PODCAST · society
When the Flames Go Up
by Magda Pecsenye and Doug French
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up. whentheflamesgoup.substack.com
Episodes
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Episode 71: Planning ahead
After a few weeks off, we’re back behind the mics to catch up and pitch topics for some upcoming episodes. It’s been a busy time, and we’ve had a lot of opportunity to talk with friends about retirement (what even is that anymore?), parents, kids—and that big spicy meatball, health. This includes...
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Episode 70: Where's the Gray Mafia?
We all knew of the American Association of Retired Persons when we were kids, right? It was that super powerful interest group that got senior citizens all those cool discounts. It started before Medicare in 1958 as a way to secure health insurance for 65-year-olds (a lot of them teachers) who…
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Episode 69: Navigating college when the fog gets thick
Kimberly Shepherd coaches young adults (and their parents) that college is just one of many paths for a high school graduate to take. And that path often seems impassable—whether you’re applying, choosing a major, or sussing out a potential career. It’s also important to understand that...
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Episode 68: Keeping up with culture
Two extraordinary things happened on Sunday: 1) Kendrick Lamar livened up a noncompetitive Super Bowl with a halftime show that people will discuss for years to come; and 2) Doug didn’t watch it. In fact, he blew off the whole event, mostly as an experiment to test the limits of his FOMO.…
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Episode 67: Healthy aging takes guts. Literally.
After several years of suffering her own gastric distress, Maya Gangadharan consulted the Nutritional Therapy Association and learned a ton about how so much of our bodily function connects back to our GI health. Digestion is an inflammatory event, it starts in the brain, and it can become more...
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Episode 66: What is Meta for?
Now that Mark Zuckerberg thinks fact-checking is overrated—a decision described as both desperate and potentially disastrous—you might find yourself in a quandary over whether to keep using Meta’s social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even though Facebook’s credibility has fallen off a...
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A collective exhale
Last week, the family endured a big scare after our son texted us the picture below with the caption, “something very, very bad has just happened.” He had hit some black ice on I-90 near Presho, South Dakota, and rolled his 1982 Chevy Silverado, which coincidentally was packed with everything he...
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Republicans like Bryan McGrath are sick of this crap, too.
Bryan McGrath describes himself as “a Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley conservative” who has written his blog, The Conservative Wahoo, since 2008. After 21 years in the Navy, culminating in the command of the guided-missile destroyer USS Bulkeley, he currently works as an author,...
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How broken are we?
As Kathryn Hahn said recently, “the universe doesn’t give us anything that we can’t handle, but JESUS CHRIST.” There’s lots of emotion to sift through as the asbestos settles on this disastrous election, which once again elevated the worst man to the highest office. The horse is once again loose…
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Caring for parents in Tokyo means bridging a huge cultural gulf.
Aya Yasukawa-Dudzinski is a “third culture kid,” a native Japanese who has spent almost all of her life in America. She has a full-time job and two tween daughters here, and her parents in Tokyo are adjusting to her dad’s newly diagnosed dementia. But that’s not the hard part. Aya’s parents are...
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Reunions = high school + time
Over the weekend, Magda got the biggest glimpse of her new husband’s life before they knew each other when they attended his high school reunion. They didn’t know which classmates would be there, so there was no chance to prepare for whom to embrace (or avoid). So everyone was essentially a blank...
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Balancing the opportunities of a new life amid the chaos of your old one.
Now that her daughters are adults, Carlotta Stankiewicz thinks a lot about how she and her sister will take care of their parents, who split up decades ago and live two time zones apart. And really, nobody among the foursome gets along with the others as well as they might like. She’s also…
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He thinks, she thinks
We came up with the idea for this podcast topic after gauging the different reactions from men and women about the vice presidential debate last week. After a weekend of canvassing, Doug found that most men listened to the bearded guy’s glib, shameless horseshit and wanted to take him outside.…
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How to start HRT for menopause (even in Florida)
If you’re considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat your menopause, this is the reference for you. Dr. MaryBeth Lewis-Boardman stopped delivering babies in 2021 in order to concentrate on menopause treatment full-time, and she’s very enthusiastic about how much the medical community...
