Mama's Boys

How do boys' relationships with their mothers influence who they grow up to become? Cristen and Caroline unpack the psychology of "mama's boys" and the unique dynamics of mother-son bonding.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristin, and we'd like to welcome you to
Weird Parental Psychology Week. Here on the podcast. Today we're
talking about Mama's Boys, and Kristen and I learned in

(00:26):
reading all of these sources reading up on this topic
that you know there there is a social stigma against
Mama's Boys, but it is so it comes from like
a really deeply ingrained place that goes way back and
have some very questionable dark origins. Yeah, and not to
jump too far ahead, but the next episode we're going
to do in Weird Parental Psychology Week will be Daddy's Girls.

(00:49):
And pay attention in this episode because there will be
some similar psychoanalytic threads that run throughout both episodes. So,
when it comes to the cultural history of Mama's Boys,
when we started getting and by we I mean socially

(01:10):
began growing more mistrusting perhaps of this mother son relationship.
It seems to really ramp up in the post World
War two era with all of these changing ideas about masculinity,
the fear of men becoming feminized as they returned to
the domestic front, and also the evolution of women's roles.

(01:33):
It's really interesting to to sort of watch the evolution
of this concept as a negative thing, particularly not not
as a positive. Yeah, mom is supporting her son, and
it really stems from a lot of ideas about performing masculinity. Right,
will this boy grow up to be sort of weak
or too feminine if he loves his mom too much?

(01:55):
There were also fears about if mom was too distance,
so it's like there's no winning for mom. There were
also a lot of fears about if a close relationship
between a boy and his mother would make him grow
up to be gay. A lot of uh social fears
that were circulating around this time. That we're behind this theory,
And of course we have to mention Freud and the

(02:17):
Oedipus complex, which of course is based on the Greek
myth about Oedipus who ends up killing his father to
marry his mother, which is the fulfillment of his prophecy.
And oh no, and then Freud was like a ha,
now I have figured out all the all of the things.
So basically, the Oedipus complex is this idea that boys

(02:39):
in their early phases, are you know, developed this intense
love for their mothers are threatened by their fathers, And
if there is a sister in the house, he'll see
that she doesn't have a penis, and then he will
develop castration anxiety because he won't know why she doesn't
have a penis and will assume that it must have
been cut off. At some points he was like, oh,

(03:02):
all right, I better get my act together and stop
falling in love with my mother because my dad is
really the man of the house. And then he grows
up and I guess um transfers his love on to
someone else. That's that'll be three thousand dollars, ladies and
gentlemen for Christian's psychology class that she just gave you.

(03:23):
And the thing is, we bring up Freud these days.
It seems like as almost in like a cliche way,
but Freud Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis sort of had American
culture in a chokehold in the mid century. I mean,
we were really basing a lot of how we were

(03:45):
living our lives and understanding the dynamics of family families
in our households based on Freud. Yeah, so it's interesting
how how ingrained this whole concept of mama's boys and
mother's son relationships was in society, because if you look
back to nineteen thirty four, Vanity Fair ran an article

(04:05):
talking about Hitler being a mama's boy. And granted this
was in ninety four, this way before the war, before
the US involvement in the war, and before Hitler had
committed mess genocide. But in the same breath that Vanity
Fair talks about how Hitler weeps easily, they also talk
about how he hated his father but loved his mother

(04:27):
with a fanatic devotion, which is the same language you
see a lot of psychologists and sociologists around this time
starting to use regarding mama's boys well, and to drive
home the point about how culturally ingrained, even in thirty four,
this idea of the Oedipus complex was just take this
quote from that article. Undoubtedly Hitler grew up with a

(04:47):
very strong Oedipus complex. Almost everyone has this to some extent,
but in Hitler it was more than normally pronounced so right,
the writer was talking about how Hitler was chained to quote,
chained by an immense bond to the woman who is
the most important factor in his life and talking about
how he was driven not only by his yearnings to

(05:08):
fulfill the great historical mission that his mother basically gave him,
but subconsciously trying to prove to his then deceased father
his right to independent success and power. Oh boy, so
Hitler the ultimate mom's boy, and this podcast all the
parents listening are terrified. Well yeah, but I mean, I

(05:30):
think it's it's interesting to talk about it from this
perspective about how an American writer and an American publication
was talking about this guy in these terms, because I
think it illustrates how from the get go, being a
mom's boy was a negative. Yeah. And a little bit
after this, we have the coining of the term mom

