WBEC Chicago, It's This American Life.
I'm Ira Glass.
So when I was 36 years old, the year I started This American Life, my relationship with my parents was not the greatest.
I've been working at NPR since I was 19, and they were not into it.
At all.
They were not into public radio.
They were not into me working in public radio.
They saw public radio as this sad little backwater when they would listen to All Things Considered in Morning Edition,
which were shows I was working at.
I remember they would complain, like, why are the stories so long?
They especially did not like that I wasn't making much money.
I did not make much money.
They were both people raised in families where there was never any money,
and they really organized their lives to get themselves firmly into the middle class,
and they really did not understand why I didn't want to make money.
And then also, there had been a period in my early 20s when I was kind of judgy
about certain choices that they were making, and I hurt their feelings.
And by my 30s, I tried to make amends and fix that, but it still wasn't quite right between us.
And really, I felt pretty distant from them.
They did not hide the fact that they disapproved of pretty much all my life choices,