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Are you happy now?
What is happiness to a middle-aged person? Does it still feel like a realistic goal? Or have we lived through too much to aspire to anything more than contentment? Or satisfaction? In midlife, the pursuit of happiness can feel a bit like rubbing two sticks together to start a fire in the snow.…
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At least there was a bus.
We’re back! And there’s a lot to catch up on since Season 1 ended a few weeks back. We got the college drop-off experience we always wanted. We traveled. We saw family. We got sunburned. We turned off the news for a little while. It was all pretty damn great. And after Doug biked his first metric...
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How's it hanging?
Does just staying alive seem more difficult to you? This is the question on our minds as we end Season 1 and break for the rest of the summer. Because when you reach your 50s, you start coming to terms with the weird pains and limitations that your body starts imposing on you, often thinking “OK,...
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Sarah Lyman Kravits adapted to a decade of grief by yielding to its unpredictability
Sarah Lyman Kravits appreciates when people refer to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, even though she knows they’re not based in reality. And she doesn’t feel all that brave about surviving breast cancer, since all she did was follow through on her only treatment options. After…
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Episode 53: As we live more with our finality, celebrity deaths hit different
It’s hard to keep up with the swift pace of death, which claims 11 people every second. When we recorded this, we were still processing the departures of Shannen Doherty, Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Since then we’ve lost Bob Newhart, Lou Dobbs, John Mayall, Sheila...
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Episode 52: Carolyn Sklar couldn't find a children's book about mastectomies, so she wrote one.
After Carolyn Sklar’s grandmother (and namesake) died of breast cancer in her 50s, the family learned that its women carry the BRCA 2 gene. Rather than risk cancer, Carolyn opted for a prophylactic double mastectomy not long after her kids were born. When she wanted to answer their questions…
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Episode 51: Have you ever felt guilty about bringing kids into this mess?
We’ve been off for two weeks, and what a two weeks they were! With the debate performance and SCOTUS’s immunity ruling, two of the guardrails against Project 2025 (and the useful idiot who will line his pockets escorting it into reality) took a hit. And suddenly it’s easier to feel that much more...
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Episode 50: Catherine Connors is grieving everything everywhere all at once.
After a sundry professional career as an academic, a mom blogger, a Disney executive, and an entrepreneur, Catherine Connors has entered what can only be described as her Holy Doodlebug! phase. That’s how her mom would react to extraordinary or unexpected things, and man, does that ever fit the...
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Episode 49: Can boys express emotion in a culture that doesn't want to hear it?
This week’s episode was inspired by the latest in a large library of think pieces about the emotional isolation of boys, who want more emotional intimacy but “have neither the skills nor the social permission to change the story.” No one really knows what masculinity is or should be, but there’s…
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Episode 48: Eliza & Jeff moved north after Florida started messing with their kids.
The parenting life of Eliza Fendell and Jeff Oberg began in Miami-Dade County and has been an adventure from the start. The oldest required lifesaving surgery to remedy some birth defects. Their middle child is nonbinary, and their youngest has a specialized IEP for his learning challenges. The...
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Episode 47: Helping our kids and parents know when to stand up for themselves.
Initially, this episode was inspired by the stories of Scarlett Johannson and Riley Keough fighting back against brazen rip-off attempts. And it was fueled by the news that scammers hauled in a record $10 billion in 2023 and how this personal finance writer was somehow conned out of $50,000 in...
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Episode 46: Shannon Reed became an overnight success after just 30 years.
Shannon Reed will turn 50 this weekend, and that makes her think a lot about the types of books she couldn’t possibly have written until now. After a long career as a playwright and writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she’s broken onto the New York Times best-seller list with her...
