00).

The first act begins at the beginning of Genesis and takes us through the end of Adam’s and Eve’s life. Act II is the story of Noah and the Ark. These are stories I grew up with, presented in ways that provoked completely new interpretations and emotions in me. Without dragging you into a theological workshop processing this show (which I neeeeeeddddd), I left the theater thinking that maybe these stories are about what it takes to be part of a family: the excruciating choices, the loss, the willingness to look for joy in expected places when the world tells you it’s cliche.

There’s been a barrage of reporting for the past several years about falling birth rates, fewer people getting married, a “sex recession,” and a general macro-sense that the family is no longer the center of life. This is not something I lose sleep over, but I’m interested in the fact that countries across the world–western and eastern, wealthy and impoverished, individualistic and collectivist–are seeing similar trends. These countries are bringing a diverse array of policy tools to the table, and they aren’t making a demographic dent. All of that makes me wonder whether this is a policy issue at all and what thread is running through disparate cultures to cause this shift.

You’ll hear me searching for words today. I feel uncertainty about the topic. I feel intense emotions about my own family. I feel acute awareness that everyone else does, too.

Near the end of Children of Eden, Noah sings:

“And it’s only in Eden grows a rose without a thorn

And your children start to leave you

On the day that they were born

They will leave you there to cheer for them

They will leave you there to mourn ever so

Like an ark on uncharted seas their lives will be tossed

And the deeper is your love for them

The crueler is the cost

And just when they start to find themselves

Is when you fear they’re lost”

The only thing I know for sure is that I find tremendous purpose in my attachments. Whatever else you think about today's discussion, I hope that’s a thread that runs through this community. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Gerrymandering Battles in Virginia and Tennessee

• Iran and Ukraine Challenge Our Assumptions of Winning and Losing in Modern Warfare

• Demographics and the Luxury of Family

• Outside of Politics: Mother’s Day and Celebrating our Villages

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

Episode Topic Resources

• Two Ways Out of the Gerrymander Trap (Pantsuit Politics)

• Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases (The New York Times)

• The End of Children (The New Yorker)

• Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. (The New York Times)

• The Cost of Raising Kids 2025 (American Family Survey)

• The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable (The Atlantic)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:31] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:32] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:33] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. We’ve got a lot for you today. We’re going to catch up on three big stories: the gerrymandering fight and why Democrats are despondent, if Trump is looking to walk away from Iran, and how Ukraine is actually winning on the battlefield even if nobody’s talking about it that way. Then we’re going to spend some real time on a conversation we’ve been wanting to have for a while about what it means if having children and getting married in America is increasingly becoming something only certain people can afford to do. And we’re going to close out by talking about Mother’s Day and whether it’s become a holiday that can actually hold all that we’re asking it to hold, or we’ve just buried it in a bunch of brunch and flower arrangements.

[00:01:20] Beth: Before we start, we need to talk about our T-shirt. A few weeks ago we asked you to submit designs for an America 250 Good Neighbor shirt. We were blown away by what came in. You all are so talented and generous with your time out there. Thank you so much. So we went through everything. We made the excruciating cut to two finalists, and then we couldn’t cut anymore. Sarah and I were just done. We said, “This is too hard. Amelia and Bethany’s designs are impossible to choose between.” So it’s up on Substack. We have a poll on our Instagram stories. We would like you all to vote, please. Your country, or at least the two of us, are counting on you.

[00:01:59] Sarah: And everybody’s just saying both, Beth.

[00:02:01] Beth: I know. Listen, this is a persistent thing with our community. We say, “How about this or this?” And they’re like, “But why choose?” And I like that spirit of abundance.

[00:02:10] Sarah: That’s what happened to you today on More to Say.

[00:02:11] Beth: It’s what happened to me. I said, “Tariffs or UFOs?” And it was, like, 50/50. It was basically a tie, and then Caitlin comes in and says, “How about both?” And so that’s what I did. So I’m making the problem worse.

[00:02:28] Sarah: We do have a spirit of abundance here on Pantsuit Politics. Okay. Next up, let’s at least start with this gerrymandering death spiral. Beth, the Virginia State Supreme Court has struck down the redrawn map that was going to give Democrats at least a fighting chance in the war that Republicans began

[00:03:01] Beth: I have not yet read this decision. My understanding of it is that they said not that the map is wrong, but that the process through which the map was created was wrong. The process that involved taking the idea to voters at this moment was incorrect. And I think that’s important to say because it’s very confusing to live in a world where the Supreme Court says, “Pretty much all maps are okay. We have no thoughts about maps. Maps are political documents that we aren’t going to weigh into,” and hold that alongside this decision.” So this is a process decision. Bad and confusing for the justice system when they say the process was wrong after the fact. Much more helpful for the process to be declared invalid before the voters weigh in and the new maps are created, and it’s May of an election year.

[00:03:51] Sarah: And I just think this is starting to stack up, that you have blue states going to their voters, like in California and Virginia, in the same exact week that you have Tennessee just taking it to the state legislator and saying, “We’re done. We’re not going to have this Democratic district in Memphis.” You’ve got protesters, you’ve got their colleagues saying, “No, we don’t want this,” and they do it anyway. So you have red states just plowing forward not putting it up to voters at all. You have a blue state putting it to voters. The voters say, “This is what we want.” I’m not saying it was a close election, but it won the election. And here we are. Here we are saying, “Nope, not good enough.” And if you are just going on the sort of previous assessment of how people vote and how they carve up these maps, it’s easy to get despondent as a Democrat because we brought as much fight as we could, and it looks like despite an historically unpopular presidency and historically low congressional approval ratings, they’re stacking the cards in their favor.

[00:04:54] Beth: May I give everyone a pep talk?

[00:04:55] Sarah: Please.

[00:04:56] Beth: Point number one, despondence is unattractive in a political party. Okay? It’s an election year. We’re getting close. November will be here before we know it, and despondence is a bad look. That doesn’t look like leadership. That doesn’t look like a party that can pull us out of the muck that we’re in politically right now. The world’s got big problems. Don’t be despondent over the maps. Despondence also sounds like you don’t trust the public. Every message that the Democratic Party ought to be focused on right now, in my humble opinion, is, “We can do it, but we need you.” Okay? We can do it. We have ideas. We have thoughts. We have principles. We didn’t want to be in this dumb gerrymandering fight anyway. Fine. You know what, we always knew this was wrong. We were just trying to do it to make things a little fairer, but if it’s going to be unfair, no problem. You, the American people, can fix it and we need you to fix it. We need you to get out and say, “This is unacceptable to us.” And I would just remember the lessons of history. I wrote about this on our Substack last week. In the very first Congressional election, there were attempts at gerrymandering. Okay? Anti-Federalists in Virginia... Feel your history, Virginians. In Virginia, Anti-Federalists tried to keep James Madison out of Congress by drawing a district where he had to go up against James Monroe, and James Madison won anyway. They cannot take all of our power if we exercise it collectively in these elections. So I just want everybody to put their game faces on, be pissed about this in private. Complain to your group chat, okay? But do not have reports from Politico and Axios and everyone else saying that you’re just sitting around going, “God, life is unfair,” because that doesn’t sound like a group of people who can lead us forward.

