The Illusion of Knowing with Lulu Miller

Lulu Miller I was very pregnant. It was summer in Virginia. This was very hot. Pregnancy felt good on me. I felt the most balanced I’d ever felt. I felt this like pride in my body that I’d never felt, ever. I think I stood up straighter. But then eight months pregnant, I’ve got this basketball tummy, really hot. And I remember I was at the pool at the YMCA in Virginia, this big giant pool. And I had this moment where I was swimming and I was like, oh, it’s so nice to be just all alone in the pool. And then I was, like, HUH, I’m not all alone! And I pictured the baby, I didn’t know it was a boy yet, but I pictured like the baby swimming in sync with me. Like I was just doing this big, slow breaststroke, like really slowly stretching my muscles. And I picture this baby in the amniotic fluid, also in fluid, like this baby tortoise or starfish, like swimming in synch with me, and I just was like, I am no longer alone…

Michael Feigelson You try to picture what it will be like. Parenthood. You read, you talk with friends, you prepare, you imagine, and then something like this happens. You’re in a gigantic pool, you think you’re alone, and then you realize, not anymore.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

But not all of that learning is about making sense of the world. Some of it is about letting go of the sense we spent our lives making up to that point.

This is Birth of a Parent. Our guest today is Lulu Miller. She’s a science journalist, co-host of Radiolab, and the author of Why Fish Don’t Exist, a book about our deep urge to organize the world and the reasons why we will inevitably fail.

In this conversation Lulu shares how motherhood and the psychedelic nature of children’s minds changed how she makes sense of the world.

Michael Feigelson In some place you wrote, when you became a mom, you suddenly found kids minds fascinating, but didn’t before necessarily. I was curious if you have recollection of what did you find fascinating and when did you have that sort of realization? What happened?

Lulu Miller Yeah, I mean, I think it was almost immediate and I knew I wanted kids, but I just didn’t have a lot of experience with them. So I think that for me that their minds, it was almost immediate. It was like watching my son crawl around on my chest and like watching where his little eyes would go and watching like his immediate trust and ease with me and like noticing what he noticed was so cool because it was so different. I remember one day, he was probably about one and I was walking him in the little snuggie thing on my chest, and there were all these flowers out and he was not looking at the flowers, he was looking at the shadows they were making underneath the window box. And his little head would turn because he saw something so cool and I kind of traced his eye contact, you know, and it wasn’t like the gorgeous flower, it wasn’t the dog, it was the shadows. And then another one was when we were still living in Virginia, so he was like six months old and our lawn had exploded overnight into having all these tall buttercups. And he was just like, he just kind of crawled over to this one buttercup and kept pushing it so it would like boing and come back. He made his own jack-in-the-box toy. He’s discovering just the simple rules of our world: shadow, buoyancy, whatever. And they’re stunning to him because I mean, I don’t know, maybe because it’s like, it works each time. It’s like you’re watching someone do math or physics or work things out and see there are these rules, these games that I can, you know, like, I dunno. And it just was, I think, trying to imagine, before there were words, trying to like imagine why are they finding something that I’ve long ago. Turned dull. Why are they finding it interesting? And just that puzzle is so interesting, trying to crack it. And then, of course, you bring in words and they’re telling you what they notice or they’re making these language mashups that are just hilarious or deep. And then that’s like a whole new level. So it’s just, I think there’s some degree of the black box of it all for so long, like where you can’t ask. So you’re just left to wonder.

Michael Feigelson Watching her son, Lulu starts to notice something. Kids are like tiny scientists running experiments all day, trying to figure out how the world works. And that sense of wondering, of not quite knowing, it feels familiar. It connects to something she’s been wrestling with for a long time.

Michael Feigelson What’s the earliest memories of wanting the world to make sense and suspecting it doesn’t?

