Levittown, NY, a post-WWII suburban single-family sprawl

Gen Z is conservative. Not culturally, but in how they respond to collapse. They grew up inside system collapse—financial crisis, institutional failure, pandemic, climate instability—and they’re responding the way post-crisis generations always do: by seeking constraint.

The Gen Z choices that confound us most are those that decrease opportunity: living with parents longer, delaying or rejecting children, choosing stable jobs over ambitious ones, preferring workplace protections over flexibility.

These aren’t signs of disengagement. They’re preparation for a correction that’s already underway.

Post-crisis generations don’t rebel, they stabilize

When large systems break, the next generation doesn’t tear them down. They stabilize them by making certain failures costly.

People who lived through the Great Depression and World War II built suburbs full of predictable single-family homes—stability at any price. But when isolated families led to spiking divorce rates, society didn’t ban divorce. It made abandonment expensive: child support, alimony, wage garnishment. You can leave, but you can’t externalize the damage.

We’re approaching the same moment with children.

Care is cheap because children pay the bill

Care looks cheap right now because children absorb the cost. Inconsistent parental presence means rotating caregivers, which harms development. But children have no enforceable rights, so the system treats this damage as free.

This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a price-signal failure. The market thinks care is cheap because no one is billing for the damage.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Molly Jong-Fast reports: “My mother was a famous feminist writer known for her candor and wit who couldn’t be bothered to spend time raising me.”

Her mother, Erica Jong, would likely agree. In an op-ed she wrote: “My travel schedule could not have been more divergent from my daughter’s schedule, so I hired nannies.” Then she showed a photo of herself cuddling her dog while her daughter leaned into the frame.

Jong writes about her parenting with impunity because children have no enforceable rights. The system treats the damage as free.

Children’s rights are coming

We can’t make parents more virtuous. But we can give children enforceable rights: consistent caregiving, adult presence, and relational continuity. The basics they need to develop without absorbing adult chaos.

Those rights will expose that jobs demanding total availability are incompatible with children. Someone other than children has to pay the cost.

Enforcement won’t target families. It will target employers. The same way payroll systems enforce child support, work structures will have to comply with care minimums. Jobs that require total availability will have to redesign roles, pay for compliant care, or accept that some positions can’t be paired with caregiving.

This is the same logic that governed divorce: don’t ban it, make abandonment costly. Applied to careers: you can have a demanding job, but you can’t externalize the cost onto children.

The TIME 100 proves care disqualifies you

In the list of TIME 100 Most Influential Women, almost none of them have children. Movie stars are the partial exception—they can buy continuity of care. But writers, activists, executives, academics? Overwhelmingly childless.

That’s selection pressure. The idea of productivity came from factories where the assumption was that time is infinitely extractable. Right now, influence is defined the same way: sustained, uninterrupted availability. Care disqualifies you by definition.

The system has already decided that care and power are incompatible. We’ve just been pretending otherwise.

Gen Z is planning for constrained time

Once children’s rights make time genuinely constrained—not just “hard to balance” but legally protected—fewer people will be able to have children. Declining fertility is capacity planning. Gen Z can feel that care is about to become structurally expensive, so they’re refusing to organize their lives around a system that only works by letting children absorb the failure.

Once children’s rights force the cost into the open, the outcomes are predictable because everything reorganizes around constraint rather than aspiration. Rather than asking How can I have it all? we ask What arrangement actually works?

Fewer children are better supported. Stable jobs overtake greedy jobs because they’re more compatible with care. Influence detaches from sheer availability. Living with parents becomes coordinated care capacity. Grandparents realize if they want grandkids they have to show up.

We are failing children today because we price them at zero. The people still chasing influence through uninterrupted availability are optimizing for a world that’s already gone. Gen Z isn’t giving up. They’re reading the future correctly.

The post Your children subsidize your ambition appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, Robert Maxwell

We clamor for the release of Epstein’s emails, but we already know what they’ll show: powerful men sexually abuse girls. What we’re avoiding is this: the U.S. government trafficked children as an intelligence operation, and we—the electorate—have spent two decades protecting everyone who made that possible.

Jeffrey Epstein was a fired prep school teacher with no college degree who briefly worked at Bear Stearns, where he remained undistinguished and replaceable. Up to 1991, he was nobody.

