Mike and Nandita | A Life-Changing Conversation

ChildfreeOverpopulation

Dec 16

Written By Population Balance

Podcast host Nandita and her husband Mike are interviewed by guest host Mary Pat Champeau.

Mike and Nandita met in a philosophy class in Toronto. Nandita was trying to break out of the traditional cultural norms of her Indian upbringing. Mike was dissatisfied by the hyper-consumerist norms of his culture. With shared values around environmentalism, minimalism, and philosophy, they instantly connected — a connection that soon blossomed into a relationship. A transformative conversation around the subject of having or not having kids led them down a deeply rich and surprising journey.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Mike (00:00):
And I never really thought about population, environmental impact, biodiversity loss, climate change, all of these things that I'd really been insulated from for so many years. And I was in my early twenties, and it was really the first time that I started to question about whether I wanted to have kids personally. And it was in the first month that we were dating, and I just decided to bring up this question about children. I thought, well, that's an important thing to talk about if we're going to go any further with this.
Nandita (00:30):
I was kind of perplexed by the question because I did not know what he meant. And my response was, what do you mean, don't we have to have kids? And Mike's laughing. He's like, no, no, no. This is our decision. And I was like, really? We don't have to? Well, can we not?
(00:49):
Hey folks, just a quick couple of notes as we wrap up this year. Today's episode will be the last one for 2025. Our team is taking a short break and we will return with a new episode on January 13th. Also, today's episode is an extra special one for me. It's a conversation between me and my husband Mike, about our decision over a decade ago to not have children - a decision that led me down the path to understanding pronatalism, eventually leading me to my work at Population Balance, including starting this podcast. And Mike and I are both honored to have this conversation be facilitated by a dear friend and colleague, Mary Pat Champeau. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I wish you a restful holiday.
(01:49):
Hi everyone and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandita Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism, Finding Fulfillment With or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with women and men from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. In each episode, I dive into personal stories with people who are forging unconventional pathways to fulfillment, including redefining what family means to them, whether that means being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones.
(02:37):
Hi, everyone. We are so fortunate today to have our dear friend and colleague, Mary Pat Champeau hosting this episode. In fact, some of you may even recognize Mary Pat. She was one of the first guests to join me on the Beyond Pronatalism podcast. And by way of introduction, Mary Pat is the director of graduate programs at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University. And this is where both Mike and I graduated from, which is where we met Mary Pat. And Mike and I are now both teaching in the Humane Education program alongside Mary Pat. And Mary Pat has played a huge role in our lives and we're really thrilled to be in conversation with her today. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Mary Pat.
Mary Pat (03:30):
Thank you so much, and I think I'm not alone when I say that it's a dream come true to be the one whose job it is to pry you both for some personal information about your relationship and your decision not to have children. I think when we listen to these podcasts, the questions that you ask, Nandita, they definitely come from a place of knowing and research. And if I didn't know you and if I didn't know Mike, I would be very curious about you and about how you came to this, because you often are talking mostly about the person you're interviewing and not about yourself. So, thank you for asking me. I've been looking forward to it all week. And let's just begin with a little background about you both.
Mike (04:21):
Thanks Mary Pat, and I just have to say it's a real pleasure to be here with two of my favorite people in the whole wild world. I'm a little nervous actually, I feel like we're in the hot seat here, but I am excited to talk about this and it's something, it's been interesting kind of talking with Nandita and going through our own story and revisiting it. And so, I'm really excited about sharing that today. So, for myself, I am now 54. I spent the first 20 years of my life growing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto, and I've been in Toronto for the last 35 years or so. I've been working as a high school and middle school geography and environmental studies teacher for over 20 years now. And more recently, I've been teaching in the Master of Teaching program at the University of Toronto, and of course as a lecturer with Antioch University through Institute for Human Education Program too.
