S’mores (Bonus Episode)—Tara Boyce on Hope

About the Guest

Tara Boyce is author of This Is My Restoration, available at thisismyrestoration.substack.com.

Transcript

BLAIR HODGES: Hey everybody, this is Blair Hodges, and you're listening to a special “S'mores” episode—a bonus episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges. We're revisiting an episode from earlier in the season with Tom Whyman about hope and parenthood. We're gonna dissect it a little bit and talk about it a little bit more in-depth with a friend of mine named Tara Boyce. She's a fantastic writer. She has a Substack that you'll hear about in the interview. Thanks for being here and let's dive in. It's a S'mores episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges.

When I Grow Up I Want To Be a Mother - 00:29

BLAIR HODGES: Tara Boyce, welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges.

TARA BOYCE: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Have you ever heard the song, “I Want to Be a Mother”?

TARA BOYCE: No, but I hate it already. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: So, by way of background for listeners, we both—Tara and I—come from a Mormon background, and I had this record growing up by Janeen Brady. And it had all these really wonderful songs. One of them was about how paying tithing to the church is great. And one of them was about becoming a Mormon missionary.

And one of them is “I Want To Be a Mother” and let's take a look, let's take a listen to this.

[Song]  

When I grow up I want to be a mother. I'll have a family.
One little, two little, three little babies of my own.

Of all the jobs for me I'll choose no other. I'll have a family.
Four little, five little, six little babies in my home.

And I will love them all day long and give them cookies and milk and yellow balloons.
And cuddle them when things go wrong and read stories and sing them silly tunes.

When I grow up, if I can be a mother how happy I will be.
One little, two little, three little babies I could love.

And you will say each sister and each brother all look a lot like me.
Four little, five little, six little blessings from above.

BLAIR HODGES: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like that song really kind of describes your life.

TARA BOYCE: Yes! It's like, this is going to be so beautiful and magical and cozy and cookies. And literally when I was deciding to, with my husband, who was always like, “sure, yeah, let's have kids—”

BLAIR HODGES: “Okay!”

TARA BOYCE: “Never thought about it before.” Um, I was like thinking about Christmas morning, of like how cute and fun it would be. And so…I chose to have kids! [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Well, there's yellow balloons. There's cookies.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah, and those parts are and can be magical. And they're also sometimes chaos.

BLAIR HODGES: All right. You ready to talk about hope?

TARA BOYCE: Sure.

Tooth decay - 03:14

BLAIR HODGES: All right. Here we go. We're going to take a look back at a conversation we had with Tom Whyman. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, I suggest checking it out before you dive into this one. I invited a friend to come and talk about the episode from her perspective. It's Tara Boyce, and she's author of a really great Substack called This Is My Restoration. You can find that at thisismyrestoration.substack.

Now, Tara, as a writer, when I reached out to do a podcast, I'm just wondering how that felt. I don't know if you've done a lot of interviews before.

TARA BOYCE: No, I have not. Um, other than Marco Polo with friends— [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, that's a little bit different

TARA BOYCE: —which feels like an interview.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it kinda does!

TARA BOYCE: I was actually really nervous because I've always been a writer for the reason that speaking makes me kind of nervous and writing allows me to sit on my thoughts more and find the right word, edit, get to that nugget of what I'm really trying to say, whereas with speaking I’m more kinda bumbly.

BLAIR HODGES: I actually feel that way too, honestly.

TARA BOYCE: Maybe a lot of people do, but…

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, being on this side of the microphone, I have the advantage of having a script that I've written out beforehand and these S'mores episodes are kind of more free flowing. So I share a little bit of your nervousness too, so, just as full disclosure.

The reason I wanted to talk to you though, is because I had read something, a really, really powerful essay you wrote. And I read this around the time Tom Whyman's episode came out.

So to remind people, Tom Whyman did a book about whether it was ethical or right to become a parent right now. He's thinking about ecological crisis. He's thinking about suffering. He's thinking about pain, and whether it's right or not to introduce new life into those situations. And he's a philosopher. So he comes at it from philosophical studies he's done at university kind of thinking about it, what hope is and the ethics, I think, of being a parent. And he's doing it before he's become a parent and in the process of becoming one. So his child is born during that time.

Your essay is very different. Your essay is more memoir. It's personal. It's exploratory. It's talking from the midst of being a parent, right? I'm interested in how this essay came about. Tell us a little bit about this essay. It's called, “Holes are generally suspicious things.”