That changed when Robert Maxwell died.

Robert was not simply a media mogul. He moved through the highest levels of political, financial, and intelligence circles across multiple countries. When he died, he received an Israeli state funeral attended by the Prime Minister, the President, and multiple current and former heads of intelligence—an extraordinary honor for a man officially described as a publisher.

Ghislaine Maxwell was the youngest of his nine children. Her mother devoted herself to recreating the family Robert lost in the Holocaust. She was Robert’s partner running The Pergamon Press until 1961, when Ghislaine was born. Two days later, Ghislaine’s teenage brother was in a car accident that left him in a coma for seven years.

From that point forward, Ghislaine was raised almost exclusively within her father’s orbit. She was his favorite. Court documents and her mother’s autobiography document that Ghislaine was anorexic even as a toddler, a condition widely associated with control, deprivation, and sexual trauma. Robert named his yacht after her. She was not permitted to be seen publicly with boyfriends until after college—only with him. After graduation, they were inseparable.

Shortly before his death, Robert introduced Ghislaine to Jeffrey Epstein.

Viewed socially or professionally, this introduction makes no sense. Robert traveled among heads of state. Epstein had no credentials, no connections, no power. The introduction only makes sense if Robert was being replaced.

A successor to an intelligence asset would need familiarity with finance but no institutional backing, no independent power base, and a demonstrated willingness to commit serious crimes. Epstein met those criteria. His sexual abuse of underage girls was not a liability. It was leverage.

In 1991, Ghislaine transferred her loyalty to Epstein and, with it, access to Robert’s network. Within a year, billionaire Les Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney over his finances. No one has ever explained why.

From this point forward, everyone benefited except the victims. State actors preserved their assets and connections. Epstein got money, protection, and access to girls; Ghislaine got a father replacement. The cost was borne entirely by trafficked children.

In 2008, despite testimony from at least 36 underage victims, U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta dropped all but two minor charges against Epstein. Acosta later acknowledged the non-prosecution agreement was unprecedented. He also stated he was instructed to do so by someone whose authority he could not override.

Who outranks a U.S. Attorney?

The identity of that person has never been disclosed. No law was broken. No accountability followed. We protect the answer to that question.

We re-elected officials who classified the trafficking as “national security.” We confirmed judges who ruled those classifications unreviewable. We voted for both parties while both parties protected this person’s identity. We have not even made these actions illegal.

What did we think “intelligence operations” meant?

Public obsession with Epstein’s files is misdirected. We are not going to discover that powerful men behave badly—we already know that. We are not going to be shocked by any name in those documents. The behavior was visible long before the paperwork.

Epstein was not a rogue genius. He was a sociopath willing to do anything for sex and money. Ghislaine Maxwell was not a mastermind. She was a victim of childhood sexual abuse who replicated that abuse as an adult.

The mastermind was our government.

As voters, we claim national security justifies any crime if the victims are invisible. We let “classified” mean “unaccountable.” We tell ourselves this is too distant to confront.

But it isn’t distant. And the most disturbing part of the Epstein scandal is not what happened—it is that we make it legal.

Democracy requires identifying with the victims of unchecked power. We refuse to do that here. So instead, we wait for more documents, more names, more spectacle—anything that lets us avoid responsibility for building the system that made those emails inevitable.

The post Epstein isn’t the scandal. We are. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Each week I post about personality type. If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe!

INFJs are not negative; it’s fundamentally positive to think everyone can do better

INTJ: What happens when you optimize the wrong thing

ENFP hazard: learning forever, producing nothin

INFPs don’t need motivation, they need inevitability

ENTPs think rule-breaking is why they succeed

ENFJ trap: turning parenting into coaching

INTPs don’t need to master emotional conversation — just show up

ENTJ danger zone: I should just take this over

The post Personality type posts! Come and get ’em! appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Farewell to the Wet Nurse by Etienne Aubry (1776)

For hundreds of years, middle-class women have maintained their social position by making childcare into dirty work that only desperate women do. The wet nurse was the original outsourcing: a poor woman feeding another woman’s child while the middle-class mother kept for herself the clean, socially acceptable parts of motherhood.

