Mary Louise Kelly

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In my experience, there’s nothing like kids getting older to remind us how it goes so fast. Yet when the time came to say goodbye to my daughter on freshman move-in day last weekend, I was grateful for the college-issued 4:30 pm deadline for parents to skedaddle. It had been a long day! I was too hot and hungry to get emotional anyway. My husband and I had sweat through our clothes, hauling duffle bags and disassembling bunk beds. I had dashed to the hardware store multiple times for thumbtacks and a plunger and whatever else came from my daughter via text:

I was her lady in waiting for the day.

Some might call it indulgent, but as the mother of a fiercely independent daughter, I relished the feeling of being needed. After all, she’s my last of three kids to leave home.

How am I doing without her? I miss her a lot. I have days where I wish I could knock on her bedroom door, get the okay to come in, and plop on her bed like I used to. I’m also elated for her. Having sent my two sons off to college in the past few years, I’ve realized that college drop-off isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of a new chapter—not only for the child, but for the parents, too.

Life transitions do that. They are sprinkled with possibility. They invite adventure and hope. They can also force us to look inward, to reevaluate our life choices. They can beget sadness and regret, a mourning over the passage of time. Whether it’s sending kids to college or witnessing parents grow old, life transitions are worth slowing down for. Otherwise we might just miss the point.

My friend Mary Louise Kelly wrote out these very issues. Her memoir It. Goes. So. Fast. is a heartfelt chronicle of her eldest child’s final year at home, the death of her father, and other curve-balls in her life that forced her to reckon with her evolving roles as a parent, mother, daughter and wife. On this very special episode of Beyond the Prescription, Mary Louise describes the emotional and physical manifestations of grief, the bittersweet moment of sending a child to college, and the heartbreak of losing a parent and ending a marriage.

It turns out that even a woman who “has it all” isn’t immune to feelings of regret and sadness over the passage of time. Mary Louise’s authentic voice provides reassurance and hope that we are all caregivers at heart, doing the best we can with the time we are given.

I hope you enjoy. Please like, comment and share the episode!

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The transcript of the episode is here!

[00:00:00] Dr. Lucy McBride: Hello, and welcome to my office. I'm Dr. Lucy McBride, and this is Beyond the Prescription, the show where I talk with my guests like I do my patients, pulling the curtain back on what it means to be healthy, redefining health as more than the absence of disease. As a primary care doctor, I've realized that patients are more than their cholesterol and their weight. We are the integrated sum of complex parts. Our stories live in our bodies. I'm here to help people tell their story and for you to imagine and potentially get healthier from the inside out. You can subscribe to my free weekly newsletter at lucymcbride.substack.com and to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get into it and go Beyond the Prescription.

[00:01:01] Today, I am thrilled to welcome Mary Louise Kelly to the podcast. Mary Louise is a journalist, author, and current co-host of NPR's All Things Considered. But perhaps her most significant title is that of mom. In fact, Mary Louise and I know each other through our sons and occasionally through the soccer field. She has written a deeply personal new memoir. It's called It Goes So Fast: The Year of No Do-Overs. It was inspired by her realization that her oldest son, James, was entering his senior year of high school and that the moments as a family under one roof were numbered and that she couldn't keep saying next year, I'll make it to his soccer games, next year I'll be more present with her kids in the book. Louise wrestles with balancing the two things she loves her family and her career. today we'll talk about what that struggle looks like mentally and physically. So Mary Louise, thank you so much for joining me today on the show.

[00:02:08] Mary Louise Kelly: Hi Lucy! It's so fun to be here and see you, like, in a forum that's not the soccer sidelines, which is where I'm usually running into you.

[00:02:17] LM: Yeah. And like you, I would be at the office seeing a patient and it would be like 3:58, the soccer game was slated to start at four. And you thought, Oh my God, how am I going to care for this person in my office and care for myself, which includes being present for my kids.

