When the Flames Go Up

Shannon Reed will turn 50 this weekend, and that makes her think a lot about the types of books she couldn’t possibly have written until now. After a long career as a playwright and writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh , she’s broken onto the New York Times best-seller list with her second memoir, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out . Among t...

We have limited data on this, but based on a sample size of one we can confirm that the second first anniversary is a lot more fun than the first. It turns out that—once you’ve set aside the burden of synthetic romance—it’s really great to relax and chat about how we manage to pilot our little boats through the riptides of middle age. After 44 episodes, 36 guests, and one remarriage, we’ve also de...

We talk a lot on this show about the stresses of the Sandwich Generation , especially when a parent or child has a chronic condition that needs a lot of care. But what if you’re the primary breadwinner, your kids require a lot of medical attention, and you’ve got a debilitating chronic condition of your own? After four years of treatment for Long COVID, Heather Petit knows a lot about that. And th...

As fate would have it, this publication day happens to coincide with the 25-year anniversary of the day we got married. So we decided to devote an episode to get a little real and remember what we were really feeling while it all went down dooby-doo down down . The episode’s cover art is an image on the front of a wedding album that Doug’s sister made for us, and it’s kind of eerily prophetic that...

If there’s a common theme to the separate adventures we had over last weekend, it’s probably Attempts to Defy Cultural Reinforcement. Magda took our son to an Accepted Student event and met parents who wanted to know how promptly the school responds to phone calls. Because modern parents still feel compelled to fly our helicopters onto campuses and advocate for our kids in a chaotic world. Meanwhi...

After creating the “accidental empire” Scary Mommy , Jill Smokler is ready to go deep with her new project, She’s Got Issues —a site devoted to helping women navigate midlife. And she wasn’t afraid to go deep with us about her apprehensions about eldercare, why her marriage failed (and not just because her ex-husband is gay ), and the challenge of adapting her skills and strategies for modern medi...

This episode arrives during what feels like a very weird confluence of confluences. Mercury went back into retrograde on April Fool’s Day (the same day when Germany legalized weed ). The Great American Eclipse —which every U.S. state will at least partially experience —will occur the day after the moon reaches perigee , its closest orbit distance to Earth. And next month, billions of double-brood...

We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about our parents’ impact on our lives, mostly in the context of supervising their eldercare and/or grieving their loss. But this conversation with Amanda Magee is our first to delve into how it feels to stop all contact with your parents, especially when your kids start aging out of the household. Any fundamental change in an intimate relationship leaves a mark,...

After a week off, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. But the standard conversational deviations into The Price Is Right, Rush lyrics, and why ADHD affects your ankle bones serve a subtle purpose as therapy for Doug, who is living alone—like alone -alone, not the-kids-will-be-back-next-week alone—for the first time since 1987. Empty nesting can feel different for single people, especially when you...

As a mother of twins and self-described overthinker, Laurie Smithwick began planning for sending her daughters off to college “on the way home from the gynecologist’s office.” So when the house was suddenly empty again, she was ready. She was taught to embrace change as an opportunity by her dynamic parents—a mom who’s working on her eighth book and a dad who’s still processing the medical acciden...

With Washington’s birthday and the Michigan presidential primary freshly concluded, listen in as Magda regales us with her meteoric rise from tenderfooted poll worker to precinct chairperson! Witness the palace intrigue! The moral relativism among desperate foes! The unquenchable resolve of a willful ingenue who stepped on any neck she had to in order to plant her flag in the fetid mud pit of Detr...

There are no easy answers when you’re “Deep in The Dagwood ” of sandwich parenting. When you’re looking after your wheelchair-bound mom and 90-year-old stepdad, your siblings don’t live locally, you have a full-time job, and you want to model competence for your teenage daughters without perpetuating the thought that holding families together defaults to the women. Helen Jane Hearn does all of the...

Magda and Doug are each at a point where it’s time to make some new real-life, face-to-face friends: Magda because she has moved across the country to live with her husband, and Doug because he is a man. And really, how hard could it be? All you have to do is live in a place where at least a few like-minded people are, find the places where those like-minded people hang out, be at least a little b...

