Doug French: Hey, speaking of watching stuff, because can we talk about Road House?
Magda Pecsenye Zarin: We can talk about Road House. Did you watch the reboot?
Doug: Do you have any interest in watching this reboot?
Magda: No! The fact that the reboot exists is insulting to me.
Doug: You know, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but I abandoned it. Once you get in there, you realize, no, there's nothing here. It's all like UFC.
Magda: I mean, I think I wouldn't be as insulted by a new Roadhouse if Patrick Swayze were still alive. He's not, so I am. And that's the way it is, right? I mean, if somebody wanted to make a remake of Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, I've Had the Time of My Life, crap, what's the name of that movie? Magda: Where Penny gets the abortion?
Doug: Oh, yeah. Dirty Dancing.
Magda: Dirty Dancing! Oh my God, what the hell is happening? 51 and I'm in the dirt. I mean, it's the same as if somebody wanted to make a remake of Dirty Dancing. Just like, no, why do we need that?
Doug: All right, so what's a good word from the mansion?
Magda: Things were a real mess when I packed up a lot of my stuff to take it to Mike's and so I'm just very slowly going through all of that, and picking up the detritus and figuring out, like, do I want to keep all of this stuff? Do I want to get rid of some of this stuff?
Doug: “Detroitus.”
Magda: Detroitus.
Doug: I'm sorry, but I'm leaving it in and I'm not ashamed to do it. It was just sitting right there.
Magda: Well, okay.
Doug: All right, so you got your eclipse plans all set up?
Magda: I do have my eclipse plans all set up. By the time people listen to this, I will have seen the eclipse in Cleveland in the path of totality with my brother and sister-in-law. I've been restraining myself from buying a whole lot of eclipse-themed crap. You know, like the local brand of potato chips has released an eclipse version of potato chips because their factory is in totality. And I could have bought a 10-pack of bags of those for $25, but I restrained myself.
Doug: I think that's wise because I think we know where they'd all end up. You'd eat like half of the first bag and then you'd find them.
Magda: They're not as delicious now as they were when I was a child because when I was a child, they were cooked in lard. And they switched from cooking them in lard at some point probably in the ‘90s, I don't know, and they don't taste as good anymore.
Doug: But it's like there's some places that are offering eclipse swag only while the eclipse is above you.
Magda: I know, which I think is weird. I also saw that Bell's Brewery made a version of Oberon beer that is Eclipse Oberon. And I was like, you know, if I could buy like three bottles of this, I would buy three bottles of this. But like, you know, my brother is a big corn fed Midwestern guy who lives in Cleveland. And so everybody is always giving him beer. And one time I was going to his house and I was like, “Do you need me to bring beer?” And he was like, “Oh, no!” because apparently anytime anybody comes to their house, they bring him beer, and he's got beer for the next century because he doesn't drink very much beer, either. You know, he's, how old am I? I'm 51. So he's 48 and he's drinking, I don't know, like one, maybe two beers a week, maybe on a heavy drinking week.
Doug: Well, I guess there's just plenty of options for regifting.
Magda: I guess.
Doug: Just like apparently you can stay in a Super 8 along the Eclipse path for $900. So here's to price gouging!
Magda: Well, I mean, you know Emily, our pastor friend, she and her wife wanted to go see the eclipse in totality and they wanted to stay somewhere and all the regular hotels were all jacked up. So she found some sort of situation, you know how these like family camp things where they'll have a bunch of cabins, these weird cabins?
Doug: Oh yeah, you took me to one.
Magda: Just run by some family, and they don’t have any internet presence, and you have to call them up and reserve, and she called them up because they have no internet presence, so she has no idea if they’re, like, they’re either going to this lovely little cabin situation, or they’re going to the middle of Deliverance, and she has no idea. But the price was right, so…
Doug: I appreciate that. I appreciate her willingness to go off into the void and say, you know what? This will work out.
Magda: She is such an open-hearted, adventurous person that it really just makes me think, huh, I really wish I could be like her, just not as cynical and weird (as I am). She just, you know, goes into everything waiting for good things to happen.
Doug: I gotta say, I think part of it is, what comforts me, what makes me feel less cynical and weird is reading history. And she’s a historian.
Magda: Yeah, she’s a historian.
Doug: And there’s a perspective there. That lets you just kind of breathe a bit. I mean, I get it now why every man of a certain age needs to bone up on his World War II history. You know what I mean? It's a comfort thing now. It's not just, I'm studying for some exam. You know, it's funny because as we get on to Jill, you may have seen Amanda McGee left a comment about how our intro for her episode with Koala Chlamydia. She was really appreciative of that. So, Jill, I don't know if we're living up to the example we set last time.
Magda: Well, yeah, I mean, Amanda got koala chlamydia and all poor Jill's getting is eclipse beer.
Doug: With real Oreos in it, probably, you know, something dumb. But I was really glad to talk to Jill. I didn't know her as well as a lot of the mom bloggers I've come to know over the past decade. But she was as big as any of them, especially given the platform that she created. Especially when she was talking about the lessons she learned from the previous platform and what she's doing differently now with She's Got Issues.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, I think it's got to be really interesting having had one sort of accidental empire and then sort of setting out to start another one and not knowing, you know, like conditions are different now, right? So she can't even retrace her steps. I mean, I guess that's the essence of being 50.
Doug: Yes, building new stuff with old tools.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, everything that worked before isn't necessarily working now. And stuff that we just lucked into before, like, just everything's different now. When I read her back in the original days, I assumed that Scary Mommy was that she felt like she was scaring the other moms. And I kept sort of waiting to figure out like what was wrong with her, like why the other moms would be afraid of her. So every time I read one of her things, I was like, “Well, this isn't scary.” And I think it was very much a thing, at least on the internet back in those days, for women to tell themselves that they were not like the other moms that were around them. It was almost a badge of honor in those early blogging days of like, “I'm writing this blog because I don't feel like I fit in with the other moms on the playground.”
Doug: Well, that's the nature of blogging anyway.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: If you have something to say, and you don't feel you have anyone to hear it, then yeah, you're going to turn to the internet and start writing about it.