[00:02:39] MLK: Yeah. Well, and while no one's juggle is easy, I will point out you can arrange your day so that you don't see a patient from 4 whereas All Things Considered is not going to shift our national broadcast because my son has a soccer game. And so for me, the choice that became so vivid was I cannot be in two places at once, you know, Zoom, like we're talking over now, makes a lot of things possible, but I cannot anchor a national news program from the bleachers.

[00:03:09] LM: That's right.

[00:03:10] Mary: in a soccer stadium. So, something's gotta give.

[00:03:13] LM: Yeah. So this is a book about you, your family and your sons, and you put it very crisply right away early on in the book. And you say that this is a book about what happens when the things we love that define and sustain us come into conflict. So can you flesh that out and define what that means?

[00:03:38] MLK: Yeah, because I'm a mom. This was a book that I decided to write in real time. I wrote last year in real time which was my oldest son, James's senior year, because as you laid out in the intro, I realized, like, I kept thinking every year I'm going to figure out how to do my job and also show up for these soccer games or, you know substitute summer camp, substitute, you know, field trip, sleepover, whatever it was.

[00:04:06] And suddenly I was out of next year's. I was out of do overs. And so this was my story of wrestling with. You know, of the many things that are important to me and that define my life and give it purpose that the two biggest ones have been my job and being a mom. And that's been the case for 19 years.

[00:04:26] But I wanted to write a book that might speak to, you know, not everyone's a mom, not everyone has a high school senior, but I think just about every one of us has had that feeling of, I absolutely need to be in two places at the same time, and it absolutely is not possible. And, being true to this commitment I made to one thing that really matters to me means I cannot honor this other commitment to this other thing that I promised to do.

[00:04:52] And how we navigate those choices, and part of the realization as I wrote it was that I actually did okay on the big moments, you know, the really huge news stories that I needed to be there for, I was there. The really, you know, when I got a call from the emergency room, or the really critical, you know, milestones in my kids lives, I have showed up for.

[00:05:18] It's all the, the things that are less black and white, like the grey moments in the middle. The four o'clock soccer games where you think, next time I'll be there. And then the next time you think, okay, well, next time I'll be there. And suddenly it's all of those little decisions that add up and become the life that you're choosing to live. And those gray moments are the ones that are, that are harder because they slip through your fingers unless you stop and say, hang on, I need to sit with this.

[00:05:46] LM: Yeah. And there's one particular moment that I'd love you to describe for listeners where you had this difficult decision. You're in Baghdad and you've decided that two things have come into conflict, your commitment to your work and your career and your commitment to your kids. And you realize that these things are no longer sustainable. So could you talk about that moment, Mary Louise, and what that felt like specifically in your body?

[00:06:13] MLK: I, uh, at that moment was Pentagon correspondent for NPR and part of that gig involves traveling with the Defense Secretary when they go overseas and on this particular trip we were in Iraq and for a U. S. Cabinet Secretary, certainly in those years, it was not safe enough to drive a motorcade through the streets so they get moved around by helicopter and from one meeting to the next it's like a swarm of Blackhawks that's taking you around and so if you're part of. The press corps that's trailing him, you're in one of these helicopters as well, so on the day in question I'm, I'm there, I'm in Iraq, we're in full body armor and helmets and all the rest, and my phone rang, and I have to push back my helmet to, you know, get it up to my ear and try to answer it, and it's the school nurse from back here in Washington at my youngest son's nursery school. He was four years old at the time and the nurse is saying, “he's sick. Where are you? Like, when can, how quickly can you get here?” I started, I think I started laughing because I was thinking, you know, if you could see where I am lady, it's, it's not anytime soon that that's, that I'm going to be able to get to school and I'm.

