Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to, you guessed it, figure it out. How are you Marty? We’ve got jet lag.

Martha Beck:
Bad.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we are lagged from the jet.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, because we flew for a long way into another world and then we were there just long enough to adjust to the time change between Philadelphia and Melbourne, Australia. And then before even getting fully adjusted there, we turned around and came back.

Rowan Mangan:
Look, I don’t know about you, but I have a little bit of lag.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I’m lagging.

Rowan Mangan:
The reason I bring it up is that I wish the jet lag to be the disclaimer for how unhinged this episode may or may not be.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the hinges came off somewhere over Fiji. No hinges anymore, folks. You’re just going to have to hold it together with your own tiny arms. So yeah, we are very jet-lagged and it’s the middle of the night for us and we are not accountable for anything we do. Not legally, not morally.

Rowan Mangan:
It’ll be all right.

Martha Beck:
It’ll be all right.

Rowan Mangan:
It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, what are you are you specifically trying to figure out [inaudible 00:02:03]?

Rowan Mangan:
Besides what time is it and who am I?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So I was reminded of something as we were unpacking from our trip. Don’t know if we mentioned it. Don’t know if we’re going to continuously mention it throughout this episode, but we’ve been on a trip. And you were unpacking and it came to my attention not for the first time that you are a hoarder in a very real sense.

Martha Beck:
Not in a gross, my stuff’s going to fall on me and crush me in the night kind of way.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we’re not there yet, but it’s a matter of degrees, right?

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
And the thing is, you hoard random stuff.

Martha Beck:
I categorize it.

Rowan Mangan:
You hoard deodorant.

Martha Beck:
Yes, but in a labeled drawer. That makes it very different.

Rowan Mangan:
Does it? Okay. So I will be ordering deodorant. And you know how… This is so bad. If you happen to order things online because you’re having an armpit emergency, so you quickly order things online, but I can only order more than one at a time. And then I say to Marty, I’m getting deodorant. Do you need some? And then her face goes all innocent. And she nods her little head and goes hm-hmm. And then when I open the drawer in the bathroom.

Martha Beck:
Labeled.

Rowan Mangan:
Labeled, to borrow some deodorant. What do I find? Like six deodorants.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
[foreign language 00:03:26].

Martha Beck:
[foreign language 00:03:26]. I’ll tell you what I accuse of trois of two and that is that when we got to Australia, who needed to borrow deodorant? Was it me? No, because I’m a hoarder and that I pack what I need in a suitcase.

Rowan Mangan:
Only because I’d given all my deodorant to the poor. And I did find one behind the door a little bit later, but anyway… But I have a side quest. I don’t think it’s gross to share deodorant. Now we’re talking about roll-on, we’re talking about the kind of roll-on… In Australia there’s a roll-on that has that actual ball that rolls.

Martha Beck:
We have that here as well, small one, we do.

Rowan Mangan:
The kind that I have tended to use since my arrival upon these shores is the kind that it’s just like a chunk of something.

Martha Beck:
Cakey, cakey, fragrance.

Rowan Mangan:
There you go. I don’t think it’s gross to share that, especially since you’re usually putting it on when you’re quite clean.

Martha Beck:
It depends. I would share my deodorant with anyone in this house, anyone, including my hairy armpit son because he’s a very, very tidy man. But just as a random thing, sharing deodorant with anyone, there might be someone that would be like, no.

Rowan Mangan:
I once asked if I could borrow someone’s deodorant and that person was absolutely repulsed, revolted.

Martha Beck:
I remember this.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think that was the beginning of the end of our relationship. It wasn’t a romantic relationship. I hasten to add.

Martha Beck:
I think that it’s a borderline issue. I think you’re going to get viewers, listeners coming down on both sides of this issue.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like I want to do some sort of poll about it because I think I’m in the right in thinking it’s just a nice thing.

Martha Beck:
I want to do a poll about it and then correlate it with other life variables.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, of course you do. You want a whole software program.

Martha Beck:
Yes, I do. Do you want to share your deodorant? Do you think it’s gross? And then on the side, just try to correlate that with how often do you get car sick or something?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you want a control for all the factors.

Martha Beck:
Yes. I want variables. I want regression equations, dammit.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, given all this, what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I’m sensing my armpits to see how gross they are.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re sensing your own armpits.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I am not going to feel them with my hands. I’m not feeling my own armpits with my hands. I’m certainly not using my other senses.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re feeling them from within.

Martha Beck:
I am feeling my armpits from within. Correct. And it’s taking a lot of focus and it’s all I’ve got one.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re trying to figure out…

Martha Beck:
Here’s what I’m trying to figure out. I am trying to figure out the flora and fauna of that wild and crazy place Australia.

Rowan Mangan:
Did we mention we went to Australia recently?