Mary Pat (05:16):
Yeah, I'd just like to tell our listening public that Mike and Nandita are both popular favorites in the graduate program, and it's really a delight to be listening to podcasts like this about a specific issue like pronatalism and hear time and again, the way issues of animal protection, environmental ethics, and human rights are woven in. And I just happen to know the deep knowledge that both Mike and Nandita have about these topics. And I feel like these are the kinds of areas that we might not typically associate with pronatalism or even human overpopulation. So, thanks for that, Mike. And Nandita, how about you?
Nandita (05:54):
So I was born and raised in India for the first 17 years of my life, and I grew up in a relatively patriarchal culture, but relatively progressive home. My parents and I moved to Canada when I was 17, and I have lived in Toronto and the greater Toronto area for the last 27 years. I am now teaching at the Institute for Humane Education, as you mentioned, and I am also, as many of the listeners already know, the executive director of Population Balance.
Mary Pat (06:33):
Nandita, can you say anything about that experience of coming to Canada as a teenager when teenagers are already struggling with who they are and their sense of identity? So, to sort of have that big shift between your mid-teens and your late teens at 17, it has to shake your sense of self. Anything you can say about that?
Nandita (06:55):
Yeah, moving to Canada from India at the age of 17 was actually quite a difficult experience, especially the first couple of years of transitioning. And I was in my last year of high school and coming into a brand-new system of values and norms felt like a huge culture shock. My parents had raised both me and my sister with progressive values, but that was really in the confines of our home because outside of our home, everything around me was extremely traditional and conservative, things weren't really that great for women and girls in the public sphere. Both my parents are highly educated, but it's extremely uncommon for a woman my mom's age to be educated and to be working. In fact, my mom was the only person in our entire friend group and family who was a working mom. And so, in some ways I had aspirations to be independent, but I wasn't allowed outside of my home to really express that to the same degree as I would've liked to. And part of moving to Canada was actually a very liberating experience, as difficult as the first few years were and that was the start of a journey of starting to question cultural norms and what did that mean about me as a human being?
Mary Pat (8:20):
I love that. So interesting. I'm also wondering, Mike, so Nandita has this experience that's kind of a dramatic experience of leaving one culture, going to another culture, feels like a natural progression if you're a thinking person to be questioning what does this have to do with me? But Mike, I'm wondering if you can remember a time either in college or your teenager years or whenever when you suddenly sort of realized that you too were questioning some of your social conditioning around anything.
Mike (8:51):
Yeah, very different story than Nandita's, but having grown up in the suburbs till I was about 19, I didn't really know anybody, for example, that was childfree. It was just kind of quite a homogeneous upbringing in a lot of ways, a very loving and wonderful upbringing, but quite homogeneous kind of in every sense of the word. But when I went off to university, I had the great fortune of doing an exchange program to western Canada and South America for a year, and it was the first time something had kind of dislodged in me and similar to Nandita's words, it was like a chance to look at life through fresh eyes, away from this habitat that I'd been part of for so many years. And it was a real watershed moment for me. And coming back, I decided to switch what I was studying. I went back to university to study global issues and environmental issues, and I never had really thought about any of that stuff.
(9:54):
And it was the first time I'd been introduced to the idea of population, environmental impact. This is again, the early nineties. And so, a lot of this stuff wasn't really on the radar, biodiversity loss, climate change to desertification, all of these things that I've really been insulated from, protected from, for so many years. And so, I started to think about my own place in all of this and what I wanted to do with my life. And it was really the first time that I started to question about whether I wanted to have kids personally. And I had, I think just given everything I was learning about at that point, and I was so young, I was in my early twenties, I had an intuition that I did not want to have kids for a number of reasons, but partly because I was looking at the impact that I was having on the planet. But really all of those ideas were kind of half-baked, but it was a time of real exploration and learning for me. It was very exciting and a little terrifying as well, because the very foundation that you grew up with starts to crumble. And there's something so beautiful about that, but it can be very discombobulating. And it was for me, but that was a really powerful time in my life.
Mary Pat (11:11):
It's a great way to say it is beautiful and terrifying. The ground shakes beneath us. And just one quick follow up with that, Mike, did you have trouble sort of fitting back in and did you try very hard or did you just feel like I'm kind of gone from this?