[00:07:28] You know, trying to explain, and she starts shouting and says, {I don't mean to bring him home, I mean, he's really sick. He's struggling to breathe, we need to get him to a doctor or a hospital now. Where are you?” And I started trying to figure out, like, what's the time zone calculation, where's my husband, where's the babysitter, like, how can I handle this? And as I'm trying to figure it out, I lost the phone signal because we had to get in this helicopter, which is not waiting for me, and take off. I did get a phone call through to Washington and learn that he was okay. And I remember Lucy sitting all strapped in, in a Blackhawk, you know, looking down over Baghdad and thinking, what am I doing?

[00:08:15] What am I doing? Just this weight on my chest of, I love my job, I worked really hard to get here, but this is not working for my family. And that night, I remember crawling into bed, I met my deadline, filed my story, crawled into, I say bed, it was like a triple bunk bed and a trailer behind one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces was where they had the, the press corps sleeping, and I remember crawling into the bunk and just crying. And feeling not even physically pulled in too many directions, but just flattened. Like, just flattened and thinking, this isn't working and it might be time for career plan B. And several months after that, I left my job at NPR, resigned and started writing what became my first novel because I wanted to find a way to do work that would still feel meaningful and engaging, but that I would be a little bit closer than a rock the next time a call like that came in.

[00:09:20] LM: It strikes me that this memoir is not just an accounting of the facts of your life. It's really a reckoning. It almost feels like I'm in your therapy sessions, which is beautiful and a gift to the reader because. A lot of us are internally wrestling with these feelings, but we don't externalize them. And, as you and I were talking about before the show, I consider myself a storyteller as a physician in the sense that I'm not just trying to gather the data of people's cholesterol and their weight and send them along their way.

[00:09:57] I, I'm trying to elicit their story because our stories... Live in our bodies, our stories are relevant to how we feel every day. And one of the common recommendations I have for people who perhaps don't feel well and part of their not feeling well is a result of them not having adequately downloaded their interior world is to journal, to write, to try to connect the dots between who they are and how they feel. And so it strikes me as you being a varsity patient. If you were my patient, I would say, this is a great thing you did because you've really, really…

[00:10:46] MLK: Do I get a cool leather jacket with like the letter?

[00:10:48] LM: yeah, you're like the varsity patient because you have put. On paper, the interior of your brain to then look at and then begin this process that I try to help patients with, which is kind of looking at all the facts, good, bad and ugly, and then laddering up acceptance of the things we cannot change, the things we cannot control, which is the hard part, the sticky part, and then ggency, which is the holy grail, right? If we have agency over our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors, and then how we live our lives, like that is health more than having nice cholesterol levels. I mean, to me, so I guess my question to you is. What was your health like before you wrote this book? Did it change as you're writing the book and do you feel healthier having written it down and having sort of seen sober reality in your face what is going on inside you?

[00:11:55] MLK: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. One of the techniques that I deployed for my day job, anchoring for all things considered, is it's a little terrifying when you come in to broadcast from a big studio and you're thinking there can be seven, you know, several million people listening at any given moment.

[00:12:16] That's a little terrifying to think about, so you don't think about it. You think about, I'm just I'm just going to talk as though I'm talking to one person. That's all it needs to be. My voice doesn't have to, you know, project. I'm just talking to you, one person. And I tried while I was writing the book to think about that as well.

[00:12:35] I'm just talking to one person. That's all it needs to be. I mean, I am a writer. Writing is how I process the world. Putting something so personal like this out there is terrifying. And so I, I decided I'm not going to think about that. I'm just. I'm just going to write for one person. Just this is me having a conversation with a good girlfriend or with my mom, like, what do I need to tell her?

[00:13:01] What do I need to offload if I were to pick up the phone and call? And my words of encouragement to anybody thinking about this, I would totally echo your advice to, whether it's journaling, whether it's, you know, like, I think I might have a book in me. Like, I don't know if you have a book in you, you might, but just start.

[00:13:20] And there are sections that I started to write and looked at and thought, Yeah, this doesn't need to go out in the world. This can be shoved into a little ball and thrown in the trash. Nobody else needs to see it, but now that it's out of me, I'm done. I can move on and I can focus on the thing that does need to get written.