(05:52):
is um, and we learned about this in the book
Mama's Boy, moms Um and Homophobia and Postwar American Culture
by role Van been Over Watt in two thousand twelve.
And and and it was in two that this social commentator
named Philip Wiley writes this book called Generation of Vipers,
in which he coins the term mom is um in

(06:14):
a chapter and titled Common Women and Generation of Vipers
turned out to be this surprisingly successful book and was
reprinted a bunch of times, and a lot of people
were reading it, and this particular chapter on women and
moms got a lot of attention because Wiley in it

(06:36):
attacks mothers for instilling in their sons a supposed quote
uncritical tendency toward mother worship, and he blamed technology giving
women more free time in the home that made essentially
shifted their focus from you know, taking all day to

(06:57):
clean and cook and make sure that the house was
ready for their husband when he came home to ben
overdote on their children. Right, it's it's it's his language
is dripping with misogyny. Honestly, ah, he sort of is
just blaming mothers for societies ills. And this is a snowball.
This really snowballs over the next couple of years. But

(07:17):
Wiley talks about how Mom steals from the generation of
women behind her that part of her boy's personality, which
should have become the love of a female contemporary, Mom
transmutes it into sentimentality for herself. And he even coming
full circle, compares Mom to Hitler, Like, seriously, seriously, people,

(07:41):
I bet no one knew we would be mentioning Hitler
so much. And I thought, hey, I didn't realize that either,
But just the next year in psychiatrist David Levy publishes
a study in which he catalogs all of the harmful
effects of overprotective mothers, you know, according to him, basically
everything from poor eyesight from reading too much to disobedience

(08:05):
and finickiness about food, basically placing any and all anxieties
about our sons on the mother's shoulders. Yeah, because there
isn't too much focus at the time on the mother
daughter relationship, because I mean, you don't really need to
raise strong daughters who will be independent and go out
and fend for themselves in the nineteen forties, So it's

(08:26):
all focused on the sun's And in addition to a
lot of these texts being you know, dripping with misogyny,
they're also dripping with homophobia. Because the undercurrent of most
of this fear of mom is um is that these overprotective,
you know, overly affectionate mothers are raising these boys who

(08:47):
will turn out to be gay because they associate men
being gay with femininity. And what two more terrible things
could there possibly be in American society in n I no, God,
I just wish all of America were nothing but strong,
brawny men. I'm sure that would work out really well. Well, Caroline,
we have so much more fascinating research findings to share

(09:12):
when we come right back from a quick break. But so,
in nineteen forty six, psychiatrist Edward A. Strecker blamed not
only mothers. It's not just mom's fault, it's also mom's
substitutes faults. So he said that there were all of
these people and institutions in American society that were to

(09:35):
blame for keeping men quote immature, things like weak fathers, grandmothers,
mothers in law, governesses, nurses, and school teachers, basically other women. Yeah,
and in a few week, dads, but really just other
other women. Really women are terrible. And so then the
structures I found, the structures that he blamed really interesting,

(09:57):
everything from religious fanaticism to political isolationism, the army itself,
Nazi Germany, Kristen and Imperial Japan, and on and on
and on, all of these things that are keeping men
from realizing their true masculinity. And then in ninety seven
the following year, sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and psychologist Marianna Farnum

(10:21):
ramp things up even more and they argue that women
were quote one of modern civilization's major unsolved problem, which
just makes me think about that song from the Sound
of Music. How do you solve a problem like all
of women? All of women? Yeah? Yeah, um, but yeah,
they compare. They put women on par like women, all

(10:45):
of women on par with social ills like crime, poverty,
and epidemic diseases. And they took a nice look back
and said that, hey, guys, things are really started going
downhill around the Industrial revolution to chnology coming up again technology.
And they point to good old Mary woolstone Craft because

(11:06):
they said that it was out of her quote illness
arose the ideology of feminism. Yes, she the author of
Vindication of the Rights of women. And so when they
fast forward to the nineteen forties when they were writing,
they said, the manifestation of all of these womanly induced
ills his mom, this is mom, just a horrible, horrible

(11:29):
mom who's vacuum cleaner has really cut down too much
on cleaning time exactly, because if mom were focused more
on cleaning and less on, you know, being a dissatisfied housewife,
she wouldn't make her child pay the price for her dissatisfaction.
Talking about how she's neurotic, she has penis envy, and
it's all the feminist movements fault. And so with all