[00:06:40] Sarah: The good news is most voters aren’t reading Politico or Axios, so you can even report about it. You can talk about it on Punchbowl all you want. It’s not going to break through to the American public. So at least there’s that. That’s basically a private group chat as far as most of Americans are concerned. And the Democratic voters have to go somewhere. They’re not erasing them. It’s, though, frustrating because gerrymandering has been around that long because it does work. The reason they keep doing it is because it works. It’s the same argument I have about advertising. Yeah, I bet you think advertising doesn’t work on you, but you think it’s continued as a billion-dollar industry because it’s ineffective? No. My moment of hope is more long-term, which is I have never heard so many mentions of Uncap the House before. It’s feels like every time I turn around, someone is forwarding me because I’m the Uncap the House girl. I’m happy to have that title, and it seems that momentum is building towards the idea that this bottoming out of Congressional approval and fewer and fewer Competitive House districts cannot co-exist. Something’s got to give. And if they continue to control the House in the face of rising discontent, I do think something will give. I do think people will say, “Okay, this isn’t working, so let’s try something different.” There is lots of moments in history where that became true as well in America, where people just had enough and said, “Okay if we can’t get the change through the process, then we will change the process, period.” So that’s my moment of hope.

[00:08:20] Beth: Uncap the House is a very big idea that feels hard to people, and it is. I’m for it, and I think we can do it because I think we can do big things. If you are looking for more medium steps, though, something can give out of this in pretty short order. We could have Congress just pass a law that says you can’t change the map for a federal election in the year of that election. I would take that step. There are many ways for us to express our unhappiness with people who say, “Gerrymandering works for us, so we’re going to keep doing it, but it doesn’t work for you.” And I think that’s the message around this, and I think that’s still low on the priority list for these midterm elections. We’re about to talk about the war in Iran and the many effects of that. There are so many higher priority items for people who don’t follow politics closely. So focus on those, get your game faces on, keep going here. All is not lost around this. It’s bad, and it’s ugly, but all is not lost.

[00:09:21] Sarah: Let’s talk about Iran. You could be forgiven, even as a highly informed news and politics person, for struggling to keep up with the daily narrative, facts, updates, reporting on this war. I think that if there hasn’t been a conscious decision from the Trump administration to flood the field with confusing statements around this conflict, then they’ve done it subconsciously. I think that reflects his discontent with where he’s stuck, which is in a very bad place, with a ceasefire that involves strikes, with a negotiation that is seemingly going nowhere, and I just read this morning that he is asking for risk assessments from intelligence and military experts about declaring victory and walking away.

[00:10:21] Beth: It’s really tough to be honest with yourself about the fact that him declaring victory and walking away might be the best-case scenario at this point. I have a really hard time, as, as much as I can envision many paths forward out of this gerrymandering situation in the United States, I have a really hard time coming up with paths forward out of the mess that he has created in Iran. He is complaining openly this morning, on Monday, as we’re recording, about the people in Tehran being crazy and unreasonable and they can’t make a deal for anything. First of all, who are those people? It’d be good for the world to know. And secondly, that’s your fault. You killed everybody else and didn’t have a plan for what comes next. And so what are we going to do? Iran is acting like the party with the upper hand in these negotiations. Iran is saying, “The United States should pay us reparations for what they’ve done to our country. The United States should recognize our sovereignty. The United States should get out of the Strait of Hormuz and realize that it’s ours and we control what flows through it.” That does not seem like a country that is scared to death of what comes next. He can threaten all he wants to in terms of military action, but Iran doesn’t seem very scared. And I don’t know what to make of that, especially because Iran is not a reliable narrator on the world stage. And again, I don’t know who’s narrating right now. I don’t know who’s in charge. But this situation feels so intractable to me that there’s a part of me that thinks maybe he should just hang a banner and say, “Mission accomplished,” and we can all know that it’s false, but not make it worse. It feels like all he does right now is make this worse.

[00:12:07] Sarah: And this is in combination with the reality that he’s an unreliable narrator and the United States has been an unreliable narrator from the beginning. There is reporting from The New York Times that the damage to our bases is far beyond America’s understanding of what went down, particularly in the beginning of this conflict. And that’s the thing; I don’t know how I feel about him declaring victory and walking away. I guess what I want is competency, which is just not on the menu right now, sadly. I don’t know if that is the lowest impact option right now, is just to stick the world with this new reality that we have created. Even the really high-level analysis you read from the war institutes is in conflict. Some people say Iran is at a breaking point and yes they’ve understood this, but they can’t coexist inside this blockade for much longer. And then you hear “Yeah, but the stakes for Trump are worse because if a single strike gets through a ship that we are saying we’re accompanying through this path, then that is all it takes. We’re talking about primarily like private business and insurance, and maybe the global economy can figure out another way to supply the commodities we all depend on that flow through the Strait of Hormuz. But I am worried that whatever future that might be would take a very long time to get here, and the process would wreak a lot more havoc and suffering. I will say that this is maybe a good way to begin to talk about Ukraine because what I have seen, and I’m interested in your take, is that the narrative about Ukraine and the end of America’s support was pretty dire, right? It was dire. They’re going to lose, and it’ll be bad for Europe, and it’ll be bad for the Western world. But that’s not what we’ve seen. Just like the assumptions about Ukraine at the beginning weren’t true either. Russia is losing. They have suffered a net loss of one hundred and sixteen square kilometers in April, the first time it lost ground since the summer of 2024. I’ve reported on the news brief there’s a general in Ukraine who’s using drones to basically kill more Russians than they can recruit and has been doing that successfully for months. They have now gone to the Gulf states. They’re going to be the future of war, at least in the short term, for the globe for a long time because they’ve been fighting it, and they’ve been learning, and they’ve been developing technologies that the rest of the world is going to want. It’s going to be really profitable for them, and I’m sorry if that’s dark, but it’s the reality. I think we’re seeing that the narrative that the United States props it all up and if we all walk away it’s going to fall apart isn’t always true. And I think that we’re going to see that with Ukraine. I think we’re already seeing that with Europe and defense and military spending. I just don’t know what that looks like in Iran. I don’t think it will be the end of everything, but I don’t think the people in charge right now are capable or competent enough to understand, much less prepare, for a future where the world doesn’t need us, and that makes some people stronger. Some people we want to be stronger like Ukraine. And then sometimes maybe it’ll make people stronger who we don’t want to be stronger like Iran, who’s now learned that the Strait of Hormuz is their ultimate weapon