Magda: Some of us have something to say even when we have people to hear it. But the thing is, when you're a writer, you write. So I think I assumed that Jill was one of those people who was telling herself that she wasn't like the other moms and that's why she was writing a blog. But now meeting her and talking to her and being like, oh, she's just like me. She's just like all the rest of us, right?
Doug: She's a good writer. Nothing scary about her at all.
Magda: I'm kind of feeling bad that I hadn't dug deeper, I guess, and become her actual friend back in the days because I thought, I think she's just so regular, sort of, you know? Like the same way I'm just a regular person.
Doug: You're not a regular person.
Magda: Oh, I'm not a regulated person, but I'm a regular person.
Doug: You're an extraordinary person.
Magda: I am deadly boring, my friend.
Doug: Marching about in a regular-looking husk, but there's a lot of extraordinariness brewing beneath.
Magda: “Sugar…in…water.”
Doug: Now we're doing right by Jill.
Magda: We're bringing out the Edgar suit reference.
Doug: That's, I think, a step up.
Magda: Right.
Doug: It's not koala chlamydia, but it's something.
Music fades in and fades out.
Doug: First of all, you are the first person that I've talked to from Baltimore since the Key Bridge fell. So, oh my God, what must that be like?
Jill Smokler: Crazy. I can't claim to have any personal connection
Doug: You're not under the bed weeping, is that what you're saying?
Jill: I do not. And all of a sudden, you know, my feed is filled with people and their childhood, you know, pictures of it in the background of their childhood and all that stuff. I didn't have that, but it's very jarring for the city and really sad in terms of how long it'll take to clean up and the jobs that are lost and the expense. And so it sort of just feels like another hit, which we're pretty low anyway. So that sucks.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: Well, I used to drive across that bridge all the time to and from school or from New Jersey to Virginia. So yeah, it was a little kind of a jarring thing, especially since apparently so many people got firsthand looks at it and recorded it because you can watch it fall from every angle there is.
Magda: So crazy.
Doug: And thank goodness that they were able to stop the traffic and that it wasn't in the middle of the day.
Jill: Yeah.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: They got an advance warning out there and they closed the bridge.
Magda: Well, they had an amazing procedure if anything happened. So they were able to stop traffic right away.
Doug: That's amazing.
Jill: Really impressive.
Doug: So what is your relationship with the city of Baltimore? I mean, it's a city you've inherited. And now that your kids are out from under in many ways, what's your relationship with the city now?
Jill: A countdown. Two more years until my youngest goes to college and I will move. Yeah, it's been a fine place to raise a family. It always has felt a little random. I'm from Swampscott, Massachusetts, and that always feels like home. New York feels very familiar and homey. Baltimore, it's a very small town, and when you ask someone where they went to school, it's high school, and everything still goes back to where you went to high school, which I'm not used to. So I'm looking forward to being somewhere new.
Doug: Do you know where that new place is?
Jill: Probably…Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, that neck of the woods.
Doug: Well, there'll be a house for sale in a couple years that you get there.
Jill: Yeah, exactly.
Magda: We're selling this house in 2026, so.
Jill: Good to know. That's the problem is because my mom and I are sort of a package deal at this point. I mean, Baltimore has a lot of things going for it, but cost of living is so much better than in the other places we're looking at.
Magda: Yeah, I came here from Detroit, and it just is mind-boggling to me. I feel like the value is just not here, whereas there's a lot of value in Detroit.
Jill: Yeah. The one thing that's nice is not having to consider public school at all. So maybe that'll help a little with costs, but we'll see.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: Well, for a while there in Brooklyn, there were billboards saying “move to Detroit because here Detroit is what Brooklyn used to be before everybody got priced out.”
Magda: I actually think Detroit and Baltimore are very similar in that sort of like underdog thing, and people who really love being there, really love being there and genuinely don't care if the rest of the country thinks it's trash because it's like, hey, I like it here.
Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Doug: So what do you think the equivalent of the Key Bridge in Detroit would be?
Magda: Okay, if something took out a huge stretch of I-75, like maybe.
Doug: Or I-96, which tripled my commute into Detroit to take the kids to school.
Magda: Yeah, but okay, so like, let's say the Marathon refinery there on I-75 just exploded and took out that huge section of I-75. That's what it was like.
Doug: All right, so we'll conclude the civil engineering portion of the podcast. But now, how did you end up in Baltimore? And are your kids from there? Were they born there?
Jill: I have one child who was born in Annapolis, Maryland. One was born in Washington, DC, and one was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My ex-husband got a job there. We came from the DC area after college, and so went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we're like, Oh, my God, we can live like millionaires in Tennessee. Like, why doesn't everybody live here? We thought it was the best thing ever. And then when I got pregnant with my third, we just needed to be around family. So we wanted to move back to the DC area, because that was felt like home base, and were totally priced out of the market. So ended up in Baltimore.
Doug: So I'm piecing together the origin story of Scary Mommy a bit because you are arriving in a new city with three children, which has got to be hard just in terms of building a new social group and being a mother of three.
Jill: Yes, it was hard, but it was also the easiest time to make friends. I mean, since college, because everybody's desperate to just have their children entertain each other.
Magda: Right. Whether they're your choice person or not, it's still people that you're interacting with.
Jill: And I think it's much harder to make friends as an adult. But yeah, it was very... Yeah, but it was very isolating. And yeah, I think that's a big part of why I threw myself into Scary Mommy was that I felt like I didn't have my people around me. Initially, it was just about me and I thought my family would read it and that would sort of be the end of it. But once I realized that there was potential to build it out and maybe make it into a business and prevent myself from stopping maternity leave and going back to work for somebody else. That has always been my goal to not work for somebody else. And I do graphic design, so I always was doing that on the side, but I think I got sidetracked.
Doug: Well, I'm going to preface this next question with what I think the answer relates to, which is when parent blogging blew up.
Jill: You mean when it got big or when it like...
Doug: When it got big, yeah. When it got big as opposed to it in an imploded sense. It blew up the first time. Not the second time.
Jill: Right.
Doug: But during that time, we were launching into a time when it was like moms do all the parenting and the dads don't. And both sides of that were trying to kind of shift that a bit. And so the dad blog names were like The Rookie Dad, One Good Dad. To soften the image or say we're also capable caregivers. Whereas the moms were like, don't put all this on me. And we had Her Bad Mother and Whiskey In My Sippy Cup and Shit, Mom’s On Heroin Again.
