Jessi Klein: Nurture Vs. Nurture? | Metaphysical Milkshake with Rainn and Reza

welcome to metaphysical milkshake i'm your host jessica jackley and i'm your other host holiday reinhorn and today we're talking about motherhood obviously a topic that we know a thing or two about yes that's correct i almost have an 18 year old like i'm about 30 days away from that that's unbelievable i'm only 10 years in uh but i have four little ones so the math works out uh we both have a lot to say on this topic as women and as mothers what's going on obviously we mean what's going on we're it's a podcast about motherhood excuse me excuse me no no no no no no no oh i'm sorry no no we got this we have a few things to say about motherhood excuse me please let the man just handle this okay oh my god oh geez i'm being kicked out here's the worst brotherhood podcast maybe listen and learn yeah okay maybe listen i think there's some things that you could learn from us okay uh we'll be doing about an hour maybe a sandwich would that be a la out hey don't let the don't the door hit you on the way out of the podcast room welcome to metaphysical milkshake the show where we go deep we get weird and we search for the meaning of life along the way presented by cast media and soul pancake [Music] hey hey can you can you believe this i mean these things who do they think they are jeez we're talking about motherhood rayne and i as fathers have a lot to say on this a lot to say oh oh men can't talk about it let me tell you ladies a little bit about motherhood i find it very sexist to think that a man cannot explain to a woman what motherhood means i find that to be incredibly offensive it's so limiting it's so limiting it's a gender crime really by the way in my household i mean not for nothing but you know i do all the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and the shopping and and all that stuff and jessica just sits on the couch and scratches her quattro area is crotch all a word yes stop throwing things at me people can see this in my household we hire people to do all of that work so neither of us do any of the traditional mother work but in all seriousness certainly we are not qualified to talk about motherhood so we thought we would bring on someone who is qualified to speak about motherhood the author comedian stand-up comic host tv writer award-winning she's a lot of mine is going to be coming a lot of things she has regularly appeared on the showbiz show with david spade vh1's best week ever i mean the the the bio here is incredible cnn commentary on the debates she was a writer on saturday night live she was a consulting producer on transparent and show runner and executive producer of the new showtime comedy series i love that for you about a group of people working at a home shopping network i love that this is her second book her first book was a bestseller called you'll grow out of it and um she's been a consulting producer on the animated sitcom big mouth since 2017 and she voices the main character of jesse let's bring this mother expert this motherf expert jesse klein to the show jesse hi welcome to the show thank you so much for having me i'm so excited to be here oh we are excited thrilled to have you we uh have greatly been enjoying savoring so good so funny your delicious collection of essays oh my god midlife and motherhood thank you and who better to be talking to you about motherhood two middle-aged men that's you know what i let me get rid of any sheepishness you may be feeling and say um it makes me so happy to talk to men about the book and um assuming you're not lying about enjoying it or having read it listen here's how we think about it if we can pass laws to control your body then certainly we can have a conversation about it yeah i mean let's just cover all our bases you know here on metaphysical milkshake we try and dig deep we try and get a little bit weird we want to explore the topic of motherhood in perhaps a different way maybe a profound way and we would love to res and i were talking before the interview like we would actually like to learn a little bit about motherhood what we want to do we want to drink in what haven't we thought about i have one child reza has four young children right now but we really want to put ourselves in the in the shoes in the in the in the stomach of motherhood and listen we we're totally willing to admit that there might be some things about motherhood that we don't know about i think we're i mean i'm open to that idea i mean we have four kids i feel like suddenly the tables have really turned could probably be schooling me i mean i've just got the one and it's definitely going to be staying that way so listen there's a lot of questions going on right now all over the youtubes and and media about like what is a woman who can be a mother this is a big you know cultural and political debate and we're not going to go there this is no thank you this is not that conversation okay it we're we're stepping out of that i mean if you have things to say we'd love to hear but we're just we're staying in a lane we're staying in a lane but and and we were talking about this first question um earlier on like forgive us if this is a sexist question maybe this is a sexist question maybe it's sexist to think that this is a sexist question i'll be the judge yes okay okay becoming a mother how do you understand and view motherhood as a fundamental part of a woman's identity oh what is it you were like let's go deep deep deep we're not even going to ramp in we're going to go 60 billion you thought we