(11:51):
of this commentary and academic mumbo jumbo seeping into our
cultural consciousness, you have these theories developing that are taking
the perils of mama's boys even farther from the internal
effects of you know, hampering their social and psychosexual development,

(12:14):
to then blaming mother's too close relationships to their sons
for things such as asthma, autism, and schizophrenia. But but
worst of all, of course, in in their eyes at
this time, is being gay right, And sort of the
the manifestation of all of these social anxieties about gay
people would be people like sex police, people like Joseph McCarthy, who,

(12:39):
in the same breath that he denounced communism, was also
denouncing gay people in the United States at the time.
But these anxieties became so pronounced that they started coming
through in our literature and movies and other pop culture
at the time. And that author vanden Over, who Kristen
mentioned earlier, looked at four texts in his book, and

(12:59):
they all had a dominant mother figure with what he
called a queer son Figure. They included Suddenly Last Summer,
The Grotto, Portnoise Complaint, and Psycho, and he talked about
how all four featured the Sun's sexual transgressions, everything from
homosexuality to pedophilia and cannibalism. And then he looks at

(13:20):
Psycho in particular, which came out in nineteen sixty and
points out that Norman Bates, who is the cross dressing,
mom obsessed, voyeuristic murderer character spoiler alert boiler and another
author Alexander Doughty, in his book Flaming Classics Queering the
film Canon, talks about how Norman, the character of Norman

(13:42):
Bates is understood to be perverse somehow, quote he is
the quintessential mama's boy gone horribly bad. But this incestuous
mama's boy coding is also the basis for reading Norman
as homosexual. And so there was a lot of literature
around this time, a lot of this pop culture stuff,
as in Psycho, where people were equating mama's boy being

(14:06):
a mama's boy not only with homosexuality and their fears
about that, but just like all of that being taken
to a really evil level. Well, and then there's also
the real life application of these assumptions about how, you know,
the potentially devious effects of this mother's son relationship. In
the case of the Boston Strangler in the early nineteen sixties,

(14:29):
the police were essentially basing their idea of the Boston
Strangler as this, you know, murderer who had to be
the product of an overbearing mother based on i'man sure
there were pop cultural cues going on, but what we've
just talked about this legacy, you know, for decades now
of all of these horrific theories about the mama's boy,

(14:52):
and it turns out when he was caught, his mother
didn't fit the profile at all. No, but this allowed
did terrible nous that she apparently had, and her son's
assumed obsession with her had really already infiltrated society's imagination
because keep in mind, they made a movie based off
of the Boston Stranglers, like Psychiatric Case File before he

(15:15):
was even caught. So the mama's boy guilty before proven innocent? Right?
Is that the right way? Is it? Sure? So? Thanks
to Freud and are deeply ingrained societal and securities around
this time, being a mama's boy even today is super loaded,

(15:36):
and you know, Kristen and I wanted to look into why,
and as you might imagine, a lot of it has
to do with gender norms and expectations. And this is
something that Alana Nash talks about briefly in her book
American Sweethearts teenage Girls in the twentieth century popular culture,
which focus is obviously more on girls in the idea
of the daddy's girl, which we're going to talk about

(15:58):
in our next podcast. But Nash writes, because of the
cultural insistence upon heterosexuality, and because heterosexual masculinity is popularly
imagined to forge itself through separation from feminine influence, a
boy overly identified with his mama transgresses against gender expectations. Yeah,

(16:20):
and she writes about how like being a daddy's girl
is more socially acceptable even if we do have all
of these societal assumption is tied up, and what did
daddy's girl means? It's still more socially acceptable because she says, quote,
it's a diminished female paired with a dominant male that
is socially normal quote unquote, and it's not pathologized the

(16:42):
same way that a mama's boy is. Well, and there's
a whole thing too when it comes to daddy's girls.
There's this idea that and it makes total sense that
it should be. You know, it's good for a girl
to have a solid relationship with her father because he is,
you know, the primary model of what a especially speaking

(17:03):
in heteronormative terms, the primary model of what uh, loving,
caring future mate should look like. You don't see the
same kind of thing talked about though, in terms of
mother modeling the ideal mate for her son. No, that's
what we get into arrested development territory of mother boy dances,