TARA BOYCE: So this is the essay I wrote in the midst of writing an essay about motherhood.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] So you're supposed to be writing an essay about motherhood…

TARA BOYCE: I'm trying to write about coming into motherhood, the reasons why, how it was some of the trauma and sorrow there. And it's a huge emotional project. And I set a time, a day to try to finish a draft. I suspected I wouldn't actually finish, but that was the goal. And I arranged babysitting, and that morning my daughter wakes up with a giant hole in her tooth. Like suddenly the cavity has appeared. Obviously it's been working its magic, but this is the moment we realize, and it's a crisis.

And I have to literally decide whether or not to address this crisis or write about my motherhood. And it just turned out that I ended up taking my daughter in. And it ended up just being a day of parenting, an exacerbating day. My daughter also, my youngest, ended up barfing on me at the end of the day.

So it just was, it was not a typical day, but it was a common experience that happens as a parent and especially as a mother who is, right now, currently full time caregiver.

BLAIR HODGES: This is an essay of, like you said, it’s not necessarily a typical day, but it is definitely a parent's day.

TARA BOYCE: Yes. I mean, even this morning, getting up to get ready to come here. I live in Springville, so it's an hour drive, which is a luxury to just drive by myself here. It is a nice break.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s “You Time” in the car.

TARA BOYCE: And you know, I've already had my antibiotics. I'm good. I had strep throat. My daughter did. So I got her antibiotics. She's good. And then my husband woke up this morning and is like, my throat hurts. Right? And he's the one who's supposed to be watching the kids this morning. And I was going to get up early and kind of get some notes together.

And it's just, this is what parenting is. It feels like constant interruptions to your plans. Or not necessarily plans, just like what you're trying to do.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. I find myself saying like, why can't things just be the way that they should have been?

TARA BOYCE: Like why can't I just like, ever do what I want to do, how I want to do it.

Premature hope - 08:08

BLAIR HODGES: Why can't it just happen how it should? Yeah, no, I relate. Like we've had some sickness here at the house the same way, you can lay out all these plans, but the real world, and especially with parenting, the real world is going to impinge on those.

And I think looking at Tom's book, it's talking about hope. And when you think about hope as a parent, I guess it can be easier to have hope before you've really been into the middle of what it's really like.

Also, you had certain expectations of becoming a parent that have changed since you became a parent, right? Talk a little bit about your background and your upbringing and kind of what you expected of motherhood.

TARA BOYCE: So I have a mother who loved mothering. She's a very naturally caring, empathetic, nurturing person. She loved it. We felt like the center of her world. She enjoyed that. And it's kind of interesting because later in her life, she could no longer just be mothering. She had to go to work and it was really hard for her. She wanted to just be there with us.

And so I grew up with this idea—and I was the oldest daughter. I grew up with this idea that I would always be a mother. I was even telling some friends, like they were expressing what they wanted to be when they were little and all this stuff and I'm like, I always just want to be a mom. Like I saw my mom doing it. She seemed so good at it. I was the oldest sister. I loved my little siblings. I loved my stuffed animals and it was like, this is what I want to do. It was pitched to me as this way of creating a world and like a nest, a cozy nest for your little family. [laughs]

And it sounded so beautiful. And I think that is how it is still pitched. It's like, you get to bring this little life and create this world for your child. And that is true in some ways.

BLAIR HODGES: So you didn't share any of the existential anxiety, maybe, that Tom talked about. Like you didn’t think about the world—

TARA BOYCE: No. And I was taken care of enough. My parents made enough money. I was one of six children. And so it was always like, we weren't lie rolling around in the dough or had treats ever, or could buy or get a lot of gifts or anything. I just was taken care of.

So the concept of, I may not be able—well, one, I may not even be able to have children, like that didn't cross my mind. I assumed and I was also raised Mormon so I believed that being a mother was my role on Earth and an eternity. And so it never crossed my mind that anything that wasn't God's will would get in the way of me being a mother, and specifically a stay at home mother.

I write in other essays about, like, I remember writing in my journal that I would be a stay-at-home mom. Because I had gathered from information I had heard and read that this was the best and most righteous thing to do. So I also assumed that if I chose the most righteous thing to do, I would also have a lot of joy and fulfillment in that choice. Because both things were promised to me.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you lacked that existential anxiety because this was actually the plan—

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. I didn't have concepts of like, maybe you wouldn't be able to afford being a stay-at-home mom. Maybe you wouldn't be able to have children. Like I have.