Martha Beck:
I’ve been there once before, but since then I’ve traveled a lot in many places of the world. But I’ve never woken up to a place where the bird song and the insect noises are just slightly different from anything else I’ve ever heard.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s the accent.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s true. The birds are doing things with an Aussie accent, so they’re all going [inaudible 00:06:57]. But your wonderful, beautiful mother who hosted us and let us stay in her own house and probably would’ve let us use her deodorant if… You were probably rifling through her drawers looking for it anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
I was.

Martha Beck:
And then you borrowed it from me. Okay, we’ll do this off-screen. But she gave me a book that was about the flora and fauna of Australia. A lot of which I knew because I love animals.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I know so much about flora and fauna.

Martha Beck:
They’re very nice people. That’s what I’ll say about flora and fauna. We have a little niece named Flora.

Rowan Mangan:
We do. And a little nephew named Fauna.

Martha Beck:
As far as I know. No, his name is Mally and he’s adorable. Anyway, Paula gave us a book about animals that I’d never heard of and never seen. And it said so much about the land and life of Australia, which as you know, drifted away from the rest of the continents a long, long time ago. So it has more difference than most continents do.

Rowan Mangan:
May I observe something verbally about you that I’ve just realized? You tend to do anthropology via ornithology.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah, is there any other way?

Rowan Mangan:
You figure out how the animals, what they’re like, and then you generalize it to what the people are like.

Martha Beck:
Well, yes, I think it holds.

Rowan Mangan:
Go for it.

Martha Beck:
I mean every traditional culture does dances where they imitate the wildlife. There are intersections, interactions between species going on. We don’t see that in our little cities cut off from everything. Anyway, let me just tell you about some of the freaky fauna. One specific freaky fauna. It’s the tawny frogmouth. And see you knew it right away. It looks like it was made as a duster for furniture. Literally, its face is just feathers sticking straight out. It’s a whole new arrangement.

Rowan Mangan:
You know where we were staying, they’re everywhere.

Martha Beck:
Why didn’t I… I probably thought they were just dusters for the house.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, just the dusters that we keep in the trees.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, here’s the deal. They don’t have big talons. They’re birds of prey, but they don’t have big talons. What they have instead is a massive, massive beak like wide beak, deep beak, capacious beak. And they sleep with this beak open so that they can eat the spiders, mostly spiders, but also other insects that float, that walk in there, like investigating.

Rowan Mangan:
While they’re sleeping.

Martha Beck:
Yes. They sleep with their mouths open. The spiders go in… And I know from your accounts that there are spiders the size of a damn volleyball in Australia. So this is what the tawny frogmouth is doing. And apparently they’re so common that all you have to do is lie with your mouth open and one will go in, because they’re living off… What?

Rowan Mangan:
A tawny frogmouth will go in your mouth?

Martha Beck:
The spider. Once it gets past the tawny frogmouth. You’ve got to pay attention, Ro. This is your country. I mean your country of origin. Anyway, the last thing it said in this little description of the tawny frogmouth is that it captures its food by being this big boggy mouth. And then it says they like to lay eggs at the same time every year, but will also lay eggs in response to heavy rain.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, I do that.

Martha Beck:
I know you do. That’s why I brought it up.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like a way of being really cozy after the heavy rain.

Martha Beck:
Yeah I guess so. And immediately my brain said, okay, well there are heavy rains, that means there’s going to be lush greenery and a lot of spiders gangling about. And so there’ll be more things, comestibles running into the beaks of tawny frogmouths. So therefore the females lay more eggs. But it really sounded like they were just getting up and they’re like swallowing the huge massive spiders. And then Estelle turns to Fred and says, oh damn, it’s raining again. I think I’m just going to stay home and lay eggs. And this was like, why would… A response to, if you were going to lay an egg, if you could lay them as opposed to just off casting them.

Rowan Mangan:
Excuse me.

Martha Beck:
What would be a trigger?

Rowan Mangan:
Getting a bit personal.

Martha Beck:
You could lay eggs in response to loud noises or the presence of a rooster. Chickens do that, right?

Rowan Mangan:
I would lay eggs as a way to express my delight when visitors came over.

Martha Beck:
That’s really good because you’d have something to show them.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I would greet them squatting in my own front garden.

Martha Beck:
So you’d wait for them to get there so they could see the egg come out?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, out of my, what do you call those things?

Martha Beck:
Oh, the [inaudible 00:12:12].

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I thought it was something completely different.

Martha Beck:
Well, maybe that may be insects or eels.

Rowan Mangan:
I thought there was a coch.

Martha Beck:
Or an egg.

Rowan Mangan:
Something that sounded like a [inaudible 00:12:20].

