EP18: How All Working Husbands Can Become Lead Dad Material

Interview with Lara Bazelon / Lawyer, Author, Honest Assessor of Dads

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Lara Bazelon is an attorney and author of the book Ambitious Like A Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids. Her book is about this moment in time, when we’ve come out of the pandemic where whole groups of people have been able to work from home, and that has allowed spouses to see exactly what the other one was doing and when. Listen to her thoughts on shaking off lingering stereotypes – like who’s the breadwinner and who’s the caregiver – to create better relationships and more dynamic families.

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Transcript

00;00;05;03 - 00;00;30;20
Paul Sullivan
I'm Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their parenting role. Today my guest is Laura Bazelon, attorney, author, and mother of two. She has a new book out called Ambitious Like a mother, with the subtitle Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids.

00;00;30;22 - 00;00;48;12
Paul Sullivan
But as I read about the book, I realized it's perfect for this moment in time when we come out of the pandemic, where whole groups of people have been able to work from home, and that's allowed spouses to see exactly what the other one is doing in a way. Not surprisingly, it's cause tension. When I read more, I immediately reached out.

00;00;48;12 - 00;01;01;19
Paul Sullivan
In so many ways, a company of dads stands to provide another way of being a father and husband in some of the stories. Fantastic, fascinating stories that she tells, including her own. Welcome to the Company of Dads podcast, Laura. Thanks for joining me.

00;01;01;22 - 00;01;03;22
Lara Bazelon 
Thank you so much for having me.

00;01;03;25 - 00;01;18;09
Paul Sullivan
64% of women earn more in the family or equal to the spouse. So in what percentage of those households are women still working the second shift or, doing the majority of the parenting.

00;01;18;12 - 00;01;45;01
Lara Bazelon 
The vast majority? The statistics are pretty daunting in that the second shift has not really been reduced over time. And then, of course, during the pandemic, it really metastasized and overwhelmingly a lot of the domestic responsibilities, including homeschooling, making three meals a day, plus snacks fell to the mothers. And of course, you couldn't outsource it anymore to babysitters and nannies or even grandparents because of the restrictions and the quarantine.

00;01;45;04 - 00;02;07;28
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. I mean, why why you have, you know, if you're in a position where you're able to work from home. I don't want to be too presumptuous, but you're, you know, you you're a high achiever. You have a job that allows you some flexibility. You're both there. You both have the same constraints. Why does the pandemic not work as, as a catalyst to to change this and to get dads to to step up a bit.

00;02;08;01 - 00;02;30;21
Lara Bazelon 
I was asking myself the same question. And I think it's a couple of things. Part of it is that women are socialized to believe that it's their job to really hold up the vast majority of responsibilities in the House, and that somehow we're being told that we're quote unquote, better at it. And when you really break it down, are women any better at changing a diaper or making a doctor's appointment or carpooling a kid to soccer practice?

00;02;30;22 - 00;02;50;28
Lara Bazelon 
No. And yet we're the ones who feel that we're supposed to be doing all of that. There's an interesting study that came out, and they looked at married women versus divorced and single women, and divorced and single women do a lot less housework. And the reason the authors found, was because some of the domestic labor that women did was actually performative.

00;02;50;28 - 00;03;11;07
Lara Bazelon 
They felt like they were supposed to be doing X, Y, and Z thing, even if it wasn't sort of absolutely necessary. So it wasn't that single and divorced women were living in slop and filth. It was that they didn't feel like they had to present in this very specific, curated way. So I think that's one aspect of it.

00;03;11;07 - 00;03;31;12
Lara Bazelon 
And then I think the other aspect of it, and this came out with a lot of the moms that I interviewed, is that they think that if they outsource this to the dads, it will be done differently and worse. And so they will admit to being resentful and at the same time not want to give up control because they're worried that maybe the doctor's appointment won't get made or will get made a couple of months late, or the dinner won't taste very good.

00;03;31;12 - 00;03;51;09
Lara Bazelon 
And so part of it is, I think you just have to, if you want parity, accept that there's going to be a learning curve and a lot of these more traditional heterosexual relationships, and that things aren't going to be done exactly to your standard. Hopefully they'll get better, but they probably never will be. And you're going to have to accept that if what you want is equality.