[00:13:42] And some things I would write and think, you know... This is something I'm really glad I got out of me and I think this is a letter that's overdue to someone so I'm gonna pack it up and mail it off and some I would think yeah this is a chapter like I'm gonna keep going with this and then the chapter gets added to the next chapter gets added to the next chapter and that's how you write a book one page at a time But you don't know unless you start, and I often think about it is like therapy in a way.

[00:14:11] I don't worry about starting with the whole backstory and the detail and the history. I can fill that in later. It's just, if I were to pick up the phone and call my best friend, what do I need to tell her today? Like what's on my mind? And I would start there. And then as I say, some days I would think, that was a really boring phone call. That can be deleted. But that helps me get it, you know, what my voice is and what I need to get out on the page and if that's true and real and honest, then my hope is that it will resonate with other people. And certainly was helpful to me.

[00:14:46] LM: So let me ask you specifically about the writing process. So when you're writing things down and you're kind of excavating The various corners of your mind, how did it feel to come across like a piece of data or a fact that you hadn't necessarily looked at before, like I picture like you're going around the interior of your brain, like all these neural networks and you've got a flashlight.

[00:15:11] It's like you're, you're like spelunking and you like see an area and you're like, oh, wow, I had forgotten about that kind of fact pattern. I had forgotten about that painful moment. That is true and ugly and hard. Like, what did that feel like emotionally and maybe even physically to, to come across things that you hadn't actually reckoned with before?

[00:15:34] MLK: Yeah, it's a joy. I say in the book, I'm not sure there's anywhere on this earth that I feel as content as when I am in the zone writing, have given myself space, have silenced my phone, have disconnected from Wi Fi, holed myself up in a room either before the rest of the house is awake, or, you know, just to have an hour that's just mine and let my mind just roam and write is… It's a total joy.

[00:16:04] Now, I will also say many of the mornings where it does not come and I wake up early and I'm all ready to go and I have my coffee and I sit down and stare at a blank page or stare at a paragraph and think this is awful, it's terrible, it sucks, and I can't figure out how to make it better. I often, in fact, just about every day at some point when I will end up saying, okay, enough.

[00:16:30] And I close the laptop and I push back and I go out and I'm a runner. I will go for a run, but walking does just about as well. Lace up, break a sweat. Go out and it's amazing. As soon as I'm away from my keyboard, the words unlock and they start to flow and I'm writing in my head and I will find myself. I was in a moment like that this week where I just couldn't crank out what I needed to crank out.

[00:16:58] It was not coming and I stood up and went for a long walk along the Potomac and found myself grinning like a just demented person because it was just all coming and it's so happy and then I have to when I get home, I can't stop for water, I can't say hi to anyone My children are used to this like mom is gonna be super ferociously unfriendly for 15 minutes when she comes in from a run because I have to go upstairs and download it immediately, and it's not going to be perfect prose by any means, but just the ideas and the sequencing and the gist of what I wanted to do has to go straight like into a notebook or onto my computer or I'll forget it.

[00:17:37] So that's my process. and then if I've done that, then the next morning when I wake up and show up bright and early with my coffee, feeling devoid of any ideas or creativity, there's a roadmap. There's a path. There's the messy thing that I downloaded from my walk the day before, and so there's a starting point. I have a friend who's a writer who told me his guidance was always [00:18:00] park your car facing downhill.

[00:18:02] I said, what does that mean? What does that mean? He said, it's, you know, don't write until you're finished and everything is perfect and wrapped up with the boat. Like. Stand up at the end of your writing day when you've still got three paragraphs in you and you think you know where they're going.