(17:24):
and it's horrifying. And maybe though that's because of the
fact that culturally, women as they age and become mothers,
tend to lose their sexual currency, whereas obviously, you know,
as men grow older, they can continue to procreate and
still you know, are are more sexually alluring um in

(17:46):
their older years. There's so much wrapped up in it,
and so it seems like overall, my mama's boys are
more stigmatized and have been historically stigmatized more than the
idea of a daddy's girl, which is really interesting to
compare the two. Yeah, but a lot of research, well
research and also just conversations have been happening in the

(18:07):
past couple of years about how it's really not as
bad as everybody's panicking about. Yeah, thankfully we are at
this point in the twenty one century, maybe finally moving
on just a little bit from Freud. It is a
time of it, and we will talk more about that
and more of the positive sides of this whole mama's

(18:27):
boy thing, because it is not all bad, as sons
and mothers of sons listening can at test when we
come right back from a quick break. So one woman
who got really really fed up with this whole mama's
boy stigma is New York Times contributor turned author Kate Lombardi,

(18:53):
who in two thousand twelve wrote the book on it,
the Mama's boy myth While keeping our sons close makes
them stronger, And it got a lot of people talking.
I mean, she she had a ton of press for
this book, which I think says a lot right because
she was one of the first major people to come
out and loudly proclaimed that you guys are overreacting. There

(19:15):
is nothing wrong with a mother having a close relationship
with her son. In fact, it's incredibly healthy for him.
And it also seemed like in all the articles we
read about her or by her, everything was prefaced with
kit Lombardi has a son. They're very close. But it's
not like creepy close. It's just, you know, like they're
close and it's healthy. I mean, even the fact that
that who wasn't writing over in the parenting blog over

(19:38):
the New York Times was talking about how it's unfortunate
that that that distinction even has to be made, and
that gets to the heart of why she even wrote
this book, calling it a myth in the first place,
right and writing for Time magazine, Lombardi side a study
from the journal Child Development where they found that baby

(19:59):
boy is who don't form strong attachments to their mom
end up becoming more aggressive and destructive children as they
get older. She also cites sociologist Michael Kimmel, who writes
about how when young sons are encouraged to separate prematurely
from their moms, they end up becoming anxious and carry
a fear of intimacy and betrayal into their adult years.

(20:23):
But you know, you don't hear about that talked about
the same way that you hear a woman talked about
who has quote unquote daddy issues if she is insecure, anxious,
or has a fear of intimacy. Well, that might have
to do with the fact that these ideals of hyper
masculinity are still very strong within our society. This was

(20:45):
something that Carlos Santos, professor at Arizona State University, investigated
for a study he presented to the American Psychological Association
in two thousand and ten, and he found that as
boys enter adolescents, they tend to embrace these hyper masculine
stereotypes more, being influenced mostly by culture, not by this

(21:08):
hardwiring as we often hear about. Right, and so he
says that the boys that he looked at who remained
close to their moms didn't end up acting as tough
and we're more emotionally available, and then those same boys
went on to have better rates of mental health through
middle school. And the mom in this situation is is

(21:28):
key because closeness to dad's didn't have the same effect
on the boys. And he positive that it could be
that dads are reinforcing intentionally or not reinforcing gender roles,
and that expected typical masculine behavior and so analyzing his study,
Time Magazine is talking about his findings and talks about
how these like quote unquote typical masculine traits lead men

(21:53):
to seek less medical help when it's needed, for instance.
But those boys who ended up having closer emotional connections
relationships with their mom, those relationships provided a sense of
safety and emotional security that ended up reducing stress and
fostering good health. And that makes sense because if you're
more emotionally literate, basically, if you're more willing to talk

(22:13):
about how you feel, that greatly reduces stress forming those
connections with people. Well. And there is though, one thing
in a lot of the stuff we read, particularly with
uh Mama's Boys, that maybe research just hasn't caught up
to or what, but the fact that there are a

(22:34):
growing number of families in the United States and elsewhere
where there are no moms in the house because there
are two dads. So I think that the one caution
with this kind of research, particularly when it's like, well,
you know, boys can only get this particular kind of
love and care and attention from a mother figure. They

(22:55):
can only learn this sort of you know, derive this
kind of emotional security from that softer feminine force. I
think that I take that with a grain of salt,
because I think studies have shown that two fathers can
also provide that kind of openness and caring and kindness
as well. Sure, well, this definitely this research definitely focuses

