# What My Mom Taught Me: Just Do The Next Thing

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/what-my-mom-taught-me-just-do-the-next-thing
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/what-my-mom-taught-me-just-do-the-next-thing.md
Podcast: [Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone](https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501)
Published: 2026-05-10T20:02:43+00:00
Episode link: https://www.sashastone.com/p/what-my-mom-taught-me-just-do-the
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/197125255/2f7ec1b108db11fd4a4e1c6a2bad1d50.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/episodes/what-my-mom-taught-me-just-do-the-next-thing
Duration seconds: 922

## Resource

My mom doesn’t read this Substack. We sit on opposite ends of the great divide. But she doesn’t hold my political shift against me, even if she doesn’t understand it. When I visit her, I often find CNN or the BBC filling up the silence. The same messages drone on and on: Trump is bad, the world is coming to an end, it’s all terrible. And there’s my mom, absorbing it like a sponge. It’s a wonder she talks to me at all. We get along because we studiously avoid any mention of the Orange Man or politics. She is always on one side, and I am almost always on the other. If it does come up, and she makes an off-handed comment, it’s like someone lighting a match near a gas leak. We can’t talk about it at all, none of it, and so we don’t. I’m grateful that politics doesn’t define her to the point that she would go “no-contact” with her own daughter. No one in my family went that far. I guess I’m lucky. I think they think I caught a crazy bug, and one day I will go back to normal. So we just tread water until things change. My mother’s life wasn’t what she wanted it to be, although whose is? She was a bright light who looked like an adult by the age of 12. At 14, she was pretending to be 16 to compete in beauty pageants. Here she is, at number 1. It wouldn’t last long, just a few short years. But it must have made her parents proud to see her star rise that fast. She never knew her biological father and still doesn’t, but those genes are partly what made her such a stunner. Not long after, she would meet a man, get pregnant, and drop out of high school. That would never become a marriage and a family. Eventually, she’d start working nights at Pandora’s Box in Hollywood, where she met my dad, a Jazz drummer. My dad would split, and she’d be a divorced mom with four kids before the…

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