Mike (11:27):
Yeah, all the above. I remember coming home to my parents who lived in the suburbs of Toronto, and I had this great idea that we should plant corn crops on the lawn. Why would we have lawns when we could grow crops in suburban Toronto, which did not go very well. And that is pretty much how everything went. I didn't really know how to locate myself and didn't really have the maturity as well on how to deal with that and how to integrate that. That was also a big part of my learning. So, I'm sure this is not uncommon, but there was a sense of nobody understands me, but I did have something that had shifted me. And so, it took a number of years to figure out how to integrate that into myself and to figure out a way for me to integrate into a community and what I wanted to do.
Mary Pat (12:20):
It also shows the huge benefit of any kind of travel or cultural shift. And I do think especially because the theme today of what we're going to be talking about, these early experiences of separating ourselves from our own culture, we can get outside the jar, and we can see things more clearly for the distance. So, I am also thinking now, we've brought ourselves all up to around the age of 23, so I have to ask about the cute meet. How did that happen? How did you meet? Nandita, why don't we begin with you?
Nandita (12:54):
Yeah, sure. As you said, this beautiful metaphor is once you're out of the jar, you cannot imagine yourself going back in. And for me, just getting out of that jar of just even leaving India and then waking up to this psychology of cultural norms, that was what was happening with me in my early twenties. I had finished university and I was working at this point as an engineer, but I was still living at home because within my culture, it is expected that girls and boys continue to live with their parents until they are married. And I was 25 and I was already working, so I was fully independent, and I just felt this kind of gnawing sense that I was feeling very confined.
(13:42):
I couldn't actually figure out what I wanted to do outside of those expectations. So I decided to move out of my parents' place, not out of any rebellion or spite. I was just like, if I'm going to figure out what I want in life, I need to have space. And that caused a little bit of a production, and it felt like a difficult time, but it was around that time after I moved out that I started exploring my own interests, one of which was looking into meditation and looking into philosophy and taking courses, these kind of special interest courses that adults could take. And one of them was just a philosophy course, which is where I met Mike for the first time. He was also one of the participants in the course. And we had a really sweet conversation. I was going through this rough period of not being understood, and I had just moved out actually.
(14:42):
And one of the first questions, we were sitting next to each other and one of the first questions Mike said, how are you doing? What do you do? And front and center for me was, ‘I'm going through a bit of a rough time right now, and I know it sounds weird, but I'm 25 and I'm having a hard time with my parents.’ And Mike said, ‘oh, I can relate to that. I'm 35 and I still worry about what my parents think of me.’ And I thought that was so sweet, not the usual response I would get. And that was the kind of start of a really sweet friendship. We started to get to know one another. We realized we had a lot in common. We're both really concerned about the environment. We were interested in philosophy. We were both interested in simple living and minimalistic lifestyles. So yeah, we just started to hang out a lot with one another. And we were friends for a year before we decided to start dating. And I'll let Mike share his side of the story.
Mary Pat (15:45):
It feels almost like a metaphor for things, meeting at a philosophy class. And so, Mike, anything you want to add? Did you think, oh, who's this lovely young woman sitting next to me spilling her heart out to me? Was there anything like that?
Mike (15:59):
I think this might relate a little bit to your previous question about trying to integrate into this world, which is incredibly complex and challenging. And there are, just like in India, there's a lot of social norms here in Canada and Toronto. And I just found myself kind of unsatisfied with what was going on and to some extent where I was personally. It's an interesting place to meet someone where you can actually have that grounding of, well, there's some shared values there about wanting to try and explore things and try and make sense of the craziness of life in our own lives. And it was just really kind of sweet. When we first started dating, it was interesting because I think it was in the first month that we were dating and we were having dinner, and I just decided to bring up this question about children. I thought, well, that's an important thing to talk about if we're going to go any further with this. I asked what she thought about this idea about having kids or not. I think she was surprised by that, and Nandita maybe this might be a good place for you, because you were at the receiving end of that and you had this really interesting reaction to it.