[00:18:18] So that when you come back the next day, it's not terrifying, you're not looking at a blank page. You're like, oh yeah, that was gonna be a great, that was a great sentence I have coming up. And I left myself, you know, a bullet point to remind me. And so I'm gonna engage. And that, to me, the hardest part is clearing the space to engage, because it's so tempting, you log on, you check your email, you're like planning your shopping list. There's always a million more urgent things than getting sentences down on a page. I have to clear that space and think, okay, this is a way in. Let's go.

[00:18:53] LM: How did putting all this on paper kind of help you have more insight into what the reckoning was really about? I mean, did you already know kind of how you're going to feel at the end of the book. Cause you kind of thought, Oh, I'm going to write down what's, what I've been talking about with my girlfriends and my mom, and you kind of wanted to share it with the world or was the process itself elucidating, did it tell you things you didn't know about your own story?

[00:19:21] MLK: Very much the latter. As I say, I really did write last year in real time, which was fairly terrifying because I'd sold the book to my publisher based on two very early chapters, and I didn't know what was going to happen in this year unfolding in real time, but I knew I was very interested in the contrast, again, to my day job, um, my day job as a broadcaster doing hard news and anchoring a nightly news program is and fascinating and intriguing and energizing and exhausting and all the rest, but it is also ephemeral. Today I will be working to put on a fabulous program for you, hopefully, on all things considered and maybe I'll get lucky and everyone will return my calls and grant me interviews and they'll all be articulate and fascinating and break news.

[00:20:15] Or maybe not, because it can go either way, but however it lands, I have to put two hours on the show, on the air tonight, and then it's done, and tomorrow I have to wake up and do it again, and the next day, and the next day, and I, I can look back at a program from three weeks ago, and it can feel like a lifetime ago, because we've been through so many news cycles, and I've done so many interviews, and You reach a point when you do that year after year after year where you're like, does anything stick?

[00:20:44] I just, I'm always on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. So part of trying to sit down and write a book was to see, well, what sticks? I'm going to reckon and put down on paper in real time. The choices I'm making, the trade-offs I'm making. And I, I wish I could tell you that I walked away with some grand epiphany. This is how you have it all and have it all at once. You know, this is the way it's done. I didn't. If anyone else out there has figured it out, please write the next book and clue us in because I sure haven't. I did one of the beautiful parts of the process was, you know, talking about as I wrote it talking about things with the boys who inevitably were experiencing things in different ways or remembered family stories in different ways and it prompted some really interesting conversations and also me aware I'm very good at beating myself up for failing to do again what is impossible, be in multiple places at once.

[00:21:53] But part of writing it when you actually set it down and think. Here's how it happened. Here's the choice I'm making. Here's what I'm doing. We're all making the best choice we can in the moment, trying. And I've, I finished the book and thought I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay. And part of that has been a process of trying to learn to be as gracious and generous and forgiving of myself as I automatically try to be with friends and family, you know, extending the benefit of the doubt, extending some grace. And I'm far less good about doing that to myself. But when you, when I actually sat and looked at the record, I thought, you know what? I've raised some great boys. They're doing okay. Almost regardless of whatever choices I make. They're fine.

[00:22:41] LM: And I know they're fine because I know your boys and, and I know you. And I think one of the hardest parts about this tension you're describing between work and home is the self flagellation, the self-doubt, the regret versus guilt, right? Regret is like, I wish I hadn't done that. And the guilt is like, oof, I feel badly emotionally because I did it.

[00:23:05] And I wonder what, like, do you have any physical manifestations of that kind of tension? I mean, for some people, it's migraine headaches. For some people, it's a tight jaw. I saw so many people in the pandemic who thought they had an ear infection when in fact, it was just really tight jaw muscles. I have patients who carry their tension in their pelvis, believe it or not.

[00:23:28] They have pain with sex because they're so tight. People, you know, have myriad health manifestations of sort of internal turmoil from high blood pressure to, you know, insomnia to the gravitational pull to alcohol. I mean, what health manifestations, if any, did you have as a result of kind of stress and internal wrestling?

