Dad, Interrupted Podcast

About Dad, Interrupted Podcast

Cautionary tales about kids, wives and chucklehead neighbors, from a dad who's seen it all. dadinterrupted.substack.com (https://dadinterrupted.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Francis Flaherty

Category

comedy · kids & family

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Apr 2024

Latest episode

16 Mar 2025

Latest episodes

50 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Mar 2025

   Tumbleweed Blues

   Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for another episode of “Dad, Interrupted: I Finally Get My Say.” This week, I’d like to talk about cowboys, and how millennials have done them wrong. Dead wrong. I call this post, “Tumbleweed Blues.” Here’s one of the things I don’t understand about millennials: their early-onset love of coffee. Coffee love is something you’re supposed to get in middle age, when your body starts to falter and you need coffee to rev up in the morning and re-rev-up in the afternoon. But millennials fell in love with coffee in their late teens and early 20s. Now, something is badly amiss here! At that age, millennials should have been drinking IPA’s and pilsners and wine, not debating the merits of Robusta coffee beans versus Arabica coffee beans. But ok, it is what it is. I am not angry about this, I am not upset about this. My emotional state is, “Whatever.” The same holds for avocado toast, a signature dish of millennials. The two ingredients of this dish — toast and avocado — are sublime by themselves, and unlike many foods they are highly matchable with other foods. Add some tomatoes and lemon to avocados, and you have guacamole, the finest chip dip around. Add butter, cinnamon and sugar to toast, and you have the finest breakfast around. But despite all those delicious matchups, millennials decided to slap avocados and toast together. What do you have with this dish? You have meh. This dish would taste ten times better if you just lifted the avocado off the toast, put it in a bowl, kept the toast on the plate, and ate both things separately. Is there a word that means the opposite of synergy? Because that’s what avocado toast is. The dish is less than the sum of its parts. But again, as a boomer I am confused by this but not angry. It is what it is. Inevitably, there are going to be cultural gulfs between generations. Millennials don’t get The Grateful Dead, and boomers don’t get Limp Bizkit. We can try to bridge the gap, though. I like Drake and Eminem, and our millennial kids like Dylan. But some generational gulfs are impossible to bridge. One chasm that many boomers won’t even try to cross is language. Sometimes this generational rigidity is anchored in politics. My wife Jeanette and our daughter Clara regularly face off over using the word “them” to refer to a single person. Jeanette says it’s dumb to use a plural word to refer to one person; Clara says we need to break down the dictatorship of the binary in the English language. They’re like two ships passing in the night blowing their foghorns at each other. Also, some boomers are especially rankled when millennials use words to mean not only something different than their standard traditional meaning, but the exact opposite of that meaning. Jeanette and I were completely at sea when Clara was telling us a story about a “biddy,” B-I-D-D-Y. That’s because to us a biddy means a nosey old lady, but to Clara a biddy is a young, pretty woman. How did this definitional turnabout happen? Boomers don’t know, but they do know that our biddy came first! These boomers say the worst case of words suddenly meaning their opposite is the word “literally.” Boomers know literally means “actually,” as in “Dr. Spock wrote the book — literally — on baby care.” We boomers say it this way because Dr. Spock actually did write the standard book on baby care. But millennials use “literally” to mean “figuratively” — which of course is the opposite of “actually.” Aggravated boomers say this usage demolishes the whole point of the word. Now, I’m a journalist and words are my stock in trade, so you would think that I’d be on the ramparts fighting these word battles. But actually I’m mellow, in part because I know language evolves. “Gay” used to mean only “happy,” but now it also means homosexual. The pronoun “whom” — w-h-o-m — is dying; “who” — w-h-o — is killing it. Do you remember when “you guys” meant only males? Well, I have news. Those days are gone. But the one language gulf even I find unspannable is the word “Whoa.” Not as in “Woe is me” but as in “Whoa, Trigger!” or “Whoa, Silver!”, which are what Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger respectively said when they wanted their horses to stop. This word has roots in the 1400s and has been spelled W-H-O-A since before the United States was a country. But millennials, for some unfathomable reason, started to spell it W–O-A-H. W-O-A-H. That looks like some kind of Hebrew word — which would be fine except it is not a Hebrew word. Or a German word, or a Greek word. In fact, “Whoa” is the signature word of the American West. How many cowboys, rangers and sheriffs have said “Whoa” to their horses since the West was born? Millions! “Whoa” also means “I’m surprised” or “Come again?” So, unlike the words “biddy” or “literally,” this word is used a ton. Why can’t millennials spell it right? To make things worse, the way this weird, made-up word is spelled induces some people to pronounce it as “Wo-ah,” two syllables. “Wo-ah.” This makes it doubly hurtful to boomer sensibility. It has been pronounced “Woe,” one syllable, ever since the First Cowboy rode into town and had a notion to stop at the saloon and knock back a whiskey. Would John Wayne have said “Wo-ah, Duke,” when he stopped in the tumbleweed to arrest a varmint? No, of course he wouldn’t. And that explains why the word “Woah” — misspelled, mispronounced, or both — feels like sand in my boomer saddle. Because it messes with the central icon of America. Nothing says “USA” louder than cowboys and horses and “Whoa!” Cowboys and their horses are iconic not just because they spanned more than a century and a whole continent. They are iconic because the cowboy is as mythic a human figure as there is. He’s more swashbuckling than a pirate, he’s braver than a medieval knight, he’s tougher than a Green Beret. The rest of the world agrees, because, besides conquering the Wild West, the cowboy conquered movies and TV. Western figures like Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and Wild Bill Hickok were all real, and they were made even realer, legendary even, by actors like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. But even though cowboys are globally iconic, I blame only one group in one country for the abomination that is W-O-A-H. I blame American millennials. Why? Because they are supposed to be the keepers of the cowboy flame. They cannot say “Wo-ah, Trigger” because the Wild West is their central heritage. They are entrusted with preserving it. Do French millennials confuse merlot and chardonnay? Have British millennials stopped eating crisps or curry? Do Italian millennials call the Leaning Tower of Pisa the Tilting Tower? No and no and no. And that’s why American millennials need to say “Whoa” to “Woah.” Not to be harsh, but are you even American if you spell “Whoa” w-o-a-h? I’m just wondering. And to you skeptics out there: No, I’m not being petty, and I know I said language evolves. But this is not about just a word. It’s about cowboy values. I surfed the web for cowboy sayings so you could get those values from the horse’s mouth. Here’s a few: “Every sunrise is a new trail to ride; make it count.” “Fear’s just another critter in the wild — learn to ride it or it’ll throw you.” “Bravery isn’t about being unafraid; it’s about saddling up anyway.” “If you think you’re important, just try bossing a mule around.” Yes, I know. Some of these lines are corny. And some of our Western icons, like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, I’m not a big fan of politically. But cowboy values transcend any particular boldface names. Also, there were cowgirls, too — from Annie Oakley to Belle Starr to Calamity Jane. And of course the values of the Wild West also extend to Native Americans, like Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Geronimo. My favorite Native American is Chief Little Turtle of the Miami Indians. There’s a statue of him in Kentucky, overlooking the Ohio River, that I have visited many times. If you want the ideal of what cowboys, cowgirls and Native Americans stand for, read about him. Millennials: Please don’t take “Whoa” – the real Whoa, W-H-O-A – away from us boomers. It’s too much a part of who we are. There were probably still one or two cowboys living when the oldest boomer was born. So, please, spell “Whoa” our way, the right way, at least until every one of us has ridden into the sunset. And if you make that promise, millennials, be sure to keep it. As the old cowboy saying goes, “A cowboy’s word is as strong as his rope — never let it fray.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dadinterrupted.substack.com (https://dadinterrupted.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   9 Mar 2025

