Good Inside with Dr. Becky - Resentment, Joy, and Why Moms Don't Believe They're Allowed Either

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Was today a good day? Did my kid seem happy? If the answer is no, even a little, it can feel like the whole day failed, like you failed.Dr. Becky sits down with Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke University, to make the case that happiness might be the wrong thing to optimize for in the first place. Happiness, Kate argues, is really just ease: a hundred small circumstances lining up so nothing feels hard. Which means chasing it for your kids can quietly turn you into what Kate calls a professional happiness manager, smoothing every rough edge before it reaches them.Joy is different. It doesn't need conditions to line up. It shows up in weird obsessions, a dumb dance in the kitchen, a dry pasta fight, a moment at the worst point in Kate's own life (she spent years navigating a serious cancer diagnosis) when something good found her anyway. Kate and Becky talk through what kids already understand about joy that adults forget, why so many moms don't believe joy is even available to them, and a practical exercise Kate uses to name the resentments that quietly block it.Read A Blessing for Parents Who Are Trying, adapted from Kate Bowler’s latest book, Joyful, Anyway.*Thank you to our partners for making this episode possible:Skylight: Get $30 off a 15-inch Skylight Calendar at myskylight.com/beckyGirl Scouts: If you have a daughter in kindergarten through 12th grade, visit girlscouts.org to learn moreYoto: Get 15% off your order with the code DRBECKY15 at YotoPlay.com. New customers only, ends October 31, offer valid on select products only. Terms apply.Care.com: For a limited time, you can use the code BECKY35 to save 35% on a Care.com Premium Membership.*Offer applies to initial term of Care.com membership subscriptions. Not applicable to add-on features or non-renewing access fees or services. Expires 10/31/26. Care.com does not employ or place any caregiver. Background checks are an important start, but they have limits. Visit www.care.com/safety. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Always a good time to rediscover the sense that your life, before you were useful to anyone, you were already good. Inside. Good inside. Good inside. Just reading all the branding. I did not ask her to add that. I just want my kid to be happy. Of course we do. We want our kids to feel light. We want them to feel loved. We want them. to move about the world with ease and confidence, but at the same time, maybe optimizing for our kids being happy is a little bit out of our control or has a cost to us or isn't actually good for them long term, which doesn't mean we want our kids to be unhappy. But in today's conversation with Kate Bowler, I talk about happiness and joy, and I can tell you it gave me a totally different perspective on my days with my kid. I mean, I end most days thinking,

about how the day went. And I know I'm going to be asking myself different questions to assess my day because of this conversation. And I have a feeling it's going to do that for you as well. Kate is a professor at Duke University. She's the author of so many amazing books. And she's honestly just a deep thinker who translates her thoughts into very practical, manageable ways to go about your life differently today. I know you're going to love this conversation. I think it's also going to lead to new thoughts and new associations and a new way of seeing your day. All right, here's where I want to start. You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.

True, not true? I think people think it's true and it shouldn't be. Not that you want to look into the eyes of your child and be like, I'm thrilled. Sorry, having a bad time. Is it the worst? Not for me. But I think this endless calibration of our own emotional worlds to the unhappiness of our children has like got to stop. Yeah.

Where, okay, so you're saying, I'm so attentive to and perceptive of my kids' emotional state, which probably I think I've noticed is more and more common, right? Because there's maybe an overcorrection, but I think it comes from a good place of feeling like nobody looked at my emotional state. when I was growing up, right? No one cared in the 80s. No one cared. No. And so I'm not going to do that. No.

But now I'm so attentive. And you're saying, because your language is around kind of that being the barometer, now my mood, like I don't even know what my mood is until I've kind of assessed my kids. And I think it starts with moms in particular believing that happiness is ultimately the goal. Like, and I know we. really share this deep and abiding hatred. But happiness has hatred of happiness. Hatred.