[00:16:08] Beth: The reason that I think that the best case scenario for the world might be Trump walking away and letting the world figure out what happens next is because Trump wants to do everything alone. He does think that America is the sum and substance of what happens in the world. It’s confusing because at the same time he loves to say, “Not our problem”

[00:16:29] Sarah: Yep

[00:16:29] Beth: Ukraine has survived in the most basic sense of that word through partnerships throughout the world, through diplomacy, through transactionalism, through obsequience when it’s been called for. They have done what they have needed to do to get other players on the global stage to have a stake in their war, and deftly from the beginning have said, “We’re not asking you to fight this fight for us. We’re asking you to help us have some chance in this fight.” That’s exactly what Trump has failed to do around Iran. When I read that analysis that you talked about where you get these conflicting takes even from foreign policy experts about what can and should happen next in Iran, I struggle with knowing how to interpret them because, like my own opinions, they all seem to rely so much on their feeling about whether he should have started it or not to begin with, right? It’s really hard to just accept where we are now without saying, “This was a good idea from the beginning, and therefore I can see my way through it,” or, “This was a terrible idea from the beginning, and therefore I cannot.” I really would love to find someone who would come on our show and say something like, “I thought this was wrong from the beginning, but here’s what I think could come of it that’s good,” or, “Here’s how I think the United States could navigate a path forward.” Difficult to find that kind of analysis. My understanding as of today is that one of the reasons the ceasefire is falling apart and this memorandum of understanding is on life support is because it assumed that Saudi Arabia would provide access to bases for US troops, that Saudi Arabia said, “We weren’t consulted about this, and we’re not going to.” And what I read this morning is that Mohammed bin Salman is furious about this. That is a mistake that Volodymyr Zelensky would not make. And that’s why I think that Ukraine has a really different opportunity, despite not having the size and the might, an opportunity to continue to survive and even thrive on the other side of this that I don’t see for the United States in Iran right now.

[00:18:52] Sarah: My red flag in the analysis is not necessarily even where people start. It’s that so many of them are like, “There’s two options. There’s three options. It’s this or that. If he doesn’t do this, it’s over. If this happens one time, it’s...” And I’m like, “That’s a red flag for me.” I think that involves a really high level of confidence in the facts you have in your just ability to predict the future, and I don’t know how anyone is confident in their ability to predict the future.

[00:19:22] Beth: Especially when there are this many people with such high stakes involved.

[00:19:27] Sarah: Yeah. And when you’re assessing Iran’s motivations or decision-making when you don’t know day to day who’s going to be making the decisions. The battle between the politicians and the military right now inside Iran is real. So that’s a very hard thing to build into any sort of future analysis because it could shift day to day, one general gets taken out, or one parliamentary member gets taken out by the next strike, and everything’s different because it’s rising and falling so much day to day based on God only knows what. I don’t know. I’ve never been inside one of these situations where there’s a battle between the politicians and the military. And that’s just what bugs me about so much of this analysis, even though I can read some of these and be like, “Yeah, that makes sense,” if he-- if one boat gets a strike. But it also made sense to me when the head of the Los Angeles port was saying everything’s going to fall off a cliff before the tariffs, and that didn’t happen. It also made sense to me when everybody was saying there’s an AI bubble, and the stock market is too pumped up, and that hasn’t happened. And so the parts of my brain that go that seemed obvious, and it didn’t happen, are getting stronger by the day. And so I’m just trying not to assume that I know or that anybody else knows what happens if he sticks in this quagmire for another six months or what happens if he walks away tomorrow.

[00:20:48] Beth: I think that prediction capacity that we have that goes into these very binary directions is useful because it gives us a glimpse of what might occur, but then we have to hold it alongside how adaptable we are. So if you look at Ukraine, it’s not that America is unimportant to Ukraine at this point. It’s that America is unreliable to Ukraine at this point, that America has been disrespectful to Ukraine in every possible way, and that’s probably the lightest word that I could use for it. And because there’s so much at stake, the rest of the world has rallied around. Ukraine still really needs our intelligence. It’s going to be touch and go, I think, about whether they get it, because the more you have The New York Times writing pieces about Zelensky criticizing the Trump administration, looking for other partners. I could see the president just being petty and saying, “We’re not going to share anything else with them for a while.” It is hard to imagine who could foster a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine if not the United States, but we’re not going to do it. That peace process is dead right now. Could come back to life, but it’s dead right now. I don’t want to make those kinds of predictions about the future, because we just see that we don’t know. I think with the Strait of Hormuz, it seems like this or that, and both choices seem very dire. At the same time, talking to my dad, who’s trying to plant his crops right now, and the price of fertilizer, the price of fuel the adaptations he is having to make on a small farm to get a crop of soybeans out tells me that something will give here because it has to. There’s just too much at stake. So I think the possibilities that help us understand America is important, but not everything are good, and they’re always going to be incomplete.

[00:22:54] Sarah: We wish we had a more satisfying conclusion than that but I think that’s right.

[00:23:00] Beth: Always.

[00:23:00] Sarah: And next up, we’re going to talk about something else even more complicated and nuanced and difficult, which is demographics. I want everyone to listen to me as carefully as possible. If you take nothing away as we move forward, please take this. We’re going to talk about the most personal things: having children, when and if to have children, getting married, when and if to get married, and I know it’s going to be hard, but I need everyone to repeat after me. Sarah and Beth love me, and they are not judging my personal decisions. This is a macro conversation and not a reflection of their personal judgments about me and my life choices. If you could repeat it out loud, I think that would be helpful. If you could repeat it about three times. If you could repeat it three times, I think that might even be more helpful. I just really want to emphasize that before we start having this conversation.