Lulu Miller You know, I’m just trying to think about how to say it that’s, you know, like fair to everyone, because I adore my siblings and my parents and everyone is really wonderful. But there also was a lot of chaos in my house growing up, and it could be very loud and like just confusion, screaming and door slamming. And I also saw one of my sisters just treated horribly by the outside world, really bullied. And like, I obviously didn’t see the bullying, I just saw the result of someone in incredible pain and someone incredibly lonely, who I loved. And there was just this disconnect for me. It’s like, why is this person who’s so sweet being terrorized by the outside world? Why can no one in the outside world cut her a break? And I think that was one of my like fundamental questions like, wow, this place must be really cruel. Ulgh, the outside world doesn’t make sense. It is harsh. It is cruel. And we didn’t grow up with any religion. We grew up with my father emphatically all the time saying “nothing matters, there’s no point, there is no God.” He was a devout scientist, devout dogmatic atheist. And so those two things together just made me from an early age kind of like, what are we doing here? If it hurts, if people are mean to each other, if there’s no point, like what, ugh, what is this? Oh God, I had such a heat seeking missile for sadness. Like I was so trained to sadness. And so I think when I was around seven, I asked my dad “what’s the meaning of life?” And he was like, “nothing, there’s no point, there’s no plan, you’re less significant than an ant.” And he just really drove it home. And I suspected he was right, because he’s this smart scientist, and he’s very charming and seems to love life. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe if you accept that, things make sense. And so, I tried to accept it. And sometimes I can give you this great carpe diem feeling, but then on dark moments, it’s like, ooh, then what do I look for, you know? And what am I doing here? And so that was kind of like the central, you’re asking where it came from. I think that sense of like and he’d say, like, chaos, like we’re only here by accident and we’ll be gone soon, and like, we fit for now, humans, but, you know, we’ll go. And so I think this idea of like, meaninglessness, chaos, pointlessness, like that’s always been my sense of like the outside world and the gestalt of our existence. So that’s kind of where it came from, is a childhood and sort of my spiritual mentor. Who I’m still close with. I adore my dad. I still kind of think he’s right.

Michael Feigelson But she doesn’t just accept her dad’s scientific nihilism, the pointlessness and chaos, no. Instead of that, she gets pulled towards someone who’s trying to do the opposite, to impose order on a world that keeps slipping out of it. A scientist who refuses to let things stay unorganized. And for a while, he feels like someone who might’ve figured it out.

Michael Feigelson It didn’t seem to me like you just accepted it in one go because you did get kind of obsessed with the taxonomy of fish for a little while, which feels like a reaction on some level to that. Can you just talk a little bit about that fascination, maybe not to call it an obsession, and how it ended in a book.

Lulu Miller Oh, sure. It was an obsession. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Feigelson Why Fish Don’t Exist.

Lulu Miller Yeah, so I heard about this guy, a taxonomist, who was, you know, essentially somebody who tries to order the natural world. And he just had this wild story where he was very prolific. He discovered all kinds of species. He built up a collection. His first collection was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. He spent 20 more years building up a second collection. It came down in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The bottles, the fish were in with the labels on the outside. All smashed. It was literally like Genesis in reverse. The fish were all returned to the unknown. There was like this pile. And then he just keeps going and he begins the practice of sewing the label to the fish. So even if another earthquake comes, his order will never be shaken down again. And I had just heard this little detail about him on a tour of a museum. Just something about him struck me as like so foolish, like, Oh, you’re you’re, you fool, like, the natural world, chaos, is telling you that chaos will, you know, it will prevail. Lightning strike, earthquake, sure. Just something struck me as he is a metaphor for the human spirit, for how, like, we refuse to accept the chaos in which we live. We wanna make order, we wanna know, we wanna, like keep things tidy. And our work is always doomed. Like, we will never win, and yet we keep going. Like, just keep trying. So I became obsessed with him, and just the profession of taxonomy to me is this like perfect metaphor for what we humans foolishly do in the chaotic world in which we live. And yet of course they do make strides and people who try to make order help us understand the world. And so anyway, I became so obsessed with this guy. I wanted to understand what happened to him. His story takes an incredibly dark turn. His obsession with order and hierarchies got him to be a big proponent of eugenics and really did a lot to kick off the American eugenic movement, which was massive and stole the lives of tens of thousands of people. Was in certain ways, inspiration for the Nazis. Like this whole history as an American kid, I was never told. And it just made me think about my own beliefs and the journey of writing about him, it took me a long time. I was kind of researching him in the background over about a decade as I had other jobs and finally wrote this book, which ended up being kind of a meditation on our desire to find order and chaos and when that’s dangerous and when it’s helpful. And at the very end of it, it kind of became a celebration of doubt and uncertainty and sort of saying, even though that’s scary, I think there’s real power when you can try to let go of that quest. And so that’s sort of my belief, but I’m not always good at doing it.