00;03;51;11 - 00;04;12;13
Paul Sullivan
I'm still kind of stuck on housework as performance art. This sounds like something that would never be in the Whitney Biennial. But I hear that. And one of the early podcasts I did was with a professor at the University of Georgia named Kristin Shockley, and she had was able to do some remarkable research during the pandemic, in which she had a data set of people who were at home, some of them who were, frontline workers.

00;04;12;13 - 00;04;32;09
Paul Sullivan
They had to go out, but they were instead of sexual couples, married with children at home. And she sort of did this screen and see, you know, which couples were the happiest. So, not surprisingly, the couples that were the most unhappy or the least happy were the ones in which, you know, one spouse did 100% of everything and also worked her job traditionally.

00;04;32;10 - 00;04;52;24
Paul Sullivan
Typically it was women, the ones that were the happiest were not the ones that had some sort of 5050 mix. It was ones where one person did the majority, and then the other person was prepared to help out when necessary. And she didn't she couldn't say if if that was the, the father, the mother. And she didn't want to, you know, take a guess.

00;04;52;26 - 00;05;04;23
Paul Sullivan
But essentially the basic point was, you know what? I try to get at it in the company of dads is sort of almost like a 70, 30 split. You know, you could have a lead mom, too, but if if that person is doing sort of 70% stuff, the other person picks up 30, you know that you pick up the slack.

00;05;04;23 - 00;05;23;11
Paul Sullivan
In the case of this woman, this professor's research, doctor Shockley's research, it was really that if one parent who was doing the majority of the work knew that she had had an outlet, knew that she had somebody who, when she had that key work call that could not be disturbed, her spouse would, really, you know, step in.

00;05;23;11 - 00;05;49;26
Paul Sullivan
And a lot of the lead dads I've talked to, they embrace the role, but they also love their calendar. And their calendar is very rigid. When you were doing it, research for your book and you're talking to women who, were able to sort of, you know, find some sort of parity or find a spouse who or partner who was able to help out and allow them to sort of do what they want to do professionally, but but not grow up, not feel overwhelmed by the second chip or grow resentful of of that spouse.

00;05;49;28 - 00;06;07;29
Paul Sullivan
What were the things that that made it work in that relationship when they talked to you about, okay, you know, I had XYZ problem with my spouse, but we had this discussion and now we've come up with, a solution so we can both fulfill our professional goals. But one of us doesn't feel like he or she is to doing all the grunt work at home.

00;06;08;02 - 00;06;26;01
Lara Bazelon 
I have a two part answer. The people who tended to be the most successful as a married couple were the people who had what I call the boring conversations. When you're in love in the early throes of a relationship and you're just so excited and you can't wait to spend the rest of your life with this person, you're not actually going to sit down and say when?

00;06;26;05 - 00;06;36;05
Lara Bazelon 
When it comes down to brass tacks and we have two kids or three kids, who's going to be doing what and where do you see yourself 5 or 10 years from now? Nobody really engages in those conversations. They're sort of.

00;06;36;10 - 00;06;47;26
Paul Sullivan
See, I did I did taking out you did as taking out the trash as performance art. I really, you know, did how did I know that that would come in handy. I'm like, that's not true.

00;06;47;28 - 00;07;07;12
Lara Bazelon 
Well, if you had, you'd be a pioneer, among other things. And so, you know, and I'm totally guilty of this. I didn't have any of those conversations with my with my now ex-husband from who my mama would be amicably divorced. But if we had, I think we would have found that we had really different expectations about how things were going to look once we became parents, which we then very rapidly did.

00;07;07;15 - 00;07;29;15
Lara Bazelon 
So the people who do the best tend to sort of at least talk it through in advance and have some idea, which isn't to say that they're locked into what they've talked about, but they they at least can sketch it out and imagine it. So that's I think, the first part of the recipe, in my opinion, for having successful parody, I think, or some degree of it, I should say.

00;07;29;15 - 00;07;48;23
Lara Bazelon 
And I think the other part of it is this idea of a seesaw marriage, which is that things can be wildly imbalanced. And I think when a lot of married people take comfort in is the idea that it's going to swing the other way at some point. So I've had some of the mothers that I've interviewed say, you know, I spent a few years not working terribly hard or working part time.

