The Moth - The Moth Podcast: A Family Circus

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

On this episode, we feature two stories all about the hectic, maddening, hair-pulling side of raising kids. Plus, we feature some very special guests reading the credits. This episode was hosted by Kate Tellers.Storytellers:Mary Lea Carroll tries to figure out how her mom raised so many children without absolutely losing it.PT Smith learns the true meaning of fatherhood.Special thanks to Fritz & Olai (9), Nilah (8), Iris & Harvey (6), Zelda (4) and Esi (9 months).

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Do you want to hear something fun? Yeah, do you want to hear something fun? Yeah. So when I'm testing the equipment, the question I always ask every single time is what did you have for breakfast? So what did you have for breakfast? So what did you have for breakfast? I had muffins.

Oh, muffins. What flavor were they? I don't know. Banana chocolate chip. Banana chocolate chip. That sounds really, really good. I wish I had banana chocolate chip muffins. Welcome to the Moth Podcast.

I'm Kate Tellers, your host for this episode. A little bit ago, we had a Take Your Child to Work Day here at the Moth. There were about seven children in total, including my two little ones. And I had a lot of fun planning. I even made tiny lanyards for them. They sat in on a casting meeting, got pizza, and the kids learned a little bit about the intricacies of podcast making. I learned about podcasts and that the thingy, the circle thingy is there so that the P words like Peter don't sound weird. Overall it included lots of the delightful mayhem that is parenting. As I said during Take Your Child to Work Day,

Just for anyone that's contemplating being an apparent, sorry, and I just noticed that I sort of took the lead on every part of today, except for the podcasting part, and that's all that anyone remembers. Oh! Sometimes the role of being a parent is less visible. Kudos to Mark, our podcast producer, on an amazing workshop. What a truly fun day. So in this episode, we've got two stories about the somewhat overwhelming side of being

a parent. The family circus, if you will. First up, we have Mary Lee Carroll. She told this at an LA Story Slam where the theme of the night was juggle. Here's Mary live at the mall. I have nine brothers and sisters and when I was really little my mother would not make friends with any other lady unless she had at least seven kids. Because she didn't wanna know anybody who had free time.

So that's how come her circle of girlfriends, and there were only six of them, but between them they had 50 kids. So these ladies love to have lunch together on Friday afternoons. and I would love it when they would meet at our house because I would kind of watch from the other room and they would laugh and drink sherry and smoke their cigarettes and eat delicious food and they would make all these ridiculous crafts for the Christmas Bazaar at school, like, you know, spray painted macaroni

for ornaments. And they would really make years and years worth of wreaths out of twisted tin can lids. And they made so many of these wreaths that they called themselves the can cutters. And the can cutters met for years and years. And I, in my innocence, thought it must be really fun to be the mother to a lot of children. So 25 years later, I leave the work field and I am at home with two small children, like a baby and a toddler. And I am so overwhelmed and so out of my depth and so disorganized that I thought, how did they do it? And I was doing all kinds of ridiculous things like if I drove the car home, by the time I unloaded the car and unloaded the babies,

I'd be too exhausted to go back out and close the doors to the cars, and the car would just sit there with the doors open all day long. Or, or I'd have to move the dirty dishes out of the way for a place to eat tonight's dinner. Or one time I even drove home from the supermarket with a whole bag of groceries on the roof of my car because I had been too stressed out trying to get the babies into the car after one of them had a giant tantrum in the store, so loud, kicking, screaming, and I'm sweating and embarrassed. And all these old ladies gathered around me to watch me deal with this and say things like, children are such a blessing and an obstinate child is a sign of intelligence and you know they grow up so fast don't blink you'll miss something

and I I'm got it's like come on. All I could see was 18 more years of this. And so I knew I needed help and I knew I needed some wisdom. Like how did my mom and all of her can cutter friends do it the way they would laugh? They would shriek with laughter like, you're killing me. And I think, where? I thought, how did they do it? And I thought, well, of course, all the can cutters were dead. And now I know why they all went to early graves. But. But But one of them was still alive. Her name was Dorothy. And I thought, I just need some advice. I need somebody to tell me how to do this better.