Michael Feigelson So after years of following this story, after a decade long crusade against certainty, she publishes her book, Why Fish Don’t Exist, a celebration of doubt. A call to stop trying so hard to make sense, which is all nice and poetic until it’s the middle of the night, your child is screaming and you have no idea why.

Michael Feigelson Okay, so you’re trained professionally in questioning certainty, sounds like, over a decade plus at home.

Lulu Miller Yeah, and I’ve been, you know, a science reporter for 20 years. So your questions. Yeah. Questioning is what I do. I ask questions.

Michael Feigelson And then you’re, you’re born as mama.

Lulu Miller That I’m born as a mama.

Michael Feigelson And which I would say is special forces training in both not knowing and desperately wanting to know, especially when they can’t talk. And then you have this experience of Jude’s first night terror.

Lulu Miller Yes.

Michael Feigelson Which to me, reminded me of this time when Mila was sick and we couldn’t figure it out, but it feels like a real test in not knowing and wanting to know. So I wanted to ask if you could explain what happened, but what did that experience teach you about how to handle this tension between wanting to know and not knowing?

Lulu Miller Yeah. So it was the strangest thing. He was about a year and a half and we went and stayed at my wife’s parents’ house for a night and he woke up at around like 11 and he was just like wailing, like something was wrong. You know, new level of terror, anguish, like an eardrum has popped, some kind of excruciating pain or fear. And so I ran right up and I cradled him, I tried to nurse him, nothing. Like my presence, my milk, like nothing, nothing was working. And that was the biggest alarm bell because I had always been able to soothe him. You get me there and he’s soothed, you know, there’d been times we’d let him cry, but like if I appeared, the tears would be gone. The tears weren’t gone. It was so freaky. And finally, after about like 25 minutes of this, which is a long time when a being is just shrieking, he kind of eventually like did that like shaky, like starting to breathe deeply, but you know that little post tear deep breaths and started to finally calm down. And then the next morning he was totally fine, no sickness, like nothing had ever happened. It was just this weird, what was that? Like what had happened? And so now the truth is, I have no freaking idea what happened. I just don’t. But I wrote this essay where I got a theory about what happened, which is that he at that point had said about 11 words. He had just begun to speak. So he had like “mama” and “vroom vroom” for car. And I think it was “Dito” for dog. And “duck” was duck, but it was also every bird, and he had just said “fish”, which was this big word for me because part of the taxonomous story was that fish as a meaningful category doesn’t actually exist, so it’s kind of a gerrymandered category, so he said “fish”. And with these three words, basically fish, dog, and duck, he suddenly had every animal. Like he had land animals, aquatic animals, and sky animals. And truly, birds, pigeons, all ducks, bears, elephants, dogs, all dog, fish, sharks, dolphins, all fish. And he just like, to me, it seemed like he had this new sense of mastery. Like, with those three words, he could name the whole natural world, basically. Okay, so my theory was that he had language. So he had the illusion of mastery, he newly had the illusion of master, and then he woke up in a room he didn’t recognize and it freaked him out. And my theory was that with the advent of language, we begin telling ourselves this lie that we can know and master and even maybe control or understand our universe. And so in a weird way, it’s like this loss to acquire language because for the first year of his life, before he had language, he was comfortable with the unknown. It was all wonderful because he didn’t have words for anything. So everything was unknown and confusing, and that was okay. That was just the status quo. And now I have no idea if that’s really what that night terror was about, you know? But I wonder if basically that was the first time the unknown became scary to him. And it made me think about that babies have this wisdom where they’re not afraid of the unknown. They’re not of afraid of chaos because for that first year or so of life before they have language the unknown is their friend, it just is. And then when we acquire language, we start to believe this lie that we can know.

Michael Feigelson It took a few minutes for me to understand what Lulu was saying. That before we can name things, we don’t expect the world to make sense. We don’t have the illusion that we can order and organize and we’re comfortable with the unknown because that’s all there is. But after, when we have this feeling that we can know that we can use language as a form of control, that’s when we start needing the world to make sense. And when it doesn’t, that’s when the trouble starts.