00;07;48;29 - 00;08;12;16
Lara Bazelon 
My husband worked a lot. I did a lot more of the domestic labor. Now I'm back in the workforce and my husband has picked up the slack at home. And it's sort of this understanding that there is going to be reckoning is the wrong word, because that sounds like a bad outcome. But there's going to be a reconciliation in that things move back and forth, and it isn't always going to be one way.

00;08;12;19 - 00;08;27;11
Paul Sullivan
I mean, do you think that that seesaw marriage, you think that was just luck over those couples having the discussion, like, okay, I'm going to step back for, you know, 3 or 4 years, you run with it and then we're going to equalize things later on down the road.

00;08;27;14 - 00;08;46;22
Lara Bazelon 
Normally it was the latter. They would really talk it through and say, okay, we're going to have a baby without a second child or have a third child. It's going to be a game changer for us. What is this going to look like in terms of our family unit and our family structure? And are you willing to do X, Y, and Z for me if I do that for you 3 to 5 years from now?

00;08;46;25 - 00;09;04;16
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, I was talking to a couple guys in the past weeks where they've, you know, when their kids got older, they did exactly that, like their, their wives were, were home earlier on in their wives, you know, big, big careers went back and they took a step back. And now they're there with the sort of, you know, junior high school, high school age kids.

00;09;04;16 - 00;09;24;05
Paul Sullivan
And it seems to be working well. But again, you know, they were all comfortable with it. They talked it through. My question is, when you look at, you know, you talked about it at the top of this, about sort of the models that that women have and sort of, you know, housework is performance art. We can blame the baby boomers for a lot.

00;09;24;05 - 00;09;50;14
Paul Sullivan
And we should we should blame them regularly when things go wrong and blames important and they should shoulder a lot of it. But do you think they were just particularly poor role models for us? I mean, what do we what do people do who don't have a good role model to follow or don't have the ability to sort of, you know, course correct when they realize what they're doing in the relationship isn't working or what they're doing is as parents and workers, isn't isn't working.

00;09;50;16 - 00;10;11;28
Lara Bazelon 
Well, I would love to blame the baby boomers for everything, including inclement weather, because they've left us with a climate that's on fire, a political system in complete disarray. You and I could go on and on. I think because of the way that norms were changing when they were becoming parents, they were in this really tricky situation. They were kind of caught betwixt and between.

00;10;11;28 - 00;10;42;17
Lara Bazelon 
So, I mean, my parents, I think, are a good example of this. They got married in the 60s. They did something, I think, pretty untraditional, and that my mom went to medical school and went on to have a career as a physician, while also having four children, and she was married to somebody very traditional in that while my dad was supportive of her career, he really had no interest in how our household operated, other than to understand that she was going to make sure that the train was going to run on time, and that was the model that I grew up with, which seemed pretty impossible to me.

00;10;42;23 - 00;11;05;05
Lara Bazelon 
Yeah, just the amount of responsibility and stress. I don't remember my mother ever sitting still. And then I think the other motto was more dad goes to work kind of Mad Men style. Mom stays home or works part time, or maybe volunteers at the school, and at least around me, there weren't really other role models to look at.

00;11;05;07 - 00;11;09;06
Paul Sullivan
So what do we do if we didn't? Yeah, if we didn't have this good romance, what do we do now?

00;11;09;08 - 00;11;26;10
Lara Bazelon 
I think that to some degree, we have to imagine the lives that we want for ourselves. And then and live them, even if they're wildly imperfect. Because when you don't have a template to work from, what that means is that you have to create the will, not recreate it, but actually create it because there isn't the will for you.

00;11;26;10 - 00;11;43;16
Lara Bazelon 
And so that process can be that can be stressful and laborious. But I also think it's a worthwhile enterprise. And I feel like with my own family, that's what we have slowly been trying to do in fits and starts with greater and lesser degrees of success.

00;11;43;19 - 00;12;04;25
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, if you don't mind. I mean, tell me a bit about your own story when I write about this. You know, I read it in a book. So it's no secret here, but that, you know, you had career aspirations and then husband wasn't, supportive or wasn't supportive in a way that that would have made it work. But now you just said your amicably divorced, so it seems to be, you know, it's a it's coming out okay.

