Stories We Need to Tell With Jelani Memory

You're listening to good inside with Dr. Becky. Trust me, you're not going to want to miss today's episode where I talk with Jelani Memory. We have a really powerful conversation about the impact of our upbringing and about strength in vulnerability. But first, a word from our sponsor. Hi, I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. I'm a clinical psychologist and mom of three on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children. I love translating deep thoughts about parenting into practical, actionable strategies that you can use in your home right away. One of my core beliefs is that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us in that moment. So even as we struggle and even as we are having a hard time on the outside, we remain Good inside. Today's episode is a really meaningful one, one that I know will deeply touch anyone who listens. You might want to get some tissues ready. Today I'm talking with Jelani Memory, CEO and founder of a kid's company, about and father of six. You heard that right, Six. Jelani is not only one of my most esteemed colleagues in the parenting space, he is also a friend. And I am so grateful that we've crossed paths. I've been a fan of his company long before we connected. His company's books are on all all of my kids bookshelves and have led to some really important conversations in my house. I could go on and on about Jelani and his company and his passion to connect with kids in a respectful way, but I'll let him tell you more. So let's jump in. Hi, Jelani.

Hi. It's wonderful to be here.

It is so good to have you here. I really, really mean that. I've been looking forward to connecting for a while and the day is here. So why don't we, I don't know, kind of jump in, tell me a little bit about you, kind of some things that are on your mind.

As I think about myself, whether it's how I am as a dad or professionally or my life arc, so much of it goes back to being the youngest of four kids, raised by a single mom who worked nights and drove us to school and soccer and karate and basketball and never slept and having this really strained and difficult relationship with my dad, which I didn't realize as a kid that I did. But it's had this massive impact on my life. So. Grew up in Portland, Oregon. Fun fact, Portland, Oregon's one of the whitest cities in America and as often, the only black Kid in the class, I was dealing with the fact that I didn't read very well. No dad at home. I'm the only black kid in almost an all white class. Childhood was both wonderful, I think, like it is for many children, but also really difficult. And my childhood, I think, represents the kind of resilience that kids can have without even realizing it. Grew up and sports and art was my life. And it wasn't until I reached adulthood that I really found that at all this buried trauma that I either was going to need to work on or it was going to ruin my life. Yeah.

As obviously a psychologist who likes getting to know people and likes hearing about people's past, I think there's often this idea of, okay, yeah, that thing happened, but I want to focus on, like, I want to focus on change, like I want to focus on now, which I'm a pragmatist. So I always feel like my response is, yeah, me too. Right. The reason we focus on our past is because it comes alive in our present. It's because it acts itself out. It's not just to tell the story over and over, though. I think there's value in that anyway.

Sure.

But from a practical perspective, yes. The things we don't attend to, they take over without us having any agency. That's a really powerless way to live in adulthood.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I've taken that kryptonite, if you will, and turned it into, I don't know, the check engine light or the big red beeping alarm or the flag that goes like, huh, something's happening right now that is out of proportion or disjointed from the current moment. It's probably not this situation or this person or this thing. It's probably me. And it's, you know, in my adult life, it's led me to investigate inside instead of blaming everything on everybody else and proved to be really useful. Not always easy by any stretch of the imagination. Right. Like hard to stop in the middle of a conversation and or argument with your kid and go, oh, it's not them, it's me. Even if it's your toddler. I remember just feeling like my eyes were open to go, oh, I didn't have a dad. And that has messed up my idea of what it means to be a whole person, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a father, what it means to be okay. What it means to have a model for how to live life and not being broken or overly sad about it, to be really thoughtful and to go, huh, there's probably some areas that I need to shore up or I need to investigate back into my past to go, what are things that I did to navigate that and cope? And one of those things, quite genuinely, was to collect father figures. I collected father figures very young, and I'm sure that those father figures knew what they were doing, but I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. But I was desperate for that role to be filled. And I found a bunch of really remarkable men and some women to fill that gap. And now it's like this collection of probably 15 to 20 individuals who know me, who can speak into my life, who can offer me advice and also cheer me on from the sidelines. And. And that, to me, feels like a big win in a world where you've got a young black kid growing up without a dad, and all the trauma that comes along with that, that there was a lot of folks who stepped in to mitigate the effects of that.

