Hey there, longest, shortest time listener.

Mother's Day is coming up, and so for a limited time, we're offering a special rate to join

our special club, LST Plus.

Normally, annual membership costs 50 bucks, but from now through May 10th, you can sign up or gift a membership to someone

else for just 40 bucks with code Mother 2025. That's Mother 2025. Members get to be a part of our

community, suggest story ideas for future episodes, and best of all, they get access to a whole other show in the Longest

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So if you're looking for a gift for a mom in your life, head on over to Longest Shortestime.com

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Or hey, give the gift of the longest, shortest time to yourself.

Because you deserve it.

Ashley Parker is a political reporter.

Maybe you've read her work in the Washington Post, or more recently in the Atlantic.

She's covered some of the biggest political stories of our time,

Russian interference in the 2016 election, the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. I covered all four

years of the Trump administration, the first two years of the Biden administration, and now I'm back

covering Trump again.

But for years, Ashley's been obsessed with another type of story, birth stories, even before

she had kids. Like the worst the story, the more obsessed I was, I think in certain ways,

it just felt like the worst, most insane thing that could happen to a human body.

To me, I mean, worse things can happen to the human body, of course, than childbirth, right?

But like, basically just every woman I know, like this deeply horrific kind of pretty vivid, gruesome, lots of fluids thing

...