Quote us Kate and Dr. Becky hate happiness. Is that the... She hates it. I hate it. I hate it. Agreed. Yeah. I think...

Well, because happiness has such a distinct psychological profile. It's supposed to feel like ease. And if you think about happiness as ease and then suddenly it's women's job to to guarantee ease. It's wild when you think about all the things that would have to fall under that list for that to be true. Do you want a snack? No, is the temperature okay?

Do you want a snack? It would take a thousand details to put everyone in your life at ease. Okay, we're going to come back to the first thing I said, but now I'm on to a second thing. So I'm just going to follow my thought, which is I just want my kids to be happy, but that swap is really powerful

because it changes that sentence for me. I just want things to be easy for my kid. And then, oh, I have a little more dissonance. Is that? Do I really want that? Yeah. Right? Yeah.

I think you're right. I think we start with saying, I just want them to be happy. I care so much about their happiness. But when you think about it like, I want my kid to feel relaxed all the time, I want my kid to feel only comfort and no distress, I don't want my child to experience the gamut of human emotion and ever be

uncomfortable, then I think we start to realize how many things we would have to do to fill in a gap that maybe we should not be filling. Oh my goodness. I mean, yeah, it feels less enticing as soon as I replace it with ease, but maybe because I know if my kid only experiences ease and comfort in their early years when their body is being wired up for the rest of their life, then they're locked into a version of life where they should always be comfortable in that ease, even in adulthood, maybe even locked into a version of life where anything even a little bit hard feels this hard just because their bodies kind of experience like, what, what is this? I've never, I've never had this before. But also, nothing even about childhood is always comfortable and easy. So the other part of

that that doesn't feel good to me is my. brain goes to, oh, is that my job, then to morph and to get ahead of something and to take away and to exit. And that, it makes me think about how exhausting it can be as a mom in modern day parenting, but maybe some of it is this, this is how I'm operating all the time. I think we feel like plugged into everyone else's nervous system. And it feels, well, for a lot of people, like, very tight and anxious and kind of and worried and noticey. And if that's, it's sort of, so then it creates two very distinct roles.

The mom as the professional happiness manager. And the child as the, as the bubble-wrapped, precious darling, who is whose job it is to feel this, to receive love as comfort. Hmm. Well, another question for you, you said, is happiness ease? Is that, is that the correct understanding of happiness or do we misunderstand it? Yeah. Happiness will, it'll make you feel relaxed, but happiness is, I think our culture thinks it's just positive feeling, but it's really many things that are going your way at once that will cause you to feel like you can settle in. And so for me, it would be, this delicious beverage, a conversation with a friend I love.

You're welcome for both. A gorgeous setup. Like things are, you feel yourself. Like, in that way, happiness is much more like math than other things. It's small, incremental, tiny things that really on the whole, if you look at it, happiness is what luck feels like. Huh. That makes me think about happenstance, though.

like is it not fully in my control? Exactly. Just a lot of things happened to lined up, happened to line up. Sorry, I didn't know that's where it came from. It comes from the Norse word hap is in happenstance. So happiness. Yeah. Happiness is what happens to us.

But wait, then I'm thinking I just want my kid to be happy is I just want to create a life for my kid where everything happens to line up for them. Yes, forever. Don't. Forever though. Eish. But, okay, your newest book and tell me about this isn't, titled happiness anyways. Happiness, right? It's not. So what do we miss on? Is there happiness,

joy? Those are different. I thought that happiness and joy were the same thing until I looked into happiness as this ease, this set of things going your way, a whole world built of small circumstances. And as someone who has had really long stretches in my life where I couldn't line things up, I spent a lot of my 30s with a stage four cancer diagnosis. Like, I've had long seasons where happiness was not always available. And so I just kind of went looking like, well, if it can't always be happiness, is there some other beautiful thing that we can really like still promise each other? Yeah.