00;12;04;25 - 00;12;19;21
Paul Sullivan
But that's not the outcome that anyone sets out to have when they get married. So what was the process for you and you know, would you is your ex-husband now? Is he more of a lead dad now that he has to have the kids half the time? Is he stepping up?

00;12;19;23 - 00;12;42;05
Lara Bazelon 
I'm one I'm smiling because I'm wondering what he would think of that expression. I have to run it by him. He is an extremely present parent. He has always been that way. He's a devoted dad, and he is interested in doing things that I'm not particularly interested in. Sitting through my son's endless Little League games, being maybe one thing, and watching endless baseball games on TV and things like that.

00;12;42;08 - 00;13;04;28
Lara Bazelon 
At confession, I find baseball hopelessly boring, and I know that means I'm alienating your entire audience. And he does step up and he he does absolutely pull his weight. And I think if you asked him, he would say, in the early years of the kids lives, he was working 80, 90 hour weeks at a big law firm, and he was an associate needing a lot of control over his schedule.

00;13;05;00 - 00;13;32;03
Lara Bazelon 
And now he still works a ton. But I think because he's able to do it kind of around the custody schedule, he has more flexibility to be with the children. And so I do really think that it's it's a pretty functional partnership. And it's interesting. It's not like he didn't think I was always going to work because when we met, I had already been a federal public defender, I think for 6 or 7 years.

00;13;32;03 - 00;13;47;00
Lara Bazelon 
So he knew who I was, and I worked all the time that I was very ambitious. I think he just thought once we had children I would downshift and instead I weirdly, shifted. And I'm not sure that I even could have predicted that.

00;13;47;03 - 00;14;00;02
Paul Sullivan
But and finish that thought. And this is a conversation that you didn't have when you were first married or when you first started having kids as to what people were going to do, or you had the conversation and it wasn't a satisfactory conversation.

00;14;00;05 - 00;14;20;11
Lara Bazelon 
We didn't have many conversations, in part because we we had kind of a whirlwind relationship where we fell in love and within a year we were engaged. And then shortly after that, I got pregnant with our son. So when we got married, I was already pregnant. And then I, we were parents basically almost immediately. And then two years later, we had another child.

00;14;20;11 - 00;14;42;06
Lara Bazelon 
So we're really thrown into it. And also at the same time the recession hit, which made things very dicey for us professionally for a number of years. We just had a lot of stress, and it just felt like, I mean, you know this when you have young kids, you're just underwater, barely able to acknowledge each other, sometimes in the mass of diapers and dishes and chores and endless mess.

00;14;42;06 - 00;15;00;29
Lara Bazelon 
And so I don't think that we really terribly well thought out any of the situation that we found ourselves in, other than I think by the time the second child came along, we did have this decision point where I was offered this job that I really wanted. That was in LA. We were living in San Francisco. He did not want to move to LA because his family was in San Francisco.

00;15;00;29 - 00;15;18;00
Lara Bazelon 
His job was in San Francisco. Our house was in San Francisco. That's all perfectly valid, but I didn't want to say no to the job and I didn't. So I commuted for a couple of years. Well, yeah. What was the job? It was it was running a small Innocence Project at Loyola Law School in LA.

00;15;18;03 - 00;15;18;26
Paul Sullivan
Okay.

00;15;18;29 - 00;15;36;11
Lara Bazelon 
And I really wanted to do it, so I did. And looking back, I kind of can't believe it because from Monday to Thursday, I was in Los Angeles, and I started doing that when our kids were three and one, and I did it for three years, and that's pretty unusual. And an invited, I think, a lot of judgment and it induced a lot of stress into the marriage.

00;15;36;13 - 00;15;56;18
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the people I've talked to, for a podcast is a guy named Brad Clontz, who's a financial psychiatrist. And it's a fascinating role. Essentially, he helps people with, with money problems. And he's laid out himself and, and he said it's been a lot easier. He just move to Boulder, Colorado from Hawaii.

00;15;56;18 - 00;16;22;23
Paul Sullivan
And the whole system, the whole ecosystem in Boulder is much more welcoming and open to, a man being a late dad than it was when he lived in Hawaii. But he has this premise that, you know, these sort of deep seated sort of money beliefs, forced people into roles that they may not want to do. So money and masculinity, the man as the provider that is, you know, however ridiculous maybe we may think about it, that it is today.