Nandita (17:13):
Yeah, I remember vividly, we had gone to a restaurant, we were having dinner, and as part of our conversation, Mike said, ‘hey, what do you think about the idea of kids or not?’ And I was kind of perplexed by the question because I did not know what he meant. And my response was like, what do you mean, don't we have to have kids? And he smiled, and he had known me now for a year, so he kind of understood also my background, my cultural upbringing, et cetera. And he said, no, no. This is a decision that we make together. It's not a given. And for me, it was two competing impulses were coming up. One was that of complete liberation, like someone asking me that question in the first place and hearing from him that it was a choice. And the second feeling that I had was actually of shock.
(18:15):
By this time, I thought I was a really independent thinker and non-conventional person in the kinds of things I was doing and how I was living, and I identified as a feminist. But to realize that I didn't even know that I had a choice to not have children came as a shock, which then went on to other questions that led me down this path. But at the time, I was completely confused and I was like, really? We don't have to. And Mike's like, he's laughing. He's like, no, no, no, this is our decision. And I was like, well, can we not? And Mike's like, yeah, we can talk about it. And our conversation went on for a few minutes after that. He talked to me about his own intuition that he'd had in university. We talked about how it aligns with our values in terms of environmentalism, in terms of wanting to live a minimal low impact lifestyle.
(19:14):
But it was also, I think, for me, a validation of something that I had deeply felt but never been able to articulate, never had even thoughts around it. But if you look back to the trajectory of my journey, I have never ever imagined or dreamed about my life as a mother or imagined children in my life. Not that I was opposed to it, but it was just never something that I thought about as my future in a way that sometimes people, even my girlfriends would talk about, I can't wait to be married or I can't wait to have children and et cetera. And it was just simply not part of my thought process. I thought, okay, well, this is something I guess I'll do and then I'll work around that to do all the other things I want to do, but this is just something that'll happen. I really never thought that it was possible for me to be childfree, which is a term we didn't know at the time. And then after we spoke about it, it took us 30 seconds to arrive at the decision that we weren't going to have children. And we've never looked back.
Mary Pat (20:29):
I mean, it occurs to me that you met in a philosophy class, so you're used to entertaining the big questions, so why not just bring that up at dinner? And I wonder also then as the relationship progressed, was there ever a point where you actually declared to your friends and family that you were not going to have children? Or did you just allow that to unfold? And they might be asking five years in, Hey, where's the baby? And how public were you in those early stages with your decision to be childfree?
Mike (21:00):
We were not really public at all, which is a little weird to think about now given how especially Nandita is so public about it and we're talking about it on a podcast right now. That definitely would not have happened back then. We were really comfortable with it for ourselves. I guess that's the definition of pronatalism itself. There's a fear of how that would be interpreted. Even though we decided pretty quickly, like Nandita was saying, it didn't take long for us to come to this realization. It's almost like this puzzle where you kind of put the first pieces together in the middle and then you just start building out. It just basically since that point, and to be honest, mainly through Nandita's work and her deep dive into looking into pronatalism and population issues over the past number of years that we've been able to build on that and kind of become more clear about this decision and strengthen that and had more context for it.
Mary Pat (21:59):
Was there any pushback when you were open with people? Did you get pushback from family? Were people generally understanding?
Nandita (22:08):
Yeah, so I think by the time Mike and I were dating and we had made the decision, I feel like I had already prepared my parents quite a bit through my twenties. I think they just saw that I was not a conventional daughter or woman, and that I was just constantly rejecting the mainstream culture around gender and consumerism and even marrying Mike was a really big deal for my parents, because they had imagined that I would marry someone Indian. When they first learned about it, I mean it caused quite a bit of consternation, especially early on because they didn't know who Mike was. They kind of just saw me as continuing on this path of rebellion, that I'm just doing everything that they didn't expect. But interestingly, soon after my parents met Mike, it was an immediate change of heart.