were going to be like what made you want to write a book where'd you go to college yeah we're going right straight to the center of the vagina on this question i i feel like there's a lot of overlap in my observations around sort of how certain kind of femininity and womanhood that our society and culture prizes and praises and um demands really overlaps with kind of the view of motherhood in our culture which is like you're supposed to kind of just shut up and do it and be as kind of quiet as possible about it and make it as pretty as possible so that no one else is uncomfortable and i think for mothers and women who aren't mothers i think like trying to operate within those um prescribed little boxes is emotionally untenable that's a lot of where the book came from and just i think a lot of my experience especially in the really early years my son is seven now um but it just felt like oh my god i'm having such an unruly emotional response to all of this it feels so hard and so messy and i'm not seeing sort of the room for that reflected back and like any any popular culture around motherhood in the same way that when i was like a teenage girl i didn't feel like i really was seeing reflections of like what i was actually going through in in anything you know i feel like i grew up in a visual culture that's you know it's like just be very thin and be very pretty and ideally white and just and that really gets into your head and i think like i just always go back to an image i realize i'm really rambling but this feels like a safe space totally plus we have an edit button so it's fine you're not we're gonna we're gonna cut out all that i think i've always liked diaper ads like bait those little diapers like diaper ads where you see a mother just like holding her infant and it's like the most vaseline lens and everyone's smiling and she looks great and the baby looks great and and it's like everyone's just in some kind of little gauzy heaven no one's covered in [ __ ] no it's covered in [ __ ] but i mean the covered in [ __ ] thing i kind of talk about in the book too a little bit i think if i remember uh i guess i'm talking about it now if i didn't but like the covered in [ __ ] thing i will say is the one like trope that you sometimes see in like comedies that are quote unquote made for moms she's covered in poop and like that's the punch line of the thing but it it's like that's i mean you're both parents so i'm assuming you know like that's kind of that's not pleasant but it also doesn't really matter like the feel the real mess is so much darker than that you know the mess of like what's going on inside of you what's happening to your identity the anger and frustration and rage you might be feeling like i don't really care about the poop on the clothes i mean you know you do but anyways that's a very long answer but you sure set yourself up for it with a deep deep question you literally said like being a woman is difficult dark and messy and growing up one and being a mother is even more difficult dark and messy and culturally you're not really supported for that part of the story but i'm interested i'm interested in that uh that i think the kind of the dark side of of of womanhood and motherhood which has been for decades so you know so suppressed you know i we don't want to hear about that you know they would literally hysterectomies was like you're hysterical and we're going to cut the uterus out of you you know and pull a francis farmer on you yeah i can't even imagine how challenging that must be yeah i mean i think you know a lot of the feedback that i've gotten from the book which has been very very satisfying to have heard from so many women who've written to me and i don't mean to be tooting my own horn about this i'm really saying this in a way because it's been quite touching because a lot of women have reached out to say thank you for writing this like i i finally feel seen like especially mothers who have very young children just to hear that like that what you're going through counts as a story and that there's gravitas to it and that it is a hero's journey for people to go through this and it matters as much as any sort of more cliche quote-unquote bigger story in the world of tales that we're used to seeing you know i think like heroes journey like we think about star wars and lord of the rings and things like that where like a man goes to a far away place and conquer something or fight somebody but i think like these stories of of women and um the journey they're on as they protect and raise their children is is of equal heft and import were you one of these people and i say people not women because i was definitely one of these people who always thought about having kids like wanted to have kids like was it like a drive of yours or you know i i'm just curious kind of the way that you thought about motherhood in theory as opposed to you know the reality of it no totally so you always wanted to give you knew you wanted to be bad always in fact i uh i uh rain rain knows this about me i've been engaged four times because i wouldn't i would like meet a girl and be like you look like you have child bearing hips let's get married uh fortunately it never it never worked out until it finally did like until the one that's done yeah the one that's stuck exactly that's so interesting i never think about i feel like i wait and rain did you feel that way or no did you always know you wanted to be a dad i never hear men talk about this oh yeah i always wanted to be a dad yeah that was that was definitely one of the roles