00;16;22;26 - 00;16;43;08
Paul Sullivan
It's been sort of drilled into the brain and it makes it more, you know, difficult for men to sort of step back. I mean, obviously, I'm not gonna make excuses here, but do you think you when you think of those, those tropes and how we, you know, end them or battle against them, some people are obviously going to be, you know, more able to do it.

00;16;43;08 - 00;17;04;15
Paul Sullivan
This was not something that particularly, affected me. My wife's always been the higher earner, and I've always been very, open about it. But I was very fulfilled for years as a New York Times columnist, when you see, you know, people getting held back from fulfilling their potential men and women in, in relationships, is it often these, these tropes, these stereotypes that hold them back?

00;17;04;15 - 00;17;21;08
Paul Sullivan
Is it more that lack of, communication? Is it, you know, just to misalign is it just sometimes people have to work a lot and, and let's let's be honest, sometimes, you know, people you don't aren't both attorneys. Sometimes people are both, you know, jobs where if both of them aren't working, you're and you're not going to pay the bills.

00;17;21;08 - 00;17;42;09
Paul Sullivan
I mean, a lot to unpack in that long with the question, but when you think about it, what are the things that, you know, how do we get past these, these, these, these stereotypes that, you know, us now in our 40s and 50s can, can live fulfilling lives. But but, you know, hopefully our kids can, you know, not, not make the same mistakes that some of us of men.

00;17;42;11 - 00;18;04;13
Lara Bazelon 
I don't think you can underestimate the power of stereotypes, particularly around associating masculinity with breadwinning. And I don't know why it is that in 2022, they still have such a sway over people. The one thing that made me optimistic among some others in researching this book is I really think that that is slowly, slowly receding as the generations get younger.

00;18;04;13 - 00;18;30;03
Lara Bazelon 
I think millennials and Gen Z folks are much less invested in that whole idea and not buying into it. And and you can just see kind of a general greater level of acceptance of all different kinds of domestic relationships and sexual partnerships, etc.. And I think that that's kind of a piece with it. But certainly for my generation, that really had this fixed hold on a lot of people where they just felt like, well, what kind of a man am I if I'm not bringing home the bacon?

00;18;30;03 - 00;19;00;17
Lara Bazelon 
Which is so reductive when you think about all the different ways in which, as you say, being a dad is enormously important significant labor, both physically, emotionally, and in a sense, financially because you're saving your family an enormous amount of money. So I don't really understand why it is that we are so slow to embrace that. And also, it seems like other industrialized Western countries have made much greater strides in throwing this stereotype off.

00;19;00;17 - 00;19;13;05
Lara Bazelon 
And we have, again, it's something about the US that can found me. We're supposed to be the best country in the world, etc. and yet we're so far behind when it comes to so many things, especially having to do with families.

00;19;13;08 - 00;19;39;10
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. You know, well, the there is a penalty if you look at the data on what women earn and what men earn, equally smart, equally well-educated, equally capable. And there's a difference we talk about often. We hear about, you know, the penalty for for motherhood, and, and what it does for promotions, what it does for, you know, sort of unconscious bias, in, you know, managers, male or female, and whether or not they promote a woman.

00;19;39;13 - 00;19;56;14
Paul Sullivan
I did a had a talk with Jamie Ladd, who's a professor at northeastern, really a woman, and she's done some research on, a penalty the dads feel they're going to face if they ask for time off. Now, if you say, hey, I'm going on my my kid's baseball game, I'm going to my kid's, ballet.

00;19;56;16 - 00;20;09;29
Paul Sullivan
That's okay. But if you say, you know what? My kid's having a hard time. I would like to just go take a walk with her, for an hour and a half, maybe get an ice cream and talk. People look at you like, you know, where's you. You're not committed to work. How can you not be committed to work?

00;20;10;02 - 00;20;28;21
Paul Sullivan
What responsibility? You know, just corporate America bear for some of these problems that we find ourselves in. And what can corporate America do, to be better so that men and women aren't, aren't penalized for wanting to have a life outside of work, for wanting to have a family and a and a good relationship.

00;20;28;24 - 00;20;50;24
Lara Bazelon 
I think corporate America bears a lot of responsibility. And I'll tell you why. I think these fortune 500 types, they set the tone in some ways for the larger culture and what we're seeing is not taking, for example, paternity leave. I mean, it's offered equally to men and women. Parent look, parent leave. Right. And when I was asked, did your ex-husband ever take any.