[00:24:11] Beth: That disclaimer helps me too because I do feel myself get tied up in knots. I don’t want anyone to feel personally judged by anything that I say. I know that everything I say today is going to be colored by the weekend that I had- where I had some really intense feelings about family. And so I have intense feelings, you have intense feelings, everybody listening does. It’s good for me to hear that disclaimer. I’m going to hold my hand up to the sky and repeat it to myself too so that I can be honest and we can say things that are initiators of good conversation, which is all we’re ever trying to do, not convince you of anything, but start good conversations in your life.

[00:24:50] Sarah: So at this point, we have all heard the statistics. The US birth rate is at a historic low of 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate. This is not unique to the United States. South Korea’s is at .75. I read this really long piece in The New Yorker called The End of Children, and he spent a lot of time in South Korea, and it’s like schools where there are no kids, schools where there are two students per grade. It’s wild. It’s wild out there. And, look, it’s not just wealthy Western countries. It is countries with great family support like Denmark. It is countries with where women have low labor participation like Tunisia. It is countries that are not wealthy at all like Nepal and El Salvador. And we see similar statistics around marriage. It is in a global decline.

[00:25:50] Beth: We’re going to walk through the ways that experts are trying to make sense of this. There are a lot of different theories. What I came to as I was reading about it to prepare for this show, my umbrella theory, is that the more we can control as people, the more we try to control, and the more we believe needs to be controlled. And I think that is the only way that I can make sense of all of the disparate places and reasons people give for this macro trend. I fully understand at an individual level how people get where they are. And when I look at my life and the people I know who are not married and/or don’t have children, what I realize that isn’t reflected in the writing about this is that those people are still quite committed. People who aren’t married but still have deep commitments to other. People who don’t have children but are very involved in raising lots of children in their lives. And the writing about this seems to be about someone else, not like the technical decision, but the people who really don’t want to be committed in any particular way, who really find other people to be a burden and a risk that they can’t take and a responsibility that they can’t fulfill. And I don’t know a lot of people in that space. So there is that real disconnect for me between the experience of talking with folks about this and the macro trend that’s being reported on.

[00:27:31] Sarah: I think there’s a lot going on when we talk about it that we don’t grapple with. Even for myself, I’m not good at math, and so I had spent a lot of time thinking about what this means as far as like economically. We’re already struggling to pay for the social safety net because it’s not a savings account. The people working now pay for the people retiring. If we are having fewer and fewer children, obviously that’s going to come home to roost in a way that even immigration can’t fix because, again, this is a global problem. So eventually there will be no place left on planet Earth with enough people to distribute the labor equally across the globe. And also, I was just reading a piece that was like if we keep this up, if the trends continue, there won’t be a species. There won’t be enough humans left. Which I guess I hadn’t thought of. I was like so preoccupied with the more present day issues. And then I think there are just bigger emotional cultural issues. I was reading about how middle children are becoming like an endangered species. We won’t have enough kids to create middle children. I thought reading that piece about how people are having children later and later in life, like at 45, and I thought let’s just say plainly what that means. That means like no grandparents. That means a world where people are growing up without grandparents. Grandparents have been enormously important in my life. I grew up with great grandparents, like a lot of them. I’m 44 years old; I still have three grandparents. So just like trying to think about all the ways this plays out, and I think what it gets reduced down to is these emotional cultural issues. So you have Republicans pushing the cultural issues, Democrats pushing the economic issues. Like it’s one or the other. And if you can get to the one, that’ll fix it. And I just think of the way it gets reduced down to this bifurcated two-dimensional debate; like you can’t be a feminist and talk about this. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation on the other side of an abortion conversation we had on Friday. You can hold both things. I promise, I do it every day. You can have anxiety about the state of reproductive rights in the United States and be pro-choice, and also be really concerned about what’s happening around families.

[00:30:02] Beth: I don’t worry about the species not surviving. I kind of put that in the space that we talked about with foreign policy. It looks like the world’s going to end. We’ll figure something out. It won’t. That’s how I feel about those kinds of very long-term predictions as I take in demographics.

[00:30:22] Sarah: Important to note, 20 years ago it was overpopulation where people were saying it’s going to be the end of the species.

[00:30:28] Beth: Exactly. Again, I think control is my key word in this conversation. I don’t want to control what I cannot control, and that’s most things. And I don’t want to grasp for control through those kinds of dire predictions or other otherwise. Obviously, I have not let concern about this govern my life choices, one, because when we were in our 20s there was conversation about how we’re having too many people on the planet. And two, that’s just the way my life shook out. We had two children, that’s what we did. And I think that’s how most people live. This is what I did. And you get to this place in your 40s or 50s, maybe later and later for other people, where you think that’s what we did, and this is where we are, and we’re going to keep living.” I am really interested in what feels like a root cause of this to me, and that is the sense that other people are burdens or responsibilities that we can’t meet. And I worry about discussing it purely in those economic terms, in those social safety net terms, because I think that just reinforces the sentiment. I don’t want to look at children as a burden or a responsibility that we can’t fulfill. I don’t want to look at aging people as a burden or a responsibility that we can’t fulfill. What I believe is that, yeah, people are burdens, and being burdened by other people is our purpose for being here. That’s what life is about, and I don’t want to live under any political or ethical or religious framework that says otherwise. But that’s deeply personal to me, and I can’t control how other people see that either. So how do you have this conversation in a really inclusive way that respects that people bring a lot of different religious, ethical, and political frameworks to it? I think that’s really tough. That’s the reason we have our disclaimer.

[00:32:26] Sarah: That’s the first one I want to scratch at, is the it’s too expensive. So 71% of Americans now say raising children is unaffordable; a 13-point jump from just 2024. Here’s the thing, though, it is not correlated with income. So people report this no matter how much money they make. Okay, so what’s going on there? Now, you will find families with more money tend to have more children. And that, I think, is really what concerns me. I think when you talk about marriage and kids as like a capstone instead of a cornerstone like a milestone that everybody or most everybody pursues, as opposed to a luxury good you get after you’ve figured everything else out, it concerns me. Derek Thompson wrote this great piece about how he called it workism, and how we’re prioritizing our values around work and career instead of family. And I think there is that underlying narrative assumption when people even talk about their most personal choices. It’s this is something you culminate into when you don’t have to sacrifice anything else. How many times have I read or heard someone talk about having kids in relationship to vacations and a standard of living as if children are like a consumable good? And this has happened in so many other ways, right? Economic values have become the values, and I think this is one more manifestation of that because you see one of my favorite studies around this is around the fracking boom. Okay if people aren’t doing it because they want to have more money, then you get an influx of cash in a community, like with a fracking boom, then do we see these decisions shift? We don’t. You don’t see marriage rates increase when men have higher earning capacity because of a boom. And if you’re seeing this, even when people have a lot more money, they’re saying the same things, then I think we’re in this Venn diagram of culture and economics. I’m not saying economics are false. I’m not saying people have fooled themselves. We’ve done entire shows on the daycare crisis. But something else is going on here because, again, even in countries where you have an enormous amount of support, subsidized daycare, long parental leave policies, it’s not moving the needle, and I think it’s because we’re treating it as this luxury good to pursue at the end, and there’s some real barriers that come with that mentality.