Martha Beck:
Oh, a cochlear.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I think that’s a…

Martha Beck:
It’s a cloaca. Cochlear is in your inner ear. You don’t want a cloaca in there. Cloaca’s are these very primitive… They’re just orifices. They’re your multipurpose orifice. And I think we’ve talked about them often, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Thanks for tuning into Bewildered where people who don’t know anything about animals speculate endlessly about their parts.

Martha Beck:
Cloaca’s, they’re convenient. I mean, you got your vag, you got your anus, you got your mouth. They’re all just one big thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow.

Martha Beck:
I mean, I’m not sure about the mouth part, that might be next to it. I’m very tired.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a lot of anatomical detail coming out.

Martha Beck:
I have narrowly escaped being swallowed by a tawny frogmouth. Now you tell me they were everywhere. It was raining, so they were probably laying eggs, which is the only reason that I didn’t stumble into the open mouth of a frogmouth and have it eat me alive.

Rowan Mangan:
I once read that the average person swallows seven spiders in their lifetime while asleep.

Martha Beck:
While asleep.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and I told someone I knew that and this was his response, fucking Trekkies. And I was like, what do you mean? And he’s like, that just sounds like the kind of thing that people who are into Star Trek would say. I often think about that.

Martha Beck:
Do you know when they categorize the contents and ingredients of food, especially grain-based food like cornflakes or whatever, bread, they have to calculate in a certain amount of the weight that comes from crushed up insects?

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. It’s in there.

Rowan Mangan:
Is it part of the protein percentage?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. I just know that you really… I mean, we live in a world where there is the illusion that we can lie asleep with our mouths open and not have softball sized spiders walk in. I think that is an American delusion. Australians seem to know it and it makes them different.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we should move on to the topic of the podcast. What do you say?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, let’s do that.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean, if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls. And you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all. Mwah.

Martha Beck:
So this episode is what we are calling, a Ro cries for help episode.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I thought it was rose cry for help.

Martha Beck:
That sounds like it is a flower crying for help, like you’re saying to the rose, cry for help rose. So I say Ro, but it is, I will call it Rowe’s cry for help, kind of blend it up.

Rowan Mangan:
Whatever. It’s a cry for help and it’s mine.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Anyway, the point is that I supposedly have this coachy thing that I did.

Rowan Mangan:
And I am a total mess. So every now and again, regular listeners will know that we start talking about what we do for our podcast and I say, please, Marty, just try and fix me a little bit. And she goes, okay. And then I bring her my problems and that’s what we’re doing today. So if anyone’s not interested in my problems, [inaudible 00:16:11].

Martha Beck:
And my limitless hubris.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
No. You are not a psycho.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what therapists in Australia say.

Martha Beck:
That’s all you have to know. Okay, so tell me why you’re so messed up, my love.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so we have a daughter.

Martha Beck:
Oh my god, no wonder.

Rowan Mangan:
Her name is Lila. She’s in the vicinity of three years old. But let’s just say for the purposes of this story, she was still two.

Martha Beck:
Yep.

Rowan Mangan:
I have, well, we have earned this poor child, so many frequent flyer miles this year. So many. We have done two major international, inter-hemispherical, inter-many time zonical journeys with a very small person. We went across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, up the planet, down the planet. And this is what happened.

Martha Beck:
It wasn’t pretty.

Rowan Mangan:
The first trip was downwards across the Atlantic.

Martha Beck:
To South Africa.

Rowan Mangan:
To South Africa. It was tantruming to say the least.

Martha Beck:
I know. And Lila wasn’t great either.

Rowan Mangan:
How we laughed. Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. If you’ve never been in a confined space with a toddler who’s having a tantrum for six hours or seven hours straight. It’s very hard to describe. But that was heading down across the Atlantic.

Martha Beck:
You remember the flight attendant standing there going, can I help you ladies? And we were just like, yes, here, you take her.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, please. Any help would be welcome. No, they had no help for us. Then we had trip part one B where we went back upwards across the Atlantic and trigger warning here, if you’re not really into stories about vomit, you might just want to skip ahead a minute or two, but if you are, you’re going to love what’s coming up. Because our kid had a bunch of different viruses, a little bit of bacteria for fun, and she started vomiting at the very beginning of our trip. And then we went through an airport where we naively bought one T-shirt at every duty free store as we… And every time we thought, we’ll just get one. This will be the last time we need them. Meanwhile, we had a plastic bag that was getting very heavy of T-shirts soaked with…

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we flew in from being out in the bush to Johannesburg and she threw up as we got to Johannesburg and we thought, okay, she’s motion sick, she’s air sick.

Rowan Mangan:
No big deal.

Martha Beck:
And then followed the progress through the large Johannesburg airport and the multiple… I just do not know how much stuff that kid had in her body to begin with. It just kept coming. And we had the bag of used shirts. We were throwing away $1 t-shirts and then putting another one and throwing it, it was horrific.

