Paging Danny Tanner

As a mother, Nora like to instill wisdom onto her kids. When she sees an opening she likes to channel her inner Danny Tanner and give a big, meaningful speech. During her most recent lecture, her 7-year-old did a little fact checking. 

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If you have anxiety, depression or any sense of the world around you, you know that not *everything* is going to be okay. In fact, many things aren’t okay and never will be! But instead of falling into the pit of despair, we’re bringing you a little OK for your day. Every weekday, we’ll bring you one okay thing to help you start, end or endure your day with the opposite of a doom scroll.

Created and hosted by Nora McInerny.

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The IGTBO team is Nora McInerny, Claire McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Amanda Romani and Grace Barry.

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The transcript for this episode can be found here.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: One of my worst habits as a parent is my insatiable need to give my children inspiring, comforting speeches the likes of which you have only ever seen delivered by a sitcom father in the 70s, 80s or 90s. This is, obviously, just me trying to give them what I wanted: an adult who would see me, who would listen to my worries and help me sort through them.

But this is not what my children want. They are not working from the same reference material as I am. They don’t know what it felt like to see Danny Tanner sit on the edge of DJ’s bed and gently guide her through her adolescence while my own father’s reaction to normal human behavior like, say, knocking over a bottle of nail polish was to scream “what’s the hell’s the matter with you?” 

They are growing up with parents who have heard of self-regulation. Who have worked on their regulation. Who are – and I speak only for myself here – desperate to try not to recreate our own childhood wounds.

Instead I’m creating a new one for them! The kind where I launch into a personal TED talk for them and they’re just trying to eat some cheese curds while we draw on napkins.

My child drew an angler fish – the ones who live in in the deep, dark parts of the ocean where sunlight cannot reach – the ugly ones with many teeth, a misshapen jaw, and the little flashlight hanging off it’s head. The one my kid drew was cute – and eating a stick figure – and I thought, hey, wow, here’s a great moment for me to be Danny Tanner.

Who knows what exactly I said – I was speaking extemporaneously – but it went something like this: 

{Music swells up}

You know, we could learn something from this fish. They’re living where the light can’t touch, all alone in the dark, and they make their own flashlight. It’s kind of…inspiring, right? That even when we feel like it’s just darkness all around…we could be our own light?

My child swallowed their cheese curd, took a sip of water and said,

“They use their light to lure in prey, actually. They can see just fine.”

Not where I thought the conversation would go, admittedly, but exactly where it needed to go. 

If you’re in the dark…consider…creating your own light to lure in some prey! It’s inspiring! In another way! A more practical way?

Or maybe not everything needs to be a life lesson. Maybe we can just sit quietly, eat cheese curds, and watch the sun set over a parking lot.