(23:25):
They loved meeting Mike, and it was really sweet because I think that was also the point where I started to develop a much sweeter relationship with my parents, once they realized that I wasn't doing anything really against something as much as I was for something else that happened to not align with the cultural expectations. And I think once they started to see just how non-conventional we were, they didn't put a whole lot of pressure on me. I think my mom asked me several years after about this, and I had a very frank conversation with her about why we had chosen not to have children. And she just said, okay, that makes sense. And it sounds completely unbelievable given the culture that I come from, which is an extremely pronatal culture. It's been incredible that they've put up with a lot of this and kind of evolved with me. So, in terms of the pressure, other than some comments here and there of how it would've been nice to have grandchildren, I haven't from my family felt that much. And I think it also helps that my older sister does have two kids, and they are a huge part of our full family. So, we have children in our family, they just don't happen to be mine.
Mary Pat (24:29):
So great, you brought them along with you. I think once people realize that this isn't really about them and it's not a rejection of their parenting or who they are, this is really who they've raised a child to be, there should be a certain pride in that, right, if that can be seen and things aren't taken so personally. And Mike, what about you? Did you experience any pushback or pressure from family or friends?
Mike (24:54):
Not really. Both Nandita and I are just very fortunate. Both sets of our parents are incredible that they have put up with a lot with both of us and maybe don't fully understand some of the things we've done, but at least they're accepting of that and, like with Nandita - her relationship with her folks, my relationship has just strengthened since then. And we've been spending a lot of time together as they're aging. And I think just part of it is both sets of parents were really happy that we found each other and that we seem to be happy. And maybe nothing was voiced. Maybe there were pangs of wanting to have grandchildren or see us have kids, but we were both very, very fortunate to not have any overt pressure or tension or conflict. And we know that that happens quite a bit, which is really sad.
(25:49):
And so we both feel really fortunate that way to have such amazing parents. But it's interesting, we decided a few years into our marriage that we wanted to adopt a dog. And that was just something as soon as we kind of decided that it was all systems go, and we adopted beautiful Maggie who came from a puppy mill in the States. And that was another watershed moment for us both for a few reasons. But we found out from our vet that she had been breeding countless litters for probably about five years. And I remember Nandita and I were walking home with Maggie from the vet, and we were both in tears. Something kind of broke inside both of us where we both started to make this connection between Maggie, this beautiful little doggy that we just love to bits, her plight of being in a cage and being forced to breed and billions of other animals around the world that were in a similar situation that we really had not thought about before.
(26:56):
We had been mainly vegetarian for many, many years, but mainly for environmental reasons. And so something flipped when we adopted Maggie and then we adopted Sophie, our second rescue doggy. And this kind of just built from there. But to go back to your original question, we were really quiet about it, but this opened up this, I guess, epiphany about animal sentience and the plight of animals around the world led us down this path to wanting to study that more and talking more about this. So, Nandita, maybe I'll pass it over to you in terms of how this adopting Maggie first and then Sophie, how that really opened the floodgates into us being more open about all of this.
Nandita (27:46):
And so we were both educators at this point, and we were just opening up to animal rights, and we were scanning the scene in Toronto to see how could we get involved and realized that a lot of what was happening was work around political advocacy or protests, et cetera. And it wasn't resonant with us, that kind of work. We were both educators and we wanted to actually learn more about animal protection, animal rights. And as we started doing some research, we found this amazing program at the Institute for Humane Education. And we ended up booking a call with this incredible person. Her name is Mary Pat Champeau. I don't know if you've heard of her, Mary Pat.
Mary Pat (28:32):
She comes highly recommended.
Nandita (28:36):
And each of us had this one hour call with you and that one hour conversation felt so transformative that I think within a few days we ended up registering for the whole master's program.
Mike (28:52):
I think it was more like an hour after the call really. I don't think it was a few days. I think it was like, how fast can we get to the registration page?
Nandita (29:02):
Yes.
Mary Pat (29:03):
That was a great gift to the field and to the program. Look, you're both teaching in the program now. And I want to say too, just quickly that I feel like this is really the heart of the educator - where you have a dog, Maggie, and you're recognizing that Maggie has been forced to breed and to then not stop there in the emotion of that, but to think, how are we complicit in this? What about other animals? It's not a far leap, right, once you start to see those connections. So I feel like it's really instructive as we are all looking for ways to live our lives, is that when we know better, we do better.