i wanted to play and it was it was tricky for me and my wife because all of a sudden we found ourselves in our mid late 30s and we're like uh oh biological clock and then we had trouble conceiving and it took us like a year and a half two years something like that and my wife i think similar to you my wife was 40 when she had our son yeah and it was a very difficult and traumatic birth so we're we that's so interesting thank you for sharing that yeah i never i i never felt compelled towards motherhood i had a couple of friends who like always people i i'm very lucky to have some friends from when i was pretty young like elementary school junior high school friends and a couple of them i know really always always knew they wanted to be mothers and i i definitely did not i just i i felt like i was uh i don't know i don't know why i didn't i i didn't have strong feelings kind of against it i just i was just driven by other things i didn't really get there until kind of the moment was really like after i got married and i was also quite you know geriatric in these terms they do use that term like geriatric pregnancy i'm sure you're familiar with i think if you're like 36 or about right you're like pregnant high risk or something i was kind of trying to find out how late i could push push the buzzer beater because my my spouse was interested in having a child and then in the process of like doing a routine fertility check where i was like well let's just find out i can wait till forever it was revealed i had like less than zero eggs left or whatever and then it became like this huge panic and negative number of eggs no negative eggs that's my first album nobody buys it when i found out i had negative eggs i i i flipped out and i was like for whatever reason i guess it maybe sounds kind of small and a little like tracy flickish or something like oh i'm gonna do the thing i've just been told i can't do but i really when faced at that age i guess with never having a kid i suddenly wanted to have a kid very badly ran you seem like a brunch kind of guy right you're a lovely person i love i love it i love it most important meal of the day most important meal of the day is brunch and my assumption is that you know before you go out to eddie brunch place you pour over lists and lists of reviews right you want to make sure you go into a quality place yes you got it well then why don't you do the same when you're booking a doctor disappointment hey he's off sorry i was a little that was a little too impassioned but that's how i feel about zocdoc my friend see with zocdoc you can see real verified patient reviews to help find the right doctor in your network and in your neighborhood after all finding the right doctor is just as if not more important than finding the 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search for a top-rated doctor today many of them are available within 24 hours that's zocdoc.com milkshake zocdoc.com milkshake thank you so much and now folks a little word from our sponsor better help you know wellness mental wellness self-care is so important for all of us it's especially important for me i wake up every morning i have my kind of devotional period which is meditation and some prayer um i do a little journaling sometimes of course i have my weekly therapy these are the things that keep me grounded that keep me kind of aligned with my life's mission and purpose with a little bit of serenity thrown in so think about it like a car okay now if you had the same car for your entire life how would you take care of it well that's how our brains work that's how our psyches and our souls work why don't we treat them the same way because how we care for our minds affects how we experience life so it's important to invest time and care into keeping them healthy you know it's funny like even to this day there's still a weird stigma about getting therapy which just doesn't make any sense at all like you like you rightly said you know we are all dealing with a world on fire and listen it helps to have someone to talk to about all that stuff and what's great is that better help is an online therapy service it offers video phone and even live chat only therapy session so you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to you don't need to go sit in a dusty office you know in a waiting room with a bunch of other patients this is very private it's all about you and the things that you need to get off your chest and by the way it's also much more affordable than in person therapy you can be matched with a therapist in under 48 hours so our listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com milkshake that's better h-e-l-p-com slash milkshake give it a try see i wonder if it's because of like the way that i was raised i mean i love my parents and my father has passed my mother is still around and will never ever ever die no she will not you know i think like when i grew up like i i didn't come from like the most you know functional family and so like i always as a kid can't really not exactly no spreads i think there's like two avenues and all rain definitely also came from a completely dysfunctional family i always i feel like when you come from that there are these two paths that go before you one is like i'm never gonna have kids and the other is i'm gonna have a million kids and i'm gonna prove that i can do this better and i definitely was in that latter category and like before when we were kind of doing research for this pod i was uh reading uh perhaps the preeminent expert on all things women and motherhood