Well, first of all, just thank you for sharing all this with me. I really mean that. So many important things. Where was your dad? What did you know of him?

Did you.

Did you ever know him? Was he around? Were there stories? Yeah.

I mean, this will sound fictitious and really ironic if it weren't so sad, but my dad always lived a handful of miles away from us, just on the other side of town. And not only that. So most folks with estranged parents, they never see them or they run into them at the grocery store 10 years later or something like that? No, I saw my dad in the paper about every other month. Would hear about him on the news and, you know, cherry on top, strangers would come up to me, basketball games, soccer practice, coaches, teachers, and say, are you Thera Memory's son? And I'd say, yeah, I am. And they go, your dad is incredible. He has had the most remarkable impact on my life or my kid's life. And that was hard. That was really hard as a kid because, one, I idolized my dad. He was a accomplished jazz musician and arranger and band leader, not just locally, but nationally trained alongside Wynton Marsalis. He was one of the best trumpeters in the country. And he spent his time when he wasn't gigging, teaching kids how to play jazz. And so he left these massive fingerprints on all of these lives, except for his own children, and especially me. And so just making sense of that. There was the pride and the impact that my dad was making, but also that sort of like, why am I not important? Enough. And then eventually there was the anger and the resentment and the just like rage about it. When I got into my later teenage years and especially into my 20s of going like, that's wrong, I didn't deserve that and what the hell. So my dad was always around in some sense, but I never saw him. You know, no birthday presents, no cards, no random show ups. You know, I maybe saw him, I can count on my hand how many times I saw him in person throughout all of my childhood.

That really does feel like almost unbelievable. I'm just picturing this image of walking by him or even hearing these stories. Your dad is amazing. Your dad has had such a huge impact on me.

Yeah.

Is that your dad? Which is such a complicated question. Cause there's like a yes and a no answer to that for sure.

Yeah.

But I don't know why I'm picturing you in like a grocery store getting that question. And then what, like, what are you frozen there? Is your mom near you to help kind of explain an almost unexplainable situation. You just walk home, like, what, what happens next?

I don't want to say it was always a solo venture, but for the most part you learn how to answer the question really well. So when I was a kid, it was, yeah. And I would sort of share in the pride of that. Yeah, it's so cool and hyde. The, you know, I don't know him, I don't have a relationship with him. And you know, so when something's like, oh, you must be so proud, it's like, yeah, I am so proud. And then as I got older, I'd start to be a little more honest and go, yeah, but I don't, I don't really know him. I don't really have a relationship with him. And that, you know, like I'd shift, I'd shift the responsibility of that moment from me to them and, and, and that would sort of stop them in their tracks and go, oh, I had no idea. I'm so sorry. Right. And that felt good. And then when I was able to really sort of interrogate inside myself the trauma there, then I was able to be honest in a different way. And not in like a, you know, let's throw him under the bus way, but in a way where it's like, you know, hey, I, I know the thing you think you're doing with me right now, which is something I think every kid would want have their parent praised back to them, but that's not the thing that's happening. And so I would give context around that. And that became a way for folks to understand how to navigate my dad in a sensitive and thoughtful way. With me, it's only really just now. I'm 38 years old, I have six children. I won't say I'm more famous than my dad, but people know me. For me, when the name memory comes up, it's attached to me and what I've done and what I've accomplished and the legacy that I'm starting to build. And my father chose a path that was really all about him. And in that way, unknowingly, he gave me a gift that I got to see where that led all the accolades. And yet I knew it was underneath it all, which is no relationship with his kids, right? To some extent. No real integrity underneath there. And so I was able to take that same creative passion that he had that's built into me, that same desire to make and to do and to create, but to have it sit backseat to my family and to my kids and to my role as a father.