Even when times get tough. And it turns out the joy is like a really beautiful, unusual thing. Like, if happiness is. relaxed, joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling. It'll make, it's like it startles you awake. So there's nothing relaxing about joy. In fact, some of the historical descriptions of it, I really liked the CS Lewis one. It was so funny. He said, you know it's joy when you feel like you've been stabbed with longing. And I was like stabbed. It's a little excessive. But like, it makes you feel like it's out of nowhere. You couldn't have predicted it, because it'll feel

like two things, it'll feel like a surprise of temporary wholeness. So it's not like that slow math of happiness where everything's adding up. If you get a moment of joy, it's like in that one moment, you will suddenly say, even if nothing is okay, right now it is deeply okay. I'm thinking about myself in this chair. You're like, oh, happy. Like that's happiness. And joy makes me, it's activating. Like I want to get out of the chair and go do something or be some effervescence bubbly thing. Yeah, that's right. Because it'll feel like your soul is saying yes. And what it says yes to is like, it is good.

It's my life is good. It's good to be alive. So walk me through a situation with each of these kind of operating principles. I just want my kid to be happy and I just want my kid to experience joy. Yeah. Would those lead to different frameworks, perspectives, ways of interviewing? I just want my kid to be happy would require like a full orchestra of circumstances where they're singing a whole song around this child's experience. So I just want my child to be happy. You would have to try to smooth the sharp edges of every circumstance.

Joy doesn't require a lot of things to go right for it to still come your way. I was very surprised to learn that joy doesn't just hit your dopamine and your reward system. It engages your stress system, which means that while you can't be happy and sad at the same time, you can be joyful and sad, which is a very neat trick. And I think what it feels like is you can have, say, a child who has maybe a more complicated life. They're not always experiencing school as a wonderful place, maybe friends. are great one day, bad the next. Maybe they get worried.

You can have a child who really knows that life is not always going their way and truly believe that they have an enormous capacity for joy and that no matter what they're going through, joy can still find them. Okay, two different things are pinging in my brain. Tell me this is fair. If my job as a parent is to kind of keep my kid happy, I feel like I'm in the category of needing to change conditions. Yeah, that's right.

With joy, I don't need to change conditions. I think that's a perfect description of like the control that isn't required to still know that your kid can be a deeply joyful kid. Yeah. And there are a couple because, I mean, joy is is a bit tricky because it is because it's a surprise. It's usually something you can't orchestrate because you can't surprise yourself. surprise. Have you tried? I know. It's like, yeah. It's like, it's like trying to tickle your own arm. You're like, this is boring. It does, it is something that happens to you, but you can be, you can like create a capacity for joy.

And what's funny is kids have this unbelievable capacity. Like their compass will lead them there if we can try to set up a couple. Yeah. I think like, I mean, in that case, there are maybe a couple of preconditions. Okay. But it's mostly following what they already do. Tell me about that. What kind of what we can learn from kids about joy.

Well, if the first one would be, like everyone says like, well, you have to stay in the moment. Well, what's nice about kids is like, they can't not stay in the moment anyway. Like, no one has to be like, guys, come back to the now. Come back to the now. I'm going to start saying that. I'm going to see what my eight-year-old does. That's right. He's always in the now.

It's why I doesn't want to leave. He doesn't want to, you know, anything. Exactly. I live in the anxious middle future where something might happen. Every kid has this wonderful, like, oh, oh. They'd be like drawing things and they're like just constantly making a world where they are. And what's so beautiful about it is it's that kind of person. if joy is a surprise, that kind of person is much easier to surprise.

Their head isn't in their phone. They're not totally stuck on a story of how it's going to be. Like, that kind of person is open to, like, being visited by something lovely. So I think their quality of presence is, and I do that for myself. I try really, when I'm like, I don't know, I'm, I'm humming about something. I'm really too worried. I really tried just to look at the look on my kid's face. Because there's just like a, there's just his giant froggy eyes.