Wet nurses ran their own show when it came to emotional bonding and infant nourishment. You can’t regulate someone else’s food intake or emotional output. No one talked about this, because admitting it would have meant admitting that the woman doing the real work of mothering mattered more than the woman writing the checks.

Once machines stripped housework of its dirtiness, middle-class white women had to find another way to separate themselves. The answer was a college degree.

And now women show class position by getting high-paying jobs and outsourcing childcare. If you don’t take care of children all day, you’re smart and special. You deserve respect from men because you hold the same roles they do. The woman changing your child’s diaper for $20 an hour wasn’t “smart enough” to get a real job.

I know because I did this myself. I told myself I was running my family like a company: each kid could be with a nanny while I earned money. I even rode in the car with the nanny, because when I tried to work and drive, I totaled three cars. Of course she should drive. Of course her kids would be home alone after school. I had the money. That was my logic.

There were years when childcare cost six figures—though it was “my work” paying, not me. That distinction made me careless. Once I left for live TV in another state without telling the nanny. She had to call that night to ask if I wanted her to feed my kids dinner. I thought the paycheck was respect enough.

And this wasn’t new. I grew up with a laundress named Sula. She started with my grandmother in the late 1930s, when they were both teenagers. She stayed through my father’s childhood. My dad sat in the basement after school with her, because there was no one else to care for him.

Later, when I was a child, Sula came to my parents’ house too. If I stayed home sick, I was alone—except on laundry day. Sula would make me chicken soup and put new sheets on my bed while they were still warm. On days I wasn’t sick, I went to the basement just to sit with her, the way my dad had, though I didn’t know that at the time.

I didn’t know she was my grandmother’s oldest friend. I didn’t know every kid in my family learned to iron by pestering Sula while she worked. We never thought about who was taking care of Sula’s children while she was taking care of us.

Kurt Vonnegut remembered his 1930s childhood the same way: White women calling housework “n-word work”. That was the open secret. Childcare was degrading labor, fit only for women with no other options.

The language has softened, but the logic hasn’t. Today we say “quality daycare” or “empowering careers,” but the message is the same: respectable women don’t do the dirty work of raising children.

I recently published a post detailing what women in high-paying jobs actually do for childcare. Some stayed home. Some had a stay-at-home spouse. Some paid for full-time care. The last group did not have good outcomes.

I mentioned the President of Cloudflare who speaks openly about her children, and I noted that she appeared to have a stay-at-home husband. Her PR firm contacted me to say I needed to fact-check better: her husband, they said, is the CEO of a startup. When I didn’t revise the piece, they badgered me.

I wrote back: “The post I wrote is about taking care of children. I’d be happy to update the post. Can you tell me, if both parents have full-time jobs, who is taking care of the children?”

There was no reply.

That silence is the point. Childcare has to remain invisible. When it starts to make successful women look bad—when it exposes the trade-offs rather than the empowerment—we pretend it doesn’t exist.

This explains why we lie about childcare options. Admitting that group daycare is warehousing would mean admitting we’ve built professional identities on harming children. Admitting that most nannies are underpaid and overworked would mean recognizing that we exploit other women’s desperation.

We’re told this is about women’s empowerment, but empowerment for who? Not for the working-class women we pay poverty wages to raise our children. Not for the children who spend their earliest years with stressed, underpaid strangers. Not even for the middle-class mothers, who discover the price of professional success is giving everything you have to work.

We could design a society where raising children is valued and supported. Instead, we built a system where good mothering is what we pay someone else to do while we chase status.

The post Women we pay to raise our children appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

I’m learning to serve a volleyball with my left arm, because my right can’t handle another ten years of impact. I keep having to use my right arm anyway, to remind myself how to serve with my left – to remember the little details. So my right arm coaches my left.

After the gym, I shop so long for a basic black skirt that the salesperson says, “Are you finding your desired silhouette?” What? I buy what’s in my hand so I don’t have to talk to her.

I walk home while Nino walks toward my apartment, so I dawdle a little to catch him in the middle.

I say, “My aunt died. I’m going to the funeral.”

He looks at my leg and says, “I hope the funeral is in a couple of weeks.”

I can go. My leg is improving.

“You saw a physical therapist?”

“No. I’m still using ChatGPT as a PT. But I think it’s working.”

“It’s not. You’re walking like someone just taught you how to walk yesterday. On the phone.”

