Your Mom Is A Podcast · A Comedy Parenting Podcast

Interest in Reading and Politics with Ben Sheenan and His Mom

October 28, 2024·1 hr 9 min·6 clips

An actress navigates the guilt of leaving her kid for a major space film role.

The episode opens with Ben and his mom in a loose family check in. The hosts ask who, besides his mother, deserves credit for the man he became. Ben points toward his dad and his eighth grade English teacher, and the conversation is happy to let both answers stand for a while. His mom says the organized streak he has looks much more like his father than anything she passed along. That becomes a running idea in the exchange. The group keeps circling the question of inherited traits. Then the teacher story takes over. Clay Robertson comes across as the first adult who treated Ben like an intellectual equal. The standard was high rather than soft, and that mattered. He talked to a room of eighth graders as if they were philosophers. The class read Fahrenheit 451 and talked through ideas like Plato's allegory of the cave. They also looked at Magritte as part of the same broad education. Ben ties that period to his first sense that the government might not always have his best interests at heart. The conversation gives that idea room without turning into a lecture. Another thread is Ben's old habit of practicing public speaking with chickens. His mom and the hosts treat that as both funny and oddly useful. The episode keeps returning to family labor and the way parents divide time. Ben's mom remembers a vacation where his father took him away from her and how that felt at the time. She also talks about working long hours and wanting every free minute with her child. The conversation ends up in the space between couple time and parenting time. She points to How to Stay Two and Baby Makes Three and says the marriage lasted anyway. The final note is less a thesis than a family recognition: forty one years together, still going, still making adjustments.

As heard by us

A family interview that treats reading, politics, and parenthood as one conversation.

Ben and his mom turn a family check-in into a small account of how a person gets made: by an organized father, a sharp eighth-grade teacher, and the books that helped make government feel newly legible.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a mom-and-kid interview that threads reading, politics, parenthood, and a little chicken talk into one conversation.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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