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Episode 45: "The four horsemen of the Fiftypocalypse."
We have limited data on this, but based on a sample size of one we can confirm that the second first anniversary is a lot more fun than the first. It turns out that—once you’ve set aside the burden of synthetic romance—it’s really great to relax and chat about how we manage to pilot our little...
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Episode 44: "My body is doing a damn good job of keeping me alive."
We talk a lot on this show about the stresses of the Sandwich Generation, especially when a parent or child has a chronic condition that needs a lot of care. But what if you’re the primary breadwinner, your kids require a lot of medical attention, and you’ve got a debilitating chronic condition…
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Episode 43: "If you choose yourself, you have a future."
As fate would have it, this publication day happens to coincide with the 25-year anniversary of the day we got married. So we decided to devote an episode to get a little real and remember what we were really feeling while it all went down dooby-doo down down. The episode’s cover art is an image…
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Episode 42: "I was wondering how deep we were gonna go."
If there’s a common theme to the separate adventures we had over last weekend, it’s probably Attempts to Defy Cultural Reinforcement. Magda took our son to an Accepted Student event and met parents who wanted to know how promptly the school responds to phone calls. Because modern parents still…
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Episode 41: "It was all snakes and lions and blood and daggers."
After creating the “accidental empire” Scary Mommy, Jill Smokler is ready to go deep with her new project, She’s Got Issues—a site devoted to helping women navigate midlife. And she wasn’t afraid to go deep with us about her apprehensions about eldercare, why her marriage failed (and not just...
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Episode 40: "A big phase of disequilibrium."
This episode arrives during what feels like a very weird confluence of confluences. Mercury went back into retrograde on April Fool’s Day (the same day when Germany legalized weed). The Great American Eclipse—which every U.S. state will at least partially experience—will occur the day after the...
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Episode 39: "As much as I ran from my childhood, there gets to be another chapter."
We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about our parents’ impact on our lives, mostly in the context of supervising their eldercare and/or grieving their loss. But this conversation with Amanda Magee is our first to delve into how it feels to stop all contact with your parents, especially when your...
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Episode 38: "It's just a man, a cat, and two guest bedrooms."
After a week off, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. But the standard conversational deviations into The Price Is Right, Rush lyrics, and why ADHD affects your ankle bones serve a subtle purpose as therapy for Doug, who is living alone—like alone-alone, not the-kids-will-be-back-next-week...
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Episode 37: "While I still can, my answer is always Yes."
As a mother of twins and self-described overthinker, Laurie Smithwick began planning for sending her daughters off to college “on the way home from the gynecologist’s office.” So when the house was suddenly empty again, she was ready. She was taught to embrace change as an opportunity by her...
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Episode 36: "I wanted to defend the votes of my neighbors."
With Washington’s birthday and the Michigan presidential primary freshly concluded, listen in as Magda regales us with her meteoric rise from tenderfooted poll worker to precinct chairperson! Witness the palace intrigue! The moral relativism among desperate foes! The unquenchable resolve of a...
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Episode 35: "Where’s the line about how much you give to your family?"
There are no easy answers when you’re “Deep in The Dagwood” of sandwich parenting. When you’re looking after your wheelchair-bound mom and 90-year-old stepdad, your siblings don’t live locally, you have a full-time job, and you want to model competence for your teenage daughters without...
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Episode 34: "How not to die alone."
Magda and Doug are each at a point where it’s time to make some new real-life, face-to-face friends: Magda because she has moved across the country to live with her husband, and Doug because he is a man. And really, how hard could it be? All you have to do is live in a place where at least a few...
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Episode 33: "We don‘t arrive at 50 on Plan A."