Lulu Miller In my life, I try to be like a baby and try to, you know, with things like to approach, oh, these weird shadows, aren’t they beautiful? To wonder about them instead of being terrified when like the world does not go according to plan. And it’s not easy, but I do think, I do like that wordless phase of children is so fascinating and my daughter, my youngest, she’s just leaving it. She’s just starting to talk and I feel very tender about her kind of like walking out of the realm of wordlessness, because I think it’s a very beautiful space for her to be in, for herself, and for me to get to watch and learn from. So I am kind of mourning her exit from that place.

Michael Feigelson Most parents I talk to and their kids start talking, they’re like, this is so awesome. Like, what’s that? What’s that, what that? And just start putting it around. But that sort of sounds to me, like when your kids start talk, you’re like oh no, I’m so sorry. Yeah, I do. How do you balance these two things? Like when his 11th word is fish, did you feel betrayed?

Lulu Miller Ha ha! No, because at the end of the day, I’m a mom, I was like, yeah, I was like you got it. It’s so it’s so empowering to see him like, label the world and like step closer to you. And they’re so funny. The things they say are they’re interesting. They’re funny. They show this incredible like, insight into their mind and what they think about and care about. Of course. No, I mean, I love being able to talk to them. And it’s a whole new level of a relationship that of course, I delight in. Like, that’s its own box of delights, all those words. But it’s like a private tenderness. I think it’s just this first chapter of my daughter’s life now that she’s my third kid and I’ve watched the two kids move out of wordlessness. I think I just noticed it more. Like I’d be taking a bath with her and just trying to really notice and soak in like what is our connection and our communication like without words. And isn’t this beautiful? Like, I think it just helped me to savor and watch that time with her and, yeah, and it’s like just a little tender mournfulness of like, okay, well, this stage of our relationship is peeling away and we’ll enter a new one. But man, that’s a tender base. Like, I just always feel grateful that we got to know each other so deeply as like, you know, this pure wordless, because I think words contain a lot of lies. And so those wordless months and time is just like, it’s just profoundly sacred to me. I just love it.

Michael Feigelson There’s some irony in this. We spend years learning language to communicate with other people. A baby shows up and we start teaching them language so they can too, and we celebrate each and every word they learn. My mom did too, for a little while at least.

Michael Feigelson Hello? Hello?
Mom Hi, hi Mike. How you doing?
Michael Feigelson Good, you?
Mom Good, I’m sitting here playing chess with Eva.
Michael Feigelson And who’s winning?
Mom Who do you think?
Michael Feigelson Uuuuh, Eva?
Mom No! I’m winning, your mom
Michael Feigelson Okay, fair enough.
Mom What’s up?
Michael Feigelson Do you remember my first word?
Mom Oh, I do indeed.
Michael Feigelson Yeah, what was it?
Mom It was ‘bus’. It was very exciting, you know, you were looking at the window in Riverside Drive and you saw the bus come down Riverside and you said “BUS”!
Michael Feigelson And you, how did you feel when I said bus?
Mom Thrilled. I was very excited.
Michael Feigelson And then what happened next?
Mom Well, after that, you never stop talking.

Michael Feigelson A first word changes everything, even if it’s as simple as being able to notice a bus going down Riverside Drive. But a first word is certainly not the beginning of communication. Long before parents and babies share a vocabulary, they’re already learning how to understand one another through gaze, touch, and sound. Which means maybe Lulu is onto something. If we’re too focused on teaching them words, we might miss what they’re teaching us about communication.

Michael Feigelson Before I leave Fish, one more question about Fish.

Lulu Miller Yes…?

Michael Feigelson So my nephew, when he was little, he’s almost 30 now, but my family’s Jewish and he learned quite early that Santa Claus didn’t exist. And then my sister got a call one day from the school and was like, we have to talk. Matthew’s telling. All the kids that Santa doesn’t exist and the parents are getting angry, and then they went and they talked to the teacher and they asked Matthew why he did this and he said, well, I want the Christian kids to know the truth. They deserve it. So my question for you is-

Lulu Miller I don’t want to lie to them. I get it. Yeah.