nietzsche of course um yeah it's my go-to my go-to for any information on on women motherhood he has this whole thing where he talks about how one's view of women is determined by one's relationship to one's mother so he says quote everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother it is this that determines whether on the whole he will revere women or despise them or remain generally indifferent to them and this guy is called coco cool cool thanks thank you nichi thank you thanks for that um he sounds so chill niche is ready by the way nichi also said quote usually a mother loves herself and her son more than she loves the son himself all right thank you i guess uh it's projecting he's exactly he is projecting but you know it got us ready now we're talking about this earlier we got us to thinking about like how our mothers especially have either inadvertently or not shaped us as people not just the way that we that we look at other women or whatever but just like the way that we exist as human beings and i mean i certainly have a lot of stories i know reigns got some stories his are more depressing i think than mine are uh but uh is that something that rings true to you like when you think about your mother do you really do you see the the relationship that you guys had as fundamentally defining kind of how you see yourself as a mother is there a story or something that kind of is indicative of that as a mother or as a human as a full human eyes are both both i mean doesn't does nichi have a similar theory about people's relationship to their dads to their fathers just just women just men well that's a whole ton of pressure and i'm wondering if that is because the assumption is like dad's just like peace out normally and like maybe like out of 100 dads like 20 or even in the pictures i think definitely a niche time that dad meant something quite different that's for sure yeah because i think of myself as being very i don't know i'm curious to hear for you guys but very much formed by my mother and my father and my relationship to them both kind of in equal parts you know like i i don't so i don't i don't think i agree with our old friend friedrich if that is history are you saying nietzsche may have been wrong about something by the way uh uh our producer safa just told us that miche's dad died when he was five which makes so much sense i mean i guess if that's the parent you're left with that makes tons of sense i just think about like i mean my dad has had a lot of influence on my life but my mother you know it's it's hard to shake i think your mom's influence like i think the things that i probably dislike the most about myself i can't i can trace to my but i can i can represent my mother and her relationship to me with a single story when i bought my very very first house i was 30 years old i bought a house i was so proud i was maybe more like 35 now that i think but i was so proud of myself i bought a house in los angeles which is no small thing oh and you know it was just you know it's not a giant house but it was my house and it was like i was so proud of myself and when my mom first came to to see the house after i had moved in she kind of you know walked through every room and walked through the first floor and went down to the second floor and then then she had to use the bathroom so she went to the bathroom and she came out of the bathroom and i said mom like what do you um think about my house and she said you bought a house with a broken toilet paper dispenser there was a the toilet paper dispenser was broken that's literally all she said about you bought a house with a broken toilet paper dispenser how could you be so stupid and i was like okay wow what were you thinking this is me like i am always like i always see the worst in everything i am always like i i can guilt trip anyone into just an early grave that's my that's my spiritual gift that i inherited from my mother the thread the thread yeah well i mean it's so funny because i feel like um i kind of have a little bit of and i love you know i love my parents uh so much but there's definitely uh i think they both have a lot of that vibe of like uh like i was a very god sorry about so many brags but i was a very good student growing up because i was a real i was a classic middle child i was you know middle of three wanted to please wanted everyone to get along didn't didn't want to make waves so i just was like i'm gonna just get good grades and do what i'm supposed to do like when i would get like a 95 on a test like my dad was the person who would be like who got the other five points so yeah i mean i guess that that vibe can come from either side but i've lost the plot i've lost the pot now we're just kind of lightly complaining about it well we're talking what we're talking about jesse is how have our mothers shaped us and this reminds me of a joke it's one of my favorite uh jewish jokes my grandmother was jewish it also applies to persians by the way you might get something out of this too which is jewish or persian mother her son is elected president of the united states this is the very short version okay they the sun is like you've got to come out for the inauguration she's like oh no no i couldn't possibly and he's like no we're going to fly you on air force one you know it'll it'll be either a kosher buffet or a kebab buffet however you want to do it and it's like okay okay so she shows up in inauguration the sun is being sworn in she's seated on the diocese and the front of the tv cameras next to the secretary of state and um he's swearing