I was in the NY Times!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about responding to a New York Times call-out for how your relationship with your children had changed during the pandemic. (You can read my submission here). To my surprise, a reporter from the Times called me shortly after submitting it and left a voicemail during our teacher appreciation lunch at the school I own (outdoors, with distanced tables, don’t worry..).
When I called her back later that night, I left her a message. The next day she called again, and this time we connected. She told me she had received a lot of responses, explained how being interviewed by the press worked, and then we just talked for about thirty minutes. I expounded upon my central ideas from my original response, and she told me she would get back to me if she was going to include it in her piece. It was an exciting, novel experience for me to be interviewed and to think about my ideas being in a publication like The Times. As I talked, I understood myself better - more clearly - and could see that my central idea was an extension of both the most comforting and also terrifying thing I believe about parenting. It was like part-therapy, part-interview.
“Who you are matters more than what you do. ”
A few days later, she called again to let me know she did want to include it in the piece and to ask some additional questions. It started to feel more real, and I started to get a little nervous - did I say something I would regret? But during this conversation is when I heard myself say what I hoped she’d quote. Spoiler alert - she didn’t, though she did make me repeat it twice.
“The goal isn’t to have no bad days, but to know how to take care of yourself when you have bad days. ”
And now you know what I’d write about in a parenting book - just encouragement to be yourself, bad days and panic attacks, insecurities and mistakes and apologies and all. I don’t think this approach gets enough credit, but the opposite approach of trying to be perfect and have it all together certainly does plenty of damage. If you would like to see an example of the damage that focusing on appearances over honesty can do, just watch Bridgerton and pay attention to the storyline of Daphne’s journey of learning about sex and reproduction. Also, you should just watch Bridgerton because it’s completely delightful and we all need that kind of distraction right now.
At the end of that call, she told me she would call a third time to fact-check and make sure that everything she would write would be okay with me to share and to make sure that it was accurate. When she called again, the first thing she said was that the photo editor wanted some pictures, and they would be calling to set up pictures of our family if I was okay with that. Somehow, that felt a little invasive, but I agreed - at this point, I felt committed to seeing this through.
As we moved into our conversation about fact checking, I felt like it was unnecessary, since we had spent an hour or longer on the phone at this point, and she had been recording it all. But in the end, I was glad she called because some of what she was planning to write wasn’t true about me or my family, and I appreciated that I had the opportunity to clarify.
Then I started thinking about what we would wear for a photo shoot, and where it would happen. In our backyard? In our house through a window (one of the ways she said it would happen)? What would I wear? I haven’t gotten a haircut or highlights since February, but should I try to get that done now?
In the end, the photo editor never called, and that was fine. The article didn’t run on the day she said it would, so I spent several days checking the Parenting section each morning to see if it was there. Finally, it appeared. For all the time we spent talking, the part of the article about me was very short. My ego isn’t offended, but it was an interesting behind-the-scenes reminder of the work that goes into creating each piece of journalism — talking to people who aren’t even mentioned, going over information again and again, looking for interesting bits to include.
Have you learned anything about your children during the pandemic?