00;20;50;24 - 00;21;08;29
Lara Bazelon 
My answer was no, not one day. Even though he was entitled to the same amount as a woman in his law firm, it just wasn't done. And until the partners start taking leave, until they start modeling that kind of behavior, the people under them are going to feel too afraid to do it themselves. They're going to be afraid of exactly the kind of judgment that you said.

00;21;08;29 - 00;21;24;12
Lara Bazelon 
So until people who have the power and the platform and the clout step up and embrace this different way, and quite frankly, a better, healthier way of being a dad, it's going to have a harder time trickling down.

00;21;24;14 - 00;21;46;10
Paul Sullivan
Yeah, I've tried to make the argument that, you know, change starts in the middle, because if you've risen to the top of your profession, whether you're a man or a woman, you're going to suffer from confirmation bias, well known principle in behavioral economics. You can say, hey, I did it this way and it worked out. Whereas if you're that person that, you know, emerging manager, you know, formerly known as a middle manager, you're closer to those that that group that you're managing.

00;21;46;10 - 00;22;04;11
Paul Sullivan
And chances are you're at an age where if you have a family, you're going to be more empathetic to them. But it's sort of empowering those people because I just don't feel that change is going to come from the top. I mean, it's going to be those managers who are with people day in and day out and as you said, you know, set the example, you know, take parental leave.

00;22;04;11 - 00;22;33;06
Paul Sullivan
I mean, one of the bits of research that Kristen Shockley did was she looked into, you know, the average time off that men take, for, for, you know, paternity leave, for parental leave and the average and this is blows my mind. The average was one day. So like if that's. Yeah. Like I took a month off and so like if the, like, what did I do to skew the average so that it's one day, if you could give, you know, advice to people who are listening younger, you know, couples, they're trying to figure this out.

00;22;33;06 - 00;22;51;24
Paul Sullivan
Younger kids, if they're both working and, you know, they're seeking advice because maybe it's not going as smoothly as they thought it would or should. What what's some of the advice that you, you'd give them to to help bring a little more, you know, equity to their, their relationships?

00;22;51;26 - 00;23;13;26
Lara Bazelon 
I would say use the lessons that we've learned from the pandemic to your advantage, because as much death and destruction as it wrought, it also completely upended the way that we think about work. And to some degree, it did away with these artificial notions of face, time and rigid schedules. And that flexibility was a bad thing, or only for people on the mommy and daddy track.

00;23;14;04 - 00;23;36;25
Lara Bazelon 
In fact, what it showed was that under incredible stress in a virtual hellscape, parents held on and in some ways performed better and more efficiently under extremely harsh conditions. So I think the key here is to not go back. We don't want to go back to 2019 because that model was pretty inhumane. What we want to do is pivot using what we have learned.

00;23;36;25 - 00;23;56;13
Lara Bazelon 
What we have learned is that if you give people flexibility and you are humane towards them, they will perform. And what that means is we need to stop demanding that people come in five days a week, or even three days a week if they do not need to. We need to say, when someone is telling you this shift works better for me than that shift.

00;23;56;16 - 00;24;22;14
Lara Bazelon 
Okay, I understand, and I'm going to accommodate you because I know that you're a good worker and your happiness is important. And the thing that we have as workers to our advantage is that there is a tremendous labor scarcity right now. People are desperate to hire across white collar, blue collar and pink color industries. And what I've seen in the women that I've been interviewing recently in preparation for a new piece about post-pandemic life, is that people are saying, I'm going to leave if you don't give me what I want and I'm going to go somewhere else.

00;24;22;19 - 00;24;36;09
Lara Bazelon 
It's not that they're saying I quit. I'm out there saying I quit and I'm going to this other place because they're going to treat me better. And so I guess what I would say to the younger generation, who hasn't made all of my mistakes, seize on that.

00;24;36;12 - 00;24;48;11
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. That's perfect. I always like to give my my guests the last word. And that was a perfect last word. So Laura Bazelon, author of Ambitious Like a mother, thank you for being my guest on the company of Dads podcast.

00;24;48;13 - 00;24;50;22
Lara Bazelon 
I absolutely loved it. Thank you for having me.