Three more blocks to my apartment. I am quiet. Working on my walk. But then he says, “Which aunt?” And, “Which cousins are going?”

I’m surprised. He’s the one who wanted a divorce. Now, after 20 years of self-imposed exile, he wants to talk about everyone.

Two days later (because Nino needs his space), we are walking out of the third concert in a row. This one is Chinchester Psalms at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Nino remembers singing it when he was in the national boys’ choir. Everyone else is there for Tchaikovsky. We leave at intermission.

“Would your parents have walked out like this?”

“As they got older, they had less patience.”

“Your mom had patience for you when you were little?”

“No. She never had patience for me.”

We’re close to Nino’s apartment, but he always takes me home. I don’t need it, but it’s so nice to feel cared for.

“What about when you took care of your mom at the end? Was she nice to you?”

“In the hospital I asked if I could hug her and she said no. And then I asked if I could hold her hand. And she said no.”

I think about how I asked Nino if we should have sex, and he said no. But I didn’t ask about holding hands. Which is probably what I really want. I think about asking while we walk. But I don’t think I can handle him saying no.

It’s grocery shopping day, so I put a leash on Tali. Nino says, “Do we have to? It’s so much more work with a dog.”

“I take her everywhere. I guess we don’t have to. It’s like kids. Everything is easier doing it yourself. But that doesn’t help the kids.”

I say that so he remembers that he did no hard stuff with the kids. I did it all. Then I think about our couple’s counselor who turned out to be our divorce lawyer who said we need to do things with just the two of us. And we didn’t. And then we got a divorce. So I say, “Let’s leave Tali at home.”

I cook dinner while I call my mom, so if she triggers me I’ll have something to focus on, like burning myself. She tells me that she had cancer on her leg, “but don’t worry, it’s early.” She went to the doctor, who sliced it off a sliver at a time so that only the bare minimum was removed. After the first slice, which “as God is my witness was no bigger than a nickel,” my mom sat in the waiting room for three hours. Then she left.

The doctor’s office called 45 minutes later to say that they were ready for her. My mom “didn’t prevaricate. I just said I’m already home. It can’t be today.”

I said, “Wow, Mom. You sure showed them! No one will ever have to wait for a doctor again.”

“You know what my mom would have said?”

“Wait, you have your mom’s voice in your head? That’s surprising, because I have your voice in my head.”

“Yeah, my mom would’ve said, ‘You cut off your nose to spite your face.’”

“Well, it can’t be that bad; they aren’t covering their tracks for a lawsuit.”

“Oh. Well, they did call me back with four people on the phone.”

The day of the funeral I decide that wearing black is an old rule, so I show up in blue.

I wait to return the skirt I’d bought until Nino goes with me. It might be that the essence of the second stage of our relationship is errands.

We sit next to each other on the train. I used to sit at the seat with a pole in between us. Now I sit away from the pole.

He says, “I saw a film student who reminded me of me: going up and down an escalator with an 8mm wind-up camera.”

In film school, Nino cut up film into smaller and smaller pieces to put them back together. I say, “I love when you talk about process.”

He says, “Seeing the inefficiency killed me.”

“I have this idea that the kids will graduate, and you’ll decide you want to see me so much that you’ll stop skipping days, and then we’ll make films together.”

“That will never happen.”

“Which?”

“Definitely no films. Maybe the first part.”

I procrastinate on cooking dinner while Nino plays nonograms. He plays nonograms incessantly. If he’d been playing nonograms on his phone when I met him, I never would have asked him his name.

But there weren’t phones when I met him. And probably movies with wind-up cameras in film school is the 1990s version of nonograms on the phone. So maybe I’d ask him his name today, too.

He asks me if I need help cooking dinner. This means emotional help. He wouldn’t actually cook. But he would help me pay attention so it gets done. I turn on Bach.

He asks who the pianist is.

I tell him to guess and he guesses right. So we play Name That Pianist with Bach while I cook dinner.

Which I burn. But I am so impressed with his guesses. I think I would have asked him his name no matter what decade it was.

The post How many days in a row make a marriage? appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

You should send money. I know most people don’t like sending money to random, unvetted recipients. But here’s why you should do that now.