[00:23:51] MLK: Well, I mean, I can't tell you how many mouth guards I've gone through cause I am the champion of teeth grinders to the point where I go in and my dentist every six months is like, are you wearing a mouth guard? Cause your teeth are ground down more. I'm like, I, I am, and I'll show a tour and I've like ground through the mouth guard, which is hard to do.

[00:24:11] But yeah, that, that apparently is my thing also. Like, I don't know if you can see the tension in my shoulders from here, but hunching over a laptop all day, every day does not do wonders for tense shoulders. I notice I try to do yoga once a week. And in tougher moments in my life and in a part of, as I wrote this last year, I also, I lost my dad and had other stuff going on in my life that was challenging.

[00:24:37] And I have had moments where on the yoga mat, you know, I've never been the strongest. I've never been the most flexible, but I always, since I was a little girl, I've had pretty good balance. I can, I can do whatever you need me to do on a balance beam. And I've had moments trying to do the simplest tree pose.

[00:24:55] And I'm falling over on the mat and I couldn't figure it out. And I thought, is this just what happens to you in your fifties? Or am I just totally out of shape after, you know, two years of either zoom yoga or not doing yoga during the pandemic. And I think, and you can tell me as the doctor, but I wonder if, you know, the mind and the heart and the body are all tied up and in moments where life has really, really slammed me and knocked me off balance, I literally can't find my balance, and I have to really think about it and reclaim it, and I have noticed that, and then life will calm down a tiny bit, or I'll push through whatever it is, and I can do tree pose again.

[00:25:38] LM: well, I think you're, I think you're exactly right. I mean, we are kind of the integrated sum of our emotional health, our mental health, our physical health, and then balance specifically is about the intricate coordination between our eyes, our brains, and then our kind of emotional state. Because, you know, the tree pose, which I'm terrible at, by the way, is, is really also about mindfulness It's about letting go and…

[00:26:10] It’s a really interesting metaphor, actually, because like when I've been able to do tree pose is when I'm not thinking about how bad I am at it and how to not fall. I'm thinking about height, you know, it's like when you distract yourself and you think about going up instead of you thinking about the literal wobbliness of your ankles.

[00:26:29] And that's a metaphor for perhaps how we can be healthier emotionally is by, you know, instead of being in the weeds of the sort of, you know, hamster wheel thoughts that we have actually zooming out and thinking broadly about what is our North Star? What is our vision? Let's think about sort of gratitude to take us away from those, you know, those sort of noisy kind of eddies of thoughts in our, in our heads.

[00:26:56] But the jaw is interesting. I mean, I see so many people who, like I said, who have jaw tension, neck tension, and that could cause headaches. It can cause high blood pressure. It can cause just stress from the discomfort itself. So maybe it's too quaint to think that like after the book, like. Your jaw liberated itself and now your neck is no longer tension.

[00:27:17] I think that would be too cute and too quaint to assume, but like, do you feel differently having read this book, having excavated your sort of internal world a little bit more, or, or do you feel like this is just a process? And, and this is another step in the journey of becoming more aware and insightful about yourself?

[00:27:38] MLK: Well, I will tell you what has surprised me, which is... There's the writing the book, which is helpful on a just, you know, daily, weekly basis in terms of being mindful about, okay, I'm going to really be mindful of navigating this year in real-time. The part that has surprised me has been the putting it out in the world.

[00:28:00] Because again, this is very personal, very vulnerable, I, you know, there have been moments where I lay awake at night in the months after I turned in the manuscript to my publisher and before it has come out into the world, moments where I thought, is anybody beyond my mother going to care? Like this is, you know, is this going to resonate for anyone beyond me?

[00:28:22] Also moments, I'm a writer, I'm happy to tell my story, but telling my story of course implicates others. You know, I don't share any deep confidences about the internal lives of my children and they read and had veto power over all of this and there were a couple of things that are not in there, because they said, “can we lose that?”

