When the Flames Go Up
When the Flames Go Up
Episode 39: "As much as I ran from my childhood, there gets to be another chapter."
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Episode 39: "As much as I ran from my childhood, there gets to be another chapter."

Amanda Magee missed her oldest daughter desperately after she left for college, in part because Amanda is still processing her decision to stop talking to her mother.

We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about our parents’ impact on our lives, mostly in the context of supervising their eldercare and/or grieving their loss. But this conversation with Amanda Magee is our first to delve into how it feels to stop all contact with your parents, especially when your kids start aging out of the household.

Any fundamental change in an intimate relationship leaves a mark, regardless of how it comes about. And during this turbulent time among the three generations, she relies on several creative pursuits—writing, music, set design, and entrepreneurship among them—to help keep her train on the rails.

Amanda speaks frankly about adjusting to motherhood, building her parental self on her own terms, and how her three daughters, raised in the age of social media, have learned that when someone knocks, it’s OK not to answer the door. And we almost got to the end without mentioning menopause!

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We also talk about maintaining a business with your spouse for 20 years, the perfect simplicity of the Tug Rule, and the children’s book about The Secret Pee that needs to happen.

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Edited Transcript

Discussion about this podcast

When the Flames Go Up
When the Flames Go Up
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up.