Jill: I don't know. I mean, it was just...
Magda: Yeah, it was like the dads were all like, “I'm not an asshole like they portray me on sitcoms” and the moms were all like, “woohoo, I'm here to party!”
Jill: I never thought of it that way, but that's a really good point.
Doug: And Scary Daddy doesn't have quite the same ring as Scary Mommy does.
Jill: Scary Daddy is a little more eyebrow-raising.
Magda: Scary Daddy is like Dad in a white van.
Jill: Yeah, exactly.
Doug: Yeah, windowless white van by the preschool.
Magda: That's no good.
Doug: No good. Just like that, there was that hashtag that was Dads Talking.
Magda: Oh, God, Dad Stalking.
Jill: Oh, Dad is Stalking.
Magda: That's not good.
Dad: It was Dad Stalking. It's like, guys, you've got to rethink that. And they never did. Never did. I mean, that's a choice. Even in a land of Her Bad Mother and Mommy Drinks And That's Why She Cries All Day. Even in that scenario, Scary Mommy is a choice. So what went into that, the naming of that?
Jill: There was no objective. I did not, I wasn't aiming to be in this badass mom crew. My son, my middle, had just seen a Disney movie and was so freaked out by, I think it was Little Mermaid in the, what's her name?
Magda: Ursula?
Jill: Ursula, yes. And he was calling everything scary. I was trying to take him for a nap. He was like, no, scary mommy. And he just, you know, referred to like his sandwich is “scary” and like his brother is “scary.” And he just, it was just a funny little comment. I was like, that's a pretty good blog name. And the URL was available.
Doug: Okay, so I'll take it.
Jill: And the first thing I did was design a logo, which I think the logo set the tone for it more than the name did, because the logo had like snakes and lions and blood and daggers and it was very
Doug: It was dark.
Jill: So yes, I definitely embraced the dark part of it. But I was always very aware to balance that out with levity and professing my love for my kids because I didn't want it to be all the negative side of parenting and, you know, just the scary bad stuff.
Doug: Yeah, and there's a lot of interesting Rorschach interpretations in the way you design this initial brand.
Jill: Yeah, my first blogging speaking thing was at BlogHer, and it was they had given me an award for, I think, logo design or something. And everybody was like, oh, I never saw it that way before. Snakes and daggers. That's fun.
Doug: Well, now when you've since named another media platform that you're starting, She's Got Issues, and parent blogs are full of stories of people who put exactly three seconds into naming their blogs. I mean, my blog was Laid Off Dad because I was a dad and I got laid off. But now in this current climate where you're aware of the importance of branding or at least maybe have a bit more of a longer view of where the brand might go and how it might be interpreted and what you might be able to do within its umbrella, was there any more intricate a thought process to naming She's Got Issues
Jill: So much so, it's funny. I thought of the name years ago while I was still immersed in Scary Mommy and really was not seeking an out. And I loved it. But the URL, much like Dad's talking, says She Go Tissues. That's the lamest thing. I can't name a company, She Go Tissues. And then years went by and I sold, left Scary Mommy and was looking to start something new and couldn't remember if I bought the URL or not because I knew I had the idea, but I couldn't remember if I was smart enough to actually buy it. And I was, but I didn't remember that I was. And I was resetting my, you know, whatever the domain thing was and all of the emails were going to Jill at Scary Mommy, which I had no access to anymore, no was to get it back and it was like
Doug: It was a lot of issues, it sounds like.
Jill: Yes, exactly. But She's Got Issues, once I, you know, got over the URL, I just thought it was the perfect name, you know, to just cover all the different crap. And then also just sort of as a punchback to the eye rolling, oh, She's Got Issues. I sort of like that.
Doug: So the full URL was She's Got Issues with Withheld Intellectual Property.
Jill: Yes.
Doug: Well, that's the thing too. You don't think when you just start a blog and start gazing at your navel that one day you'll be thinking, you know what, I'll be locked in some nonsense war about who owns what at some point, especially if I build an entity and manage to finagle an exit, which you did.
Jill: Yeah, that's funny. My dad is a trademark attorney, so that's the one thing I did know from the beginning, with all the mistakes I made. That was one thing I was careful about, or at least I figured if I fuck up, then my dad will help bail me out, which never happened, fortunately.
Magda: I'm just thinking about the name, She's Got Issues, and to me, so for people who don't know, She's Got Issues is focused on writing about being in perimenopause and menopause, right?
Jill: Yeah, just, you know, being in the sandwich generation, just, yeah, all of the different issues, perimenopause being a big one.
Doug: And you have a podcast too.
Jill: I do.
Doug: Is this your first foray into podcasting? Did you podcast much with Scary Mommy or what do you think?
Jill: I did not podcast at all with Scary Mommy. I was supposed to do a podcast with Scary Mommy and my exit was because at the last minute it was decided that somebody younger would be a better representative of the brand than me.
Magda: That's just shitty. Wow. Wow.
Jill: So I departed and had a very short lived podcast with one of my closest friends called Generation EX, which was like a sex and dating single mom podcast, but then COVID happened and neither one of us were dating or having sex. So we were like, we have nothing to talk about anymore. So we stopped doing that. So yes, this is the first time I've recorded more than like five episodes. I like it. It's a lot of work.
Magda: It's so much work. You don't think it is.
Jill: Oh my God, no. People who are listening, be thankful that you're listening because so much work went into it.
Doug: Do you have a staff or are you doing it all yourself? Are you editing and booking?
Jill: I have a partner this time, which is an entirely different experience. A friend of mine from Baltimore who has a business background and is doing all of the stuff that I am not good at and don't like to do at all, which is so nice. So I can focus on just the creative and what I think is the fun stuff and not deal with the numbers and the spreadsheets and all that stuff.
Doug: Well, we kind of organically touched on that one bullet point I included in the proposed discussion points, which was, does acquisition ruin everything?
Jill: Yes.