And there's just an awareness of where he is that makes me, that like brings me back to myself. So I think we can like definitely follow their lead in that way. The second thing that is so amazing about kids is you kind of have to believe in joy for it to find you. because you have to be able to quiet those voices of doubt or despair about the world or about your life that says nothing will ever get better. And if you follow the lead of your kid, they will very likely believe already that the world is full of treasures for them to find. And I know that because my in-laws gave my son a metal detector, just a walking nightmare. Yeah. A beep, beat, beep walking there.

Yep. So it is full of literal treasures for him. But when I watch him ruin my backyard with debris, what I'm learning from him every time is like he'll take a little bottle tab, you know, like the end of a aluminum can. Yeah. And I'll be like, can we just throw this out? And he'll be like, Dr. Pepper, the best drink of the day.

And like, is it hoarding? Maybe. but in there is the like aliveness. It's his answer to the question, is it good to be alive. Yeah. And if I look at all the little evidence in his life, his answer is yes. Yeah. And I think having that kind of ability to be delighted is something that we lose pretty quickly as adults.

How do we lose it? I mean, who has time? There's a lot of that for joy. to do what you're going to ask me to love my life? I was planning on just living it. Thank you. Some of it is that. Some of it is. And I think it kind of almost made me sad when I was doing this joy research,

realizing how many particularly women and moms don't believe that joy is for them, they really don't. Like they would do anything to make their kids experience a beautiful moment. Yeah. They're going to run around screaming about, poor memories until they die. They're going to buy expensive concert tickets a million miles away. For an artist they don't like.

That's to be honest. Very basic. To be like a Ramada Inn with three other people's children. It's like it's really true. Anything for other people. Yeah. But if you ask them what lights you up? What brings you delight?

It will, nothing will come to mind. And that's because. it's been a long time since we even just wondered if that was something we should expect from our a day, a week, a year of life. Yeah. Aren't we just like treating life like a project we're trying to get done instead of wondering, like, but is it good for me just to feel this alive? And there's something about your description of joy versus happiness that.

that makes me feel more hopeful about getting that feeling back because you're saying it doesn't have to be so holistic. You don't have to do stuff that lights you up all the time. Don't worry people. But it does feel like, oh, so to have that all the time, it feels intimidating. And I wonder if that's where the selfish things, oh, so my life, even with all my kids, is just about me. And, you know, that's not even what you're saying.

You're talking about the capacity to have moments, to be surprised by moments, to have a magnet for something that lights you. you up that activates you, not in the anxious way we all get activated, but in a, that feels good, I feel alive way. Because, I mean, our desire to make it into horrible homework that we're already feeling out is very strong. Yeah. That's our optimized culture.

Yeah. But I mean, that's, I think that's the, that's probably the last and most important thing kids teach us about joy is like you, a child will, will not optimize. Like, if you ever seen them put shoes away, you. You know, like, they can't. They won't. I was going to say, when have you seen them but shoes away? What are you doing right in your house? If you try to watch them for 45 minutes. I, it is this thing that we have in us now in our culture where we have metrics we're measuring ourselves up against and failing. I was looking for my aura ring when I was doing that. That's like we are we're trying to make ourselves into homework every day of our lives. But joy is not homework. And you can fully let go of. the idea that you have to find joy because it will find you. You just have to truly believe that you just living is a beautiful thing. You're just, aliveness and eyes on the world is already enough. But hey, now that we're thinking about it, aren't there some things, some particular

color blue, some way your kid laughs, that like you just, you want to like cherish in a way that opens up more and more and more space in your tired heart. That I would love for moms. And do you feel like no one couldn't prescribe you how to get that? Like your barometer of that feeling is the only thing. What gives someone else joy is not necessarily going to be the same thing for someone else. When I look back at some of the worst moments of my life, like in the hospital, getting a diagnosis that I thought I was not going to live through that Christmas to the summer. Like the end of everything I loved, I still had bizarre, beautiful moments of joy. And like, I would have told you that that's impossible.