Michael Feigelson My question for you is, in your house…

Lulu Miller Mm-hmm…

Michael Feigelson At what age do you tell kids that fish don’t exist and has this ever gotten you in trouble with the teacher or other parents?

Lulu Miller So it has not gotten me in any trouble with the teacher. I had never brought it up. But then I think my wife one time, like somewhat recently within the past year, showed the four and seven year old, she was like, this is mommy’s book and Jude can read now. And so he’s like, “why fish don’t exist”? He’s like what? And then they were like, “explain it!” And I was like okay, it was bed time. And so I tried to explain to them why fish don’t exist.

Michael Feigelson How’d that go?

Lulu Miller And they were just like, “that’s so stupid!” Like they were like, “but there  are fish.” And like, I could not, I tried so hard and they just, they were laughing at me. So I tried, I tried this year and I don’t think they currently buy it, which is fair. So I guess seven and four was the age that I attempted to tell them the truth.

Michael Feigelson So you don’t land in one place. You don’t give up on naming the world and you don’t fully trust it either. Holding this tension can be exhausting and I have the impression that for many years it was exhausting for Lulu. But she seems to have found a solution for how to hold this tension more gently. Turn it into a game.

Michael Feigelson What about your children’s books about trucks and balls? They feel to me like they are. Almost a homage to naming and categorizing.

Lulu Miller They totally are, you are right.

Michael Feigelson It felt to me like a little bit like an apologia to names and categories after a kind of crusade against them, is there anything to that?

Lulu Miller Michael, no one else has called. You are dead on. Yeah, because Why Fish Don’t Exist, my book for adults is like, question categories, proceed with doubt, and categories do all kinds of evil. Look at their role in eugenics, look at their roll in oppression. But there’s such a delight in categorizing. There’s such a delay. And so okay, so basically Truckee Roads, I learned early on with my first kid that trucks were just so Fascinating to him endlessly fascinating. There’s also like an underground world of little boys and truckers where they like beep and wave. And, you know, his first five words, it was like mama, car, fish, whatever. But then some of his next words were like digger, excavator. I mean, he had the whole taxonomy of trucks, cranes, all of his favorite books to look at were just, they were just taxonomies of trucks, listing different kinds of trucks. I mean that’s what he wanted to see night after night, day after day. I began to notice them. He helped me notice that they’re all around and that there’s a joy in naming them. And one day my wife said, Jude, who’s your favorite person in the world? And he paused and he goes, “Trucky Roads”. And we were like, is that a person? Is that like a book, a show, a song? We looked it up. It didn’t exist. He had just invented him. I would always, usually for Christmas, just hand draw them a book like some inside joke. So that year I made Trucky Roads for Jude for Christmas just on. Paper, you know, just doodles on paper. They’re silly, but Trucky Roads, my father-in-law was like, you know, that one’s good. Like, I think you should pitch that one. So I finally did. I pitched that one, and then it became a book. And then the Book of Balls was inspired by George, who was a little bit language delayed for a little bit. And he really only had the word ball for like, two years was one of his only words. But then I know, he would point, so many things were balls. Like there was, you know, basketballs and volleyballs. But then there were buoys and then there were the pearls that Grace wore in her ears and then they were oranges and then there were like street lights. And then I started thinking about, oh my God, certain blood cells are balls and the moon is a ball and the earth is a bowl and the, oh my god. And like, why does the universe kind of crave a sphere? Like there’s all this stuff we make, balls, stick shifts, like doorknobs. That he’s pointing out, but then there’s so many natural balls. And so I started keeping a list that was just called balls balls balls of everything he called a ball. And it was like 300 deep. I mean, it was so and it made me realize like, oh, like, there’s something there’s some message from the universe. So then I started to report out like, why does the universe crave a ball and got all these different interesting answers from scientists and, and then turn that into a kids book. But totally you’re right it’s a it’s an apology

Michael Feigelson So in her book for adults, Lulu takes categories apart. And in her books for kids, she builds them right back up again. But this time, they’re loose and strange. Less about getting the world right and more about playing with it. A game Lulu now plays with thousands of kids and their parents, Mila and I included, on her show, Terrestrials.