So I'm so curious to hear about this. What I feel like is this next chapter of your. Your fatherhood, right? But I want to be, like, just totally transparent. I'm having this experience inside of wondering, like, how are you speaking about this? Like, this. Like there's this, like, perfectly coherent story you have. And I'm just thinking about people listening. Me too. I'm like, wow. Like, I don't have that coherence about my, you know, kind of difficult things in my. Like, I gotta. I gotta see Jelani's therapist. Like, who is that person? That person knows what they're talking about. But really, because how are you able to talk about it this way? How are you, you know, in a way where what's so clear to me is you feel, I don't know, in the most simple way, like, it wasn't my fault, kind of like, I didn't do that. That was him, not me. And the pain of that, the despair, the way that could induce such self doubt, that's not my primary story about myself anymore.

I mean, so first thing is, as I did the work, and that's not like one or two therapy sessions or making sense of my childhood or digging into that. That's years. That's years of work and work that's still ongoing. I don't leave it off the table. Sometimes people think the process itself is the thing that saves them. And I go, not really. You can show up and just lie to your therapist or never really dig into those feelings or just not go there. That process will not save you. All those skeletons, all those things that you're just like that are just eating you up inside. They just stay there. And so I made a commitment to myself, this is senior year of high school, by the way, to just dive into the pain.

Wow.

Because I'd spent my whole entire life never touching it, never talking about it, never going there at all. And I had a pretty life changing experience where I was just like, you know what? I'm not happy living this way. I play three varsity sports and I have a pretty girlfriend and I have all the friends, and I'm a really popular kid in school and all the things. And yet I'm deeply unhappy. Why? And it was all this stuff sitting under the surface that I just kept stuffing and stuffing and stuffing. And so I decided to go. You know, I wonder what would happen if I just let myself feel it and feel it all. And it was. I mean, you want to talk about the outpouring of grief that just lasted months of just taking the cap off the bottle, and that was the start of something revolutionary for my life, was feeling the feelings that I felt. And the power of going, it's not going to kill me. Like that itself, I think was the biggest revelation was to go, I can survive feeling these things, this grief, this pain. To look at this thing in the eye and go, wow, yes, that happened. And yes, that's truly painful. And it hurts to feel these feelings. And it kind of feels like I'm gonna die, but I won't.

Let's make this more real. Feel the feelings. Because I'm imagining a listener being like, yeah. And then being like. But I don't really know what that. Like, what does that mean? Right? There are people listening here and they're thinking, yeah, I had some, you know, pretty painful stuff happen when I was growing up, but it's far away. And I know I haven't kind of opened that door, but feeling the feelings, does that mean I'm gonna be thinking about it and tell myself I'm allowed to be thinking about this? And I'm gonna be crying on my bed, I'm gonna be kind of writhing in pain. I'm gonna be talking about it to a trusted therapist or friend and watching myself kind of have all types of emotional waves inside me, like, what did it look like? What did it feel like?

So I'm going to try and give you three things that are hyper concrete. So one is feeling the feelings. Especially when you're talking about Pain or grief or sadness will mean pain will mean unpleasantness. And that's just the reality. We don't look at a kid when they fall and skin their knees to go, why are you feeling pain? We know why they're feeling pain, right? But we go, oh, my dad abandoned me when I was four, but I'm fine. It's like, are you, did you ever feel the pain about that thing? And for me, feeling the pain and getting on the other side of it was like this. Like, oh, this is why I can talk about it, this is why I can revisit it. Because the pain is, it has been felt. That doesn't mean there's no pain left. It just means the volcano of pain that I just put a stopper on my whole entire life is no longer a volcano. It's like a place that I can go visit. Like when I, when you, you go visit a gravestone and you go, I miss this person. They're gone. I'm sad, but I don't feel like I did the day they died. You know what I'm saying?

Yes.