All over Minneapolis there are neighboorhood groups on the ground helping people who have gone into hiding because of ICE. Hiding is isolating and scary. They cannot go to their jobs, they can’t take their kids to school, they can’t access their community support system.

Most of us can’t go to Minneapolis, but we can help by sending money to help care for these families. There are small organizations helping, and sometimes it’s one or two people. I know this because I found a very thorough list of ways to help, and I sent money to as many places as I could.

I know what you’ll say: How do you know the money is helping? Maybe it’s a scam. Maybe it’s wasted.

You’re right. There are no guarantees. But it’s a risk you should take. Because the only way to let the people of Minneapolis know how much support they have from around the US is to send money.

Ten dollars matters. It adds up fast, and it’s not that risky for any one donor. A small donation tells someone in hiding that they have support. It also tells the person caring for the family that they’re not doing the job alone. Think of it as a vote. $10 so your voice is heard.

I tell you this from firsthand experience. I’ve been on both sides.

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell, and afterwards I received a lot of aid. In hindsight it wasn’t so much the amount of the aid as the timing (fast!) and the kindness that came with it. Even three weeks later I could barely shower. I had no idea how I’d ever make money again. Aid in crisis is a bridge that keeps life from falling apart. I had the Red Cross, but the people in Minneapolis are in hiding. They can’t access large organizations right now.

I also have experience caring for a family who came to the US with nothing. I kept telling myself I wouldn’t spend more money but I’d go to the house and see that the little girl had only three crayons. Or the family had hot dogs but no buns. There were so many things I could do to make their days a little better. And I saw what a difference it made. Parents want more than anything to be able to care for their kids. I was giving them resources to feel like a family.

Sometimes I didn’t like what they did with the money I gave them. I thought the birthday party was extravagant. I thought makeup shouldn’t have been a priority. But if the roles were reversed, I’m sure people would have found fault with how I spent money.

This family taught me that spending money is very personal. There’s dignity in giving someone the chance to make their own financial decisions. You probably would not have spent as much money on the family as I did. There were two trips to Ikea. And then they moved and couldn’t take the furniture.

But I wasn’t upset. I was one of the only people helping them, and I was happy they found a place where they could get more help. I was happy I had the experience of getting to know them by knowing what they needed. And I was happy to let them know that someone here cares about them and wants them to succeed.

You’ll have that warm feeling if you send money to Minneapolis. Regardless of what someone chooses to do with the money.

The post Why you should send money to Minneapolis right now appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Book illustration by Yaacov Epter 1922

The subreddits for personality type torture me because people who misstype themselves are always the loudest – probably because misstyping ourselves is not a faulty attempt at a test but rather a faulty attempt at wish fulfillment.

I couldn’t resist jumping into the ENTJ Reddit: “You are not an ENTJ stuck in a career as a watercolor artist because ENTJs would not touch that career. Maybe take a closer look at why you choose the life of an artist in the first place.”

I got banned in under fifteen minutes.

Then I started playing around with AI and personality type and I was shocked by how many times I had to lecture AI. For example, it mixes up INTJs and ENTJs a lot. Like, it suggested “ENTJs can pick a direction without complete information.” But it’s INTJs who will pick a direction; ENTJs will move full speed ahead without complete information.

So I became a crazy person taking it upon myself to train AI on personality type like I’m Gepetto talking to Pinocchio. So I did what I always do to re-establish connection to reality: I wrote.

Each type has it’s own super-size struggle and the more we understand that the more empathy we have for other people. Also, we all have strands of each others’ struggles, which is why personality type also helps us have empathy for ourselves.

Now there are personality type sections on my Substack header. When you look for them you’ll feel like a kid looking for the afikomen — unsure if you should keep looking or someone purposefully made it too hard to find.

If you don’t want to receive a weekly personality type email, go to http://penelopetrunk.substack.com/account and unsubscribe from personality type emails. It took me about three days to set things up so I could write that last sentence; you should read it twice so I feel it was worth it.

This is the first personality type email with my most recent post about each type. Future emails will not have a preamble.

