To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way.
I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely have children ... someday. But I was too transient and my career always took priority, so I just put off the decision. I crossed into my 30s and started to stare down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and knew that even though I still felt like a teenager who is woefully unprepared to be a parent, it was time to make a decision. It still felt like I didn't have enough information.
When I was booking guests for the new season of Try Hard, I asked Anna Sale, the creator and host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money, if she had any major transformational moments that she wanted to talk about, and I was thrilled when she suggested the moment she became a parent.
We use a word in the episode, "matrescence," that is becoming increasingly popular but that still isn't in the dictionary: It describes the long period of becoming a parent, from pre-conception to pregnancy to birth and after. The idea is that matrescence, like adolescence, encompasses physical, social, and emotional changes that can leave a person feeling totally rearranged.
Anna and I talked specifically about how her matresence affected the way she thought about her career, and specifically her ambition.
Try Hard is also available wherever you get podcasts: RSS here, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify (if you must). A transcript of the episode can be found here.
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