Doug: The empire that was Babel has long since faded into the ether, and I think that was the first big acquisition, at least that I was made aware of. You have experience building one platform to success, but now it's a whole new world out there. It's kind of like, yes, I built in the forest and now I'm in the desert or vice versa.
Jill: Oh, completely.
Doug: What have you learned about, you know, when you think about, like you say, you've made a lot of mistakes. We all made a lot of mistakes. When you're strategizing for She's Got Issues, what's altered your thinking? What are you kind of trying to achieve this time around?
Jill: My problem with Scary Mommy was doing it all by myself. I had a volunteer staff, but I didn't have anybody else at the top who I was consulting with. Every major decision was on me, and I was still at the very end dabbling in the coding, and the site would go down for three days at a time. And I'd be like, “I can't help it. I'm sorry, you guys. It's just me.” And I just got so burnt out and felt like I either need to sell this thing or it's going to fizzle out and die. So this time, I have no interest in doing it alone again, because I've really learned what my strengths are and my weaknesses. And my strengths are not running a business. It's creativity, it's developing the ideas, it's executing them, but it is not the money making parts, the business parts. So to have somebody else be responsible for all of that is a wonderful thing. It's been an exercise in, I don't know, acceptance. My record for partnerships wasn't great. I mean, I had a failed marriage, but with Scary Mommy, it was always me and I could make all my decisions. I didn't have to bounce it off of anybody. And then I sold it and I had to bounce everything off of everybody. And I had no say. And so starting over, yeah, it was much more calculated. Accidentally starting a business is so much easier than intentionally.
Doug: Well, and we'll get back to that. We're going to talk about She's Got Issues a lot, but you touched on that point. You had a failed marriage. Now, technically, you're not married anymore. And you were, and you're not.
Jill: I am not.
Doug: But I think, you know, Magda's and my marriage failed. But do you think your marriage failed in the sense that if your spouse decides that their wiring is different, that's not necessarily a failure, is it? Do you look at it that way?
Jill: My ex is gay, for people who don't know. I look at it as a failure of a marriage, yes. Obviously, I have my kids, and that is not a regret, blah, blah, blah. But I feel like our marriage was so dysfunctional in ways that I didn't see. I think because of and I think it manifested itself in ways that just it was just so messed up, our dynamic, our balance of work, just everything about it was just not a good partnership. And I think I was so desperate to keep our family intact and sort of hushed down any suspicions I had, and convinced myself that this wasn't the case. And I think that was, what I did for 18 years was sort of brainwash myself. So...
Doug: Well, we all do that. We lie to ourselves sometimes just to think that the thing we want is still available to us.
Jill: Right, right.
Doug: You know, that's why I'm saying, I mean, from the outside, it seems like I couldn't build this building out of sand because I was having a discussion with a friend of mine on Facebook the other day basically and we agreed no one ever knows anybody. And that's a big revelation in your 50s.
Magda: Well, I think nobody ever knows themselves really until, you know, like you think you know what you're going to do in a certain situation and you really don't until you're in that situation. And then if you're in the situation again, you still don't. You might do a different thing. Yeah, I really just don't think it's possible to know what anyone is going to do, including yourself.
Jill: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I when I look at friends of mine who are in miserable marriages, maybe not with a gay spouse, but and I'm like, God, why don't they just get out of this? Yeah, you know, but when you're in it, it's not as easy.
Magda: Yeah, and I think it's just different priorities. For me, it was hard to imagine leaving my marriage with Doug because I had always been required to not just excel, but dazzle people. And being divorced is incredibly common and incredibly boring. But I really had to let go of that expectation and just being like, oh, I can be a colossal failure who picked the wrong person to marry.
Doug: I'm right here.
Jill: No, I hear what you're saying completely.
Magda: Hey, Doug, I am a colossal success because I picked the right person to podcast with.
Doug: Well, there's a spectrum of dazzling, and I just was the different flavor for you.
Magda: Yeah, but I mean, like, the thing is, I think when you are a person who has been used to excelling and pushing through and making everything work and making everything happen, it almost feels like there's valor in holding together an essentially broken marriage. And it's very hard to let go of that idea. It's like, if I'm not holding together this thing through sheer force of will, then who am I?
Jill: Yeah, yeah.
Doug: Do you each feel as though that falls on the woman's shoulders to kind of hold it together?
Magda: A zillion percent. Would you have ever left, Doug?
Doug: Would I have left you?
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: You know, it's hard to say. I don't think so.
Magda: I don't think you would have.
Doug: We had both kids by then, and I had very little experience with divorce. So I saw a quote by Mike Birbiglia just this morning. He's trying out new jokes, and he said, “You know, I'm happily married, which means I'm not happy, but I'm happy I'm married.”
Magda: Yeah, that's why I think you never would have left. And like, you know, when people would ask me, like, oh, is Doug really upset about it? I'd be like, Doug really does not want to be divorced. Doug does not want to be with me on a daily basis, but he doesn't want to lose his wife and he doesn't want to be divorced. And I think, like, that's the essence of it for a lot of men.
Jill: Right. Now, Jeff wanted to have a mixed orientation marriage, which means basically an open marriage on one side, but not the other.
Magda: Oh, really?
Jill: Yeah.
Magda: That's something.
Jill: Yeah, kind of a not, yeah, wouldn't, didn't really come out ahead on that deal.
Magda: No.
Doug: Were you guys in couples counseling at any point?
Jill: Not during the duration of our marriage. We saw someone like at the very, very end.
Doug: Because I can't imagine even a really bad marriage counselor being like, Oh, okay, that sounds like a great idea about this, like, half open.
Jill: And I think that's why we never went. I think. And I never sought therapy. I knew it was too dangerous to go there. And I think that, you know, with our relationship, I think what I resent is that our marriage never had a chance. And I didn't know that from the beginning. And he did. And I feel like that was really unfair to me. And it's great that he came out and that he's living life authentically. But he also dragged me along with him.
Magda: Yeah. Which basically forced you to be complicit in your own harm.
Jill: Yeah.
Doug: Well, do you think couples therapy as a thing works? There's a rule of thought that in a three-person dynamic, each person's going to think that the therapist favors the other or usually in that position, there's like one person in there who has already left and is trying to make this as smooth as possible and the other is clinging to like, hey, let's see if we can work this out.