BLAIR HODGES: Infertility wasn't on the radar then.

TARA BOYCE: I have family members who've only been mothers of miscarried babies. Right? And so, faith seemed to triumph all of that for me in the way I understood things. And so that was just where I was gonna go. And so that's what I wanted to be. And so I think that's why the reality of motherhood was such, such a bomb in my life. Like it just, it impacted me so differently than anything I had thought or been told. And so I had to kind of create a new way of seeing it.

When hope meets reality - 12:28

BLAIR HODGES: This is one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you because you just brought hope to the equation. Right?

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. Automatic.

BLAIR HODGES: Tom’s book is like, should we have hope?

TARA BOYCE: Yeah, I hoped.

BLAIR HODGES: You just, the hope was there. And then you get into a reality that then would challenge. What your hope had maybe promised.

So yeah, so let's explore that a little bit about like what the realities of becoming a parent have been like for you, because you brought the hope from the get-go and then reality sort of challenged that hope after the fact.

TARA BOYCE: I think what was really hard, particularly as a mother who was able to conceive and carry babies, is it really impacted my physical body, my hormones, my brain. A lot of moms talk about, and science also shows this, the way your brain changes after pregnancy and childbirth. It rewires and allocates resources in different ways for you and your child. And it's such an adjustment. Your body, it’s so changed just carrying a child.

And then after the fact as well, I had such bad postpartum depression. There's this sorrow when I look back at those early years after my babies were born and this is why I've chosen to write about motherhood is because I've avoided it so long is, but it's the sorrow that kind of like, it sits in my gut because there's a lot of pain there in this moment that I always thought or believed based on my own hope and naivete and also what I was told, I thought it would be this beautiful thing and it felt like my death. It felt like my annihilation.

And I mean that in multiple ways. It felt like my body was destroyed. My mental health upended. And that was the first time—I had always struggled sometimes with mood or hard times, but never depression where I sunk into what I call “the black hole.” And so the arrival of motherhood came with a lot of darkness and hardness. So when I think about it, when I talk about it, it's still there.

BLAIR HODGES: There was a book I wanted to do for Fireside with a philosopher, the book is called Transformative Experience. And she's a philosopher, and I think the gendered nature of her approach made a difference compared to what Tom was doing.

She was basically saying there are decisions we make in our lives that can't really be rational decisions, no matter how rational we think they are, because making the decision changes things in ways we could never anticipate or never expect. And parenting is one of these where you could have every friend tell you, “Parenting is the best,” or “Parenting? Avoid it! It's really bad.”

But until you actually, yeah, there's really no way to know. And she actually, there's a really funny thought experiment she uses, which is like, suppose all your friends come to you and they’ve all become vampires and they say, “Tara, being a vampire is the best. Like we know it sounds weird. Uh, but trust us.”

TARA BOYCE: Sold.

BLAIR HODGES: “We've got ethical ways to get blood. Like you don't have to worry about any of that. You get to live forever and it's super rad.”

But you cannot make a rational choice in that instance, because you have to become that thing and experience it before you can really know what it's like. And I think that perspective really nuances Tom's approach, which he's sort of talking about, you know, having hope beforehand, and making a decision based in hope, but you've really got to recognize that shadow side, and you can't really anticipate whether that hope will pay off or what the consequences will be.

And it sounds like you experienced that. That intrinsic hope that you brought to what it would be to be a mom.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah I did. I didn't know how my particular body and brain would respond to pregnancy. I didn't know I'd have postpartum depression. I didn't know I had ADHD at the time. In fact, motherhood and mothering exacerbated a lot of my stress and situation so I then even noticed these problems.

But yeah, it was, it's a transformation and it's a risk. It is never a guarantee, like most things in life. But it does particularly impact a woman carrying a child in a way that a father will have no way to understand, not as an accusation, but just a difference.

BLAIR HODGES: That's it. It's just a reality. And I think the same goes for like, adoptive parents or people that foster and things like this—

TARA BOYCE: The disrupted sleep—

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. Or how labor is divided between partners, or what it's like to be a single parent and juggle these things. So however, parenting happens, you know, you can try to anticipate stuff. You can have these hopes. But again, they're going to bump up against a reality that could challenge those.