Mike (29:40):
I couldn't agree more. And really that was a turning moment, that moment with Maggie where we were in tears. It wasn't just about becoming vegan - it was actually wanting to honor her and to stop hiding in terms of taking a stand about things that were important to us because kind of been in the shadows before about a number of things about environmental issues and diet and being childfree, but there was just something that hit us so hard with that. We just made a decision that we were going to take this out into the world in some way, shape, or form, and it's looked different for both of us. We've taken different paths with that. But really the springboard for both of us was the graduate program at the Institute for Human Education, which really was transformative and gave us a space to figure out how to do that.
(30:27):
It didn't happen overnight, even though there was that impulse in that moment that we have to do something. We can't kind of just keep these things to ourself. We want to, through education as Nandita was saying, we want to make a bigger impact. We just didn't know what to do. We didn't have the tools, we didn't have the information, and that's really what led us to you and the program. And we haven't really looked back from that. And we just keep trying to build on that and learning from our mistakes and exploring how to keep evolving our own message and what we're doing with our own lives.
Mary Pat (31:03):
Well, you've both done a lot of work, Mike, in animal protection, animal rights, animal welfare, also looking at that through the different lenses of how this impact of our decisions on animals and the environment and human rights and Nandita certainly with pronatalism, until you presented on it in the introductory class that I took, I had never considered in my 40 years as an educator, the sort of cultural global impact of having a child. I also came to childbirth from the perspective that that's just what you do. And I think the work allows anybody who knows about the work you're both doing, anyone who even listens to this or knows about this and recognizes this as a reasonable choice, a choice among many, right, will feel inspired to hear that kind of story. It's not a radical choice. It can feel that way if you're experiencing disapproval everywhere. But when we listen to this story, I feel like in and of itself, it is a threshold to new ways of thinking and new ways of living to just have some models for this, which I know you do a lot on your podcast Nandita, so I also just would like to know what your lives are like being childfree. What does that look like for both of you?
Nandita (32:32):
I guess I could start just by talking a bit more about this question that started as such an innocent inquiry 15 years ago between me and Mike ended up bringing us into so many different opportunities, including a big transformative part of our lives, which was doing the graduate program at IHE. It ended up getting me my job. I've been working as the executive director of Population Balance for four and a half years, and one of the first things I did was transformed the vision of the organization through a humane education framework. And everything we do now is done from a humane education perspective, including running this podcast. So I leave there, I'll pass it over to Mike.
Mike (33:21):
For me, I decided to and like some people do upon graduation is I kept in the same job I was doing, which is as a classroom teacher, but I just had a completely different way of looking at it through this humane education lens. And so, it's led to, again, teaching in the IHE program, but also teaching at the U of T. And it was kind of, again, another springboard for myself as to, okay, I'm not going to hide in the shadows as an educator about animal issues or these other issues. I'm not going to close my classroom door and kind of whisper about these issues. I was really going to talk about this and explore this with my students. And the interesting thing is that students really want to learn about these issues.
(34:17):
A lot of teachers want to learn about these issues. And so, there's a lot of this anticipatory fear I think a lot of us have about these things that we're going to get in trouble or people are going to think we're weird. But I think there's also been this cultural shift that's been going on that we need to look at this, and we need to look at this simply because we understand and care for other beings on the planet, but also just for the very survival of the biosphere that not considering human rights and environmental preservation and animal protection and the links between those three things, we really don't stand a chance as life on our planet unless there is a massive paradigm shift about that. So, life is very full. It's really busy. And Sophie, our dog, she's kind of the center of our universe. She loves being the center of our universe, and that's really something beautiful for us. And that's just a way that we define our family is we're a group of three. She would think we're a pack of three and she leads that pack. But it's a way that for us, we've been able to form our own version of our own family that yeah, it was just something that we really love.