Rowan Mangan:
I’d saved most of those t-shirts. I didn’t really throw them out. And I just want to say the odor never really quite goes away.

Martha Beck:
But you know what? That was okay compared to when she was throwing up on airline personnel.

Rowan Mangan:
No, wait, do the… There was a bit before then.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, I’d repressed this. Okay, so we’re going through this airport and they’re all the little duty shops and we’re buying t-shirt after t-shirt and she’s ovorping. That’s the backwards pronunciation of the town where I grew up. Provo, Utah. The opposite of Provo is ovorp.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t make that sound though anymore. I’m not triggered, but that triggers me.

Martha Beck:
Okay, I’ll use ovorp. And Ro had run to go get something to try to deal with the catastrophe. And so I was there with Lila and I thought she going to throw up again. She just barely threw up into our very last box of Kleenex or whatever. And then I looked down and there she was getting it going again and I had nothing to deal with what came out. So I just cupped my hands in front of her face and she puked into my hands. And there I was standing next to a child, the screaming child, in a stroller, in a clothing store with my hands full of vomit. It was just one of those moments that you don’t really train for.

Rowan Mangan:
If Sarah Jessica Parker was narrating this story in Sex and the City, I feel like she would say something at this point like, as I stood there, hands full of my infant daughter’s vomit, in the duty free store, I had to ask myself… And how would you finish that sentence given that it was your experience?

Martha Beck:
How much can love really handle? Because if you can handle someone’s vomit, I think that’s real love. That’s what I think. And that’s what I would’ve said on Sex and the City. And that’s why I was never on it. Anyway, you went into a kind of zen state.

Rowan Mangan:
I experienced a level, like a transcendent kind of experience of motherhood that it really surprised me because I’ve always been worried that as a parent I would be too… Actually, this is what this whole episode is about, be too socially swayed and worried about what people would think and all of this sort of thing. But after the endless vomits in the… And we’d had to change, get all her clothes off in the middle of the airport. And it had just been… And we finally got to the point where we were in our gate and we thought we were getting pretty close to taking off. And I actually went up there with Lila on my hip and just sort of said to the woman, she’s not feeling that well and be great if we could get her on early and just settle her in a little bit.

And at that point I was standing, Marty, at the bit, I don’t know what we call it, the desk where one would present one’s boarding pass. And she had a bit of paper with a checklist on it, the computer, there’s a little barcode reader thing coming up. So then Lila did your hometown spelled backwards.

Martha Beck:
Ovorp.

Rowan Mangan:
She ovorped all over that table. And it was interesting because even now I say it, I think that wasn’t a great moment in my life. And yet at the time, I can remember just being seized with a kind of sense of the inevitability of the moment itself. And I just looked across at the woman who, the flight attendant or airline employee who was standing there and who was looking at me like could you please unmake that happen? And I was just like, no. This thing is happening to us both now. It just is. We just have to deal with it. This is part of our life story now. And it was beautiful.

Martha Beck:
The perfect moment when your soul and the soul of a stranger just meld.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I don’t know if she melded with me, but I was melding away.

Martha Beck:
I remember looking at that and just going, nothing can happen now.

Rowan Mangan:
We got a lot of complaints about us on that flight.

Martha Beck:
Oh, we did.

Rowan Mangan:
You’d be surprised to hear.

Martha Beck:
On all the flights. And that was actually, that was peanuts compared to… The Atlantic is a puddle that we jumped, the Pacific is a big mama jamma ocean.

Rowan Mangan:
So then we fast-forward a couple of months, not really isn’t many months as we probably should have fast-forwarded but there you go, downwards across the Pacific. Lift all trigger warnings to do with vomiting. You won’t find that here. We’ve got new and better. So the flight down, Marty, you had a very strong feeling about what Lila was channeling as we flew to Australia.

Martha Beck:
It was interesting, for those of y’all who don’t know, some of the first Europeans to colonize Australia were there as prisoners. The living conditions were not good. And it was considered undesirable. And they were sent to places without much happiness where they were beaten severely. And you can see this in many movies and history books. So it was, what did you call it? A penal colony, not a penile colony, but a penal colony. So there it was, and I’d imagine a lot of people weren’t happy being taken there. So Lila…

Rowan Mangan:
Well, also political prisoners.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
Irish political prisoners.

Martha Beck:
Who only ever stole a loaf of bread to feed [inaudible 00:25:16].

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And to put their middle finger up at the monarchy and whatnot.