That's like, I'm not that good of a person. I can't engineer that. And I, you know, I am. Are you thinking about one now? There was just like I felt so, when you're, that sick, nothing can be okay, right? Anything anyone says just isn't that true. Like, of course it will be horrible. Of course it will be painful. Like, I, the story is, well, nothing will ever be good again. And, but then for a moment, like, I felt deeply whole, like, loved, loved by other people,

loved by God, just, like, loved. It was like, but it was like a little, it was like a gift. It was like a and it came from outside myself. I couldn't have made it up. And then I felt, and I think this is the piece that I just think is so like important right now is I felt carried by it because it like gives us strength

to feel whole. And so if you're going through a horrible time, like I know it feels like we always have to crawl back out of the hole, crawl or way back to happiness, but like just knowing that like something as beautiful and temperate as joy can come find you in the dark and somehow convince a terrified and scared person that like their life is still somehow deeply meaningful and beautiful. Like I'm I'm so grateful I can know that we can all have that. And like kids can have that. We can have that at any stage of our life. And I just, I know despair feels very

allowed for people, especially when they're tired and they just wish, like, no, no, no, just let me take care of everyone's needs and then we're going to be okay. And if it can't be like that, maybe we can renew a belief that the best parts of life are not going to skip you and go find somebody else with better luck and more money. They can still, they can still pick you out of a lineup and convince you that your life is beautiful. There are things that bold. block our potential for joy, even if there aren't things that give us joy. Yeah. I think huge joy blockers are, one is, is our deep resentments. And I would love it if women felt very comfortable talking about their resentments. Yeah. Because, I mean, it took me halfway through a book about

joy to be like, am I very resentful? Were you? Yes. Yes. About the amount of the amount of out of happiness I've created for other people? Yeah. Pretty pissed off. How much happiness have I created? Your language was interesting that. You didn't say how much joy. So you're saying,

am I a kind of condition creator for so many other people that it's blocked my ability to experience joy? That's the perfect way to put it. That is exactly how I felt. And I did not realize that I was, there was that much sort of just calciful.

frustration, especially because I had dug my way out of a tough situation and then tried to make it not just good for other people, easy for other people. What do you mean? I mean, every, I'll say this lovingly, every man in my life will never go without a snack. You know, I had to call myself on it the other day when I realized I was opening chip bags for men on airplanes if they looked like my dad. Wow. And I was like, no, ma'am.

Hold on. This is old. This is very old. My therapist would tell me to pause here. This is going straight to therapy. Hold on a second. This stranger looked so happy. I looked so surprised.

I was like, and there's something wrong with me. The amount of comfort that I'm very comfortable creating for the people around me is just is so ingrained. I'm so wired into everybody else's hopes and needs. You're good at it. So good at it. Let's make it a compliment. Yeah, exactly.

I was like, I will die of empathy. I will die this way. Yeah. But very practically, how do you unwind that or if it's in the name of trying to preserve conditions for joy to reach you? Yeah. What's like a decision point? Like what I feel like someone's listening like stop opening chip bags. Is that what Kate, is that what I should do?

Is that the thing? Yes, definitely that. Okay. But also what I did was I made. a list of my resentments. I made it with my best friend. We thought it was hilarious, but it was actually quite deep because it is. Like, when you, when you can hear the stories that you're telling, this is, we started to create like rules for how to create this list. And one is just write down everything. Don't, don't, don't, any moment that changed you, scarred you,

you wish it could be another way. Don't make it pretty. Don't make a lesson. No. Name names. someone didn't hurt you in general, it was Linda. Yep. And this is just for you. Yeah. Sorry any Linda's out there, but you've been named a lot. Okay, write it down. Don't make it pretty.