Jill: Right. I did not say that, Doug.
Doug: No, you didn't.
Jill: Not that I wouldn't like to be saying that, but I did not say that.
Doug: I'd like this to be an aspirational podcast. Now that we've left civil engineering, let's just visualize the lives we want. But if you think about a subsequent relationship and even a potential marriage, would couples therapy be something? Like I have a good friend who committed to well visits. I mean he's happily married, but he's like, look, why not go to a counselor to help to work on your marriage while it's not in crisis?
Jill: Yeah, I have no idea. I mean, I don't know. I personally don't have any experience with it being successful, so I don't know. I mean, would I be open to it? Sure, yeah. I'm so far from the point of being in a relationship with somebody that would merit counseling that it's hard to think about.
Doug: Because one of the things I've also mentioned a number of times is that, in my view, every couple needs to learn how to fight, needs to learn how to be adults and ask for what they want and be prepared to express differences in a civil way and then come back and make up afterward. That's something we never did. It's funny. No, never.
Jill: We never did either.
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: Okay, as somebody who's remarried.
Doug: Speaking of dazzle.
Magda: Speaking of dazzle.
Doug: Hi, Mike.
Magda: So Jill, I am married to a guy that I developed a crush on in the fall of 1990 in college.
Jill: Oh, I love that.
Magda: He was in an acapella group. He had this glorious mullet. He wore rugby shirts all the time.
Jill: Oh, that's a good combo. Oh, I'm so happy for your high school self.
Magda: Thank you. Seventeen Magazine had told me if I went to school on the East Coast, I was going to find a guy in a rugby shirt. So, you know, they were right.
Doug: Oh, for God's sake. Tell us more about the secret, why don't you?
Magda: So, like, I am not sure of the usefulness of counseling. I do think the Harville Hendrix Imago method of counseling helped me get my own head on straight, just reading books about it when Doug and I were coming out of our marriage. But a thing that I think would be useful is a relationship coach, because I think a coach tells you how you're misunderstanding each other and gives you processes and procedures to work through things. Whereas a counselor is really more about like your feelings, your emotions, your stuff like that. And that to me is less useful. I've been in enough individual counseling and like, I mean, the stuff that comes up with Mike and me and now in hindsight, the stuff that came up in every relationship I was in was all process, like logistics. You know what I mean? Like, how do you talk to the person? How do you set policies about what you're going to do? Like, how do you deal with all of this other stuff? It's never really about your deep emotions. It's about living together.
Doug: Big dry erase boards or maybe, you know, yarn held together with push pins.
Magda: A murder board.
Doug: All right, yeah, we can talk about conspiracy theories too, but wow, we're off the rails. No, but I wanted to bring it back a bit to perspective now. So when did Scary Mommy start?
Jill: 2008. I was later than you. 2008.
Doug: Yep. So now, 16 years later...
Jill: That was impressive.
Doug: Oh, I taught math for a cup of coffee.
Jill: I stopped taking math my sophomore year of high school. convinced my principal that I was much better served taking pottery classes than math because I was destined to be an artist. And he signed off on it. So I never took math my junior or senior year in high school. So I literally, like, that was impressive to me that you just did that magic math.
Doug: And this is why you have a partner who does all the P&L stuff.
Jill: Precisely.
Doug: When you think about that, we've talked about how, okay, now I want a partner who can support me in that way. But when you think about just marketing yourself, I mean, you have a bit of juice behind your name. You have that brand, which by the way, when we texted each other, before I added you to my contacts, it came up as “Smoker Jill.”
Jill: That's funny. It's not entirely off the mark, but that's fine.
Doug: Right. But it sounds like a movie with Burt Reynolds.
Jill: Oh, it kind of does.
Doug: And Dom DeLuise. Cannonball Run Part 6 starring Smoker Jill. So how do you go about getting your message out there now? I mean, Twitter has fragmented.
Jill: Oh, this is the million dollar question. So much of the platforms have fragmented.
Doug: Yeah, and if you want to talk shop for a sec, I mean, I do believe, I mean, this was kind of the whole thing with dads anyway, because we always were a smaller demographic and the pitch was, you're not going to get millions of followers, but you are going to get an engaged audience.
Jill: Yeah.
Doug: That opted in and wanted to talk about this. Like the open rates on our newsletter were always like 70-80% and that was all we had because we didn't have size.
Jill: Yeah.
Doug: So when you think about rebuilding, it's not necessarily from scratch, but it's sort of. What did you set out to do?
Jill: It feels like it's from scratch because I left Scary Mommy pretty impulsively and I didn't like take my contacts with me. I didn't wind things down and I wasn't
Doug: Well, again, forgive yourself. You had three tween children and a marriage that wasn't ideal. So, I mean, you were juggling a few plates, so.
Jill: This is true.
Doug: Cut yourself a little slack.
Jill: Thank you, thank you. But yeah, starting over, it has been challenging. Social media, I don't like how it's evolved. I miss the old Twitter. I'm actually really into Threads. I really like it over there.
Magda: I don't know how you discover new things on the topics that you like. Like, to me, it just feels so haphazard. Like, if one of my friends rethreads something I'm interested in, that's great. And sometimes the algorithm just shows me stuff I'm into. But half the stuff the algorithm shows me is like, Pickup artist dudes trying to talk about how to neg women, right? It's like, what?
Jill: I have so many dog grooming videos. I don't groom my dog at home, yet I see, like, a psychologist eating my feed. I'm like, why?
Doug: Well, your phone's tracked you to the veterinarian and back, and so they have all the data they need.
Jill: But yeah, I do. I like it. And it's it won't scale like Twitter. But I didn't like Twitter when it was older, I liked it the early days when it felt like a community. So I think that's what, if Threads just maintains what it is now, I think it's kind of a nice place. And like you're saying about, you know, massive audience versus a very small focused one. Like when I post there and I ask people to go read something, they'll read it and come back and comment on it and try to have a discussion, and it's it's nice. It feels very different from like TikTok and just the fast scrolling. And that's what I hate.