A lot of people our age are grieving the abrupt death of one parent and taking on sole caregiving responsibility for the other. Some have endured a bitter custody battle (or two) after a breakup and built a business around their experiences. Some have had children later in life and know the…
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Episode 32: "FAFSA's 1.8 billion mistakes"
FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and given all the problems with rolling out its update, another f-word is conspicuously missing. Determining financial aid is intricately interwoven into the admissions calendar, but yesterday’s news that FAFSA data won’t be available…
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Episode 31: "I look forward to yelling at my grandchildren to hand me my hip."
When you think about a quintessential Fifties Moment, Bill Braine’s 55th birthday checks a lot of boxes. At the midpoint of his 50s, he was recovering from hip replacement surgery, adjusting to his new CPAP machine, and negotiating intently with his parents to downsize and de-clutter. He was also...
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Episode 30: "Nobody can want what you want them to want."
This episode is an experiment. Our primary goal for this podcast is and always will be to learn more about our mid-lives, helped by the expertise and experiences our guests offer up. And we’ve got lots of chat partners lined up over the next several weeks to do that. Sometimes, though, we learn…
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Episode 29: "We'll remember the ones we've lost, but we're forging new ground."
It’s our first podcast episode of 2024! And we’re greeting the new year with a discussion with writer Jeff Bogle about holidays, death, serendipity, literature, and cats. It’s a difficult episode to encapsulate in one blurb, so let’s try three: * Late last year, Jeff randomly tweeted an idea for…
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Episode 28: "When we get married, we often don't have an agreement on what love is."
There’s a reason why family advisors—therapists, coaches, lawyers, and such—refer to January as Divorce Month. The holidays can be joyful, but they also represent the end of another cycle, a gauntlet just to get through and then consider if you want to go through another cycle with your spouse....
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Episode 27: "I go and I run through the woods for ridiculous amounts of time."
Sure, you’ve cross-country skied since childhood, earned an MBA, and been a working mom for 19 years. But can you run for 100 kilometers? In a row? Soon after her hair went silver, Annie Crombie discovered she could. And she really liked it. Most long-distance runners look at finishing a marathon...
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Episode 26: "Our education in menopause is still very fear-based."
One of the myriad misconceptions about menopause and perimenopause is that they’re only “for old women.” A wide range of potential (and potentially dangerous) symptoms can start as early as your mid-30s and last for as long as 14 years. It’s kind of a No Woman’s Land. Jackie Piasta, WHNP-BC…
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Episode 25: "I need to be more than just the guy who glided through."
Like all the best podcasts, this talk with Ian Shea-Cahir could spawn a half-dozen new episodes. We could talk about his career in journalism or his job running Princeton University’s social media team. We can talk about divorce, co-parenting, remarriage, forgiveness, redemption, and parenting a...
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Bonus Episode! "Light a candle, drink something, and you're done."
It’s Thanksgiving Week in America, which launches the joyful, year-end tradition of crowded travel, meal preparation, frenzied purchases, crushing ambivalence, and family drama known as the Holiday Season. What better time to launch a bonus episode about Candletime, the holiday created to help…
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Episode 24: "Getting a new business card is not a career change."
Breaking up with academia felt a lot like a messy divorce for Emily Benson, PhD, who needed a career change after 11 years as a management professor. Throughout that time, she helped hundreds of students assess their skill sets and build the narratives that would secure the jobs that best matched...
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Episode 23: "There was always a moment in every interview when my jaw dropped."
Fair warning: After you listen to this episode, you might develop a compelling aspiration to downsize everything into a 30-foot motor home and hit the road. Author and recovering attorney Michelle Fishburne did that in 2020 and spent much of those 12,000 miles talking to hundreds of people across...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up.
whentheflamesgoup.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Magda Pecsenye and Doug French
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does When the Flames Go Up have?
When the Flames Go Up currently has 80 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is When the Flames Go Up about?
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up....
How often does When the Flames Go Up release new episodes?
When the Flames Go Up has 80 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to When the Flames Go Up?
You can listen to When the Flames Go Up on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts When the Flames Go Up?
When the Flames Go Up is created and hosted by Magda Pecsenye and Doug French.
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