Martha Beck:
I saw a meme that said I was trying to get a visa to go to Australia, and they asked me, have you committed a felony? And I said, I didn’t know that was still necessary. Anyway, Lila was… We flew all the way to Auckland, New Zealand, and then we had four hours to go to get to Melbourne. And it just broke her patience entirely. And as we’ve said before, she was a very strong child. So I had her sitting on my lap and they put a seatbelt extension around her. So I had my seatbelt on, and then she had her seatbelt that was connected to my seatbelt. So we were irrevocably bonded by seatbelts and she decided…

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it wasn’t irrevocable, but go on.

Martha Beck:
It wasn’t revoked.

Rowan Mangan:
It felt irrevocable.

Martha Beck:
It felt irrevocable. So she screamed. First of all, she fought like a wild alligator the whole time. If you could have tossed everyone on the plane about four foot long alligator, and then put a lot of caffeine in those little alligators, it would’ve been… Everyone would’ve understood what we were dealing with. As it was, it was just us dealing the mighty baby. And her screaming, two things over and over, top volume. I mean, there was no one who couldn’t hear it. The first thing was, get me out of here, which I think everybody identified with. And the second was, this is not fair. And she just screamed those two things for four hours and fought and kicked. She did not ovorp and that was an improvement. I was back in my zen state again. So that was the trip to Australia.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty decided Lila was reenacting the convicts who were sent there. She was on some level channeling their spirits.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Your ancestors.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It was coming through her against their will. Get me out of here. This is not fair. There it is. There are probably still people wandering Australia saying the same two things.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, there are, trust me. Most of them.

Martha Beck:
No, I loved Australia. I thought it was beautiful. I love the people. Nothing against Australia except that it’s a long freaking way away.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we should work on that. Aussies, let’s figure something out with the whole distance. So then trip two B was coming up the Pacific again, and what we didn’t know is that our kid was dealing with parainfluenza and a ear infection. She’s also, because of the whole sperm donor was a Greek God, supernatural strength thing, she doesn’t really complain about pain.

Martha Beck:
If anyone’s wondering about that, listen to our backlist.

Rowan Mangan:
So we didn’t know how sick she was. We just knew she was being a bit of a brat. And inevitably when your toddler is being a bit of a brat at your home airport and you’re trying to wrangle everything and you’re just trying to get home and please God, let this be a better trip than our three other trans hemispherical trips of the year. So then I bumped into an old friend at the airport, while Lila lay on the floor, and she was lying on the floor… She was staging a protest, I wouldn’t say a nonviolent protest, about the fact that Marty and I had tried to sit in some seats and that wasn’t okay.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, so that was embarrassing because my friend had two beautiful children who were extremely well-behaved. And that’s just for me to work through in my own time. And look, we got home.

Martha Beck:
We did.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the thing. But now I’m left with a quandary. So in taking these trips, and particularly this second trip to Australia, was there on my part, a degree of trying to please other? Yes, there was.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Did I give Lila the opportunity to object to this travel? No.

Martha Beck:
Oh, she didn’t need an invitation. She seriously objected. Did we allow her to object successfully? No.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, it’s hard to know how to best measure success, but certainly if we were measuring impact. But no, she had to go and was she to some extent my kind of show and tell exhibit throughout the trip to see my family and friends? Yeah.

Martha Beck:
They’d never seen her before. They wanted to see the new family member.

Rowan Mangan:
I wanted to show her. I also wanted to tell. That was there. Did this traveling exhaust her and also make her seriously sick twice? Also yes. Marty?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It did. So I feel bad that she got sick and I’ve just got to… That’s my responsibility to figure out and to work through and la la la. But what I come to you with today is that I can’t quite figure out for myself where the culture nature divide lies in all of this. And for people who for some reason have the misfortune of tuning into our jet lag special as their first episode of Bewildered, what we try to do is talk about where culture and the idea of coming to consensus is in conflict and can take us away from our true nature, which is about coming to our senses. And so I am trying to figure out how… To what extent was I contravening my nature in doing this? Because it’s actually quite a hard needle to thread in a way.

So it’s like, should I have stayed home while my kid was little? Was I wrong to want my family to meet her? Was I imposing my love for travel onto this small, not defenseless by any means, but small person? And did I do this whole endeavor for the sake of culture at the expense of my kids’ health and wellbeing?

Martha Beck:
Welcome to the quandary of parenthood every time something goes wrong for your kid, because there’s always that question, there is always a choice you could have made that might have spared them some suffering. And not everybody does international travel obviously, but everyone is confronted by conditions where they have to do difficult things. And very often there’s no way to do it without dragging the kids along, either emotionally or physically, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Or both. And then people… Life is a tough road to [inaudible 00:32:41], people get bumps and bruises of all sorts. And when it’s our children, I think we are taught that we’re supposed to spare them everything. And so we get into this knot of guilt about everything bad that ever happened to our children because we hold ourselves culpable for any damage done to them.