   Mission Unaccomplished

   Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for another episode of “Dad, Interrupted.” Over the years, I’m proud to say, I’ve hustled a bunch of projects over the finish line. I grew two ginkgo trees from seed; they now each top 10 feet tall. I fixed an old but cool lamp that had been left for dead. I studied the art of making vinaigrette dressing, and I make the best one in town or at least on my block. But this post is not about that. It’s about the opposite. I call it, “Mission Unaccomplished.” If you were a keen observer and you were sitting on our pea-soup-green couch, you would notice that two bookshelves in our living room have helpful labels, like you’d find in a bookstore, to tell you what kind of books are there. One says “New York” and the other says “Nonfiction.” But, sad to say, you would also notice that none of the other bookshelves in the living room have any labels at all. Those two yellowed, tilting, paper labels are the sad traces of a grand initiative that we launched years ago. The plan was to organize all the many books throughout our house. But, as the poet wrote, “Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.” That shadow fell very early in our book-labeling initiative — like when we were done with only maybe one percent of the job. Sadly, the book project was not a one-off. If I’m in a bad mood, I see mute, reproachful evidence of my lack of sticktuitiveness in every place I look. In a desk drawer sits a garden notebook with my hand-drawn blueprint for raised vegetable beds. Those raised beds never happened. Nor did the goldfish pond, nor did the rock garden. In the tool closet is a foot-tall stack of artwork and photos that I once aspired to display on our walls. Eight or nine years later, they are all still there, unframed, unhung and unseen. Then there’s the harmonica. I inherited it when my brother-in-law died four and a half years ago. I am a big fan of the blues and especially of blues harmonica virtuosos like Little Walter and Junior Wells. I also have long regretted that I never learned to play any musical instrument. So I was gung-ho to learn to play. And yet, and yet, and yet, the harmonica remains in its box. It’s that darn shadow again. These plans always start bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I hatch many of them on vacation, when time seems endless, or on a Friday or Saturday night, when the beer is flowing and deposits gauzy possibilities right there under my barstool. But then years pass, the gauze vanishes, the dreams go unrealized, and I end up sad and mad. I’m stuck in a place that I call the Land of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda. The worst example is my sleep book. Have you read my book about the mythology of sleep? Of course you haven’t because it was never published. Also, it was never written. I did some research about sleep, and I know many sleep-related things. Did you ever hear of Clocky? He’s an alarm clock that sports two big wheels. When Clocky’s alarm goes off, he jumps off the night table and starts to zip around on his wheels, like a very loud, frantic Roomba. So the sleeper has to leap out of bed and chase Clocky to turn the alarm off. By then, of course, he’ll be fully awake and in no danger of pushing the snooze button. Genius! And do you know about the bedroom of Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer? It’s called the Altitude Chamber because the air there is as thin as it is at an altitude of 8,000 or 9,000 feet. Phelps’s muscles and lungs need to work harder to get oxygen in that atmosphere, so even when he’s sleeping he’s working out. Other athletes use it, too. Now, that’s dedication! My book idea was born years ago, when I came across an article saying that sleep is the last big frontier of biology. Biologists know a ton about the body, but sleep, a thing we spend one-third of our life doing, is in large part a mystery. So my thought was to explore how people have explained and generally deal with this very singular mystery of our daily life. People hate mysteries, they abhor a vacuum — so how, I wondered, do people fill that vacuum? What do they say sleep is, what is its purpose, what accoutrements do they surround this island of mystery with? And what does that all say about human nature? Great idea, right? Yea, well, I never got around to it in the, oh, 15 years since I thought of it. I do have notes, and half a dozen books, but no, I didn’t actually do the deed and write the book. But now I’m fascinated by a mystery different than the mystery of sleep. It is the mystery of how you can get deeply entangled in something that you aren’t doing. Because that is my situation now. I am mired in the non-writing of this book and the complications that not writing it have visited upon me. For example, a couple of my sleep research books are from a local library. I checked them out in the first flowering of my enthusiasm over my idea, and I still haven’t returned them, which means they are massively overdue. Why do I still have them if I haven’t done any work on the book in 15 years? Because, I figured, if the clock is ticking on my overdue books and the library fines are piling up, I would be much more likely to get to work on the book than if I returned them. Do you see my warped thinking here? That’s how your mind fogs up in the Land of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda. But I’m even crazier than that. For the past 15 years I have regularly read any new article about advances in sleep research. Well, I don’t actually fully read these articles. I skim them, hoping that I’ll find a line that says something like, “But despite this recent advance, sleep remains largely unmapped and unknown to the scientific community.” Yesss! I would say with a sigh of relief as I read this sentence. Sleep is still a mystery, the essential premise of my book! So it’s not too late to write it! Then, the next article on advances in sleep research will pop up, and I’ll repeat this ritual all over again. So you see, it’s almost more work to not write a book than to write one. Only one thing improves my mood when I’m lost in the Land of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: The fact that I’m not the only one in the family who is wandering around there. We all have projects that never left the runway. In his teens our son Patrick was fascinated by boxing, so we got him a boxing bag. It has long gone unpunched. More than a decade ago, our daughter Clara studied beer-making in college. (She went to school in Vermont, so no surprise there.) She was so excited about being a home brewer that her then-boyfriend bought her a beer-making kit, and I planted a hops vine in our yard for her to harvest. Well, you have probably guessed the bottom line: No one in the family has tasted even one thimbleful of Clara’s beer. As for my wife Jeanette? She saw an accordion in a music shop window in Montreal 16 years ago. The shell was shiny red fiberglass; she fell in love with it. But to this day her accordion sits forlorn in a closet, the dust thickening on its keys. Unplayed instruments, unwritten books, unpunched punching bags: At least our family thinks big, right? In conclusion, let me ask you a question: Does anyone want my sleep notes? There’s a lot more interesting stuff than just about Clocky and Michael Phelps. You can have my notes for free — just give me a brief mention on your book’s acknowledgements page. But I suggest you get crackin’ because they’re discovering new stuff about sleep every day. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dadinterrupted.substack.com (https://dadinterrupted.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   2 Mar 2025