[00:28:44] And so we did. But, it's a little terrifying putting yourself out there in quite this way. And, I have been really bowled over by the reaction. It has resonated with people who are, of course, reading and hearing whatever they need to hear, whatever resonates with their lives or doesn't. But, it would appear I am far from the only person who is wrestling with trying to be true to two things, you know, in my case, it's trying to be good at my job and be a good journalist and be a good mom to my kids. And that resonates for some people. And, you know, for others, it's a very different tension or dynamic, but that it's been lovely. You know, it's nice to. Put a book out in the world and have it be well received.

[00:29:29] But beyond that, just the conversation and the solidarity, the people who absolute strangers are writing me letters about whatever is going on in their life and sharing it with me. And I read it and I'm crying and I'm thinking, thank you so much. Like that means so much to understand. I'm not alone, not alone.

[00:29:51] Like, you know, that on a certain level, but to really feel it has been a total relief. Just a total tension draining relief. Like it's okay. I put this out there and it seems to have helped a few people and that feels wonderful.

[00:30:07] LM: You're definitely not alone. And it's one of the more powerful things I can say to a patient as well, who feels ashamed about their alcohol use, embarrassed about their, you know, the fact that they haven't gotten into an exercise program, despite what I recommend, and yes, you are helping so many other people feel seen and heard. A lot of us are struggling with these same tensions, and I think it speaks to. This notion of health being about self validation, about soothing that sort of primitive urge to feel like you're okay, you're safe. And so, you know, one of the ways I try to help patients, and if you were my patient, I would, I would, I would talk about it this way as well.

[00:30:57] LM: It's like, we would talk about your night guard, we talk about your posture, we talk about, you know, we talk about your cholesterol and your blood tests, but we would also talk about the process of Accepting the things we can't change and the process of acceptance itself, which involves kind of soothing ourselves.

[00:31:17] And knowing that we are not alone and knowing we have supports and then having the courage to muster, to then lean into the parts where we have control. And that is a hard process for people, but it sounds like for you, helping other people and then writing down your own thoughts has helped you be more accepting of the choices you've made. And that's, that's like, that again is like entering the varsity space. I mean, when we think about dying and, you know, people at the end of their lives are sort of forced to reckon with the choices they made, and they may have not thought about these things in such a nuanced way, but if we can do that when we're living and when you have 50 more years on the planet as you do, and you can be accepting of the choices you made, and you can give yourself permission to be vulnerable and scared.

[00:32:12] And you can say, oh, my gosh, of course you feel that way. And then you have other people kind of in your world, in your community saying me too. And Oh, by the way, I've got your back. Like that is deeply helpful to then write the next chapter. I mean, I think of health as the ability almost to write our next chapter to the extent we have control.

[00:32:34] We don't have control over our genetics. We don't have control over some of our environmental factors. We don't have control over a whole heck of a lot, but we do have the ability to write the narrative that's rooted in facts and that is. You know, accepting of the parts we can't control, which then opens the door to this whole other space of agency.

[00:32:56] And I wonder what your next chapter is going to look like now that you have this kind of intense self-awareness that you had before, but you put on paper, you have this kind of outpouring of support for what you've been dealing with. You have the understanding you're not alone. Like, what is your next chapter going to look like for you?

[00:33:15] MLK: I don't know. I really don't know. I do know that I feel excited about it. I have always found it an interesting exercise to think of life as a, as a play. And how many acts would yours be? How, how big a cast would you need? What would your costume, budget look like, you know, all of the kind of, you can take the metaphor as, as far as you want it, but as I think about mine, I think act one is my youth, going to school, going to college, I would pack into that act as well, like meeting the man who became my husband and buying my first house and getting my first job, all of those milestones.

[00:33:54] And then act two was becoming a mom. And having kids because it so changed everything that came before. And Act two has been really tiring and quite messy. And the wardrobe budget has been consumed by diapers and then soccer uniforms. And I'll always be a mom, but the, the child, you know, being a mom of children act is coming to an end.