A lot of people our age are grieving the abrupt death of one parent and taking on sole caregiving responsibility for the other. Some have endured a bitter custody battle (or two) after a breakup and built a business around their experiences . Some have had children later in life and know the fatigue of chasing after a grade-schooler. Jessica Ashley came on our podcast to talk about what it’s like...

FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid , and given all the problems with rolling out its update , another f-word is conspicuously missing. Determining financial aid is intricately interwoven into the admissions calendar, but yesterday’s news that FAFSA data won’t be available until mid-March —which we learned after we recorded this episode—means a lot of admissions decisions wil...

When you think about a quintessential Fifties Moment, Bill Braine’s 55th birthday checks a lot of boxes. At the midpoint of his 50s, he was recovering from hip replacement surgery, adjusting to his new CPAP machine, and negotiating intently with his parents to downsize and de-clutter. He was also continuing his now-14-year tradition of mapping out his annual goals with his adapted method of Gettin...

This episode is an experiment. Our primary goal for this podcast is and always will be to learn more about our mid-lives, helped by the expertise and experiences our guests offer up. And we’ve got lots of chat partners lined up over the next several weeks to do that. Sometimes, though, we learn by doing what we’ve done best since we met in 1996: killing a cold afternoon with hot coffee, talking ab...

It’s our first podcast episode of 2024! And we’re greeting the new year with a discussion with writer Jeff Bogle about holidays, death, serendipity, literature, and cats. It’s a difficult episode to encapsulate in one blurb, so let’s try three: * Late last year, Jeff randomly tweeted an idea for a book and walked away a month later with a literary agent and a deal for “Street Cats and Where to Fin...

There’s a reason why family advisors—therapists, coaches, lawyers, and such—refer to January as Divorce Month. The holidays can be joyful, but they also represent the end of another cycle, a gauntlet just to get through and then consider if you want to go through another cycle with your spouse. That’s why certified divorce coach Kate Anthony’s new book, The D-Word: Making the Ultimate Decision Abo...

Sure, you’ve cross-country skied since childhood, earned an MBA, and been a working mom for 19 years. But can you run for 100 kilometers? In a row? Soon after her hair went silver, Annie Crombie discovered she could. And she really liked it. Most long-distance runners look at finishing a marathon as an ultimate goal. During this podcast, we sit mostly goggle-eyed while Annie describes the thrill o...

One of the myriad misconceptions about menopause and perimenopause is that they’re only “for old women.” A wide range of potential (and potentially dangerous) symptoms can start as early as your mid-30s and last for as long as 14 years. It’s kind of a No Woman’s Land. Jackie Piasta, WHNP-BC , NCMP , has devoted her medical career to treating, educating, and mentoring about menopause because there’...

Like all the best podcasts, this talk with Ian Shea-Cahir could spawn a half-dozen new episodes. We could talk about his career in journalism or his job running Princeton University’s social media team. We can talk about divorce, co-parenting, remarriage, forgiveness, redemption, and parenting a tween in your 50s. We can talk about the pressures of his Mexican/Irish background, or hitting rock bot...

It’s Thanksgiving Week in America, which launches the joyful, year-end tradition of crowded travel, meal preparation, frenzied purchases, crushing ambivalence, and family drama known as the Holiday Season. What better time to launch a bonus episode about Candletime , the holiday created to help you survive it all, with only a candle and a drinking vessel? Candletime is the People’s Holiday, create...

Breaking up with academia felt a lot like a messy divorce for Emily Benson, PhD, who needed a career change after 11 years as a management professor. Throughout that time, she helped hundreds of students assess their skill sets and build the narratives that would secure the jobs that best matched their abilities and ambitions. After her own successful career shift, however, she has pivoted to help...

Fair warning: After you listen to this episode, you might develop a compelling aspiration to downsize everything into a 30-foot motor home and hit the road. Author and recovering attorney Michelle Fishburne did that in 2020 and spent much of those 12,000 miles talking to hundreds of people across the country about how they endured the COVID lockdown. The result is Who We Are Now: Stories of What A...