   What I Found at Ballerina Farm

   Hi, this is Frank Flaherty. Welcome to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for another episode of “Dad, Interrupted.” This week, I focus on homemade yogurt and homemade mustard and other little things like that. But they got me thinking, and soon I had a much larger — and possibly dumb — thought. You be the judge! I was in the kitchen whisking the secret spices into my locally famous vinaigrette dressing when I heard something on the radio about “Ballerina Farm.” I made a mental note to check it out later because when you see two words together that you never normally see together, like “ballerina” and “farm,” it may lead to something interesting. Now I want to be very careful about this topic. I am definitely not saying I approve of Ballerina Farm. I am just saying that it suggested to me other ideas. So, women of Park Slope, please do not chase me with pitchforks and torches. Just hear me out! Ballerina Farm is the online name for a 34-year-old woman named Hannah Neeleman. She lives with her kids and husband Dan on a 328-acre farm in Utah. She also has 20 million followers on social media. Why does she have 20 million followers? Because she has become a symbol of what is called the tradwife approach to life. “Tradwife” is short for “traditional wife.” I know some of you are bristling right now, but let’s just take a look at her world. I have a point to make that is not what you think. Hannah Neeleman has eight kids, and when she’s in her kitchen, which seems to be often, she’s frequently wearing a farmy gingham dress and carrying a baby in a papoose and is surrounded by two or three toddlers who are milling about. Her green stove has a name — Agnes — and when she cooks anything on Agnes, it’s from scratch. As in, homemade mozzarella on the grilled cheese, and homemade yogurt in the beef stroganoff. Then there’s also homemade Worcestershire sauce and homemade applesauce and homemade mustard. It’s farm life and farm fresh. Hannah apparently can also do two things at once. In one video, for example, she’s lying on her stomach on her exercise mat, lifting up her torso in an exercise that I think is called the press-up. Two of her kids are sitting on her legs, and she has them counting her reps with her. In other words, she’s working on her abdominal muscles and teaching her kids to count. Two things at once. Hannah studied ballet at Juilliard — that’s why her social media handle is “Ballerina Farm.” She’s also a beauty queen, having been crowned Mrs. Utah in 2021. Most impressively, two weeks after her eighth child was born, she won the Mrs. World beauty pageant in Las Vegas. Again, I’m not endorsing her. I’m just explaining why she’s got 20 million followers. Love it or hate it, she is an emblem of a world — the world of the traditional wife and mother and woman. Her arenas, in which she seems to excel, are her kitchen, her home, her kids, and female beauty and grace. What in the old days we’d call the feminine arts. She demurs about the term tradwife, but then again she also says things that seem pretty tradwifey. At the Las Vegas beauty pageant, for instance, when asked a question about female empowerment, she said, “After I hold that newborn baby in my arms, the feeling of motherhood and bringing them to the earth is the most empowering feeling I have ever felt.” So. It is what it is. Her critics, and they are legion, arch their eyebrows at many things besides her answer to that question. Such as the fact that her father-in-law founded JetBlue and four other airlines, which leads skeptics to think she might not be living exactly hand to mouth. Her Aga brand stove, which she says she bought secondhand on Craigslist, costs a breathtaking $35,000 new. Also, she and her husband are Mormons. And she sells a boatload of branded products to her 20 million followers, like Ballerina Farm Protein Powder for $67, and French Coarse Gray Salt, for $9. So: Is she a tradwife? A tycoon? A Mormon P.R. machine? A rich social influencer trying to get richer with an airbrushed, performatively-perfect social media presence? Here’s the thing: I don’t care. I don’t care about any of those things. What I care about is something rarely discussed about Ballerina Farm because it is very infrequently seen. And that is Dan, Hannah’s husband. Where is Dan most of the time? Well, he’s out on the farm proper, baling hay and mucking out the barn. What struck me in watching these videos is that this couple seems to have their