[00:35:27] Beth: I think that’s probably been true for a long time. I had many conversations with my grandmother, “When’s about the right time to do this?” And every time she’d be like, “There is no right time. You just do it when you do it and it’ll work out. And that’s fine.” I don’t hear almost anyone say things anymore that sound like, “It’ll work out fine.”

[00:35:50] Sarah: Me, and I get yelled at on the internet. All the time.

[00:35:54] Beth: I think we have lost a lot of the vision that things will work out fine. I think even in those countries-- and I can’t take credit for this; I’ll link an article that talked about the vibes theory of demographics that feels close to right to me. And the author of that piece said, even in those countries with a whole lot of support, there’s a sense that you never reach the capstone where things are settled and done. People believe that the world is precarious now. People at all income levels believe that the world is very precarious now. And so you don’t feel like you arrive at that place where you know that for the life of a child, you believe that things will work out okay. There’ll be some hard times, there’ll be some good times, but things will work out okay. I talked to someone recently, I had a really interesting discussion with this person about the government shutdown, and they were telling me about a member of their family who is really dependent on WIC, the economic situation for this family makes SNAP pretty unhelpful to them, but WIC, the government program that provides nutrition assistance for some families, basically is where all the calories for the child that this person was telling me about comes from. And this child is loved clearly by a large number of people. That is a precarious situation, though. When the government opens, closes, opens, closes, when something that’s been around as long as SNAP or WIC doesn’t feel reliable, I get why a lot of people think, I don’t know. I get why a lot of people... My whole life we’ve been looking at Social Security being like, “I don’t know if you’re going to get that. You’re going to pay into it, but I don’t know if it’s going to be there for you.” So we’ve kind of practiced maybe it won’t work out instead of maybe it will work out. And I feel like that has taken root in me pretty deeply. There are a lot of times when I need to go back to my grandmother saying, “ You’ll figure it out one way or another,” because I can kind of spiral.

[00:37:54] Sarah: Yeah, it’s so interesting, though, that in other points of American history in particular where things were very unstable, you didn’t see this reaction. The Great Depression was pretty scary, I can only imagine. You didn’t see marriage rates and reproductive rates fall off. There’s no indication of that. Because we still saw the pursuit of kinship, family, as the reason we were here. And there’s these really interesting anti-capitalist, anti-fascist writers who are like, “This is what they do.” This is the plan, right? You pick apart this fundamental understanding of what keeps people together and what makes life worth living, and you put it all in people’s pocketbooks. And I feel like it’s a self-fulfilling process. You say what makes you happy is being economically stable, and so that if you’re not economically stable, you feel unhappy. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s just this instead of finding places, third places that aren’t your work, that say “This is what we’re doing here. This is why we’re here.” And I think as those have fallen away, we have left people with one choice. And if it was working and I felt like everybody was great living their best life, maybe we could talk, but that’s not what I see. That’s not what I see. And what really gets in my heart as someone who still considers themself progressive, is this is not playing out equally. I think that what bugs me the most is that you have people who define the cultural narrative, highly educated, highly resourced people who are still pursuing marriage and family, and for the most part getting it. Getting that capstone. When at the lower income level, marriage and children produce stability. It is not something you get once you find stability. It plays out differently in different portions of the American population. The bottoming out of marriage rates at the lower income ladder in America has been very detrimental to children, to families, to everyone. And that is not saying that I want to go back to when American women and wives couldn’t hold a credit card and had no rights. That’s not what I’m saying. But you also have this narrative that a world without marriage is really what we’re pursuing. You can see it. I hear it. I feel it. I read it. I was reading in this piece where somebody was like, “The marriage rates are bottoming out. The fertility rates are bottoming out,” and there were all these tweets that were like, “Hold the line, ladies. Keep going. We’re almost there.” And I’m like, “What is this?” You really think we’re going to opt out of the most fundamental form of human relationship, which is the family? I don’t know, guys. I got some questions.

[00:41:23] Beth: I think that if you approach it as a capstone, that will lead to opting out because it is the truth that committing to other people will produce tremendous instability in your life. It is also the source of stability. So as you said it is where you get the capacity to handle instability. It’s where you get the capacity to be motivated to problem solve. There is tremendous purpose and fuel in being burdened by other people and allowing yourself to be a burden to them. Both things are true. It is the source of instability; it is the source of stability. I was really down for a lot of this weekend because I planned to go see my mom on Mother’s Day. She has had several surgeries recently, and she just was not up for it. She still feels really bad. And I went down this road in my mind of just looking for someone to be mad at about that. Maybe I can be mad at our healthcare system. Maybe I can be mad at an economic system where I didn’t ever feel like I could live near my parents in my hometown as an adult. I went through a long list of everyone that I could be mad at, really from a political angle, because that is where my expertise lives now. And the bad news is that I really couldn’t find anyone to say, “I’m so mad at you, and if you had been different, none of this would be true. There’d be no suffering or pain in this situation whatsoever.” That’s what it is. You love people, and it’s hard because they will suffer and you will suffer, and it’ll be hard on both of you at different times. And we can try to enact policies that would make things better for them. But there are lots of things in the healthcare system that would make my mom’s life easier. But there are no political moves or policy moves or governance moves that would end everything that is ever going to hurt her physically or emotionally or otherwise. And I know that she wishes that she could have those things for me too, and they are not to be. And so I kind of struggle when we talk about this with where we want the conversation to go, because I don’t see ways in which the government Can change what we feel in our hearts that leads us to commit to people or not. I think the best I can do is say that I am not a person who dreamed of getting married and having kids. I dreamed of having a career, and everything good in my life has come from family, my family of origin and the family that I’ve created with Chad now, and our friends. And if I could go back and tell my younger self “Hey, just don’t put all your eggs in that work basket,” that would’ve probably saved me a lot of sadness. But I am proud of my professional life, too. I’m searching for a, “And here are my three bullet points about where this conversation should go,” and I don’t have them, but I do think it’s good to just share in the world that loving people is hard and worth it and being a burden is just part of being human, and that’s okay.

[00:44:54] Sarah: I do have some bullet points, Beth. Great news.