This is one of the points you said you wanted to bring up as we looked through the old episode, which is the object of hope, right? And, and how that makes a difference. What you're hoping for matters a ton. You can't just think about hope in the abstract. You're actually hoping for specific things and that makes a difference.

TARA BOYCE: Yes. Okay. So there's two things if I remember that I wanted to talk about with this.

One is, hope for me has had to change as a mom. I can't wake up and be like, “I hope today is a good one. I hope I'm not interrupted. I hope it goes smoothly.” Because that almost leads to more disappointment because it won't. [laughter] It's possible, kind of, but it's really not that possible enough to justify hoping in that without kind of hurting more because you're striving for that thing.

BLAIR HODGES: Like dashed expectations.

TARA BOYCE: And that's so hard. Yeah and not just the expectations, but like striving to get something that's so outside of your control. And so my hope has to adjust to, I hope I can show up full-heartedly. I hope I can be present. I hope I can find moments of joy and love and connection. Because that's—I don't know if it's because that's what I have control over or have some say in? I don't know, but to hope for things that just can't be, as a parent, makes it harder, right?

To hope to come to this podcast without my caregiver having strep throat and everyone…[laughs], you know, it doesn't work as well. It ends up being more frustrating. I think that's what it is, is more hoping in those things you can't really do creates more frustration and more burden.

And I like to kind of think of it—You are a jazz fan, right? [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, I am.

TARA BOYCE: Uh, following you on Twitter.

BLAIR HODGES: The Utah Jazz, in particular. I mean, I also like jazz music.

TARA BOYCE: Oh and jazz music. Yeah, I was assuming basketball. And I used to play basketball, and so I'm thinking of, you know, is it ethical as a team—there's two minutes left. I don't know about “ethical,” but let's think about rational. I don't know what word we'd use. But you're down by 30, okay? Are you gonna win? Hoping for the win is silly, stupid, irrational, because based on the rules and boundaries and confines of basketball, points are only worth so many, right? You've got three pointers, two pointers, free throws. There's rules about who gets the ball when, there's boundaries, et cetera. And so to be like, at this point in the game, “Let's just give it all we've got to win!”

It's like, you cannot score that many points in two minutes.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's, it's literally impossible. Yeah.

TARA BOYCE: And so that's where it's like, hope is interesting to me because the object of the hope seems to make all the difference. At that moment, it seems like a good coach has to change the object, right? “Okay. We're not going to win. But what are we going to hope for now,” right? Do we want to win games down the road? Should we sit out our starting five and put some of our younger players in, give them that experience and just say, “let's see how we can close the gap,” right? There's an adjustment—

BLAIR HODGES: The goal changes completely, yeah.

TARA BOYCE: The goal changes, and then hope can be the thing that gets you off that bench. But the object of that hope—you're not gonna get off the bench if you're down by 30 and the goal is to win.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. you can't maintain that goal.

TARA BOYCE: Or you could—you could be driven by duty, right? And this is why I played in games where we were down and you just keep going. But you're like, this is depressing. I'm wasting my time because I wanted to win.

BLAIR HODGES: And that's just a game. Imagine that's your level of disappointment like in life.

TARA BOYCE: And in life, life's so much more complicated because it's not so finite, and so obvious what the rules and possibilities and opportunities are.

Now, sometimes there are—there's laws, there's these kinds of things, and they impact people differently and in different ways. And you have to take that into consideration when you are finding objects of hope. But that's where hope, I think, also requires wisdom, and knowledge of what really is, and what is within your means and possibilities.

So when I was thinking about what to say today, I kept trying to come to this conclusion, almost like confirmation bias: why hope is good. And I kept asking, “How is it bad though?” [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right.

TARA BOYCE: You know, like when is it better to just be like, “Yeah, we're losing. Let's just, let's go out and have some fun. Like, let's just smile while we do it. Give the crowd a show.”

Where the good outweighs the bad - 23:27

BLAIR HODGES: And I see that in your essay here, to go back to the dentist thing, you're with your daughter at this dentist appointment and you're holding her hand. And the essay kind of talks about this list that you keep running in your head. I don't know if you want it to run or not, but it's basically the pros and cons or the goods and bads. You're thinking about: Am I a good parent? Is this relationship good? Will my kids grow up and think of me as a good mom? Am I hurting them in some psychological way? Like if I stack up all of the beautiful parenting moments on one side of the scale, and stack up all the times that I shout at them or get frustrated or just kind of have a parenting fail on the other side of the scale, how is that going to balance out in the end?

