Hey, it's Martine. I hope you're having a great Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends.

We're taking a couple days off for the holiday. In the meantime, I wanted to share an episode of another

podcast we make here at the post. It's called Impromptu, and it comes from my colleagues on the

opinion's side. Each week, you can hear post-columnist having candid conversations about the things that they can't stop thinking about.

A lot of the time, they're the things that I also cannot stop thinking about.

Earlier this fall, the podcast tackled why Americans are having fewer kids.

This was a conversation between columnists Shadi

Hamid, Monica Hesse, and Heather Long. And they talked about whether this great American baby

bust is actually a problem at all. It's a very thought-provoking conversation, and I wanted

to share it with you today. If you like what you hear, subscribe to impromptu wherever you're listening to this.

And have a great holiday weekend.

We'll be back on Monday with more stories from The Washington Post.

Yeah, so Heather and Monica, I'd be curious what your thoughts are in this.

Did you always want kids?

Go for it, Heather. You beat me to it. I did always want kids. I do think my thinking evolved a lot,

as many millennials have. I remember graduating high school around age 18 and thinking, wow,

I'll probably have two or three kids by the time I'm 28. And instead, by the time I was 38, I had no kids. And anyway, I ended up getting divorced in my late 30s and had to make a decision, how much do I really want kids? So I actually became what's known as a single mom by choice.

I didn't want them for a really long time. I knew the statistics of how hard it was for women to

have careers and had families. And I knew what happened to people, especially women, when they left the workforce and then tried to claw their way back in. So I waited until a lot later in life when I felt like my work was in a good place and other parts of my life were in a good place. And that brings its own complications. So I think that there's never a great time to do it,

or maybe an optimist would say there's never a bad time to do it.

This is impromptu with Washington Post opinions, a show where we bring you conversations

about the issues we can't stop thinking about. I'm Shadi Hamid, a columnist and

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