Rowan Mangan:
So how do we think about the heart arithmetic of let’s challenge them and let’s also expose them to potential suffering? What does the culture say about it would you say?

Martha Beck:
So I think our culture right now, it basically is kids should always come first. And that was not always true. There’s a really interesting book called Pricing the Priceless Child that talks about how as children stopped being seen as economic benefits on farms and factories, they weren’t considered very valuable. But people started for the first time to say childhood itself is just valuable as a separate thing about not…

A thing where no hard things should happen to anyone. Before that, as soon as a kid was four or five years old, they were out doing work. And our culture has built up the sort of innocence of childhood ideal. And I love this, but it’s built it up to the point where if you can’t create that for your child, you’re not a good parent. And mothers in particular, parents in general, but mothers in particular should give anything up for their children’s benefit, should do anything, even if it harms them in order to spare any stress to their children. And it’s a very strong cultural judgment against women who are seen as putting themselves ahead of their children in any way or causing situations where children can potentially get sick or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that’s true of sort of mainstream American culture down the line. I think it varies. I think there are places where that’s not as intensely kind of mandated in the culture. But I think that that’s what you’ve just said is the messaging that I’m receiving, and probably most people in my position are.

Martha Beck:
It’s what I sort of see online and everything. I mean, just the other day we were talking about… I was sitting and talking to Karen about Pompeii where the volcano killed a bunch of people many years ago, and it flash fried them basically, they were killed instantly in place. And I read this article about an archeologist who found the skeleton of a seven year old girl wrapped around the skeleton of a baby. And by looking at the bones of the seven year old, she had obviously died trying to protect the baby. And I’m sorry honey, I know that… We will put a trigger warning on this. It happened thousands of years ago, but it was still super sad. But the interesting thing was by looking at…

Rowan Mangan:
I just want to say the baby would be dead by now anyway.

Martha Beck:
I shouldn’t…

Rowan Mangan:
Probably.

Martha Beck:
Probably, or maybe it’s Lila’s father, we don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it died.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Somebody else. Anyway, the child carrying the baby was a servant or a slave. Rome was a slave, an enslaved person, and she was seven and she was trying to save this baby. And Karen just looked at me and said, seven, all I ever did when I was seven is jump up and down on the bed and throw things at my siblings. And that really is the difference between childhood now and childhood for millions of years before that. People did all they could, no matter how young they were. In Nordic cultures, when a male child could reach over the top of his head with say his right hand and touch his left ear, he was considered old enough to go to battle. And that’s usually about age nine.

Rowan Mangan:
But there’s some middle ground that we’re missing here between absolute… The child is upheld as the Christ figure and the child is a commodity. Plenty more where that came from. I feel like there’s something in the middle. And what I’m trying to figure out in this very specific context is how do you math the thing, the possible upsides, how do you calculate the upsides of doing something that you may not have to do? See, it’s less complicated for me when it’s something you have to do.

Martha Beck:
Oh yes, that’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll hold that kid down and squirt medicine in her mouth if I think it’s necessary.

Martha Beck:
And have done.

Rowan Mangan:
And have…

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:37:38].

Rowan Mangan:
But gently, no, I’m not…

Martha Beck:
No, it’s not brutal or anything. She likes it, she goes, oh, banana.

Rowan Mangan:
So when it’s something that you don’t have to do, what about when it’s something that you want to do and that you can see potential upsides for your kid and you can see potential downsides for your kid, challenge, enrichment, reward, broadening horizons.

Martha Beck:
So you’re making a really good point and it is…

Rowan Mangan:
I thought so.

Martha Beck:
There are the two absolutes that basically that children are enviable and they must be handled with kid gloves or just throw them out as firewood. There is a middle area, and it has to do with the fact that life contains difficulty all the time. This was the whole Buddha story of this prince who was born and his father said he will never see anything that upsets him. So he threw out… Everybody around him was beautiful and happy and healthy. And then he became obsessed with wanting to know what the real world was like. So he sneaked out and saw sick people, dying people. He saw accidents, he saw horrible things, dead bodies. And then he spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of that. But the point is that when he was kept in the golden cage, something in him wanted to go out and experience the difficulties of life because for some reason that feels more meaningful to us. So our culture doesn’t say every experience your child has the potential to harm them and has the potential to make them grow.

And if it harms them, the potential for growth may be greater than if it does not. You don’t know. And this is the focus. So the whole idea of mommyhood that I see on the internet in the places that I look at it, is very much about be selfless. Be selfless, think of the child first. But nature says if you want to figure out how to survive and how to make the right choices, you have to get away from thinking about other people’s lives and focus on your own because you have no access to the subjective experience of another person. You have no access to your child’s destiny. Whatever it is that they need and that they experience, they’re going to experience that even if you’re a king who keeps them in a golden cage, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
The big lie is that parents can control their circumstances, can control the way the child experiences it, can control the child itself.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s like I could refuse to let her go on a long flight and she’d still learn the lesson that she’s meant to learn some other way?