And you're holding your daughter's hand, it’s a really beautiful scene. She's squeezing your hand. She's in pain. She's having something really scary happen at the dentist. They're working on this cavity, which involves drilling and pain. And you're saying you hope these little hand squeezes and this hand holding will be remembered by her. And that maybe there will be this accumulation of hand squeezing moments that will end up being with her throughout her life as something beautiful, but you're not sure because you also feel like bad moments are accumulating, too.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. Both in my relationship with her, and each of my children, and also in my experience as a mom, right? In addition to holding her hand is sweet and we have this connection and I love my child, there's so much around that moment that sucks so much in that day that it's like, was that handholding worth this quantity of suck? No!

BLAIR HODGES: And even the problems the kids will bring—

TARA BOYCE: No! And maybe down the road, because I'm still in the middle of it—and this is where hope comes in—is maybe down the road, because we've had these good connecting moments, my daughter and I will have a relationship where the good outweighs the bad as a mother.

BLAIR HODGES: Going both ways, too.

TARA BOYCE: But I can't, yes! I can't even guarantee that. I mean, how many of us hate our parents? [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: For the record, I don't, but [laughs]

TARA BOYCE: I don't either! I don't either mom and dad—

BLAIR HODGES: But I will say this, though. It does become complicated. I have complicated feelings.  

TARA BOYCE: It does! It is not a certainty. And that's what hope is. It's not a certainty. Parenting is not. And I think a lot of parents do, they put so much into their children and they do it in ways they know how, are capable of, and sometimes it creates a beautiful thing in the end or later in life, the last third or whatever, if you live that long. And then sometimes it doesn't, and there's wedges and it's a sorrow.

BLAIR HODGES: And some parents really do hurt their kids.

TARA BOYCE: And some parents do hurt their kids, and their kids are like, you did all this work, but you also hurt me so much I never want to talk to you again.  

BLAIR HODGES: That’s right. Again…

TARA BOYCE: Like why do we parent is the real question? [laughter]  

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Yeah.

TARA BOYCE: I do not have an answer for you. Other than I feel like I was lied to.

BLAIR HODGES: I think the fact that we keep going is kind of the answer in the sense that, that's the only answer we have. It's different from the basketball game in that there's not, we don't know the clock—

TARA BOYCE: Yeah, we don't know how much points a hand-holding is worth.  

Raise your hand if it hurts - 26:59

BLAIR HODGES: So I wonder how much of a difference that makes too. Ultimately, we don't know. I like thinking of your thought experiment, of a game, when your expectations have to change and like, what's the point when those expectations change? I think that's a really helpful way to think about parenting. But yeah, there's no, I don't know how much time is on this clock. So I can relate to that, but it's still—to go back to the essay, to see you holding her hand.

And there's another moment in here I wanted to mention because this pertains, I think, to Tom's point, too. Tom was worried about the pain children would face. When you're bringing a child into the world, you know they're going to have, if they live any particular amount of time, they'll encounter pain, heartache, sorrow, difficulty. It could even include your own death. How sad is it to think about your kids being sad, you know, and losing you if you have a great relationship.

You talk about your daughter raising her hand when she feels pain. So I think that's something the dentist probably told her to do right?

TARA BOYCE: Yes, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Raise your hand. And so what a brave, first of all, what a brave thing for a kid to do.

TARA BOYCE: I know. She's so awesome.

BLAIR HODGES: She's raised her hand like, “This hurts.” But then you talk about how your essay itself is kind of a raising of your own hand of saying, “I feel pain in this situation,” and you're raising your hand to manifest that.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. It was a really poignant moment for me, and those don't exist every day as a mother or a person.

BLAIR HODGES: Which is hard when you have a Substack and you want to write some good content [laughs]—

TARA BOYCE: “What can I make of this crap?” [laughs] But yeah, Eleanor, she's so interesting and brave and just so alive and so herself. And I don't feel like I can take all the credit for that, but almost in some ways I'm endeared to my own self when I see my children doing things I've hopefully tried to help give and shape in them.

One of which is: Your body, your pain, what you feel, what you experience matters. And so when she's getting drilled—which we were unsure if it would be a root canal, it was that bad—and she raises her hand that it hurts, it was like, “Oh my gosh, my daughter is in pain and she knows that her pain matters.”