in on the bible or quran or the or the torah or whatever it is and substitute the whatever book you'd like and then she turns to the secretary of state and she says my other son he's a doctor a classic very true very true but that that relates to the toilet paper paper dispenser but you know it's interesting because for me uh my mother left when i was about a year and a half and i saw her she subsequently got married three or four more times i saw her maybe three or four times before i was like 16 years old so i was not traditionally mothered so to speak i was with an emotionally absent father and i had a stepmother we had some issues long story anyway i got to know my mother as a teenager and although you know her taking off definitely left some emotional scars um i think for me uh she was able to step into my life really right when i needed her most it was kind of like i was really lost i was in a tremendous amount of pain a lot of mental health issues i was very uh in a very dark place really low self-esteem and she came in and made a concerted effort to kind of to mother me to parent me and i remember the first time i was able to really weep was in front of her i was able to kind of express emotion like all of this kind of like mother ring that i was not able to get as a child all of a sudden came into focus and really enriched my life and i you know i have issues with my birth mother i have some very serious issues but i have a tremendous amount of gratitude as well because she came into my life right at that time and so i guess my question is you know motherhood is often seen as something that you are like you just are a mother you have unconditional love for your child fatherhood is seen as something that you do you do fatherhood you provide you care you teach someone how to build a birdhouse out of popsicle sticks or whatever that that a mother's life is defined by a profound sacrifice that fathers are not expected to face but you know this i was uh profoundly mothered but not in any kind of traditional way but i'm just wondering if you had thoughts on again the effect that mothers have on us the effect your mother had on you the difference that kind of there is a profound difference it seems between motherhood and fatherhood and yet is it really such a difference yeah that's such a good question not the way i do it anyway go ahead um that's a great i mean it's a really interesting question i think like a lot of couples are you know talking about some version of this question all the time if they have kids um in terms of what the expectations are gosh i mean i definitely think there is a difference in the nature of the bond i mean i'm like always very scared to talk about anything just outside of my own experience so i can really kind of only speak to that um i do feel like there is a quality of kind of like the maternal connection i have with my son i don't know i'm really pausing on these words because i i'm like i don't wanna i'm just i'm it's it's really tough it's a really tough question it's really hard for me to say that i think that like mothers have like an inherently different connection to their children than fathers do because i i think like that's obviously sort of person to person i think um like in some ways i would say that i do and in other ways i would say that i don't i think i have like a sort of gentleness with him and a kind of i think like i'm very i think i have like a very deep sense of empathy in terms of like seeing need in in him like when i'm needed and i think some of that might also be like my own personal experience and i like with my parents who definitely did their best and are very loving but i think like in some ways like they could be a little bit withholding but so i'm like very attuned to kind of trying to meet this just sense of nurturing again part of like what led me to want to like write the book is that there are times where i just feel very unconnected to like the kind of 20 24 7 drudgery that is mothering and like i don't like to sit on the floor and play for hours on end i do get bored i do fantasize about like leaving and sometimes i also am very lucky to have the privilege of having like a nanny and so i kind of like tap out a ton but again i don't i think like the expectations are a little bit out of whack in terms of like i get especially at the beginning when my son was born i think i had a lot of guilt that i had to move through and understand and got a lot out of talking to other moms that i could be very open with and realize like a lot of people feel that way and i think we're just not really allowed to feel that way and i think feel very unsafe expressing those feelings so i i think i felt both like i feel this sort of closeness the desire to nurture and at the same time can really feel like get me the [ __ ] out of here you know we're you know we've had these conversations uh in the past about nature versus nurture it's like such a fun theoretical question to have until you have kids but you do have this one line in the book where you talk about how you write quote i suspect this can probably be traced directly to my pessimistic little genes although it's impossible to say how much of this of of your son's inborn skepticism that's what you're talking about um exists due to cosmic chance and how much is inherited jewish trauma and so i i'm sure you've been thinking about this a little bit because i mean this nature versus nurture question is is one that like all parents start to grapple with whether they are even aware of it or not i know where i found that