'We’re doing just fine': Mary Louise Kelly reflects on being a working parent in new book

When you're a busy journalist and your son is entering senior year in a nonstop news cycle during a pandemic, what do you do? You make a vow to be more present, more in the moment, and — if you’re All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly — you reflect on it by writing a book.

It’s called “It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs” and it's out this week.

Kelly recently flipped the script, answering the questions instead of asking them. Hear her conversation with MPR News host Tom Crann using the audio player above, or read a transcript of it below. It has been lightly edited.

Tell us what it means to be a working mom who's also a reporter on location often and tied to the studio.

The first thing I should say is how lucky I am to have a job and colleagues who will put up with me pushing back my chair in the middle of the live show and saying, I gotta go, because I don't have the kind of job – nor do you – where we can just cut out early one day, slink off and hope no one will notice. Dead air is dead air and it can last a very long time.

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I think the moment you're referring to was when we were in the middle of All Things Considered and Ari Shapiro and I are cranking along through all the live interviews that day, and a text pops up on my phone. It is the babysitter and it opens with something like, ‘Hi, I'm writing from the emergency room. I'm here with James and he's been hit by a lacrosse ball in the face and I think his jaw is fractured.’ And I just looked at my phone and thought, I gotta go.

A call like that, it doesn't feel like it in the moment, but those are actually the easy calls. The emergencies coming from the emergency room, you're going to push back your chair and go. It's all the ones that are not quite so dramatic that are hard. Now that my kids are nearly through childhood, I've kind of stopped and looked back at and thought about all the moments where it was a bruise, it was that it was nothing so dramatic that I'm going to jump up and run away in the middle of All Things Considered.

I missed a lot of it. And now they're grown and you don't get those moments back. Somebody else put that bandaid on and that is what it is. We all make our choices, but when suddenly your kids are about to leave home and the chances to make a different choice dwindle, that hit me hard. And I wanted to reckon with it.

Did writing the book help you make peace with the choices you've made, or did it expose examples of things you might have done differently?

One of the things that was so wonderful about writing this was looking back – because I'm prone to beating myself up – and thinking, when you actually write it all down, I did OK. We're all doing our best. We all make mistakes. We all do OK.

There are moments in my children's lives that I missed and I wish I hadn't. There are moments that cut the other way, if I'm being fully honest. There are assignments I turned down that I do wish I could have taken.

There was one interview — the one that got away. I've done a fair bit of reporting in Russia and I covered the intelligence beat for many years, and I had been asking for forever for an interview with the head of the SVR, which is Russia's answer to the CIA. He doesn't give a lot of interviews, and lo and behold, for whatever reason, the answer to the request came back ‘Yes.’

So I started scrambling to get a visa with my producer, and they come back to us with the date, and it is a date squarely in the middle of a long-planned family vacation and kind of a very complicated vacation from a logistics point of view that I couldn't just show up for four days late.

And I go back to the Russians and I push hard and they wouldn't budge. I just remember sitting there in the newsroom thinking, Oh, hell. If it's going to come down to letting down the head of Russian intelligence or letting down my children, I'm sorry, I'm going to go on the family vacation.

I won't quite say I regret that choice, but I will say, when I'm an old lady years from now, I will be beating my head against the wall in frustration.

As I read it, I was rooting for you to take the vacation. You say something in your book like, ‘There are a lot of people who can cover the news, but there's only one person who can be mother to my children.’ And I think that that's that crystallizes it.

Yeah. I have a good friend who says, ‘When you're struggling with a difficult decision to which there is no perfect answer, which decision could you defend to your 80 year old self? Which decision could you defend to a child?

In your book you say it was a life lesson for your kids to stand up to bullies and be able to defend something when you're 80 years old. Why is that?

This was the interview in which Mike Pompeo, after we turned off the recorder, summoned me to his living room on the seventh floor of the State Department. He screamed and swore at me for about 10 minutes and challenged me to find Ukraine on a blank, unmarked map. And as I thought about how I wanted to navigate the many headlines that came out of that interview, I didn't want to become the story. I've gotten into this line of work to cover the news, not to be the news. I didn't want to engage or stoke the fire. And for the record, I wish Mike Pompeo well.

So my way of standing up in that situation was I wrote about that for the New York Times. I wrote about why journalists do the job we do and what the value is of holding people in positions of power to account by asking questions and following up when they don't answer and then sharing those answers with the world.

You tell us at the beginning of the book that you wanted things to stick in the year that you call ‘the year of no do-overs.’ So what do you want to stick with us about this year and your book about it?

The idea that all of us could stand to be a little kinder with ourselves, to extend a little grace.

As I was writing this book and coming to the end of that year of no do-overs, Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. And I watched, as many Americans did, her confirmation hearings. I remember watching her own daughter, a young woman. And there's a photographer who captured this beautiful picture during the testimony, where daughter is looking at mother and there is such love and pride on her face. And Ketanji Brown Jackson was answering questions and talking about work-life balance and saying, ‘I didn't get it perfect, but if you love your kids and you try your best, it will come out OK.’ And I remember watching that and thinking, you go girl. You sure as hell got something right. And probably the rest of us are doing just fine.