[00:44:56] Beth: Great. I’m ready.

[00:44:57] Sarah: First and foremost, I’m just changing my own language, and I’m really pushing when I find myself in conversations that I think represent a very limited view of what a good life looks like. Actually, let me say this. I think it’s about what a sophisticated life looks like, and so I’m pushing really hard in those places because I do not want family to become a class privilege. That is not what I want for my country. It is not what I want for my children, and it’s not what I want for anybody’s children. So I’m pushing really hard on some places that I hear come up all the time, which is that it is foolish and problematic to marry young, that of course you’re not going to marry your high school sweetheart. Of course, you’re not going to marry someone you meet in college. You should really keep playing the field and figuring out what’s out there. Now, again, if you got married at 45, I’m so happy for you, but I am not going to tell my children, “No, you’re not going to marry somebody you meet in high school.” They might. They might find a lot of happiness meeting someone they met in high school. I’ve been with Nicholas since I was 19 years old. That was great. And I put off having kids for too long. I wish I had another child. If I’d started sooner, I think I would. And I tell my boys that. I tell them, “I don’t regret one day of going, “Yep, this is the guy. Let’s do this.” The only thing I regret is not starting having you guys sooner. I tell them that. I articulate that, and I push on places where all parenting is that heartbreaking burden. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m obsessed with my children, completely obsessed. They have made me better in every way. I would not be good on this show if I did not have my boys. I would probably still be the 20-year-old who thought she had every answer figured out. Maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d be better. I don’t know. I just think roll the fucking dice, man. I think that control, that idea that we will orchestrate it, that you can protect yourself from heartbreak when you cannot, ever. I don’t care what choices you make. I just think it’s in there, and it’s all wrapped up in this is how sophisticated people act. They don’t get married young. They don’t have kids young. They have the career or whatever, and I’m really trying to throw a bomb into that and saying no. Maybe I would have 10 times the career, and maybe I’d be 10 times the happy. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe my life is so much less because I didn’t have that fourth child. Maybe it would’ve been a girl, and I’d be a real different person right now you know? I just think we got to... Life is full of risk, and the lie of capitalism is that you can remove it with economic choices. And until we release that death grip, no, I don’t think any of this is going to solve the global population decline, but I do think we’d be having more honest conversations. And I actually think in pursuit of that idea that we want to just make everybody individually okay with their choices, what we’ve done is create an environment where no one is okay. And we think we all have to put all our eggs in one basket instead of saying, “Maybe there’s another basket out there. Who the hell cares? Great. I rolled the dice. I lived. I took the risk, and aren’t I glad that I did?”

[00:48:23] Beth: As with many things, I think my grandmother Joy had this about right. She didn’t try to control anybody else or the universe, but that sense that we do what we do and we figure it out, that’s what I want to pass on to the next generation, that you will figure it out. Whatever it is that you do, you’ll figure it out and there’s a happy life available in it. And you don’t have to be limited in your choices by what feels cool or sophisticated or even responsible. There is a drumbeat that tells people the world is too bad, the world is too fragile for you to bring people into it, and I don’t think that’s right either. I think we do what we do, and we figure it out, and that is ultimately contributing to something good.

[00:49:12] Sarah: My grandmother looked at me and said, “We are not a fearful people.” That was the e Meemaw advice that lives in my bones. We’re not a fearful people, and that’s what I’m just trying to instill in my boys. I don’t want them to make this call, whatever it is, from the idea that they’re going to get it right or wrong. It’s going to be both. Always. It’s going to be both. You’re going to make a choice. Inevitably, that choice requires loss. It is the bittersweet reality of life. It wouldn’t be worth it if it didn’t include loss and regret, and an inevitable conclusion that comes with age that you chose a different path, and that path is now foreclosed to you. I guess what I really worry about is the capstone, the narrative of the sophisticated life, is that people don’t realize the path is foreclosed until it’s too late. Because even though we have, to our incredible benefit as a species, exploded the reality, particularly for women, of bigger, wider, more expansive life choices, the rates of people who say they want children really haven’t changed that much. Most people say, “I want this,” but when we make it a luxury capstone, people want it and can’t get it, and I don’t want that. That’s what I don’t want, and if there are policy or strategies, cultural, economic, I don’t care. But if people want it, then in a country as big as ours or in a globe as diverse as ours, that’s going to look a lot of different ways, and I just think we’ve painted ourselves into a corner where we’ve said there’s one way. Again, in pursuit of diverse options, it’s become less diverse. It’s become like this is how you do it. You wait. You wait until everything is perfect.

[00:51:46] Beth: Less materially or financially, I would just like to offer that if you talk to yourself about decisions like this as though you have to earn them, that’s a pattern worth reflecting on. How do I know?

[00:52:02] Sarah: Ask me how I know.

[00:52:04] Beth: When you think that you have to earn the right to get married now or to have kids now, the right to take a nap this afternoon, the right to do something that’s pleasurable, you’re always going to measure up short because you’re always going to keep lifting the bar for when you’ve earned that, especially when the world feels uncertain. So I think whatever brings you to the life choices that you make and figure out, it’s worth watching where you’re creating a yardstick for yourself in all things that leads to a lot of unhappiness because you decide that you’re never worthy of those things.

[00:52:49] Sarah: In the big picture, both economic and cultural angle, there is a system set up to keep us in a place of scarcity, to keep us in a place that we think we have to work harder and hustle harder and buy XYZ product to earn that, to earn the decision, to earn the nap, to earn the spa day, to earn whatever, and that’s bullshit, man. That’s where I start to really sound like my college leftist self. No, I don’t have to earn that shit. All of humanity, all of human history is full of people just stumbling into it, and somehow we all are here, still here. No, I wasn’t ready to have a kid. Of course, I wasn’t. You know what makes you ready to have a kid? Having one. It’s just not something you can intellectualize into understanding what it’s going to be like, and I’m so glad that despite being a control freak and an Enneagram One and all the personality tests, fill in the blank here, I was just driven spiritually. It’s what I wanted more than anything. I’m all the way on the other end of the spectrum from you. I always wanted to get married and have kids. I had that stupid board game where you planned your wedding as a preteen. I collected People Magazine celebrity wedding editions for years. That’s what I wanted. I wanted it, and I probably couldn’t have even told you why but I’m so glad I did. I’m so glad I was just driven beyond all reason to want these things, and I think part of it is I just grew up in a place that prioritized it. I grew up in a place where you didn’t ask what people did for a living. You asked if you had kids and where you went to church. It was just a different orientation to what a good life meant. And I understand that for some people to exist inside that, my community was probably very painful. I’m not downplaying that. But I also think it’s really painful to... I know because I’ve existed in the places where everybody just asks you what you do the second you meet them. Can we split the difference? Can we find a happy medium?