Doug: I hate TikTok. I can't get on board with that. That's the last frontier for me, too, and I will not venture into it. I don't need it in my life. And Threads, you're right. It's still pretty crude because it was clear it had to be launched. There was an opportunistic window when Twitter was going through all its upheaval. It had to come out when it came out in whatever shape it was in. And yes, they are going to fix it as they go along. And I do like the idea that we have a newsletter that people have opted into. They want to know when the next podcast comes out. They want to contribute. I think there's a whole market of people.
Jill: I mean, we are the Gen X people who started blogging about our families or reading blogs about our families, so it would make perfect sense that now we're talking about being in our 50s and like, what the hell is this? And a newsletter. I mean, that's the best, smartest way to do it is investing in that and having the direct contact with people. But yeah, it's really challenging getting word out there right now.
Doug: I'll tell you what I've just told myself. It's like the only choice I really have. I mean, I do know people who live and die by UTMs and SEO and all sorts of other acronyms that I will be much happier forgetting later in life. But in the end, it's the content. If you put out good stuff, stuff that you're proud of, people will find you, I think. And so far that's worked. It's incremental, but there's still that little dopamine hit when I get that email saying you have a new subscriber.
Jill: Oh, totally. And it's funny because I, you know, with Scary Mommy at the end, I can't remember how many millions of Facebook people we had, but it was so massive and it was overwhelming. And now, you know, it's like I get excited about like one new follower on threads, but it's kind of nice. I don't know. It just feels a little cozier. And at the end, Scary Mommy just outgrew itself. It became too big.
Doug: Yeah, and there's, the bots are still minimal. I mean, I still, I have a private Instagram feed, which means I know exactly when, you know, Isabelle Lots of Numbers from Belarus wants to follow me. “Okay, well, I appreciate the interest and all the best with your career.”
Magda: They just try to follow you? They don't DM you, “Hi, beautiful.”?
Doug: No, they used to DM me in words with friends.
Magda: Oh, boy. That's ridiculous.
Doug: It was always, “Hi, Sweetie.” Hi, Sweetie. That was the big opener. And I used to have fun just messaging back saying, “oh, I'm allergic to barbecue.” Or just, it's an improv class, you know? This is a cry for help. When did She's Got Issues launch?
Jill: It's been like a year and a half, maybe a little over a year.
Doug: Did you have a growth plan? Was there a business plan in place with your numismatic partner? There is a business plan in place. I keep, like, trying to change it. And she's like, chill, we have an editorial calendar. We have this, we have that. I'm like, no, I don't feel like that. I don't feel like doing this today. It's crazy.
Doug: So you kind of have a new marriage on your plate, don't you? And this time you just have a sister wife.
Jill: Yeah.
Doug: Someone to tell you what you have to do.
Jill: Yeah, which is, compromise is hard.
Magda: Yeah, it really is. And you know, the thing that's interesting to me about having a business partner is everybody expects everybody to know how to work with a business partner, especially if you're doing different functions, right? They just think like, oh, you can work with a business partner, but nobody ever teaches you how to work with somebody else. And like, you know you get assigned a group project in sixth grade and everybody acts like it's the worst thing that's ever happened to them? And then you know like group projects in college are notorious. So if nobody ever teaches us how to work with somebody, like why do we just assume that partnerships are always going to go well?
Jill: That's so true.
Magda: Well, I guess business school, maybe would teach you how to properly learn how to work in groups in business school. Because I went to a really specific program where we were a cohort and we were all taking the same classes. So we would get one team for all four of our classes each semester. And so they put a lot into teaching us how to write work contracts, write stuff about who was going to do what each semester and all that kind of stuff. But I don't think people who are in regular business school programs where they're all mixed around in all the different classes and have a number of different teams, I don't think they get that. I just don't think people put importance on it.
Jill: Yeah. I would have loved to have gone to business school in between these two businesses. It's funny that my partner now, Kira, is working with some of my old Scary Mommy employees, which is so fun.
And she's taken over managing them, which is so weird. Because she's able to like communicate with them in a very direct way. And I'm not because I don't want to hurt feelings and I know them so well and I truly love them. I just can't criticize. I'm so bad at that, and that was the big problem in my management was just, I literally made up an assistant to turn down posts for me that I didn't want to run because I couldn't handle doing it myself.
Doug: Did you answer your phone with an Australian accent?
Jill: I didn't go that far, but I did have an auto signature that was like, “Nicole, Jill Smoker's assistant.”
Magda: I love that. And you know what? Donald Trump did that, too. If it's good enough for Donald Trump, it's certainly good enough for Jill Smokler.
Doug: All right, there's her red flag. Yeah, there you go. Now, when you look at the plan for She's Got Issues, I mean, granted, I think the ember of the idea was about single women relationships, dating, and that kind of thing, but you've expanded outward. You've talked about health and menopause. How much do you talk about elder care?
Jill: We did a podcast on somebody who was a caretaker to her father who subsequently died. He had Alzheimer's, and it's definitely a topic that we want to discuss more. It's very front of mind for me these days. I'm really close with my parents. They're both aging. I hate it. I hate the thought of not having them around.
Doug: Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because, yeah, that seems a point of mind for you now. You're much more kind of a daughter again than you are a mom.
Jill: My poor parents have parented me harder in the last five years than they ever did when I was a kid.
Doug: Well, what the hell for? It wasn't like you had anything interesting going on in your life.
Jill: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They really had to pick me up and put me back together again. So I'm very grateful for that.
Doug: Yeah. In our limited experience here, this is 40 podcasts or so coming in, and many of our guests have talked a lot about how much more real estate taking care of our parents holds in our minds than being a parent ever did. Where would you like this to go and how would you like She's Got Issues to kind of help you with your issues with your folks?
Jill: Scary Mommy was born and really flourished because of my need for community and support and around, you know, just like imperfect parenting and not finding everything so easy. And I think similarly, you know, things aren't so easy now. Like it's being sandwiched between kids who have a whole new slew of more complicated issues than they did when they were little and parents. I'm not finding this phase of life to be an easy one. But as I look forward, I'm very fortunate to have a stepmom who takes really good care of my dad and my parents are in good health. My mom is an energizer bunny, who has, I travel with her frequently because she takes me on trips. And I'm the one who's like at three o'clock, can we take a nap? Like I need some downtime. And she and I go back to the hotel and she just like keeps going and sightseeing and doing whatever she's doing. So I just hope they keep going for as long as possible. And I just want to take advantage of the time when they're here.