[00:34:19] I have, my boys are teenagers, 17 and 19 now. And Young men. And so as I face act three, I think I was quite scared. I found it quite scary as I started writing this book because there were so many unknowns and I think mostly because I was worried it would be anticlimactic. Like, how do you top getting married and buying your first house and becoming a mom?

[00:34:43] How do you top that? And I'm slower and grayer than I was in the first two acts. And is this going to be just a you know, slow curtain and fade to black, you know, at the risk of sounding overly dramatic. That's kind of what I was worried. [00:35:00] This would be boring. And I think I've reached a point where I don't know what it will look like, Lucy, exactly, but I don't think it's going to be boring.

[00:35:08] I am fully confident that I kind of know what I'm doing at this point in my life. I know what I want. I still have the energy to go after it. And I don't think it's going to be boring. I think it could be like one of the most exciting, most exciting yet. So I also, you know, to your point about that, you said something about, you know, being judgmental, and I have been judgmental about myself and others more than I would care to admit.

[00:35:40] I know, as a very young mom, I could be judgy about people making other choices than I was in terms of being all in or all out career and I have done every permutation of that from being all in in the helicopter in Baghdad to being completely at home and not working outside the home to working part time, all of it.

[00:36:02] And another lesson I take from my day job is there's usually a reason people are making the decisions they're making. Like people, you know, you can go to a part of the world you've never been to before, or a part of our country you've never been before, and it's very easy if things are different, and people seem different, and the customs are different, to be judgy about it and think, you know, this is weird. But if you stop and talk and listen to people, there's almost always a reason why they're doing the things they're doing. It almost always makes sense if you can just get a little bit of context. You may not agree with the choices they're making, or the way that... You know, things work somewhere else, but you can understand it and relate to it on a human level. And I think that's part of what this next chapter will look like for

[00:36:47] LM: Yeah, it sounds a heck of a lot, Mary Louise, like wisdom. It sounds like awareness and curiosity about other people. And then empathy, which you weren't lacking before, but it sounds like you're really trying to lean into curiosity and empathy, which like there's no harm and there's all good that comes into, there's no harm and there's only upside to being more curious and more empathetic to others and then to ourselves. I think that's sort of a liberating thing. If you, like, for example, you know, when we're thinking about hard conversations, whether it's with a spouse or a child or a friend, you know, if you lead that conversation with empathy and curiosity, like you're already setting yourself up for a productive conversation.

[00:37:39] If you lead with guns blazing and judgment. It's not going to go well. You put people on the defensive and then..

[00:37:45] MLK: Even if you win the argument, it's not going well…

[00:37:48] LM: So if you're setting yourself up for this next chapter with empathy, curiosity, and like space to kind of understand people in a more nuanced way. I am excited to see what you're going to do. I think you should write a play with like the cast and the costumes, although maybe all you want to do is. Take a nap. I don't know.

[00:38:09] MLK: I don't know. I really don't know what the next chapter will look like, but, but I think that's okay.

[00:38:14] LM: It's okay. And I think it's also not about like the what it's about the how and the approach and it sounds like right because it's like we don't know what's going to happen in our lives. You lead with those core values and your North Star is very clear, which it sounds like it is then great.

[00:38:31] Let it write itself in a way. So, Mary Louise, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for sharing some very intimate details of your life in this book. It is helping other people. It's helped me and I just can't wait to see what you do next

[00:38:48] MLK: Yay. This has been a total delight.

[00:38:55] LM: Thank you all for listening to Beyond the Prescription. Please don't forget to subscribe, like, download, and share the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you catch your podcasts. I'd be thrilled if you liked this episode to rate and review it. And if you have a comment or question, please drop us a line at info@lucymcbride.com. The views expressed on this show are entirely my own and do not constitute medical advice for individuals. That should be obtained from your personal physician.