question because i have identical twins oh okay this is very good genetically identical but it's like the same exact input and two totally opposite outputs but i'm curious like where like where do you fall on that on that whole debate the nature versus nurture debate i definitely as someone who grew up very aware of feeling kind of like oh i'm i don't really feel like the way girls are supposed to feel i guess or like i'm outside of the sort of uh norm of what like girls are supposed to look like or do and really was into quote-unquote boy stuff and didn't want to wear a dress blah blah i'm very i was very aware of this going into having a boy very aware of like how can i not put these kinds of expectations on him how can i really just let him grow into who he is it's so fascinating too i'm sure you're both so you know i think also as the girl for me i was very aware of like all of the [ __ ] around girls clothes like i never wanted to wear pink i didn't want to do rainbows and so i wasn't really thinking about boys clothes and then buying clothes even for my you know from the minute they're born like buying clothes for a newborn a one-year-old a toddler the boy's clothes are truly just such hot trash everything is like a robot killing a dinosaur like you know it's so aggro and the colors are so ugly and you're just like can we just get like a yellow a plain yellow t-shirt please and it's really hard but um can i just jump in in the middle i want you to finish i'm so sorry to interrupt but i do have to point out for those of you watching that i am wearing my pink golden girls t-shirt yes you are i i'm so glad you're pointing this out because i i didn't see the golden girls but i clocked the pink tank top and i was very appreciative of it so i'm i'm pushing against gender norms a little bit no robots blowing up dinosaurs but please continue jesse my son has turned out to be such a boy boy in ways where i don't understand even from a very young age it has a little bit changed my sense of nature and nurture i really into cars really into trucks his dad is not super into cars and trucks i don't think we bought one brought one into the home he's like a little weird jockey jock jock this is stuff from when he was like two you know and it's just so not the boy i thought that i would have but i'm doing my best i feel like everybody who has a boy has a real opportunity to like make a better boy how are you making a better boy i'm just trying at this age to really do my best to like i mean you know as the kids say normalize talking about feelings feeling feelings like saying we're allowed to paint our fingernails if we feel like painting our nails like just and just even in casual conversation just being very aware all the time of like when wimbledon is on like we're watching women's tennis we are reading books about like simone biles like trying to really expose him to as i guess fully human a spectrum of like what women are as as what men are traditionally been presented to maybe you need to watch golden girls with him oh my god i actually truly just watched golden girls the other day i was um on a little girls trip with like my best friend and we were staying in our hotel room and had a day and then we came back and i was flipping around and golden girls was on and i was like well we found it the rest of the night i just shot my uh a show on happiness and we were in bulgaria and uh number one most popular sitcom in bulgaria no way yep it is undeniable it's undeniable well those those nice old ladies just uh you know those nice ladies who are two years older than us you mentioned this earlier but something i was intrigued about your very first essay in the book is uh about motherhood being kind of the ultimate epitome of joseph campbell's the hero's journey can you tell us about that can you you mentioned it briefly but i'd love as much as juicy specifics as you can get into why why is motherhood like the hero's journey i had started thinking about the hero's journey as i write in the chapter i heard elizabeth gilbert talking about it on a podcast at a moment where i was in the middle of some very banal or so i thought mommy stuff but having very big big big feelings about it and feeling every day like i was in i don't think i'm overstating like a real life or death struggle with myself and also having a young young you know an infant where it's both the most boring and the highest stakes sort of thing because kids just can die so easily it's like if they you're not watching them constantly like in goes the penny or the marble or whatever and you know everything hits up but so it just i heard her talking about like a hero's journey doesn't always traditionally look like what we think it should and i started thinking about motherhood and basically like the sentence i guess that sums it up best for me is like after reading a lot of joseph campbell and reading a lot about the hero's journey a hero's journey is basically a journey in which someone in order to protect someone else has to go through a series of obstacles that are incredibly challenging at great personal sacrifice to themselves and at the end of the journey the hero is different than when they began and to me that is exactly what motherhood is every day you are kind of by default saving someone's life just by kind of existing near them i mean especially at that age again like just the act of sitting and watching your kids sort of doing nothing is keeping them alive at the same time it can be so soul-crushing and so hard and i think i said in the book somewhere that you do my