Mary Pat (35:16):
I think it also shows in both cases, it shows that there are these, I think of them sort of secret audiences or coalitions that are just right under, you do not know what's in store for you until you show up. That's the coalition-building potential of education in general, really, and of just overcoming the fear and being courageous enough to show up yourself and certainly in a very public way you both have. So, I guess my final question is one that people who do have children a lot of times get asked, and I always find it exciting to hear people's responses to this question, and that would be a question of legacy. So, do you think about your legacy, what you're leaving behind in addition to all the work that you've done to sort of liberate people through your own work?
Mike (36:08):
It's interesting because raising a child, for example, in Toronto, it's a really expensive thing. And that's really unfortunate for people who have kids and who want to have kids, just how expensive it is, housing and programming and clothing and food, all of it. And that can be a big barrier, but for us, it's allowed us to use that money that maybe would've been spent on raising kids and to think about, okay, what do we want to do with that? And humane education is near and dear to our heart. And so, for us, what we're doing is we're in the process of starting up a foundation, and the main purpose of that foundation is going to be to provide bursaries for students who want to study humane education and maybe are having trouble affording that.
Mary Pat (36:58):
It's very moving to me because I think both of you, you are already humane educators and you took to it and, I feel like put some of this thinking to its ultimate use, its most public use, and the idea that you would want to amplify what you do by helping to support other people. This is a program that is in the US. We all know that education is expensive here, and the expense is a huge obstacle to many people who might really want to do the kind of work that you're doing who have been influenced by you. So yeah, thank you for that, Mike. Beautiful. So, anything that either of you would like to say in closing, anything that I didn't ask that's top of mind? Whatever you'd like to say.
Nandita (37:47):
I'd like to just wrap up by saying, in addition to all of the meaningful things that we are able to do with our lives, with our work, we also have a lot of fun together. We love being able to spend time with each other. We love quiet time, and we enjoy each other's company, and we enjoy the company of our dog. So, it's wonderful to be able to have the time to dedicate to one another and to our interests. And we love being able to also just cultivate friendships and relationships with people in our lives that matter so much to us, including friendships like yours. Like Mike said earlier, we are able to spend a lot of time with our parents, which feels like a real privilege, that we live close to them, we have great relationships, and we have the time, which I think not everybody is able to.
(38:44):
I want to also just say what an honor it is to be interviewed by you, Mary Pat, for this podcast. You obviously know what a great deal you've meant to both of us in our lives, and it was just so fun to share our own life story with you and also help our listeners get an appreciation of the trajectory of our lives that led to the birth of this podcast in addition to a lot of the other initiatives that are exposing some of these harmful ideologies. So yeah, I want to thank you so much for being such an amazing friend and for not roasting us today with any difficult questions.
Mary Pat (39:31):
Well, no, those were a lot of softballs. The next time we'll really get into the complex material.
Mike (39:37):
Yeah, I think Nandita is getting a little nervous there about her job - the podcast job. I can see there's a little beat of sweat that's formed, and she's like, yeah, Mary Pat, what a pleasure. What an honor to not only know you, but when we were thinking of who we wanted to interview us, there was only one name, and that was even, we're glad you said yes. Everything feels right and perfect that you're here with us talking to us about this, just given that you're such a huge part of it and still continue to be a huge part of it. So, thank you so much.
Mary Pat (40:08):
Thank you. I was really looking forward to this, as I said, and I do think it is an act of generosity to share personal lives at the level that you did. It just opens people's hearts and minds to their own lives, to the ways they might be experiencing cultural disapproval. It emboldens that part of ourselves that reminds us to be who we are. This is it. This is our shot. So, thank you both. Really fun to do this.
Nandita (40:36):
That's all for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. Do you have your own story you'd like to share? Check out the show notes to see how you can get in touch with me. Whether you'd like to share feedback about the show or a particular episode, or whether you'd like to join me on the show to share your own story, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much again for joining me today as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. Beyond Pronatalism is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing ecological and reproductive justice by confronting pronatalism. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team - Josh Wild and Alan Ware.