And I'm thinking about how when I was a child, I don't know why, I don't know how, but I would have been too scared. I would have just done it. I was afraid and nervous about talking to adults and drawing attention to anything about me that was burdensome. And so seeing my daughter do that was just, it was beautiful.

And I've had this concept with mothering, because as a child, my mother loved me and taught me to love who I was as well. And that those things about me, my pain and stuff mattered. But it was like, at what moment did that change? Right? And I've had to confront this because my children are all daughters. And they may or may not choose to be mothers. And at what point does what they go through and what they hurt through stop mattering as much as the children they raise? You know, it seems like motherhood in many ways—as much as people like to say it doesn't—requires pain and sacrifice you don't even necessarily want to give, but will out of love.

BLAIR HODGES: And sometimes out of necessity.

TARA BOYCE: And out of necessity. Or like, how do I get my child to stop jumping on my head? And so it's the thing that I just keep going around, and it's in the essay I'm going to release today actually, about “When did I become a mom whose needs and pain didn't matter as much as it as my children's?” And that's hard. Because I don't think in our society with our resources it has to be this hard for moms, you know?

Sorry, I'm touching on a lot of things there—

BLAIR HODGES: No, I think that's important to point out.

TARA BOYCE: Because why does parenting this beautiful, wonderful, vibrant child, Eleanor, require so much from me for her to be happy? Is there a way that we can both be happy? Even if not equally, but like, why do I have to suffer this so much so she can? [laughs]

Parenting in a patriarchal culture of individualism - 31:58

BLAIR HODGES: And I think you're talking probably structurally. So about gender roles and gender expectations and the stats are clear. The extra work, that women are the ones who often put in more time in the home, even if they work outside the home, and when they work outside the home, they're often ones who still put in more than their partners.

This is something my partner and I have really—or that I should say my partner I've experienced, that I've been trying to grow better into this. I've been a feminist in my mind for quite a long time, not as much in action as much as I would want to be. And we see that in like the amount of labor that she performs. The kids default to asking her stuff, this kind of thing, right? So. You're talking about those—

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. And it's also, it's so much weight on a partner, if there is a partner, right. If you're a single parent, then it's on you. And also just structurally, like in a lot of other cultures outside of America—and I wouldn't even just say America, maybe more white America—white America is often that insular family, and we're often living away from parents or help, or these parents are having to work later and later past retirement, “normal age,” and it just seems like so much is put on one or two partners, and it's too much for either of us to hold, right? Like my husband with his hurting back and strep at home trying to watch the kids!

BLAIR HODGES: So economically and professionally too, right? We have a 40-hour work week of five days—

TARA BOYCE: Yes. How do we work around it? My friends work. No one is available to help. There's no childcare. There's no—unless you can afford it. And even then, that those caregivers are available or willing, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. If you can afford it, if you can find people, and then what cost is it incurring on their lives as well? Like you're passing along the burden.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah, it’s hard thing. It's a hard thing in and of itself.

BLAIR HODGES: Here's the thing. It didn't have to be like this. We did not have to have—and it's an improvement on things. The 40-hour work week was a success for labor, like getting it down to that. But why stop here? Like, why—my wife and I were talking about it this summer. She's now employed in the school district, so she gets to take time off, well, you know, she'll be off with the kids during summer break and I'm not. I'm going to be working throughout the whole week, right?

And so she's like, we're going to the zoo and we're doing this and this. And I'm jealous. I'm looking at that and being like, I would love to do some of that stuff. And I have this job. I can't do that.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how people do it. Not to bring us to some despairing, dark place [laughs]. Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, this is why this is why this conversation matters. I really love Tom's interview and I want people to listen to it. And I think even as I was doing the interview, I kept thinking about how much more it could be expanded, how much more there was to say. And especially how much more women could bring to the table, often being the ones who are actually bearing the children, the ones who are often taking on more of the emotional labor, the house organizational labor, just because of these—You know, we both grew up in a Mormon tradition where it's highly patriarchal. Men are said to be the providers. Women are said to be the nurturers—

TARA BOYCE: And they both come with their own particular challenges, which create a very different perspective on hope and objects of hope.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. And, and why divide it that way anyway? Like why situate it to where, “Here's your jobs. Here's your jobs. And everyone needs to fit this mold.”