So that's one thing. The second thing is the ability to not stop in the process. So what I find most people do, and look, I'm not immune from this either, is that folks, they have lines that they don't cross when it comes to their trauma or their pain. They just go, I don't go there. I don't talk about that, I don't visit that. In fact, I'm not even going to mention it. So that it's not a known thing that can be visited or that anybody knows that I'm not visiting it. And it's a really dangerous proposition because all you're doing is just letting that stuff live inside you, sort of rent free and tearing up the whole. It's like a house party all day long. And now we've got to do all sorts of pretendy things on the outside, right? Or blaming. It's you, it's not me. I yelled at you, son or daughter, because of you, not me. And when really it's just all that stuff living inside you. And so to remove those, here's where I stop and I don't go any further to remove those and start to venture into it again. It won't kill you, but it will be painful. And once you've done it, it gets easier to go further. So that's second thing, and I'll go really practical with the third thing for a story from my life. I had a few of those places in my life that I was like, I don't go here. One of them early on was just stuff with my dad, right? I just don't go there. I don't visit that thing. When I uncorked that. It was a lot of years of struggle to get on the other side of it. Another one was something that I had altogether repressed entirely because I never went there through all my years of therapy, I never went there. I never talked about it, never visited it, because it was so. It was like trying to touch a hot stove. You just don't do it. But it took the courage of one of my family members to admit something that had happened to them for me to realize that, oh, I'm at a waypoint here. I can either admit the same thing happened to me by the same individual, or I can keep my mouth shut. And in some ways, I realize I owe it to myself to go there now, finally and speak it aloud. Right? Which is why I'm such a big fan of stories and disclosure and honesty. Even this. Like, you know, little did you know I was going to get a free therapy session out of you by just getting to tell my story and. And see your face and have you listen. And my hope is by doing that, I get some healing, some growth, some catharsis. But somebody else listening is going to. Yeah, that happened to me, too. And I've made it to my teens and my twenties, my thirties, and I've never said anything, but if I did, it might just help me heal, it might help me grow. And not without pain, because show me a good thing that came in your life without pain. But I might not have to walk around every day in the fear of getting found out or the fear of it disrupting some normal birthday party or moment or wedding. See what I'm saying?

100%. And it just said that fear of being found out, right? I mean, you're talking about radical honesty with yourself. This, like, commitment to looking in and seeing what's there. And, you know, one of the things I know, we both care so much about parenthood, about working with kids, right? And aloneness is the biggest threat to a kid. You know, we've thrown a word, the word trauma. Traumatic events themselves are not traumatic. It's events encoded in aloneness that becomes traumatic. Because we're relational human beings, we can't process such overwhelming things by ourselves. So when something's encoded in aloneness, it inherently feels non conducive with attachment. Attachment is what drives evolution. And then we feel like it's A threat. And so, yeah, our body defends ourselves by shoving it into a closet. Except, like you said, the body doesn't lie. The body doesn't forget. It's in there. And it takes over in unexpected times and in really, really big ways. And one of the things that adults can do, it's so hard, but it's so empowering, is when even of a therapy session, we kind of say something to ourselves. Like, I am remembering, you know, this painful moment with my father that did happen. I believe myself. Not because my memory itself is so clear, but because my bodily feeling.

Yeah.

Is so visceral.

Yeah.

Now I am with that childhood memory. So it literally isn't alone anymore. It's insane. Now I'm rewiring that whole thing. Not in aloneness, but in the presence of the adult that memory never had, which happens to be me. But it's an adult that believes you. That's compassionate and that's there. And then literally the memory changes. Like, it actually shifts because you can see it and name it and tell stories about it. And now that I've connected to myself about it, I can connect to my husband, to you, to a friend. And we add connection and connection and connection to the thing where the only problem originally was the aloneness. It's just so powerful.

Yeah. I love that. And that makes me see my radical honesty, to use your words in a different light, where in part it's to not leave 8 year old Jelani all alone with those thoughts and feelings.

I'm literally tearing up, as you say that. That's exactly the image I'm thinking about for you and my own life. And it's what drives so much of my willingness. Because I don't want to say it's always interest, but it's just my willingness to have conversations with my own kids. Like, the worst thing is the aloneness. My kid noticed me and my husband arguing. That's not gonna mess my kid up. Feeling alone will. My kid heard on the news, you know, the word coronavirus. The words I don't know so and so died in a school shooting. Okay.