experience at least and i've talked to people who i think feel this way as well is that you do as a mother have to kind of annihilate yourself in order to take on this role and i certainly feel like i don't know anyone who has a child who doesn't feel changed by it in some profound way although those changes are you know different person to person so at least in terms of like this this joseph campbell kind of you know what is it the uh hero of a thousand faces like the way we've understood this tale to me we've just always understood it in this very specific way and i and i think like it's very meaningful to women and all parents to just think about what you are doing as having the gravitas and importance of a story that could be shared with people and would mean something to other people and that has me has meaning is worth repeating is worth telling i had never thought of it before and i think it's a truly profound sentiment and i think because at the heart of the hero's journey of of every one of those stories is is is sacrifice and i think about my wife holiday raising our son walter and the amount of sacrifice that she has put in i remember when he was an infant and we were at our old house our first house and it had a little pool in the back and and she was holding him and like the phone rang or something and she started to move and she started to trip and fall and she's next to this pool and she had to hold on to him desperately like a football and just fell right on her knees and then right on her elbow and just like blood coming out but and he didn't even like cry he didn't even make a peep but that was just like when that that that vision is etched into my head as the kind of sacrifice that she's making she almost lost her life in giving birth to him but then there's the little sacrifices too it's kind of going and you know the preschool graduation that takes three hours of your day you know all of that stuff the driving to school and all of that you know it's it also has to do with facing your demons you think about you think about the star wars saga the empire strikes back when luke has that dream and goes into the cave and yoda's planet and sees darth vader his biggest you know demon that he has to face and so there are and you you mentioned it briefly earlier about how women came up to you and said hey i really appreciate you you know i relate to this book there's a dark side to motherhood you said on fresh air once it feels like one of the biggest cultural taboos is to say that you've had a second thought about being a mother or honestly even just to talk about the hard stuff but yeah of course there are those moments when you're like i can't believe i've gotten myself into this and you mentioned you're not so into sitting on the floor and playing with blocks for hours at a time you know other mothers can pretend to be that way on instagram but that's that's not you so what is what were your demons in terms of being a mother what was in your hero's journey what were the demons you've had to face that you wrote about that other women recognize and respond to i think it was just really going through the litany of specifics that feel like that there was that thing that i i wrote about like yours you're shielding your child from a sword that you yourself are holding you know like we have this whole abraham isaac story in the bible that's like foundational to um to western culture and obviously it's a lot to unpack but it's interesting to me that you know it's not a mother's story i think there's just for me it was like the moments where i just wanted to leave i just wanted to like literally walk out the door and leave and i or even worse you know like i it's i had a moment when i was working on this book where i was at dinner with an actress who i will not name but she is a well-known actress with paltrow squid this is not good but just to say i was intimidated by this person i didn't know this person that well and uh we were i was talking about the book and i was talking about how you know i wanted to be talking about like moments where like when they're like around one and a half or something and it's i think a lot about those nights where you're just in this fifth hour of trying to put them to bed and you're hungry and you're tired and it's late and you keep putting them down and they will not go down and they keep crying and it is crazy and i would reach a point where and i would never do this i would never do this i would think about like throwing my kid against a wall you just fantasize about it you're just like get it away from me i would never but i had a thought in my head and i wanted to kind of share this with this actress and but i was like i don't know her that well i can't say and i fantasize about throwing my kid against the wall that is so inappropriate to this moment and i want her to like me so i was like oh you know when you just think about putting them down on the floor and never coming back and she just didn't miss the beach she goes or throwing them against a wall it was so relieving and funny and dark and horrible but also telling that just we all have these thoughts and i think there's something that almost makes the thoughts worse for a lot of people where you're just like oh i'm the only one having this thought i'm such a bad person but in fact if we were allowed to just sort of talk about it you'd be like oh no it's really normal to have these thoughts because what you're being asked to do is insane yeah this is so so hard it's so hard and again it's sacrificed time sleep energy career time's