And it really shaped your hope, pre-motherhood, like how motherhood would look, which again, you bumped into the reality of lived motherhood in ways that challenged all those hopes. And the basketball game changed basically, you got put in the game and the game changed.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. And my own body and health issues I deal with now are still changing that game. And it's hard.

The way hope moves - 36:05

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. So we've talked a lot about nuancing hope, thinking about some of the challenges that hope brings. But also at the same time, I think there's still a way for hope to operate, right? Even when there's constraints, I think it's important to acknowledge what the constraints can be, to expect hope to change, and so now that we're there, what next?

TARA BOYCE: Okay, so I've thought a lot about this because I tend to still be a hopeful person and an acting person. I've at times needed to adjust that. And so I was thinking of that movie, The Quiet Place. Spoiler alert. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: It's old enough to where it’s their fault if—

TARA BOYCE: It's old enough that you should have seen it and if you haven't, it's awesome. You should. Where the father—which Blair and I can't remember his name, so we'll call him Jim Halpert from The Office— at the end, you know, these creatures arrive and he's there in the field, I think it's like a cornfield or something, with his children. He knows the creatures are way stronger and faster than him and his children. And they're confronted with these creatures, they're staring at them, right? He cannot just run away. The possibility that some random miracle occurs and a spaceship appears and saves him, maybe that's a possibility, but not realistically.

And so where hope can play a factor here is there's this moment where Jim is like, you can see him thinking, and he has to make a choice, right? If they all go run away, they have a chance of all dying. If they despair and just resign to the creatures, they all die, same outcome. So the hope for all of them to live could kill them all and the despair of not doing anything could kill them all.

So he has this moment of, “Maybe I could save my kids,” right? And he decides to offer himself as a distraction to these creatures in the hope that maybe at least his kids could live, right? And so I think about that as, you know, the destructive side of hope as “We can all try to live and just all matter all the same and all be happy and never be frustrated,” but that ends up killing us all, or we can despair and do nothing and just resign to death, which sometimes is necessary and happens with people with chronic or terminal illnesses, the end is just acceptance, right? And that's how you just let it go. And sometimes that is necessary and often the more peaceful and happy ending.

But in these cases, how could we improve from utter destruction? Where is that opportunity, that sliver that could possibly end in something better? It's not certain that his kids will live. It's not certain that his kids will escape, but it's a possibility if he gives himself up here.

Now I have a hard time saying that because I'm not like, “Parents should kill themselves for their children.” I don't believe in that. And they don't have to. But there are certain things required in parenting that people don't talk about, where it's like, your body will transform and that will create a different thing, and you just have to accept that, right?

BLAIR HODGES: It's going to be, you're not going to do some things that you could have done otherwise.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. You just can't do those things. I'm always for saving as many lives as you can, including the parents, you know—But when it comes to that choice is when hope can kind of guide you to what could be done given this context, right?

Which leads me to this poem I wrote, which is funny—I had forgotten I wrote this when I was preparing this, and it's about hope. In fact, the title is called “The Way Hope Moves.” And I think what first led me to write this—which was years ago, it was published in Segullah. Is that how you say it?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Segullah, yeah.

TARA BOYCE: In Segullah the journal, years ago. And it was written about my oldest daughter. Actually, maybe my second. I don't know. It's about both of them, all of them. No competition! [laughter] It’s about this moment that I would probably classify more as awe, but I can see how it also leads to hope. So I'll read it real quick and then kind of talk about what that means for me as a mom.

* * *

There was a moment at the aquarium today—
and I’m playing it over and over and over and over in my head because I’m obsessive like that—
between the splash and the glide
of a penguin in a tank of water above us,
the sunlight ragged, tattered
illuminating floating feces.
Squatting, I held my daughter,
one hand holding each side of her rib cage,
and we looked up at the white belly of a penguin, a firm and round belly (like my daughter’s belly after she’s swallowed a whole plate of homemade enchiladas), right as it swam into splintered sunlight cascading down an artificial sea.

How we breathed!
my daughter and I, together, marveling.

And inside, deep down in my crevices, in the
slivers of my joints, something whispered,
“Isn’t that something?”

* * *

That last line actually is a line my great grandmother once told my mom when she was showing my mom a Daddy Long Legs spider. So it has extra meaning for me there.