Just name the thing. Because in an effort to spare our imagined listener, we usually won't say what it cost us. And if we want to get to a place of like, I think emotional openness first, maybe at least know that at some point you count the cost. And I, when I would kind of miss out on stories, I'd call my best friend. Did she be like, let's not forget the number four. So I made a big fat list. I found in looking at it that I could tell almost immediately that there were things that I needed a little, that I wanted to figure out a way through so that it wasn't quite so painful anymore. And a lot of it is stuff you can't change. Like I was very badly.

misdiagnosed and treated poorly in the medical system. So there's a bunch of stories like that. Mm-hmm. I'm thinking about someone listening who thinks I was, I never received a cancer diagnosis. Yeah. Is that is that the level it has to be to count? So what counts for this list? Can you be really practical? There and problems don't have to be super problemy to be really important in the way that it changed your life. I think especially when it comes to like, does this count? If you find yourself repeating that story more than once or twice, it is very likely that there's something unheeled about that

that is likely to make it difficult for you to believe that good and lovely things are still going to come your way. And so fair to say, if you're wondering if it counts, just experiment with it counting. Write it down. Yeah. Okay. I think that's right. Take yourself seriously.

I don't think women believe themselves. That's right. So write it down and then just see. Do you believe that it cost you? Because if it did, it did. I mean, I just want to pause on that for a second. I always think the most confidence building words you can ever say to a kid or just, I believe you. That is what confidence is.

It's believing your own experience, right? And I don't think we were born not believing, not believing ourselves. but it was snatched, you know. That's good. Yeah. I feel like at the end of the day, if I think to myself, because I happy were my kids happy.

Yeah. I'm oriented toward kind of the negative, toward the no, because any moment of like not happiness becomes proof that, oh, I guess I wasn't happy. And I feel like the opposite of joy, where like, oh, was there? Because joy is momentary anyway.

Were there moments of joy? Like, oh, yes, yes, yes. It's so much easier to get to the affirmation. about joy than it is about happiness. I totally agree. And I think it's also then such a relief to know that like, wasn't that big of a deal. I didn't have to do very much for it to happen.

Yeah, exactly. I wasn't a better person. I'm fine, for the record. Not great. And joy still happens to me all the time. Yeah. And, you know, like I was on this little trip with my family this weekend. And it was, it was hot.

There were a lot of non-orchestrated moments of family togetherness I didn't enjoy. Yeah. But I started doing this ridiculous thing where I look over at my husband and a historical site and I realize he doesn't know where we are. It doesn't know your world's biggest pistachio. Well, also like we're at Versailles and he's like, who's Napoleon? And then I'm like, my desire to make fun of him is so strong. But instead, what I started to do is buy the like four kids who's Napoleon book at the gift shop. And what we do is we just do dramatic readings.

And now we're all in on the joke because now I'm like, dude, I don't even really know that much about Versa. Wherever we are, I don't even know. Yeah. So we were at the Alamo this weekend and we realized that none of us had any clue why that was important. I'm so sorry. I'm from Canada. It just was not a part of our educational process. So at dinner, we were doing a dramatic reading of what is the alamo.

And we just like, it's just endless riffing and dumb jokes on jokes. And my husband took a picture and it's just like me being ridiculous, but my son, the way he's looking at me in the picture, he is like busting up. And I know that that was like a little snapshot of a dusty, unplanned, didn't go perfectly vacation where what is the alamo ended up being like a genuine experience of joy. Yeah. So it can be small and dumb and unplanned, but what a gift to know it's small and dumb and unplanned. plant. Yeah, and I'm just thinking it's such a more hopeful question. I just think about the parents listening who we do, we end our day in bed and we kind of review our day and I think about, oh, my kid's still going through this peer issue and maybe their body's changing or they're still

hitting on the playground, whatever it is. And the presence of something hard kind of becomes proof to me that I messed it up, that I failed, that my kid's not really happy, maybe that I'm not really happy. But if I could think back and instead it's asking myself a different question, just were there moments of joy today? Like there always are, and they're always in the messy situations. They're always in the ridiculous. They're when the milk spilled and, you know, you were cleaning up and something funny happened. Or I remember one time, you know, all this dry pasta, and I can't remember which my kids just threw it.