Michael Feigelson You found and were surprised by how demanding an audience kids are? Like, what is it that they demand that big humans don’t?

Lulu Miller Yes! They, well, I think big humans do too, and we just lie to ourselves. But yeah, so I started making Terrestrials, which is this nature show for kids. And at first, like when you think of like, oh, kitty humor, a kitty movie, you just think. Dull, simple, maybe boring beneath me, whatever. But the truth is to like actually command a kid’s attention, you need great plot. You need suspense. You need surprise. You need like all the campfire elements and you need humor. You need to break expectations. Otherwise it’s gonna get dull. So they need like the elements of what make a really good story and they’re not gonna sit around with the more egotistical like here’s some smarty information you should know or that I’m proud of. They don’t care. They do care. They’re curious. I’ve found like you can only educate them If you bring that information in at a time of actual curi- like, you’ve got to build the wondering. You can’t just show up with a list of factoids. So I don’t know, I just have found you cannot be boring. You got to keep plot moving. You’ve got a dollop some humor. You’ve got like the more that you set an expectation, but then break it. Like there’s both the pleasure of the game and learning the game, but the real pleasure of breaking it. Playing with pacing and things need to be syncopated, like they, I just think they get, they don’t care about sounding smart or looking smart. They just, they want, like, they need to be gripped. And so it’s for me trying to create work for them. My narrative tools and tricks are like in high gear. I’m like honing, honing cutting, cutting, trying make the most riveting ride to keep them along. And so it’s really like, to me, yeah, I think making for them is, it’s like harder almost.

Michael Feigelson Kids don’t care if something is clever. They don’t if it sounds smart. They’re looking for awe, wonder and funny, and if they don’t find it, they’re out. So over time, this has a way of stripping things down, including you.

Michael Feigelson I have a thesis about both that and the kind of creativity that becoming a parent forces on you. So I want to test it with you and see if it makes sense to you and also to Terrestrials, which is that a really important part of creativity is disinhibition and kids and parenting and sleep exhaustion just like wear down the inhibition to the point that we’re willing to just like stop.

Lulu Miller Some professional clowns.

Michael Feigelson Yeah. Clowns, commentators, all sorts of different things, singers, what is it that allowed you to do Terrestrials that wouldn’t have allowed you before? And do you think there’s anything to this? Yeah. You know, Mama Lulu became disinhibited by force.

Lulu Miller That is such a great, I’ve never like, used that word, but it is really resonating because I actually growing up especially was incredibly inhibited, like, I didn’t want to bother people, I didn’t wanna look foolish, things like that. And Terrestrials, I mean, I sing on it, I make the dumb joke, I mean, But I also feel the most myself friends who’ve listened to it are like, Oh, that’s that’s Lulu. That’s you. That that’s you when you’re being you. I think kids want to see the real self. So I think there is just this I sit in front of them. I mean, literally, I sit in front of the microphone when I’m recording an interview or recording narration for Terrestrials. And I’m just like, there’s a naturalness. There’s just, I don’t even feel the trying to be one way. I just Yeah, I think There is just. I’m going to sing along on this song, it’s going to be slightly off key, I’m going to like talk how I talk and kids don’t play the social niceties game, which used to scare me, but it also is freeing. They’re just like, what are you actually thinking? What are you up to? And it encourages me to like, I didn’t want to talk to them in a patronizing way. I really want to to talk them like people. And I think the other part about what I found out about their minds is like, yes, they demand good plot. But they’re also so open. They haven’t been around for 20 years and learned everything you’re supposed to think about whether or not communism will work or what a snake is. That’s when I think of how psychedelic they are. They’re not an audience you need to condescend to or patronize. It’s like this audience that’s open. That hasn’t formed all their beliefs about how the world works or what humanity’s fate is. And that getting in there and offering some stories about how the natural world works is that’s what’s so exciting to me. Like the kinds of questions they ask, their openness, that’s the part that’s like, wow, these are like intellectual powerhouses. And it is. It’s exciting to create for them. It’s exciting to kind of give them information. And that’s been the coolest discovery, that they’re not just these tiny automatons that you need to patronize. They are weird and deep and psychedelic.