(23:17):
purely on relationships where it's a woman and a man,
and the woman is providing that softer feminine mothering nurturing
influence and the dad and the research is definitely more
stereotypical male. Yeah, he's mowing the lawn, right, He's always mow.
Why won't he hug me? Well, when we're talking about
the nature versus nurture with the whole Mama's boy thing,

(23:39):
when it comes to nurture, we have to look at
Italian culture because this is something that comes up a
lot in Mama's Boy literature, because there is even a
word in Italian for the close bond between mothers and sons,
and it is amsmo, that's right, And those men who

(24:04):
are in those super bonded relationships with mom are called
the momoni, which is Italian for mamas balls. So in
I love that there's stats on this fifty of Italian
men between the ages of thirty four were still living

(24:25):
at home compared to American men in that age group
and researchers, mom's sons, everybody. They cite the economy that
they're saving money, or they're going to school or things
like that. But back in two thousand seven, the country's
economic minister was like, I've had it. I've had it
with this thing where you live with your mom, and

(24:47):
he said it was time to quote get those big
babies out of the house. Well, and I also found
that I'm not sure what year it was, but it
was in the past couple of years that members of
the athlic Church delivered similar messages saying, Okay, MAMMONI your
mom will be there, you maybe need to get a

(25:07):
little more independent, and probably having to say the same
thing as well to the moms because the moms feed
it as well, both literally. And figured I would love
an Italian Mondica for me. But Italian psychologist Julianna Proietti
looked at why Italian mama's might be fostering this whole relationship,

(25:28):
this whole living with mom nous and she found that
the concept of mimesmo has its roots in the traditional
role of the Italian and then way back Latin woman
who often felt unfulfilled before career and divorce, we're options.
So it's like she's, you know, filling some void with
her son. Yeah, I mean that kind of that kind

(25:50):
of makes sense. It makes sense, I guess. But the
interesting thing about me mismo is that it seems to
be a trait that is still considered endearing within the culture.
Whereas if we jump back to the nineteen forties in
the US, when you do have so many moms who
were stuck at home and we're perhaps you know, you

(26:10):
pouring out their attention on their children because they had
nothing else that they could really do, no other career options, divorced,
frowned upon, etcetera. But in American culture it spirals into
this idea of mom is um right. Yeah, I wonder
what the nineteen forties psychologists. I wonder if they would
just tear their hair out if they looked at Italian

(26:31):
men and their mothers. But Italian men, though, are also
and now I'm just speaking in broad stereotype, so warning,
but it does seem like Italian men are also known
to be more outwardly hyper masculine, you know, So there,
perhaps it wasn't as much of that that fear that

(26:54):
you're becoming gentle or soft. Yeah, yeah, that a feminine panic,
the purple panic and trupport. But I I know that
I have been friends with and dated men who have
had interesting relationships with their mothers. Yeah, this point, the

(27:14):
point of this podcast was not to explain away the
fact that there can be perhaps troublesome mother son relationships
that can negatively impact their relationships with other women against
speaking head or normatively, although I'm sure that that also
can influence relationships and in gay relationships as well. Yeah,

(27:35):
Like I I dated one guy who was like almost
afraid of his mom. He was terrified about what she
would think about a lot of stuff, and that was
stressful for me, just purely for me talking from a
selfish perspective. Well, and there are also instances when some
guys are so close to their moms, not in the
sense of having to call them every day, but just

(27:58):
not being able to make many decisions on their own
without her first inserting herself in her opinion that that
could be problematic. So, not surprisingly, there are plenty of
relationship experts out there with lots of advice to give
about how to navigate those, uh, those kinds of situations
in which you're dating someone who has a parental relationship

(28:22):
that sort of becomes a third party in your relationship. Yeah,
and a lot of these columns say, hey, you know,
don't be don't be put off if he has a
relationship with his mom. I mean that's a good thing.
Says good things. If if a man can relate to
a woman in a normal, healthy way, that's good. However,
if he is like christ and said, like, you know,

(28:42):
seeking her approval for everything, her input on everything. If he,
you know, at thirty five, still goes home every week
to do laundry and get a home cooked meal, it
might be nice, though every week it can be a
lot you can buy case faces case there's some of
the advice does say like take into account his age,