[00:55:05] Beth: And look, for people who have desperately wanted children and have not been able to have them for one reason or another, it’s painful when this gets prioritized, right? We don’t get to escape in any universe moments that are awkward and miserable and that push us down a path that we feel like we didn’t set for ourselves. And when you said there’s a system that makes us feel like we aren’t worthy, there are numerous systems. There are so many systems. All the systems in some way are there to tell you not enough.

[00:55:38] Sarah: Yes.

[00:55:39] Beth: Even the great religions of the world have components of them that cause people to feel that they’re unworthy. So in my mind, that’s the value of talking about demographics. You can just sit for a second and realize people are good, and people are a struggle. And just by the fact of your existence, you are entitled to be both. That’s your birthright. You get to be good and a struggle. And if I’m looking for a takeaway from this conversation, it reinforces to me something that I try to practice with my daughters when I ask them about their days. That’s a hard thing, to come home from school and be asked about your day for a kid. And so I really try to ask them every day, “Who was great to you today? Who was really kind? Who gave you a hand? Who made you feel special today?” Because I want them to be on the lookout for ways in which they can be committed to other people and inspired by other people and know who is committed to them.

[00:56:47] Sarah: Let’s wrap the way we started. A reminder. We love everybody.

[00:56:54] Beth: We do.

[00:56:54] Sarah: This is not a judgment on any personal decisions anyone has made in their lives. Whatever has gotten you to this point where you are listening to the sound of our voices, I am thrilled with, truly thrilled beyond measure. And what we do here at Pantsuit Politics, try to talk about policies, realities, demographics, and what that means in the broader context of a good life, and I hope we’ve had that conversation here about this. Okay, we’re going to move to Outside of Politics now, Beth. We are having this conversation coming off Mother’s Day weekend, which seems appropriate. Seems appropriate. We’re really going big here. The Friday before Mother’s Day, we talked about abortion. The Monday after Mother’s Day, we’re talking about natalism. Let’s go big.

[00:57:55] Beth: We might need a disclaimer for this section too because people are testy about Mother’s Day.

[00:57:59] Sarah: Here’s my disclaimer. It was a political act to begin with. So the idea that it’s going to be deta- we’re putting it in Outside of Politics, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Anna Jarvis founded it as a political act, and then spent the rest of her life trying to abolish it because she hated the way Hallmark got involved. So it’s just always been this Mother’s Day thing.

[00:58:18] Beth: I want to know how much Mother’s Day has evolved for you as your kids have gotten older.

[00:58:23] Sarah: I’m a traditionalist. I love a tradition, a routine, and actually, this is the first year where they did not bring me breakfast in bed, although they claim they’re going to do it next Sunday. That’s been our Mother’s Day tradition, even since they were, like, babies. Nicholas for many years, and then last year Griffin made pancakes, and they brought me breakfast in bed. And it kind of made me a little weepy because of teens. They sleep so late. But we have another tradition where I have a mother’s book, which I highly recommend. This was, like, a thing I read in Real Simple many years ago, where you just get a big-- I think mine’s eight-and-a-half-by-11-- just a blank paged book. And so if they make something in preschool, you just stick it in there. My kids write letters to me in it every year. So it’s just, like, all in one place. So I can see that evolution from fingerprint art to fully formed letters. But I don’t know if it’s changed that much. It’s still breakfast in bed. We go to my mom’s for lunch. We go to church. It’s pretty similar, even from when they were itty bitty

[00:59:25] Beth: I feel really differently about it now than I did when they were little. When they were little, I badly needed those sheets to come home from preschool that said funny things that your kids think about you. My friend Hannah posted a picture. She is very blonde, and her son had done, “My mom’s hair is black,” and she was like, “Here I am, just with my black hair,” and it was amazing. So I really needed those.

[00:59:49] Sarah: I was always so proud because Griffin’s never said “My mom likes grocery shopping.” No, they don’t, guys. No, they don’t. His was like, “My mom likes reading by herself.” That’s right, boy. That’s exactly right.

[01:00:00] Beth: I will never forget the year that one teacher captured lawyer as liar on mine. My mom is a liar. So I needed those. I thought that in the trenches time of parenting in that really physical way was so hard that I needed sort of the celebration. As my daughters have gotten older and I don’t feel so exhausted by it, it’s still very intense, for sure, and consuming, but there’s more of a flow I find for myself in this stage of it’s rewarding every day in a way, just as it’s trying every day in a way. So now I think more about Mother’s Day as a time to reflect on my mom. I also really do want to continue to show our kids these things are important, so I don’t want to blow it off either. I could kind of personally blow it off, but I don’t want to do that because I want them to know that this matters, and I want them to know when they need it, they should be honored in some way. And I felt this year particularly like I really wanted to be with my mom. I was sad that I didn’t get to be. I also did not want this to fall on Chad. We’re a very egalitarian household here. Chad does a ton around our house. We both work from home. Our division of labor is just not traditional in any way, so he’s busting it just as much as I am around the kids and our house, and I didn’t want him to feel obligated to do a lot, especially at the last minute because our plans changed so significantly. So I don’t know. I just reacted to the whole holiday quite differently this year than I have in past years.

[01:01:36] Sarah: Yeah, I don’t know if I don’t feel the shift to my mom as much because my mom is still alive. My grandmother’s 90 years old, so she is still celebrating her mother. And I think I still feel very in it with my boys, and I am, let me be clear, actively training them how I feel about Mother’s Day. They know. A week before I was like, “Mother’s Day is next week. Everybody got a plan? Just remember. I need a plan. Presents will be required. Acknowledgement is mandatory.” I was joking with them last night. I’m like, “How are you going to fill out the mom book in college? Y’all got an idea? You going to send a card? I just want to make sure we’re strategizing here, boys. This is important.” And I feel the same way about Father’s Day. Nicholas says he doesn’t care, but I do. I want them to understand moments where there’s this cultural, “ This is important, let’s celebrate it,” they’re just getting more and more rare. And so I kind of want to protect the places where it’s a reminder of, no, people deserve to be celebrated. Do I wish Mother’s Day and Teacher Appreciation was not in the same month? I do. Yeah. I think that’s shit planning and feels a little sexist to me. But I that doesn’t mean you get an out. You still got to take the moment. Look, we all want to be appreciative and grateful all the time, but we’re not. We get busy. We get distracted. Life is a lot. And I do teach my boys the moments where we’re going to take a minute and say, “Hey, what you do really matters to me,” yeah, we’re going to take them.