Doug: And what conversations, if any, have you had about preparing for the next phase, like where your mom would like to be and what kind of arrangement she'd like to have and how close she'd like to be to her daughter and grandkids, that kind of thing?
Jill: Ask me tomorrow, because those sound like some very important conversations that we should be having.
Magda: Well, I mean, this is coming from the angle that Doug's parents are in their 80s, right? And I think I'm kind of observing that people whose parents are still in their 70s, it's like their parents are just enjoying life and not really thinking about what the end is going to be. But then once they go over that 81, 82 mark, it's like they want to start getting their ducks in a row, kind of.
Jill: That sounds right. My parents are 78. My mom and I are very close, and I know basically her wishes-ish, and I know where her important stuff is.
Doug: It's an interesting feeling when your dad comes to you and says, please write my obituary. And if you want to show me what your eulogy is going to be, I'd also like you to be the executor of my will, X, Y, Z. And it was a lot at once. This was a pretty heady Thanksgiving we had a couple of years back.
Jill: Oh, I'm so not ready for it.
Magda: Okay, so I've gone through this with my uncle who died way too young. And he had some things set up, but not really. And then as a response, my parents three years later, just sat the two of us down and handed us all their papers, power of attorney, medical power of attorney, all of that kind of stuff and the wills. And there were even things we were joking around, that my mom had even designated where her hats were going to go. It's so interesting to me to see, like, what happens when they decide they want to get organized versus some people who are afraid to get organized. And whether you get organized or not, that doesn't actually have any effect on how you go out. And like, people seem to almost be using the organization as like a magic talisman to try to ward off any health problems.
Jill: I have my hands over my ears and I'm singing la la la la la to block out the fact that it's coming.
Magda: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so having gone through this a couple of times, my advice to everyone is do not put the will IN the safe deposit box because you need the will to get into the safe deposit box.
Jill: Ah, that's interesting. OK, noted. Thank you.
Doug: Well, let's take this moment to talk about how we might alleviate the moment. How do you blow off steam? How do you kind of center yourself when anything that you're dealing with currently tends to flare up. Is there more content in you? Is there more writing in you? Or would you prefer to be more of a private person since you've been on the cover of People Magazine and that once is enough?
Jill: Once is definitely enough of that. I love the idea of writing another book, but I spend a lot of my time in the garden. And you would think by how much time I spend that I would have this gorgeous flourishing colorful array of stuff and I really don't. It's kind of like a pile of dirt with like half of the zen garden that I started and never finished and then like a couple of flowers that died. It's kind of a mess, but it's where I go. Like I wear my crocs and I just sort of like dig, and I don't know. That's what I do.
Magda: You're an aspirational gardener. I think there are a lot of us out there, right? I'm an aspirational gardener, too. That's why I sent a tree to Doug's house to go into my yard.
Jill: It just seems like it should work a little more naturally. Nature just doesn't seem to be doing its job in my garden. I'm doing all the work. Nature's just not doing it.
Doug: You have really high expectations for yourself. You have very high expectations of what your garden should look like, what you should have done as with Scary Mommy. I mean, you described your mother as someone who has twice the energy you have to drag you around the world, whatever. But can we talk about that relationship a bit? Is that where this external judgment comes from?
Jill: Yeah, I don't know that I'd look at it as judgment, exactly, I think my mom...
Doug: Yeah, as soon as I said it, I was like, no, I don't mean that. I just mean you have a true sense that your best effort is going to bring out excellent results.
Jill: Yeah, and I feel like my mom was always my cheerleader and really propped me up and made me believe that I could do things and drove me two hours a day to like art classes, jewelry making, just like every little creative whim I had, she would just indulge like crazy. Yeah, and I think Jeff sort of took over that role of being my cheerleader and encouraging me to do all these things. And I think one fed into the other.
Doug: So do you feel like you have to be your own cheerleader now?
Jill: I should be more than I am. I think I haven't evolved past the point of feeling regret, or I'm working on it. I'm much closer than I used to be. But I spent a long time regretting relationship stuff, business, and just really focusing on why did I do that? Why did I choose that path?
Doug: Well, that's a big step. Just the whole idea of forgiving myself. I could not forgive myself for anything the first 30, 35 years of my life. I couldn't forgive myself for the end of my marriage. For choosing the wrong person. That weighed on me for a long time. So I'm genuinely interested in how people move past that, because I think that's a common thing to kind of be held to a standard by doesn't matter who. And when did your folks split up?
Jill: I was 18, but I never knew them as a happy couple. There was no fighting, but it was all under the surface. I never saw them hug or kiss. I remember on Valentine's Day, I bought my mom a bouquet of flowers and tried to forge my dad's signature because, yeah, that was how their marriage was. I think my mom, she's an excellent single person.
Doug: That's a goal right there.
Jill: Yes. She really is. She's really inspirational in that way.
Doug: Well, and I'm pursuing this thread because one of my main hang-ups when the marriage split up was I had no experience with divorce. And again, that's why I kind of clung to not being divorced because it felt like a real void.
Jill: That was just what I never wanted to happen. Jeff and I were, and I very much was not.
Magda: If your whole story is that you were meant to be together, then if you're not together anymore, what does that mean about any of your life?
Jill: Right.
Magda: But at the same time, your model of marriage was of just holding it together. Doug, you and I both, I remember going into marrying you thinking, I will just make this work because every marriage I saw around me was just making it work, right? It was based on that.
Jill: Yeah, that's the example. All you can do is work from the example you have in many ways.
Magda: Yeah, and I remember just being stunned when I saw couples that really, really were just thrilled to be with each other all the time on a daily basis.
Doug: Yeah, what's that about?
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: I missed that. I mean, yeah, there were times, sure, early on, that was me. That's how I felt about you, for sure. Well, but I mean, that was at the very beginning.
Magda: That was infatuation, right? I mean, I'm talking about people who've been together for 10 or 20 years and are still just absolutely delighted to be around each other all the time. My brother and sister-in-law got married after you and I were divorced. But I still, when I'm around them, I'm just like, wow, they really like each other. But I just, I hadn't had that model.
