Setting the Record Straight: What the Internet Gets Wrong About Us

I have been on the internet for a long, long time. Longer than my kids have been alive. And the single most-viewed thing I have ever put out into the world is a nine-second clip of my daughter saying she doesn’t know how to be a girl that guys like.

Not the essays. Not the years of writing. Nine seconds of Faith being honest on a Tuesday.

That clip is still bringing ten to twenty new people to this show every day. It has outrun everything else we have made, and it has been doing it for months. I am not complaining. But I have watched enough comments roll in to know that a lot of those people arrived with a picture of my daughter, and of me, that does not match either one of us.

So this week we sat down and cleared some things up.

What the clip does not tell you

Faith is not a person who spends her days thinking about dating. She has steady work through the end of next year. She financed a car by herself. She has friends she has kept since she was sixteen and she is on the phone with them constantly. If you drew her wheel of life right now, nearly every spoke is turning.

Dating is the one that isn’t. Which is exactly why it takes up so much room in what we talk about here. Nobody makes a podcast segment about the parts of your life that are working. That is not what finding the wonder in the weeds means.

There is a lesson in that for me too, and I said so on the mic. Maybe she should spend a little more time on what is going well instead of the one thing she has decided is a deficit.

The other misconception, which is about me

I get asked this directly and indirectly, and the polite version goes something like: is Faith doing this podcast because you want her to?

The answer is no, and she explains it better than I could, so I will let her have it in the episode. I will say the part that got me. She said she thinks people her age need to see what a working relationship between an adult kid and a parent actually looks like. Not a perfect one. A working one, with real disagreements in it.

There is a whole genre of content out there about breaking up with your mother. Sometimes that is the right call and I am not going to pretend otherwise, I have sat with plenty of people for whom it was. But the internet does not do “sometimes.” It does absolutes. And the absolute version is that any friction means estrangement, and any closeness means enmeshment, and there is apparently no third option where you just love someone and occasionally find them annoying.