Martha Beck:
Or she’ll still suffer. She could have gone… I mean she did eat some dirt in Africa and come down with a gastric bite, but she also ate some dirt in New York City and came down with COVID and [inaudible 00:40:46]. Was that your fault?

Rowan Mangan:
Yep.

Martha Beck:
Well, see what the idea is, you should have kept her in some sort of hyperbaric chamber.

Rowan Mangan:
I know.

Martha Beck:
And then she would’ve grown up without any real experience of the world like the Buddha did and feel like something was deeply missing from her life. So it depends on sort of the way you view the cosmology of our lives. I really think when I work with people as a coach, my presupposition is that their instructions for what they should do and what they will best experience as a full life is coded into their subjective experience. I don’t have access to it. All I can do is encourage them to get access to it. And culture tries to take away that agency and say, no, no, no. We’ll tell you what your destiny is. We’ll tell you what you’re supposed to achieve, what you’re supposed to earn, what’s impressive, what is love. We’ll tell you all that.

But if you take it from the outside, it ends up going wrong every time. And if you stop and every single person goes, and the Buddha did it too, you go off into the forest eventually, you go into the place where you see suffering, and then you go whether metaphorically or physically into the place of quiet introspection where you learn what your suffering is about. And then I really like, somebody said, a spiritual teacher I know said, the Buddha was interesting because he only saved one person.

And yet Buddhism, which is, I’m not proselytizing Buddhism, I’m not a Buddhist, but it has made many lives easier for many millennia, and he only saved one person. And then he acted from a place of I know what it’s like to be kept away from suffering. I know what it is like to suffer. I know what it’s like to find my way to my own best experience, and my parents could not do that for me.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. This is so interesting because I think I’m starting to understand something about myself that is changing this. So I’ve had this little weird guilt bubble confusion about the travel and travel is something that has always been very important to me. And I think in some way I’ve tended to categorize it as vacations, even when I was backpacking around India by myself, it’s sort of… I think I was putting it in a self-indulgent basket in my mind whereas… I think actually what I was doing was what you’ve just been describing as exposing myself to the extremes in life. And that’s what my calling was to travel. And so that changes it in terms of what I am actually exposing Lila to. Not E.coli so much as the rich tapestry, right?

Martha Beck:
But E.coli is part of it.

Rowan Mangan:
E.coli is a large section. It’s in the bio tapestry.

Martha Beck:
So if you define everything as vacation, it sounds like you are doing something frivolous.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And taking your child and putting her in harm’s way as a problem. But that’s not my experience of why you travel.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
I would take out the word vacation and put in the word quest, and I’ve just been reading a book about the new brain science of spirituality, and how people who are open to new experiences, in other words, they see the whole world as a quest, they suffer more and are happier than other people.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s cool.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I mean they suffer more short term, but they turn that into an experience of meaning-making.

Rowan Mangan:
Meaning, yeah.

Martha Beck:
And that is more important to us than comfort. So Viktor Frankl in the horror of Auschwitz, didn’t write man’s search for protection and safety. He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, and it was meaning that got him through the experience, not someone treating… Nobody was treating him well. So what he was reaching for, it was not any kind of… Obviously he wanted to be out of there and to feel better, but it was meaning that kept him from allowing himself to just give up and die or so he said.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s almost like suffering plus reflection or something juicier than the word reflection equals meaning.

Martha Beck:
I think actually the story… And I wasn’t planning to tell the story of the Buddha, but it just came up spontaneously. And I think it really is, we need an experience of being deeply protected and safe. We need an experience of being completely unprotected and exposed to the reality of a very, very difficult physical experience where you will end up dead.

Rowan Mangan:
Or worse, people will complain about you.

Martha Beck:
Or you might throw up on a flight attendant and get the nastiest look. You will wish… Anyway, and you then need the space to make sense of your own experience. And what I would gently, lovingly suggest, my darling, is that you try to make sense of other people’s experiences and you can’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, nice one.

Martha Beck:
You’re trying to force Lila’s experience to be the best thing for her. And you do that with everyone. You want their experiences to be… I do it too. Oh my God, I’m a freaking life coach. That’s all I ever do. I know how to make your life work. I don’t know how to make your life work. I don’t know. But I do know that if you choose to make meaning out of your experiences, whether they’re soft, hard or in between, you are going to have a very interesting, absorbing worthwhile life.

