Family Proclamations: Rethinking Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality Blair Hodges

Eris Young is author of the go-to book on everything non-binary. They break down the basics of the gender binary, painting a more expansive, inclusive, and accurate picture of human identity. What is it like to be nonbinary? What challenges do people face? What about healthcare for nonbinary folks? All this and more, as we talk to Eris Young about their book, ”They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities.”

Maggie Smith wrote a poem that went viral, but that wasn't the cause of her divorce. It was just one moment in a much bigger story about infidelity, raising children, and learning to live in a haunted house. Need some divorce catharsis? Join us. 
Maggie Smith is the best-selling award-winning author of the memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. She also wrote Good Bones and Keep Moving. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 
Transcript
MAGGIE SMITH: It's like the Instagram fail where you try to make the cake based on the beautiful unicorn cake you see, and then it's like, "Nailed it!"—and it looks like it's melting off to the side. You know, no one wants to make something that doesn't become the shining image in your mind you think you're making.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith talking about her national best-selling book You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Her cake metaphor gets at some of the anxieties any author might feel, but it also works as a description of the marriage she wrote about in that book. Things started off well, with high hopes and visions of a shared future, but it turned into a Nailed It scenario when she discovered her husband's affair. Maggie Smith joins us to get real about divorce, family, patriarchy, raising kids, and more.  
 
WHAT SOME PEOPLE ASK (01:21)
 
BLAIR HODGES: Maggie Smith, welcome to Family Proclamations.
MAGGIE SMITH: Thanks for having me.
BLAIR HODGES: I thought we'd start off by having you read one of the pieces in your book, it’s called "Some People Ask," because it's short but it gives a nice overview of a lot of the things you talk about in this memoir about divorce and family, about your career, and about all kinds of things. Let's have you read that on page ten. "Some People Ask."
MAGGIE SMITH: These were my attempts at—people won't ask me these questions if I put the questions and answers in the book. Alas, that did not actually deter the questions. So this is one of them.
Some People Ask
“So, how would you describe your marriage? What happened?”
Every time someone asks me a question like this, every time someone asks about my marriage, or about my divorce experience, I pause for a moment. Inside that imperceptible pause I'm thinking about the cost of answering fully. I'm weighing it against the cost of silence. I could tell the story about the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook, the face attached to the name I googled, the name I googled written in the handwriting I'd seen my name in, and the names of our children, for years and years. I could tell them how much I've spent on lawyers, or how much I've spent on therapy, or how much I've spent on dental work from grinding my teeth in my sleep, and how many hours I sleep, which is not many, but at least if I'm only sleeping a few hours at night, then I'm only grinding my teeth a few hours a night. I could talk about how a lie is worse than whatever the lie is draped over to conceal. I could talk about what a complete mindf*ck it is to lose the shelter of your marriage, but also how expansive the view is without that shelter, how big the sky is.
“Sometimes people just grow apart,” I say. I smile, take a sip of water. Next question.
BLAIR HODGES: I love the "Some People Ask" sections. They're scattered throughout the book, and they get at questions I think a lot of divorced people run into. I think this is why folks who have been through divorce can relate so much to the book is these questions that are so familiar. What strikes me is, all that thinking in the italic text that you read, that happens in a split second. All of that calculus is so fast.
MAGGIE SMITH: It does. I mean, it has to happen fast. Because when you're on the spot—whether you're on stage at an event, or doing a podcas

Jessica Pryce believed a career at Child Protective Services would be a rewarding way to help keep kids safe. What she learned on the job completely changed her mind, as the system itself kept getting closer and closer to home. Now she's a scholar of the system and works as a public advocate to help change it for the better. 
Dr. Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her new book, Broken:Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker. Pryce earned her Master's of Social Work degree from Florida State University and a PhD from Howard University. She's currently a research professor at Florida State University’s College of Social Work. 
Transcript
JESSICA PRYCE: I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them.
BLAIR HODGES: When Jessica Pryce began working for Child Protective Services, she was shocked at some of the living conditions she encountered. She wanted children to be safe, so she worked with the courts and police to figure out who should be taken away from their parents or what parents needed to do to prove their fitness.
It was a tough job, and it got even tougher when people she personally loved got wrapped up in the system. She started to see cracks in the foundation—ways the system harmed families instead of helping them. It set her on a path to advocate for big changes.
In this episode, Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services.
There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.
FIRST DAY WITH CPS - 01:31
BLAIR HODGES: Jessica Pryce, welcome to Family Proclamations.
JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me.
BLAIR HODGES: Your book starts off right in the thick of things when you were a graduate student in social work. You'd landed this internship with Child Protective Services, CPS—this is a government agency that's tasked with protecting children from neglect and abuse. Take us to your first day in the internship when you visited the home of who you call Naomi Harden.
JESSICA PRYCE: Sure. A big part of writing this book was me trying to make sure the reader understood what happens when you get a CPS case. On my very first day I was going to meet my internship supervisor and didn't really know what to expect. As soon as I got into the office, she had a case so we were thrust out into the field to go meet this mom.
As an intern we're really supposed to observe and ask questions afterwards and take notes if we can. We weren't allowed to do any of the direct interviewing or things like that. It felt overwhelming at the time, but I still said, "Okay, I have my supervisor with me. I'll see what happens," and was bewildered by what we walked into.
BLAIR HODGES: Naomi was a woman in her late twenties. She was Black. She was a mom of three. She'd been reported for an environmental hazard. When you got in the house, how did you feel? Do you remember walking in there and kind of taking it in? What was it like?
JESSICA PRYCE: I do. It's one of those things you could never forget because I hadn't been in a house that looked like that. It looked very—you know, I’m trying to say messy, but it was it was deeper than that.
It was clear that Mom was having some sort of issue around the home because typically, as I learned on that day, environmental hazards are deeper than a messy home. It really depends on the ages of the children, and because there was an infant in the home this became a huge issue for CPS. We know what infants do. They crawl around, they get into things. So I think that was why it was a big red flag for the system to go into the home in that way. Because again, I was shocked that we got called for messy homes, b

Caregiving for aging and ill parents can be tough for anyone, but it’s even tougher when it forces you to confront longtime family dynamics of abuse. Sociologist Deborah Cohan blurs the lines between academic research on family caregiving and violence, and her own personal story about a father she calls both adoring and abusive. Her memoir is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption.

The path to becoming a parent is complicated for LGBTQ people. Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg has evidence-based advice to help make it happen, debunking stereotypes and increasing the visibility of queer families. Her work can benefit all families. Including yours.

Divorce can be a difficult process today, but it’s nothing compared to what it used to be. In the late 1800s, women from around the country had to fight for the right to separate from their husbands on their own terms. April White tells their stories and how they still impact us today in her fascinating book, ”The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.”

April White has served as an editor and writer at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine. Her historical stories have also appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine and The Atavist Magazine.