And all of a sudden, like, oh, I guess we're having a pasta fight. And I say dry, because with mariner sauce, it wouldn't have been as, it wouldn't have been as funny in our house. But it was so joyful. That couldn't have lasted forever. You know, like, yeah, that's right. in that day, and I don't remember the exact day, I'm sure my kids fought, and I'm sure one of my kids got a bad grade in a test.

I'm sure there were unhappy moments, but at the end of the day, I'm asking myself, was there a moment of joy? And can I live in that for a moment? Yeah. It just feels so much more hopeful. I think that thought exercise is so useful to be like, it can be that there doesn't have to be a perfect day

to be a joyful day. Yes. And then the companion thought exercise, and this is just for every now and then, is to remember a really, really difficult time. And then ask yourself, was there a moment where you felt the light kind of break through? Because then the next time you feel your life bottoming out,

I always find I get this very scrambly, scared feeling like, I'm going down. And you can feel it when the bottom's dropping out on your life. But part of the panic, I hope, will somehow be slightly calmed by the knowledge that, like, wherever you go, joy will find you. Wherever you go, joy will find you. Kate, what is wrong with saying?

Everything happens for a reason. Well, it's, it's, um, it's one of those things that's very comforting to say, um, except that we don't usually know most of the reasons for why awful things happen. And it does become pretty cruel. to look at someone whose life is coming apart and be like, just so you know, I know the reason. What do kids understand about joy that adults do not? They believe that the world is full and ready to be discovered

and that there are hidden treasures everywhere for anyone with eyes to see. And that is not only a fun and ridiculous way to see the world, but you'll also find a lot of things in their pockets later that you'll have to throw out when I get to the dryer. What do you say to a parent who's realizing I have not experienced joy in a really long time? I think first acknowledging the sadness to that,

that probably meant that they brought a lot of joy to other people and that it's always a good time to rediscover the sense that your life, before you were useful to anyone, you were already good. inside, good inside, good inside. Just reading all the branding. I did not ask her to add that. We are just spirit animals, sisters.

Okay. When your son is older and someone asks him, what was your mom like when you were younger? What do you hope he says? Well, I like that he always says that I'm friends with strangers. And it's such a funny thing to say. But it's my feeling that the world is open, that somebody will always have a funny story. And that if joy is contagious, like, I am very likely to be, like, blown away by someone else's ridiculousness.

So I think it's my favorite compliment, and I hope I still get it later. You're friends with strangers. Just friends with strangers. I mean, that's how we started out. There we are. Well, thank you. You are just. You spark joy in so many and me every time I talk to you and your writing and your blessings and just your way.

So thank you for bringing so much of it. So many things stick out about that conversation to me, but the one I'll keep thinking about is that if I ask myself, are my kids happy? Are my kids happy today? I'm so oriented to think about all the ways my kids weren't happy. and then to say, no, my kids weren't happy and feel like a failure. If I ask a different question, was there a moment of joy today? It's so much easier to find the yes. It's actually so much more possible to kind of notice a moment and allow that to be meaningful

without having one moment negate everything good in the day. Now, I ask Kate to do something. You know, Kate is just so incredibly talented at writing practical every day. day blessings. And I asked her to write a blessing for our listeners, for parents who, yeah, want the best for their kids, for parents who want their kids to be happy, but maybe also want a little bit more joy in their life. And so I'm going to link to that in show notes. And Kate just has this amazing way with words. Trust me, it's going to be worth going there, clicking on it, maybe even printing it out or screenshoting it to save it. Now, let's end the way

we always do. Place your feet on the ground. Place the hand on your heart. And let's remind ourselves, even as we struggle on the outside, we remain good inside. Maybe as is right for this conversation, even as we struggle on the outside, remain capable of joy inside.

I'll see you soon.