This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX, and I'm Catherine Burns.

This week, we have four stories about the push and the pull.

Life's tension and pressures and creative ways people find to manage them,

from a mishap at a funeral to trouble on a marathon course, to handling anger.

But first, there's nothing quite like a toddler melting down to push someone's buttons.

Recorded at a live performance at Alice Tellully Hall at Lee Consider for the performing arts

in New York City, here's the poet R.A. Villanueva.

In principle, sharing the world with a daughter, raising a daughter that is strong-willed, headstrong, it should be a gift.

And so when my wife and I found out that we were going to have a daughter, we immediately started making lists of names that would be fitting.

Names that would usher into this world of being some kind of groundbreaking, trail-braising catalyst,

someone who would change things. And so we ended up in antiquity. And we started laughing and thinking about an epic poem by Homer.

And in this epic poem, the title character is named Odysseus.

He's the one who fights the monsters.

He's out for all this time.

But as we started thinking and talking and laughing,

we realized that actually the heart of the story is his wife.

His wife's name is Penelope.

She has ingenuity and creativity,

and she owns her role and lives it in her own terms,

staving off everyone who comes to take what rightfully belongs to her,

and she does it with creativity.

And so my wife and I said,

...