(29:04):
you know, if he's twenty one versus if he's forty.
So just you know, thanks to keep in mind. Kristen
apparently really really wants men to go go eat dinner
at their mom's house all the time. No, I'm just
saying that that can also be you know, if when
parents are getting older, I have I know, people who
see their moms every weekend, like that's the thing that

(29:26):
they do. I don't and it's not, then they're perfectly
well adjusted people. Just case by case. This case by
case if it's problematic, and if it is something that
cannot that can never be canceled. For instance, you know,
if you're dating a guy and you know you want
to go to some kind of special event or have
a special day together, and it's on a day that

(29:48):
he typically goes to see his mom and there's like
no way he can ever, ever, ever cancel that, then okay,
then that might be problematic. There you go, perfect example. Well,
so I'm interested to hear from people, people who have
had ex apariences with mama's boys, or maybe you think
you're one. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, and I will say,
from at least from my anecdotal dating experience, much better

(30:11):
to have a guy who has a healthy and close
relationship with his mom than to date a guy who
hates his mom. If he hates his mom, he's it
can be challenging. It can be challenging. Parents just in
general are challenging. Yet again, this podcast triggers my fears
about having children. So keep it coming, people, let us

(30:36):
know your thoughts on Mama's voice, and yes, if you
are one, and if you have been with one or
currently with one, tell us all of your experiences, your
tips were navigating it, all of your thoughts. Mom Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages

(30:58):
to share with you right now. Well, I have a
letter here from MICHAELA about our middle Child episode. She says,
I have the pleasant double whammy of middle child syndrome
by not only being a middle but being a twin
in the middle. I have an older, younger and twin sister.

(31:21):
It doesn't get much more middle e than that. So
not only did I get my older sisters hand me
down run down car when I got my driver's license,
but I had to share it with my twin. The youngest,
of course, got a shiny new one when her turn
came around. See that resentment still shining through nearly a
decade later. I think the most interesting thing about sharing
middledom is that my twin and I have each veered

(31:42):
in opposite directions. Whereas I tend more toward the oldest child,
characteristics of being motherly and responsible. My twin tends toward
the youngest placement, with the characteristics of being sociable and
laid back. We're both definitely middle children, and my other
sisters definitely fit their placement as well. I've always been
the type to buy into the birth order dynamics. My
family is a prime example. So thanks MICHAELA. And I've

(32:06):
got a letter here from Kelly which got me so
excited when I saw it in the Stuff I've Never
Told You in box, because she was responding to our
episode a while back Antarctic Women, in which we asked
if any you Know listeners had been to Antarctica we're
working there, and she has been, so Kelly writes, I'm
playing catch up on the podcast and just got to

(32:28):
the one about the history of women in Antarctica. I
was particularly excited to hear this since I've worked in
both the Arctic and Antarctic over the course of my
MS and PhD. I've been to Antarctica four times, twice
to Palmerciation on the South America Peninsula side and twice
to McMurdo Station in the Australian New Zealand sector. Antarctica

(32:49):
will always hold a place in my heart as well
as it's where I met my husband. We were introduced
by David Attenborough, a voice of Frozen Planet and Planet Earth,
at the BBC's rap party for Frozen Planet. About a
week after we started dating, insofar as you can date
on ice, he found out he would be wintering over.
He was on ice for six more months, fourteen months

(33:10):
total for him, before we finally got to see each
other again. We've been married for a little over a
year now and it's always an adventure. I switched up
polls for my dissertation research. I'm now studying preferential chemical
weathering in front of the Greenland ice sheet. I've been
to various parts of western Greenland for the last three summers,
and I found my field work in the Arctic to

(33:30):
be a lot more logistically challenging. So that's probably because
I've been the one in charge of getting permits, making
sure we all have our gear, finding places to stay,
and just generally running the show. I have a lot
of respect for the early explorers who had to figure
out what they needed for months and have contingency plans
when something inevitably went wrong. So thanks for bringing up
the Antarctic. Well, thank you, Kelly. I love that letter.

(33:55):
I love her story. I love that she's like, oh, yeah,
you know, I'm at my husband on Antarctica or whatever, whatever, whatever,
No big deal, just Antarctica. I mean, come on, an
antarctic love story. Have David Attenborough make a make a
documentary about that? Voice it over. It's an idea. So,
if you have any letters to send to us, mom
stuff at how stuffworks dot com is our email address

(34:18):
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