deep energy career and just truly like it's like pushing a a boulder up a mountain or something it's so it's so difficult so i think in terms of my demons it was for me those demons are just those moments of true kind of rage-filled impatience of like i can't get this to be the way i want it to be um and i'm reaching my edges like i have a limit i'm reaching my full limit and i and to understand like i that's the heroic part is i think every mother and i and i think all of her fathers go past you have a limit and you just somehow go past it it's like a marathoner or something yeah they now that i have a an older teenager a lot of the conversations with our you know parent friend group is kind of like it's the is the equivalent which is i just can't wait for this kid to [ __ ] go off to college i can't wait to be an empty nester i love our kid oh my god please leave and you you're not allowed to say that really you know you're not allowed to say it and it's it's a terrible thing to even think but it's a little bit true it's not as bad as throwing a kid against the wall one of my dad's greatest gifts to me i will say was i remember when i was very young he did say to me i don't this is my dad's a very deep and profound kind i don't remember the context of this anymore but i just remember him saying to me don't worry everyone thinks everything [Laughter] it was like don't worry about the thoughts like like everyone thinks everything it stuck with me all these years everyone everything i mean don't don't do it but we all think it and and it was true it's carried me through a lot well honestly i think that's why we gravitated towards the book so much because it is very honest it does kind of lay you know all of motherhood the parenthood in general out there and all of its glory and its gory and uh it's a great collection and really really funny and heartwarming and beautiful jessie klein thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me this was such a great conversation to be in and i loved hearing from the dads the book again is called i'll show myself out essays on midlife and motherhood and i hope you learned something about motherhood from us in this conversation yes i mean you jesse not the audience no i did again you've got four kids you're doing the most wow great conversation incredible i i've learned so much what about you reza i learned a lot i in fact i feel like as qualified as you and i were at the beginning of this podcast to wax eloquently about motherhood i gotta say i i feel even more qualified now absolutely i mean we were speaking to one of the foremost comedic authorities on motherhood jesse klein now we get to to name drop jessie klein at dinner parties with other mothers where we get to talk to them about you know how painful it is the amount of sacrifice that they make about motherhood as the hero's journey yeah i mean you bring up anything excited nietzsche quotes about motherhood the dark side of motherhood i really i could go on and on and on and on and on okay all right yeah yeah i get i think we get it uh and folks you know we we've enjoyed this book and so we have five of them five of them for our five holders listeners five whole books it's hilarious and you don't have to be a mother to like it necessarily you could you know you could be a mother blank uh but uh all you have to do to get your copy of all show myself out by jessie klein is to write a review of metaphysical milkshake on apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast take a little screenshot of that and mail it over to us at metaphysical cast media dot com that's cast with a k metaphysical cast media.com send in those screen grabs and uh listen tell us about your mom you heard us talk about our moms tell us about your mom you can find us on social media at presentation rainwilson on instagram at a physical milkshake and remember to follow rate and review us again on apple podcasts you can also subscribe to the metaphysical milkshake youtube channel and watch our full episodes every week you know what reza before we completely end this thing you know we have been uh male chauvinist buttholes for the last hour i think you and i right now we need to log off we need to go find these powerful brilliant women mothers and we need to really just you know sit them down and tell them what motherhood is i feel like okay that's all [ __ ] i'm gonna go do that right now all right thanks everybody thanks for tuning in we'll see you next week metaphysical milkshake is executive produced by rayne wilson reza aslan and colin thompson it is produced by safa samazadeh yazd harris lane mick dimaria hashem self and dj lubell cast media is the production and distribution partner original music by jeff tang [Music] i think that encapsulates i'm trying to was i just father's planing your you just made it you just you were here father explained my my thoughts right back to me and i thought and i thank you for it hey thanks for watching you guys for more fantastic videos just like the one that you watch please subscribe to our youtube channel thank you

Channel: Metaphysical Milkshake with Rainn & Reza

Views: 941

Keywords: Rainn wilson, soul pancake, reza aslan, reza, Rainn, Dwight, the office, metaphysical, meta, metaphysical milkshake, philosophy, deep questions, celebrity, talk show, podcast, pod, funny, comedy, meaning of life, quirky, office, soul, pancake, kast, kast media, podcasting, microphone, long form, celebrity talk show, late night

Id: 4Sz-VlU5FMI

Length: 53min 4sec (3184 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022