And so Dorothy had had nine children. She's really old now. And I called her. And I said, can I come talk to you? And she said, of course, dear, come over. And I thought, I was so excited to talk to Dorothy. I thought, she is going to give me the secret to how to get on top of my situation here.

And so she welcomed me in. We settled ourselves with a cup of tea. I was very excited because I was at the foot of a master, since she wasn't my own mother, but she was a master. I said, Dorothy, how did you guys all cope with so many children? And she said, well, you know, we had each other. And I said, oh, no, I know. I know you had you had you had each other.

And she says, no, that's that's more than it seems. And I said, I know, but you didn't have disposable diapers, you didn't have housekeepers, you didn't have preschools. And I said, how did you actually get it? She says, well, we had each other. And I said, Dorothy, I need more than that. And she looked like far off, like her eyes went back over the years. And then I thought, okay. And then she leaned in next to me. I thought, okay, here it comes. Good. Okay, good. So I leaned in too. And then she took her old no-nonsense finger and she pointed it at me like this. She says, that five o'clock cocktail, if I couldn't says that five o'clock cocktail if I couldn't get my five o'clock cocktail it was like one of those kids was gonna die

Dorothy no it's gotta be something besides that and she says no and so She says, no. And so going home, going home, I thought, oh my god, there is no secret here. There's just me and 20 years of chaos. What am I going to do? And then the best advice from the wisest old woman I know was like, get some friends and get some gin. And so, and so,

but I will tell you, what actually happened to me was that, I don't know, I must have blinked because suddenly, like they were in school and then suddenly, they all had their driver's licenses. And then suddenly one lives in San Francisco, one lives in New York, and one has babies of her own. So that's it. That was Mary Lee Carroll.

Mary is a grandmother, a writer, and a storyteller. She calls herself a world traveler, but has never lived further than a mile from where she was born. Her latest book, Across the Street, Around the Corner, just came out, and she is an award-winning author of two previous books. I want to take a minute to shout out to the vital parenting tool that is the text thread. Since having children, I've become a part of several. My friends who I knew before they were parents, my friends that I made because we are parents,

my sister who I text about literally anything. This is the place where we can ask the important questions. These are real. Like, help, I locked my children in the bathroom. Who is hosting Thanksgiving? But what are we going to do about the patriarchy? And help, the school just called to tell me my child stuck a pencil in her butt. And so on.

Up next is P.T. Smith. He told this at a Denver Story slam where the theme of the night was blessings in disguise. Here's P.T. live at the mosque. Woo! P.T.! P.T.! P.T.! Here's PT live at the mosque. I was born at St. Joseph Hospital, Denver, Colorado, the East Side. I was raised in Five Points, and I love my neighborhood. See in the 90s, it was kind of crazy. The news and different people made

it seem like it was a dangerous and harsh place to live. And don't get me wrong, there were extracurricular activities. But it was home for me. And I felt safe. I felt known. See, the reality is, in my hood, I knew the rules. And every hood comes with rules.

Like, for instance, mind your business. If you hear a noise in a dark alley, that is between that noise and that dark alley. So another rule that maybe you're not familiar with is you should be aware of what colors you're wearing and where you're at. Now you may need a hood specialist help on this one so you should maybe acquire one to help you out with like your color palettes okay. Know that black is always a good choice. My favorite rule, super random, super specific,

is if someone comes up to you and says, hey, that's a nice pair of shoes. What size are they? The only acceptable response is, yo size, homie. I'm just playing, don't do that. You see, in a hood, if you know the rules in general, you're going to be okay. And so, I wasn't fearful of any hoods. Well, except for one.

See, there's only one hood that struck fear in my heart, made me feel despair, made me feel sadness, inadequacy, and that was fatherhood. See, yeah. I grew up knowing my dad, but not always being raised by my dad. And so I was super uncertain and insecure when it came to this idea of fatherhood.