Whoa.

I wish they didn't hear that. You know what's worse than hearing it? Going back to his room and being alone with it. That's really overwhelming for a kid.

Yeah. You know, you're opening up all sorts of new parts of my brain, which is. I love this. One of the things that gets said again and again about our books by grownups is I wish I had this when I was a kid. And I think what they're saying is, I wish I wasn't so alone. I wish I had somebody to talk to. Even if it was just this book, there was a person across time speaking back to me and saying, I see you, I know you. I'm like you, right? And that's how we make our books. That's the passion and the vigor that we bring in the writing. It is like, I know nobody listening to this podcast knows this, but we workshop all of our books and we spend one day writing each of them. Anxiety, depression, cancer, death, being transgender, being non binary, boredom, money, all of it, okay? All these topics and we bring in somebody with an authentic story and an own voice story. They're not often a writer. Sometimes they are. And three of our team members, usually an editor, usually a designer and somebody else from the team will help craft a story together. And the thing that I, when I lead these workshops, because I sort of started them and I led the first, I don't know, 25 or so. And then now editors, you know, on our team usually lead them. They're trying to, to not have a stopping point, right? To go, oh, we don't, we don't, we don't talk about that. No, we don't go there. Like, we go there. And then they're also trying to go, and we say explicitly to the author is to go write the story that you wish your seven year old self had, those words that you wish you could hear. And then we do an exercise at the end of every workshop that is, that's so fun. That's so amazing. That's really simple. We just have the author read the book we wrote together from their voice. We do it straight up, like story time, read aloud. And we do a little editing as they go through. And they want to say a certain word, but it says another word and they want to add a sentence and those sorts of things. But the pH test, the measure of have we been successful in writing this book? Is could that have changed my life when I was a kid? And I hope, I hope that's why our books have been so impactful. Because baked into all of them, you know the ingredients. Those are the ingredients that we send them out with.

There's nothing in the world that can't be tolerated or managed when it's managed with someone who you trust and you feel, who loves you, right? In the hardest topics, I'm sure these are some of the topics that you, you know, that books about get asked about all the time. Like, like death, right? Like, this is, I Get asked this all the time. Right. Like my very young kid is asking me very intense questions about death. And is that hard to talk about? 100%. There's no easy script for that. But what's worse than talking about hard topics is wondering about hard topics and being alone. And the huge irony is also, we want our kids to wonder about things. We want them to be curious, we want them to ask questions. We want them to be change makers. And you can't suppress that when a kid is young and expect when they turn 18 for the world to feel safe to ask poignant questions. Right. It just, it just doesn't work that way.

Yeah. And our kids will, will pay attention to us and they will try and do as we do. And so if we go, ooh, we don't talk about that or not now or later, or they pick that up and they go, oh, I guess I'm not supposed to wonder about that. Or I should keep those feelings to myself 100%.

And from, you know, I always think about everything from attachment. So from an attachment perspective, a kid learns the part of me that's curious about that, that's actually non conducive with attachment. That part gets distance, not connection. And as an animal, I'm always paying attention to what gets my parents closer and what them further away. So the parts that lead to distance, I better put those parts away. Those parts are bad. They're actually then encoded in badness. Things that are encoded in aloneness get encoded in badness. That's why it's so hard to rewire. While those parts of our kids who want to know things, those are the best parts of our kids. Right. Those are the parts we want. I don't know anyone who's like, I hope my 16 year old has no questions and just takes life as it is. Like, I've never met that parent.

Right.

It just like doesn't exist. Right. So I want to get back to something because you have all these books and I hear the genesis for them and the impact of them. And I know the impact of them because I have the whole library basically in my own house long before, you know, I met you. What's the book in the collection that seven year old Jelani needed? Or is that one to come?

