The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, June 1st, the Bureaucratic Nightmare Edition.

I'm Gabriel Roth. I'm an editor at Slate, and I'm the dad of Eliza, who is six, and Leo, who is almost three.

I'm Rebecca Lavoie.

I'm a podcaster and journalist in New Hampshire.

I'm the mom of Henry, who's 15 and a half, Teddy, who's 14, and stepmom to Lily, who will be 17 in 11 days.

And I am Carvel Wallace.

I am a freelance writer in Oakland, California, and I am the dad to Georgia who is 11 and Ezra who is 14.

Today we'll be joined by Andy Brown, a mother from Oakland, who is facing a difficult challenge with a teenager who has been encountering serious mental illness.

We're going to hear from her about how she navigated that situation.

Then we'll have a letter from a mother who is wondering how far to go to have a second kid under difficult circumstances.

But first, triumphs and fails.

Carvel, we missed you last week.

Was it a triumphant week or was it a failtastic week?

It was one of those weeks that was triumphant because you had to kind of like keep going through the midst of so much failure.

And so I just would say the logistical triumph of navigating a family in which every single person is suffering from some

version of the stomach flu simultaneously was intense, as well as the fact that my kid's mom is getting

ready to move. And so we're going through every item that we've ever owned over the course of

our entire parenting life and figuring out what to donate, what to get rid of, what to sell, et cetera.

All that has been incredibly difficult, and we've worked on it a lot as a family, and we've gone

through many moods with it.

But I feel like the whole thing is a triumph because the kid's mom and I are just kind of like

...