And most of the kids in my community experienced, or at least a lot, experienced the same thing. And so when my wife told me she was pregnant with our first child, at first I had the same like emotions that any new parent is going to have. Like I was excited, man I was like feeling the good nervousness, I'm thinking I'm going to raise the hell out of this child, okay, you know what I'm saying? But shortly after that, those feelings started to fade, and other ones came in. What do you think you're about to do?

This idea, this reoccurring dream and thought that you're going to fail this child because you don't know what to do. So I decided to do some research to figure this thing out. I started with the local community. So at the barbershop, I was asking some folks that I knew had kids, I'm like, hey man, what's the rules? Tell me about this whole fatherhood thing. I got some of the stupidest answers I've ever heard.

All right, you ready? Here's the soup. All right. One was, don't let your son get both ears pierced. I was like, all right. Another one was, if you have a girl, you should invest in a lot of guns. And I was like, these are not helpful. So I was like, I'm going to go to the experts, right? I'm going to read some books on parenting.

I'm going to read some books. parenting. I'm going to read some books. And so the first book I tried to read was Gentle Parenting for Dads. And I'm not hating on gentle parenting. But I was not parented gently. So it really didn't match up. So I was like, all right, look, I'm running out of options. This kid is going to be here real soon.

What am I going to do? And I can remember the day that we went to the hospital with my wife. She was going into labor. And I thought, hey, labor could take a while. And so maybe they have like a class here that they give to dads because they're not going to just give you a kid, right?

Turns out if they did, I would have missed it anyway, because my wife's labor was actually really quick. Actually so quick that when the doctor got in the room, he had time to take off his coat, wash his hands, scrubs, gloves, and then he like one hand caught my son as he was being born, which man, you should, you might play on Sundays. And it was really amazing, it all happened really fast, and then like time kind of slowed down and I seen he's like making this like twisted face as he's looking at my son, and he looks at the nurse and he's like, you need to get this kid to ICU. He's not breathing well. And y'all, time stopped, and my heart froze.

Because I wasn't even sure I wanted to be a dad, because I didn't know if I could do it. I didn't know the rules. Even being in that room, I felt nervous. I didn't know what was going on. And so they swaddled my son, and they put him in this little glass case on wheels and they roll him out and I look at my wife and she looks at me like, go after them.

And so I'm running behind the nurse, y'all, and I'm praying. I'm praying as hard as I've ever prayed in my entire life. I'm like, Lord, I will do anything. If this kid needs my heart, he can have my heart. If he needs my eyes, he can take my eyes. I will do anything. Just let him be OK. And we get into the ICU room, and it turns out

that my son just has a flare for the dramatics because he was breathing fine. And so they swaddled him back up again, and they let me hold him for the first time. And I'm looking in his eyes, and I realize that fatherhood doesn't need to come with rules. It actually only needs to come with one thing, and that's love. Thank you.

That was P.T. Smith. P.T. is a proud product of the hood he grew up in, and now serves the youth and young adults in his community. He is most proud of being able to have an amazing marriage for the last nine years, and being the father of Pierre, seven, and Miss Parker, three. Before I leave you, remember how the kids at the Moss Take Your Child to Work Day were learning about podcasts? Well, stick around for the credits. You might hear some fun new voices reading them. That's it for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, however you parent or do not parent,

we hope that you can find beauty in life's circus. Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at The Moth, and co-author of their fourth book, How to Tell Her Story. Her author writing has been featured on Mick Sweeney's and the New Yorker. She is also our mom! This episode of the Moth podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Janess, Sarah Jane Johnson, that's my mom, and Mark Selinger. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant Walker, Lee Ann Gulley, and Aldi Calza. The Moth would like to thank its supporters and listeners. Stories like these are made

possibly by community giving. If you're not already a member, please consider becoming one or making a one-time donation today at themoth.org slash give back. All Moth stories are true as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast and information on pitching your own story and everything else go to our website themff.org. The Moff Podcast is presented by PRX the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public at PRX.org