INFJ motto: I’m not hiding, I’m just reading until you improve

INTJ: Stop trying to be supportive, you can delegate that as well

INFP: I wish I understood INFPs before I divorced one

INTP horror show: worrying about being illogical is illogical

ENFP: Stop forcing your sparkle

ENFJ: We need to talk about your followup texts

ENTJ on 9/11 and the cost of practicality

ENTPs leak influence, here’s how to stop it

The post It’s your weekly personality type email that you didn’t ask for appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Before everyone’s home for winter break, I rearrange things to feel like there’s enough room. Picture: my two kids plus one kid’s boyfriend, and me, and most nights Nino, in an apartment that’s 1,000 square feet. Of course, there isn’t enough room. But after years of very small apartments, some things are normal for us: beds doubling as sofas, dinners on top of unfinished puzzles, cafés as a source of solitude.

Everything the three of us own together would fit into a very small U-Haul. So I have to make sure they’re coming home for something besides the familiarity of their stuff. My routine panic is that my kids will stop coming home if it doesn’t feel like home.

I’m inclined to self-harm to relieve the panic, but I can’t do anything the kids will notice. Instead, I throw out things that mean something to me. They don’t mean something while I’m throwing them out. I feel like they mean something to someone else who is stupid. Not to me.

The kids know I have a throwing-out problem. I don’t throw out their stuff. Instead, I throw out boxes and boxes of wrapping paper and ribbon I’ve been collecting for a decade. Hanukkah is over. Gift wrapping is stupid. That’s what I tell myself.

I told Z I’d pick him up at the airport. I actually hate picking up anyone at the airport, but I recognize that I’m blind to most normal expressions of empathy, so if I act on every single one I notice, I might reach 50% normal empathy. Which is #goals for me.

On the way there, I watch videos of parents talking about kids who died from fentanyl. Kids turn to drugs when they’re desperate for a solution. You can always tell from the story where the parent lost connection to their kid. I watch the videos to scare myself into staying connected even when it’s hard.

When I see Z, I feel oddly shy. Like I have to remember how to be a mom again. Hugging him is a good reminder for my body.

I tell him that fentanyl is killing so many kids that it’s classified as a chemical weapon. He looks at me like I’m crazy. He says, “In Boston you can bring any bag of drugs to a center to find out what’s in it. No questions asked.”

Is him knowing this good or bad? Also, I have to remember not to try to connect by sharing information. Data is not emotional glue.

When we get to our apartment, he’s happy to see a spot for his stuff. I don’t tell him that it’s where the wrapping paper used to be. But then he needs to wrap the Hanukkah presents he brought us. He says, “Are you okay? You loved your bows and ribbons.” Then he says, “I guess it was another person who loved them.”

Probably the real reason my kids will stop coming home is there is so much that cannot be explained, except by the fact that I have multiple personalities. My kids will probably get sick of having to figure out what motivates me. I’m sick of it, too.

I don’t try to do anything while the two kids are home. I have to focus on what they need. I have to remember to do things like keeping food in the fridge. I have to go to the common area of our building to do phone calls. I have to start thinking about dinner an hour before, so that I look like I care about family dinner.

We order out a lot. It’s hard for me to be a present, caring, connected parent, even when it’s my only task. Today I make three grilled cheeses without burning one. The kids know I have a grilled cheese problem and they appreciate my focus.

While eating, they tell me they got training at school because they’re Latino.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Mom, ICE doesn’t care if you’re a citizen.”

The kids are at schools in Boston and North Carolina. This wasn’t the overlap I expected. How did I not know?

After dinner they play League of Legends and I watch. The game fascinates me because you have to memorize 150 roles, but player enjoyment isn’t about a specific role. It’s about whether you have empathy for your teammates.

It turns out that playing League is a status symbol among college kids. Brown, Duke, and Northwestern each have a League team. Yale has two. At Oberlin, the musicians play. Z spends his whole break teaching a friend who’s a violinist how the game works.

The violinist makes very little progress, but Z doesn’t care because he just got a new computer. This is the first computer he’s bought with his own money. Which is good, because I don’t have any.

But what will be my role in my kids’ lives if I’m not paying money? Attention. I tell myself to pay attention. Be emotionally available.

Z tells me he really appreciates that I didn’t throw out the boxes from the computer.

I tell him I knew he’d need packaging to bring it back to school.

He says, “I don’t want to play games at school. Only on break. I’m keeping the computer here.”

The post What I threw out before my kids came home appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.