[01:03:04] Beth: So my big win from this Mother’s Day is that Jane wrote in the card. Often, Jane will just give you a card and sign it. It’ll just say Jane with a dash. And she actually wrote something in the card. It was funny. It was not super sentimental and cheesy. But she wrote in the card, and I felt okay, we are advancing as a family here. We are moving forward.

[01:03:24] Sarah: Oh, my favorite was-- Griffin always writes me a letter that is incredibly thoughtful. Griffin brought me warm chocolate chip cookies as I woke him from a nap, which was, like, really next level, on a little tray he bought for me. But Amos wrote something that was along the lines of, “When we’re right, you stick up for us. And when we’re wrong, you come down hard like we deserve,” or something along those lines. And I was like, winning, yes. What bugs me is this idea that I must celebrate every mother in my life. I hope you are not offended that I did not text you Happy Mother’s Day.

[01:04:08] Beth: It didn’t even occur to me that you might.

[01:04:09] Sarah: You are not my mother.

[01:04:10] Beth: And I did not text you either.

[01:04:12] Sarah: But you know why? Because we’re not each other’s mothers. It’s not that I’m like I resent these group texts that are like, Happy Mother’s Day. I don’t. I get it, but I don’t know it feels like this hustle we’ve created for ourselves that it can’t just be between... it’s enough, honestly, for it to be between me and my kids and me and my mom. That’s a lot. That’s a lot, and often I feel like I’m not getting the balance quite right, just as being a daughter and being a mother. And so then I’m like...

[01:04:36] Beth: that’s so hard.

[01:04:37] Sarah: I know.

[01:04:37] Beth: I think that balance is impossible.

[01:04:38] Sarah: It’s a hard one. And so then if, on top of it, I have to think I must effectively and sufficiently celebrating every mother I know? Listen, all my girlfriends are killing it. They’re great mothers, and I love you guys so much, and I wish there was a “celebrate who you’re mothering along with” day. I just think it’s a little much to pile it on Mother’s Day too.

[01:05:02] Beth: Yeah, I didn’t get a ton of that this year, and the messages that I did get meant a lot to me, maybe because there weren’t a ton of them. My sister sent me a really kind text message about the kind of mother that she sees me being and it really did mean a lot to me. So I don’t want that obligation to be out there for anyone, but I think what you’re naming that I do want to be more intentional about is saying thank you to the people who are in it with me. Just a few days before Mother’s Day, I had a long conversation with my friend Maggie over voice text, of course, about a parenting issue that I was struggling with and she workshopped ideas with me, and we went back and forth. But she always says at some point “You’re killing it. You’re doing great. You’re a great mom,” and it’s so helpful and valuable. So I would love a holiday devoted just to those people who make you a better parent.

[01:05:49] Sarah: Listen, we can be the committee, guys. Let’s pick a month that doesn’t have a lot going on, maybe I don’t know, March 18th, just picking one out of the clear blue sky. March is low-key. There’s not a lot going on in March.

[01:05:59] Beth: It’s the day after St. Patrick’s Day.

[01:06:02] Sarah: Okay. But St. Patrick’s Day is not a lot of work, you know what I’m saying?

[01:06:05] Beth: Yeah.

[01:06:06] Sarah: All right. So we’ll make it before St. Patrick’s Day. March 10th. March 10th, everybody, is new celebrate the mothers you’re mothering with. The listeners who write and say I got some messages when I posted on Mother’s Day “Your fearlessness about motherhood makes me more brave.” And that’s really the connector between the previous conversation. I just want to put as much of the take the ride, man. It’s okay. Even when it’s not okay, it’ll be okay. Like, when people say that back to me, and when my friends... one of the most encouraging messages I have ever gotten about mothering was from a friend who does not have children, who said, “Look, I work with kids. Your kids know they’re unconditionally loved. That’s it. That’s the ballgame. The rest is gravy. That’s where you fuck up a kid is where they think that your love is conditional. Yours don’t think that. Move the fuck on, man.” You’re good.” Yeah. So maybe that’s our March 10th holiday. Text your girlfriends, your friends, or text your male friends. Text all the parents you know. Your kids know you’re unconditionally loved. You’re slaying. Move on.

[01:07:05] Beth: I’m going to have to do some of this before March 10th, Sarah, because I’m sitting here thinking about my friend Janet who has raised her kids and has children and grandchildren, and I think a great-grandchild now. I asked her if she would spend the night at my house with my girls while I was out of town. And she said, yes, and she treated them like her own grandchildren, was wonderful to them. And I want to celebrate that. Just the people who make it possible for you to have a happy family life by being willing to love your kids and observe what’s good in your kids and observe what you’re doing. I have a lot of cards to send out, I think.

[01:07:40] Sarah: Listen, though, you got to keep it tight. This is the critique of Mother’s Day. March 10th is just the girlfriends you’re parenting besides.

[01:07:46] Beth: Okay.

[01:07:46] Sarah: Or just the friends you’re parenting beside. Let’s keep it tight, and then we’ll create another day in a low-stakes month, perhaps late September.

[01:07:55] Beth: Okay. September could use something else.

[01:07:57] Sarah: September, this is where we’re going to celebrate all the people that are contributing to our kids’ lives. The aunties, the adopted grandparents, the lovely neighbors. That’s where we’re going to say, “This is the village.” The village day

[01:08:15] Beth: I love that.

[01:08:16] Sarah: Village Day, late September.

[01:08:17] Beth:  God, we have a huge village, which is really a blessing.

[01:08:21] Sarah: This is what I’m saying. Again, I want the village. We cannot let postmodern capitalism push us out of the village, guys. We have to dig in. We have to grab it. We have to keep it. I have been to Japan where the replacement rate is low and the vibe is off, guys. I loved my visit. It’s an incredible country, but there were moments where the vibe was off, okay? And so just protect... if this is a vibe issue, then we got to protect the vibe where it is. So we’ll have the March 10th, loving the people you’re parenting alongside, and we’ll have late September village day. We did it.

[01:08:53] Beth: I’m in. Good job.

[01:08:55] Sarah: Yes. Okay. It was a lot. We told you at the front it was going to be a lot. I feel like we kept that promise. All right. Don’t forget to head to our Substack or Instagram and cast your vote for the winning Good Neighbors t-shirt design. We will be back here again on Friday. And until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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.

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