But how this applies to hope for me is I feel like sometimes—I mean, often [laughs] as a parent, and I just know what it's like to be a mother, so I'll say as a mother for me—is the water, the aquarium water just feels so murky, or sometimes it looks like a rock and not even water, or lots of rocks and there's murky water in between. And that can lead to despair, right? Like this just always is hard. There's no ending. Every day's a battle and I don't really win, right? In terms of joy or peace or even contentment. Like, this isn't fun. [laughs]

And then sometimes it's like you have those especially hard days where you feel like, I don't even feel like I'm learning from this. I don't even feel fulfilled by this. I feel like our relationships are getting worse. Like I just, this sucks! Right?

I feel like hope is a way of kind of orienting yourself and looking at that aquarium water or whatever, and seeing real slivers of light, not imagined and fake. And kind of going toward there and hoping that what's on the other side or up through that light is something that will make this okay.

And so rather than despairing and resigning to, “the water is murky,” it’s where are these slivers of light that I can actually fit through and I can reach toward that, I don't know, make my life—that can make my life okay, or even beautiful. Does that make sense?

They're not as common the older I get, [laughs] but they're still there. They're still there. And if I'm looking, or if I'm even present enough to see, or if that’s what I'm trying to do each day, I can see them.

But maybe that's just like a hopeful assumption I have. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Back to hope. So you are hopeful!

TARA BOYCE: I am.

BLAIR HODGES: Are you really? Are you hopeful? Do you think you’re a hopeful person?

TARA BOYCE: I don't know. It depends.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it depends.

TARA BOYCE: I feel both in me. Are you a hopeful person?

BLAIR HODGES: I don’t know. I think so.

TARA BOYCE: I feel like the more I learn, the less hopeful I am. But then sometimes the more I learn, I'm like, “Oh, there's ways people have done this.”

BLAIR HODGES: See, this is why I'm thinking about hope—and joy is another episode I did because I'm rethinking these ideas. We must just kind of be at that age or something where we're just, you know, things are different than we might've expected.

TARA BOYCE: Yeah, it's midlife. It's that everything's not a dream and a possibility. It's the beginning of possibilities closing. And, I have both in me. Because I don't want to lie to myself. It's more like, it's also kind of will and determination, of like, I refuse to be miserable. So I will find something here.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like I'll show misery. I'm not going to let misery win.

TARA BOYCE: So, yeah, I don't know.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Thanks.

That's Tara Boyce. She's a writer who earned a Master of Arts in writing and rhetoric and she writes at thisismyrestoration.substack. You can check that out for her essay we talked about today and also a new essay about mothering by the time this episode comes out that'll be ready to read.

So Tara, thanks. This was really fun.

TARA BOYCE: Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: And hopeful. I hope it was fun! [laughter]

TARA BOYCE: Yeah. A rollercoaster.

Outro - 46:18

BLAIR HODGES: I hope you enjoyed this S'mores episode of Fireside with Blair Hodges. A little bonus for you. And if you stick around after this little outro then you're gonna hear some more bonus content, some of the deleted scenes from this episode so stick around for that.

Also let me know what you thought about the S'mores episode. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts, you can also comment on the website. I always ask you to do stuff like that. But there's something different I'm asking for this time Fireside with Blair Hodges has been named a finalist in the Signal Awards. And this is one of podcasting's biggest award opportunities. Almost 2,000 podcasts entered, but only a few will emerge victorious. And Fireside is up for Best Podcast Award in the Indie category. So is shows that aren't tied to any of the big podcasting networks or anything like that. And you can help me get a listener's choice award in that category if you go to their website and vote for me, then I created a handy shortcut to make it easy for you. Just go to bit.ly/votefireside. And the site will ask you to sign up to vote. Uh, so you'll need to use a throwaway email address, uh, maybe your junk email address. But just use one email address. They're monitoring for spam voting and stuff. And it's only fair. Vote once. But go to the website now and vote for me. I would really appreciate that.

Lastly, in case you haven't heard yet, I'm working on a new show under the Fireside umbrella. It's debuting in January. The show's called Family Proclamations. And episodes will start popping up in your Fireside feed in January and it will also be released through its own feed so you can subscribe directly to Family Proclamations now in whatever app you're using. I cannot wait to share this show with you and I thought I would throw the trailer in here to give you a sneak preview of what's coming up.

See you soon and don't forget to vote at bit.ly/votefireside.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.