Jill: I found divorce books in my mom's closet when I was 13. So from that point on, I knew something was that we never talked about it. It was just like this very off limits thing that we didn't discuss. So I was always sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop for the next five years. So yeah, it was definitely not a marriage that I wanted to emulate.
Doug: But did you feel any more equipped to help her through the hardest parts, having gone through that yourself?
Jill: No, because the experiences were so different. I thought I would be prepared and I thought I was doing things, you know, you do the best you can. And my parents were much older when I realized how flawed they were and that they just tried their best. And my kids really came to that. Maybe Scary Mommy was to blame, but I feel like they really came to that conclusion very early in life.
Doug: I really enjoy the fact that you and I are sharing this moment in that there seems to be a lot of open earth and we could go in a number of different directions at this point in our lives. It's inspirational in a way because I do look and say it's never too late to do the next thing. Apart from being the daughter that your mom's going to need, apart from being the mother that your children are going to need, what would you like to do for Smoke and Jill, for Smoker Jill, for your third act?
Jill: I love the idea of communal living. And I don't know, there's something there that I'm very fascinated with.Like in my house, I've tried to create it in a way that it's very, like I want guests, I want people over, I want them to stay over, I just want to like take care of them. And I'd love to pursue something in that. I don't know, I'd like to do something in person. I'd like to get off of the internet eventually.
Doug: Yeah. I would like to have a job that relies exactly 0% on marketing on the internet.
Jill: Oh my goodness. Can you imagine?
Doug: All I want is just those misleading TikTok recipes that take 20 seconds to display and four hours to prep and buy for and clean up after.
Jill: That was our most popular post ever on Scary Mommy was a clip of a dad with two plates and grapes and a knife and just slicing through and saying like, this is the best way to slice your grapes. First of all, it didn't work. Second of all, it was so stupid. Third of all, it kills me that that got millions and millions of millions of more views than the posts that like we angst it over and you know painstakingly wrote and it was just this dumb ass stupid clip yeah it's just bugs the hell out of me.
Doug: There's this one guy who just makes sandwiches and he gets he's like three million followers. And every sandwich comes out in 25 seconds, but never mind that the jus he makes took like four hours to steep. It's like, Goddammit. Can we get at least a time-elapse calendar or something in the corner?
Magda: I am so much happier, though, with the recipes that are actual real recipes than with these weirdos who put like four sticks of butter and then uncooked pasta and then something else and then they stir it and it just turns into this weird glop and that like it's not even a real recipe that would work.
Jill: No, not at all. I had a three-ingredient bagel come up in my feed, and it was like egg yolks and yeast and almond flour. I was like, that's just... That's not a bagel.
Doug: Are you sure that wasn't from the 70s dinner party Instagram feed?
Magda: They didn't have almond flour in the 70s. My mom was a co-op mom. I would have known if they had almond flour in the 70s.
Doug: Are you familiar with that, with 70s dinner party feed? There's a recipe in there for banana shrimp curry.
Jill: Oh my God, no.
Magda: Do you remember Candle Salad?
Jill: What? No.
Magda: It was a ring of cut pineapple, obviously from the cake.
Jill: Like a jello bowl.
Magda: And you would prop a peeled banana, but with the end cut off so you could prop the banana up in it. That was the candle. And put a little cherry on the end and you would whip cream it all together so it would stand up. Most phallic thing ever. It was called Candle Salad.
Doug: Well, it had a little ring on it, too, which takes it into a whole different direction.
Magda: Oh, yeah. It's like, wow.
Jill: I could have had a lot more fun with the name than Candle Salad. I mean, with a visual like that, that's really not impressive to me.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, I just want to hear more about She's Got Issues. You're just targeting people like us who are just trying to read about what it's like to try to make it through the day past the hot flashes and all of the weird demands that kind of came out of nowhere from places you didn't expect them to come from.
Jill: Yeah, I thought things were overwhelming when I had little kids and being in the trenches. And I find now to be so much more challenging and so much more complicated. And yeah, I just feel like I need a community of like-minded people who are just sort of muddling through it with me.
Doug: We touched on a lot of topics here. I'm really grateful you came on to talk with us today about that. I don't know if you have much chance to talk about these more personal aspects to your life because you are a personality in the blog world you achieve so much. I mean, you were a pillar of the heyday of the blogging world, and I'm really glad that I could meet more of the woman behind that success. So thanks for coming on to talk about it.
Jill: Thank you and thank you for opening the door to, yeah, talking about tough stuff. It was so nice talking to you both.
Doug: When we talk about now in your new media state as a principle of She's Got Issues, where do we find all that? Where do we find you? Where do you express yourself online most of the time?
Jill: She's Got Issues is podcast, magazine, just shesgotissues.com. And I'm Jill Smokler on Instagram. And like I said, Threads is where I'm saying the most these days.
Doug: … and “Smoker Jill” on Reddit.
Magda: I had not known about She's Go Tissues and then I started looking at it and I'm like, oh my God, these are like things that I'm interested in, right? I think it's like filling a space too because there's not a lot of stuff out there that's not maudlin. Like my dad got diagnosed with Alzheimer's and his mom died of Alzheimer's. I was looking to see if there were other people who specifically went on HRT because of the Alzheimer's piece and there's no one out there but there are a whole lot of people that want to tell you how to treasure every moment with a person who has Alzheimer's and it's like look I've been through this before like the dealing with the person with Alzheimer's is not the problem it's, “How do I stay present for my dad and at the same time do every possible thing in my arsenal to not get it myself?” And I just like that your stuff is very straightforward.
Jill: Well, thank you. And I'm sorry you have to deal with that.
Doug: Yeah, we'll link to all that in the show notes. And I'm grateful for the time. Thanks so much. And thank you, listeners, for hanging on to listen to Episode 41 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pechen-Yazarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Smokin' Jill Smokler, creator of Scary Mommy and She's Got Issues. When the Flames Go Up is the production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode, which drops every Wednesday, and our newsletter, Friday Flames, which comes out every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review. See you next week for Episode 42. Until then, bye-bye.