own very separate spheres. She’s in the kitchen, he’s in the fields among the cows. Again, I am not endorsing traditional sex roles. It could be Dan in the kitchen making savory pies, and Hannah cleaning out the barn stalls. It’s not who’s doing what that interests me. It’s that their jobs don’t seem to overlap much, if at all. This interested me because my life is the opposite. For example, one day Jeanette and I were making dinner and she asked me to get some parsley from the fridge to garnish the mashed potatoes. I did this, but I did it badly. Why? Because I used curly parsley. Apparently we use only flat leaf parsley for both cooking and garnishing, both because flat parsley is tastier and it has a stronger visual profile. I did not know this. This scenario would not have happened with my parents. My mother would never have asked my father to garnish the potatoes because the niceties of food presentation was not his sphere. It was my mother’s sphere. It’s not that he was uninvolved in food. He’d barbecue big fat London broil steaks in the summer, and grow hefty beefsteak tomatoes. He’d make pancakes on Sunday. But to ask him to involve himself with the aesthetics of garnish would have been like asking him to iron my school uniform. It just wouldn’t have happened. Same with my mom. If my father asked her to polish the family’s shoes, a ritual he did every Saturday night for Sunday mass — she would have fallen off her recliner. That was a Dad job. Again, I’m not endorsing specific sex roles. It could’ve been my mom barbecuing and my dad ironing. I’m talking about the fact that their jurisdictional boundaries were clear. Never the twain did meet! It seems to me that that’s not true today. All marital jurisdictions now have blurry borders. Nothing is either parent’s exclusive responsibility. True, couples fall into patterns of who does what, but when something is nobody’s job or kind of someone’s job but not entirely, in a way it becomes everybody’s job. Like with the parsley garnish. Yes, it’s a matter of degree. Jeanette does most of the food prep for us, but just like my father, I do things in the kitchen, like whip up my vinaigrette. These borders probably have never been fully waterproof, but it seems to me that they were much more waterproof in the old days. That situation greatly appeals to me. Why? Because I think it would mean that today’s parents can relax a little more than they do. The fuzzy boundaries of modern marriage roles come from a good place — our feminist desire for equality. But in our desire to get rid of the sexism, we also got rid of something valuable: the division of labor. I’m the kind of guy who does whatever needs doing. I clean, I tidy up, I work, I make vinaigrette, I pay the bills. Jeanette does all those same things too, to a greater or lesser degree, and this is true for millions of modern married people. Wouldn’t it be nice and restful for all of us to divvy up the work more formally? Because then you’d have less to do. This doesn’t add up mathematically, but it does in real life. I remember reading once about some men in India who bragged that they have never set foot in their own kitchens. I want what they’re having! Not the sexist part — just the part where there’s a whole swath of family jobs that I can blithely and completely ignore. How sweet life would be if we drew bright, clear boundaries between the bills and the cooking, or whatever. Not only would you have fewer things to do, the person who had that job would be the absolute ruler in their domain. Every night, my mother would emerge from the kitchen after doing the dinner dishes, and announce: “The kitchen is now closed.” No one ever said boo. In that world, she ruled. As I said, I don’t care if Ballerina Farm is a tradwife, a tycoon, a Mormon propagandist, or whatever. And I don’t care how you divvy up family jobs. Just divvy them up and stick to it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dadinterrupted.substack.com (https://dadinterrupted.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Who has been a guest on Dad, Interrupted Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jeanette
• Kenny
• Michelle Dockery
• Jeremy Allen White
• Elizabeth McGovern

Podcast Authority Score: 42 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

85

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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Guest appearances

Books guests

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