Joni Edelman

Suffering is America’s favorite thing to do. We starve ourselves to lose weight, and we’re a success story. We don’t sleep, and we’re just getting SO MUCH DONE. We do a thousand things a day and involve our kids in a thousand activities, because somehow, in some perverted way, that makes us successful.

Sam: The first time you mentioned that you have five kids I was like WHAT THE ACTUAL. FIVE HUMANS. FIVE HUMANS CAME OUT OF YOU. Like, not at the same time, but they came out and like, that sounds painful and scary WHY DID YOU DO THAT??

A weekly trip to Walmart would end in tears — first theirs, then mine. Them pining in the toy aisle. Me saying no. Over and over. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to buy my kids whatever they wanted, it was that I couldn’t.

I don’t think anyone who has been to the spirited child parenting rodeo would call a mother who screams, “bad,” or who loses her temper, a “failure.” I think we all understand parenting is really really hard from the get go, and parenting a kid who won’t sleep, who screams and kicks and says they hate you, is its own challenge

I didn't get a lot of mothering as a child, but when I did, it was from her. She taught me how to sew, how to crochet. She taught me how to stand up for myself, to be tough. She taught me how to make fried chicken and fried okra, which I will never make, because it's fucking gross.

“I don’t even know what to say, Joni. Your baby isn’t alive.”

By baby three, well let’s just say things are a little anticlimactic, at least where furnishings are concerned. Hand me down crib. Check.

Misogyny is pervasive. And my three boys are living it all.

4. A high school government class.

Don’t most kids feel afraid to come home?