Michael Feigelson Weird and deep and psychedelic. This is Lulu’s description of kids, but for me, it’s also one of the best descriptions I’ve heard of what it feels like to become a parent. Radically open and newly curious to learn the secrets of the universe.

Michael Feigelson You were seven and you asked your dad about the meaning of life and he says, “there is no meaning, no magic, no point, no plan, no destiny, no God, no heaven.” And your oldest, Jude, he’s about seven.

Lulu Miller He’s seven now. He’s 7.

Michael Feigelson If he asked you this question today, what would you say?

Lulu Miller I would say, I think the meaning of life is to be really kind to other people because how you treat them can change reality and it can open people up and strengthen the world. And so I think that’s something that really matters to do. And then I would probably ask him, what does he think the meaning of life is?

Michael Feigelson What do you think he would say?

Lulu Miller I don’t know.

Michael Feigelson That’s your best guess.

Lulu Miller Ummm… You know, I don’t know, I think he might say. Think right, we’re working on this, but I think he might be like, “make money to buy Legos.” Like he’s just so well, he’s so into Legos, we were working on it. I’m like, can you be? But he hasn’t asked that. But he has asked things like, “what happens after you die?” Or like, he asked this the other day, which I thought was very cool. He was like, “when you die, do you go back to the beginning?” And I was like you know? If you think of singularity, if you think of infinity, the infinite non-existence from which we all came and will one day again return, like, kind of? And then when he asked about where do we go after you die, like he asked it while, again, doing bedtime. And my wife was there too. And I was like, well, I don’t know. Let’s see what mommy says. And she does have faith. And she was like, “well, nobody knows for sure cause it’s one of those things where we can’t ask people.” So, she’s like, “but my guess is that there is some kind of heaven.” And then Jude said, “what is heaven like?” And she was like, “well, it’s different for everybody. Everybody’s heaven is different.” She’s like, “so my heaven would be, I’m surrounded by all the people I love and my friends and my family and I get to spend time with them.” And then we talked about like what their heavens would be. “And Jude was like, well, there’d be a lot of cobras and they listen only to me.” And then George was like “mine would be full of ghostbusters. And then he was like what happens if a ghostbuster is a ghost?” And then we talked about that. And so like, I don’t know. And then I was like well, my heaven would, you know, whatever and we, so we. I found a way to like, I don’t think like, nihilism bully my kid in the way that my dad did, but I didn’t say something I didn’t believe, you know?

Michael Feigelson At some point, your kid looks at you and asks a question you can’t really answer. And you realize this whole project of trying to make the world make sense, it’s a little shaky. You can name things, you can explain things, you can build categories that make everything feel organized and under control. And then a toddler comes along and he calls everything a ball. And at first you dismiss it, but then you realize, huh, he actually has a point.

And then a few years later, they ask you the meaning of life. And suddenly you’re not trying to be right, you’re just trying not to lie. To resist your need to answer the unanswerable. Because that’s your need, not theirs.

We tend to think that when you become a parent, you are supposed to know more, be clearer, appear certain. But listening to Lulu, it almost feels like the opposite. You become less sure of the categories, less convinced that the world adds up. This can feel threatening, but lo and behold, babies and toddlers don’t just bring doubt to our lives, they also bring a solution to doubt, and that solution is playfulness.

They teach you that the words are not lies, but they are a game, and that if you make the game fun, the chaos becomes more comfortable. You find yourself a little more willing to sound off key, willing to consider the idea that maybe, just maybe fish do exist.

Because if there’s one thing kids don’t seem to need, it’s a perfectly coherent explanation of reality. They manage just fine with something messier, more psychedelic. Something closer to, here’s what I think, here’s, what I don’t know. What do you think?

And maybe that’s the real shift. Not that a parent is born and suddenly knows what they’re doing, but that they become someone who’s a little more comfortable not knowing.

Lulu reminds us of the uncertainty at the heart of parenting, the wonder of it, the anxiety of it and the freedom that can come from letting go. Next week on Birth of a Parent, Emily Oster approaches the same challenge from a different angle, data, decision making and the idea that families might benefit from a little more structure.

Emily Oster My husband is also an economist, and so I think when I wrote The Family Farm, which is about kind of organizing your family, I don’t think it ever occurred to either my husband or I that there was some other way to do it.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.