Two books. One was my book, a kid's book about racism. I'm not trying to like throw my childhood under the bus. My mom worked her ass off and did a fantastic job and did so much and yet left so much to be wanting. As any parent raising four Kids by themselves would and should and could and all the things, but I didn't know how to navigate. I didn't have the words for it. And that's part of. I just want my kids to have the words for racism. To know that, that weird, icky feeling to go, they're all laughing and I guess I should just, I should laugh too, but I don't want to. And it feels weird and I don't like it. Like, I wish I had the words as a kid. And then to piggyback off, that is a kid's book about shame. I sought out an illustrator to do that book and she was remarkably reluctant to do it. One, because of the topic, but two, because she was like, I'm not a writer. Like, I don't write stuff. But I was like, you can do this topic, you understand it and you know it. And it was really a labor of love for us to create that. And she did a fantastic job. Jamie Letourneau on a kid's book about shame. The reason why is I think every kid, especially me, just walk around a shame all the time. Just, just like, you know, like the sweatshirt we wear in the cold, you know, that, that, that marked so much of my childhood. The shame of being abandoned by my dad, of having him be famous and people adore him and me to have not even a whisper of a relations. The shame of being poor and like, you know, not really being able to have friends over at my house, or the shame of, you know, being the only black kid and the all white class. I mean, like, you just go on and on and on and on. And I'm convinced for all the things that don't make it from childhood to adulthood that we carry with us, shame is the one thing that stays 100% there.

Shame is a very protective feeling actually in our early years, shame is the thing. If we go back to that idea of is this part of me going to get connection or distance? Shame is such an awful feeling that it generates in our body to make us learn, yeah, don't do that again. That gets you more aloneness. So it actually comes up to protect us early on. It really is. Everything starts from a place of protection, right? So if we know some part of us is always misunderstood, is always just alone, is always ignored, is always punished, is always sent away. Ever sees the need under my anger? No one ever sees the vulnerability under my outburst. Well, it will get encoded in shame in an attempt to stop you from going back to the source and feeling that pain all over again. So that makes me think we're just. With that book. Yeah. Coming full circle. That we all have parts of us that weren't seen for what they were, who. That didn't get the connection, the words, the story that they needed. And shame is kind of the legacy of those memories until. Until we really do become that adult for those parts of us. Right. And you talking about everything with your father, I have to imagine, dramatically reduces the shame around that. You writing a book about racism dramatically reduces the shame of. In those moments that you're like, no, I'm not gonna laugh. Like, I. I know what's happening here. I have words for it.

Yeah. Yeah. And credit to my dad. He reached out to me, I must have been 32 or so, and said, son, I want to talk with you. Come over to my apartment. Which that collection of words should sound very normal for every adult kid. But it was like Santa had said, come visit the North Pole, please. And I wasn't going to go because I was like, you know, I've kind of earned my anger at this point. He doesn't deserve it. But something in me said, you know, you should just go. And I sat down and he proceeded to read. Not really read, but what felt like my mind and everything I ever needed to hear him say to make up for it all. And he apologized, which, I mean, like the way that I describe it. And genuinely, this is the way that I felt in the room. It was like an older time traveling version of me had come back in time. And it's like there's this decision you're going to make at this point and don't make this decision because it ends up poorly. And looking at my father, he was like a mirror of me. He's this sort of slightly funny, slightly witty, dry jokes, and we look a lot alike and slightly creatively obsessive, but he's like, he's in a wheelchair, he's got an oxygen mask, he's lost a limb and a few digits to diabetes, and he's broken, like, genuinely broken. And it was this great catharsis to receive both an apology and to be able to give forgiveness. And then two to go. This is not the right path to choose. He chose wrong. And I need to ensure that every day. I'm not just assuming that I'm magically different than my dad, that I will just be better, but I actually have to work at being better, that the pull of all the things that drove him will pull me too. And the more I practice, the better I'll get At not letting career get in front of my kids. I just, like, it's that simple. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And that was an amazing sort of close in a lot of ways. On the chapter of the trauma around my dad. And I got one more opportunity. Let's call it the epilogue, where I got to visit my dad when he was dying in the hospital. And I told my wife I wasn't going to go because I was like, I've already reconciled with my dad. We're good. Even then, I was like. I was like, he doesn't really deserve me showing up. He hasn't earned that right, because he hadn't. I still believe that. And she gently encouraged me a lot. And then I realized, because she was like, well, are you going to tell the kids? And I tell the kids everything. So I was like, yeah, I'm going to tell the kids. And then I realized I didn't know what to say. I didn't have a good reason. It was like this weird backstory, things where I was like, I'm going to teach them a good lesson here. But the lesson is really awful. Like, don't do things for people who don't deserve it. So I sort of rethought about it, and I go, maybe this isn't about what he deserves, but about who I am now. Even if he's a bad dad, I can actually be a good son. And that's what this moment's about. And I showed up, and it was the right thing. It was the right thing for me, and I'm so glad I did it. And he'd passed away that evening. This is literally the next day was Father's Day. So, you know, take that for what you will. And. And I got to say goodbye, you know, to my dad. As his son and however he was as a dad, I got to close that chapter. And. And for me. And I'm getting weepy here now, but as. I just literally cried and cried and cried that morning, as I found out the next day, you know, my kids just came and held me, and that was everything, you know, to sit at that place in their life was never a thing I had with my dad, but I. I kind of had it just the day before, and it represented something. And then I was doing okay as a dad, you know what I mean? And that feels great. As much as that, you know, is making me just pull my eyes out now. That's all I ever wanted was. Was to do right by my kids.