And so if we kept her in the basement because we’re afraid of plague and tornadoes, we’ve been down there during the pandemic with tornado warnings, she still would’ve suffered. If we hadn’t taken her on those two trips, she still might’ve gotten sick and suffered. We can’t know. So how do you do the math? You go off by yourself into your own metaphorical forest and say, what does my quest need now from me? And then you say, does my quest feel like it needs, my role as a mother is to take my child or care for them and leave them behind or get help, but you feel it through as your quest and then you give them the dignity of their own suffering.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Okay. So I think what I’ve just figured out is that I have had an assumption that in… Because I love going places, right? This has been established. I love that experience and I thought that I was pushing something that was born of culture on Lila by wanting her to do that. But maybe it’s just that I can intuit that it’s part of her quest too, or the fact that it’s my quest just defacto makes it her quest because she’s stuck with me for a while.

Martha Beck:
At the point, and this is what nature says, we are social primates who are born very helpless and very bonded to our caretakers and totally dependent on our caretakers for an extremely long period of time compared to almost any other animal. And so as a mother, your quest is to carry the baby with you as long as the baby needs carrying. And it’s interesting, if you get all scriptural the way I did growing up Mormon in Ovorp, one of the things that is in the Bible over and over and over again, it’ll say, talk about war or natural disaster and say, woe to those who give birth or are breastfeeding basically, in this time because it’s understood that the woman and her tiny child are a unit. And the hardest moment of a human being’s life, according to this repetitive comment in the Bible is that there’s nothing harder in a human’s life than being the woman upon whom that little tiny child depends.

And being in a situation where you have to say, escape an oncoming wall of soldiers because a woman alone can run, fight, or hide, but a woman with a baby is screwed. But you don’t leave the baby. The choices are harder there than any other time. And the baby is going to do the things that make your world less convenient and more frightening. It’s going to be harder during that phase than in any other phase of your life, I promise you. And mother love is sitting down and going, how do I keep my own oxygen flowing so that I can put the oxygen mask over my child’s face? And it’s not just how do I stay safe, safe, safe? It’s how do I feed my soul?

Rowan Mangan:
Right, so what I’m trying to figure out, I guess, is what’s oxygen in this equation? What’s me indulging myself and what’s actual oxygen for my soul? What if Club Med is my oxygen?

Martha Beck:
It’s interesting the way you frame that because it implies the cultural construct that says Club Med is frivolous and over the top, and a mother should never put that above the needs of her child. So you built in the cultural judgment. But the fact is that for some… Club Med is not in my oxygen, but for some people it might be. Drawing and reading books are part of my oxygen. Somebody else might not have that at all, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So it has to be subjective. And if you’re true to yourself and you have integrity, you will know what your oxygen is and you will know that you have to give yourself enough of that to keep yourself healthy and happy in order to raise happy children.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. But I do have to just tell you that I think Club Med is my oxygen. What is Club Med? I don’t don’t know what Club Med is?

Martha Beck:
Have you ever been to Club Med? Have you’ve been holding your breath for 40 years?

Rowan Mangan:
No. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I’m fixated on it.

Martha Beck:
It’s a chain of vacation spas all over the world.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, like a resort kind of thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s kind of halfway between Disneyland and I don’t know, I’ve never been, it’s not my oxygen.

Rowan Mangan:
So I guess my point is… Well, the point that I was making was, I don’t know what my oxygen is, but that’s bullshit, right? Of course I know what my oxygen is.

Martha Beck:
What is it?

Rowan Mangan:
Travel. Exposing myself to new places, to new sites, to adventure.

Martha Beck:
And it really is part of your quest. And if you go without your… I watched this video on big wave surfing on the plane, and this guy surfed till he was 35, gave it up, said I’ve had a great life. And after two years was really successful and completely miserable. He had to surf. It was his oxygen. I’ve never surfed, but I have no judgment of him. Because dying because you don’t have your oxygen is not a moral judgment or a cultural consequence. It’s just physics. It’s the physics of psychology.

So what I would like to say in closing is that everybody has someone who depends on them in some way. If you have small children, you are maxing out the care of dependents, but you may be taking care of older parents or loved ones, friends, siblings, whatever. Everybody is depending on somebody. So when it comes time to make decisions and you’re worried about your dependents, go to the forest for yourself. Go to a place that’s away from people. We always say this, but metaphorically or physically, get away from people. Find that sense of truth. And sense what is your oxygen? What do you need to be happy? And your body will tell you, it will respond with joy and alertness to a choice that’s right for your quest. And by shutting down, if you don’t make the choices that are right for your quest. And then start a bank account, put some money in it to pay for the therapy of your dependents later.

You can apologize to them. And working that out together may be part of your mutual quest as you go through a life where every single person suffers. And all of us can make that mean something good.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you so much for fixing me once again, Marty Beck.

Martha Beck:
I know exactly what you need and I’m going to make your life good.

Rowan Mangan:
So while we’re at it, why don’t we just stay wild?

Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.