I. I have no words. I'm just Thinking about you and your kids and like, you. I mean, everything you just talked about today, you feeling the feeling of that pain that started as so much aloneness come full circle, feeling it and all of it surrounded by your kids. That's everything. Thank you for sharing all this. Thank you. I feel truly let in on your story and I feel really grateful for that. So thank you.

I think I spent so much of my life feeling and being alone that saying my story out loud as honestly as I can means I'm not. And I watch how it invites the people around me in to know me and to see me and for us to share our humanity. I mean, like, that's so true with kids, right? Every parent listening to this, every grandparent, like, think about those moments that meant the most with the kids in your life, even if they're grown adults now who have their own kids, they wanted to feel seen and heard and known, but they also wanted to see and hear and know you. And that that wasn't, you know, that can't always be. The strong together know it all, have all the right answers. I don't cry. I've got everything figured out. It's the inside of us that's just trying to find our way. And something about that I know is courageous and good and right, you know.

I have nothing left to add. So that's right. That is everything. We're gonna end on that. I don't often find myself at a loss for words, so when I do, I know I should honor that. And thank you again. I know we've alluded to it a couple times here, just for anyone who doesn't know all about your company, just, you know, give a few lines about it. How would you describe it to someone who doesn't know? And where can people find all your amazing work?

Yeah, we are a kids company about and we tell stories for kids really of all ages that we hope are the most important stories that they hear. All nonfiction ranging from empathy, systemic racism, climate change, to adventure and creativity. These big topics that we think are really important to start conversations between grownups and kids. We also have a whole podcast network of nine original shows and are always doing more. And an app, the a kids co app with content from all across our business. You can find it all@ackidsco.com and we got free stuff, we got paid stuff, we got all sorts of stuff. Come find some stories to share with the kids in your life. Thanks for having me.

This was an incredibly moving conversation and I'm so grateful, Jelani, that you let me in on what I'm sure is your most important story of all. Your own story. For all the listeners. This is another one of those conversations where it just doesn't feel right to sum things up with key takeaways. So maybe instead we can just allow ourselves to soak up this conversation, to consider how our own upbringing impacts our lives today, and to think about defining our own family values. I'll be doing some thinking about these topics myself, and I'm grateful to Jelani for sparking such important reflection. Thanks for listening to Good Inside. There are so many more strategies and tips I want to share with you. Head to goodinside.com and sign up for Good Insider, my free weekly email with scripts and strategies delivered right to your inbox. And finally, follow me on Instagram and Facebook rbeckyoodinside for a daily dose of parenting and self care ideas. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Beth Rowe and Marie Cecile Anderson, an executive produced by Erica Belsky and me, Dr. Becky, if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review it or share this episode with a friend or family member as a way to start an important conversation. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves. Even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain Good Inside.