This Is Uncomfortable May 1, 2025 Transcript

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Reema Khrais: When Hanna Sanborn was 12, she made herself a promise: if she didn’t have kids by the time she was 30, she’d figure out a way to do it on her own. 

Hanna Sanborn: I never dreamed of, like, big jobs or big accomplishments. I just always really wanted to be a mother, from the time that I was eight years old. That was all I wanted. My life goal: I want to be a mom. 

Khrais: Thirty came. She was single. So she found a sperm donor, did IVF and then came the first plot twist - twins. 

Everything was going smoothly…and then a couple months before her due date, what was supposed to be a routine check up turned into an emergency. The doctor checked Hanna’s blood pressure and was like, “You need to go to the hospital right now.” 

Sanborn:  They're, they're telling me that there is a very good chance I will have to deliver imminently.

Khrais: Minutes later, she’s in a hospital bed. Doctors tell her she has preeclampsia. 

Sanborn:  when you have high blood pressure and you're pregnant and it's out of nowhere, it's preeclampsia. They got to start treating you for it, so… 

Khrais: Which is serious, right?

Sanborn: It is pretty, pretty serious. Yes. But again, at this point, I'm just like, eh, it's high blood pressure. How bad could it be? *laugh* 

Khrais: Ugh.  Pretty bad based on your laugh. 

Khrais: Preeclampsia can be life-threatening to both the parent and the baby. But Hanna still had two more months before her due date. She wasn’t ready to give birth. She didn’t have diapers. She only had one crib. She was in such denial that she even asked a friend to bring her laptop to the hospital so she could log in for work the next day. 

Hours later, she was on an operating table. An emergency C-section. She delivered a boy and a girl. Each weighing less than four pounds.

 Sanborn: I get to see them immediately after they're born. Uh, my mom gets to hold one of them. Um, but pretty quickly afterwards, they have to get trucked off to the NICU for like very intensive monitoring. 

Khrais: Doctors tell Hanna the twins have to stay in the NICU for at least a few weeks before she can take them home. Which was a big problem. Hanna says her employer insisted that her maternity leave had to start right after she gave birth, not when her babies came home.  She had just three months of leave, most of which she spent visiting her babies in the NICU. By the time both of her babies were discharged, Hanna’s time off was almost up. 

Khrais:  So then how much time did you actually have with them before you had to go back to work? 

Sanborn: A week? Maybe a week and a half Yeah,

Khrais: How how… I just, what…like how did you feel just being with them for a week?

Sanborn: I was insulted. I was so angry.  After my leave it ended, I tacked on, I think, another week or two of PTO...

Khrais: Okay.

Sandborn: …just so I had a little more time, because I still, like, I wasn't sleeping, because they're newborns and they don’t sleep!

Khrais: and there are two of them! 

Sanborn: And there’s two of them! *laughs* 

Khrais: Before all this, Hanna thought she’d be fine. She made 115-thousand dollars working remotely in tech and was comfortably getting by. She didn’t pour over her finances, didn’t research the cost of childcare. All she could think about was being a mom. 

Sanborn: I really had those blinders on. I was just like, I can't think about it, just have to get there, just have to get there, just have to get there. 

Khrais: And now that she was there…a single mom working full-time with two tiny babies, the financial reality hit her like a ton of bricks. Hanna did the math, and the numbers practically laughed in her face. Childcare would cost at least $3500 a month. It was more than her rent.

Sanborn:  it's it's gonna be all my money it's all gonna be gone and so at this point I'm like Maybe I hold out as long as possible, 

Khrais: She moved in with her mom, who watched the twins while Hanna worked remotely. Hanna wanted to move back to her own place, but what would that look like?  Like ok she could go home and try to juggle newborns by herself while working, but humans haven’t evolved beyond the need for sleep. Or she could put them in daycare, but then she’d burn through her savings and rack up debt. It felt like there was no good answer. Late at night, during her pump sessions, while she was on the edge of delirium, she’d fantasize about a third option. What if her best friend Bryer took care of them? 

Sanborn:  I felt like I had been like in the back of my head like, Oh. Maybe Bryer will quit his job and watch the kids, like, that would be the perfect solution to all of this.  That would be so cool.

Khrais: Bryer Rossi was her coworker who’d become her best friend, and had been by her side throughout the pregnancy. He was burnt out at work, desperately wanted to quit, but couldn’t afford to. He’d always tell Hanna: 

Bryer Rossi: I can’t keep working here. Like the idea of continuing to work felt like a vice grip on my chest. 

Khrais: It had become a running joke in their friendship: the idea that Bryer should just quit his job to become her full time manny. They’d talk about it in the way so many of us daydream with our friends, like “One day we should all live in the same neighborhood,” or “Wouldn’t it just be so perfect if we shared a house?”

Sanborn: I’m going to work and you’re gonna come here and take care of the kids and we’ll hang out. That would be so cool. I could pay you 

Rossi: I was just like…yeah I mean, it’s the best of both worlds, we get to hang out all day, I get paid, I get to be with the kids…

Khrais: It was fun to think about. But when childcare costs more than rent, and job security feels like a myth, sometimes a running joke becomes a lifeline. 

I’m Reema Khrais, and welcome to Season 11 of “This is Uncomfortable.”

You know, I’ve talked with a lot of people over the years about how financial stress can take so much from us—our time, our peace, our sense of control. But I’ve also seen how it can bring clarity. When you’re stretched thin, financially and emotionally, you’re kinda forced to see what really matters—and who you can count on.

That’s what this week’s story is about. How two best friends, each in their own kind of crisis, found relief by leaning on each other. It’s a story about caregiving and how stepping into unexpected roles can change the way we see ourselves… and each other.

<<MUSIC>> 

Khrais: I noticed this pattern while talking with Hanna and Bryer. When one of them is in crisis, the other jumps in to help. It happened the very first time they hung out. It was 2018, a few years before Hanna gave birth. They were in Austin, Texas. Just coworkers at a happy hour, making small talk. Bryer was venting about his parents kicking him off the family phone plan. And without missing a beat, Hanna goes…

Sanborn: So what provider are you on? Like, let's bump you on my plan. It costs $20 extra a month for me to add a line. Like, you just have to have your dad transfer the number to me and you'll be on my plan. You can just pay me $20 a month.  No big deal.

Rossi: I was like, “yes, please! when can we do that?” That was just, to me, that was such an extension of grace to somebody you barely knew. 

Khrais: Hanna was the older, jaded coworker who wanted to help the new guy. Bryer was a few years younger – 22, fresh out of college, living on his own for the first time in a big city. They worked on the same team at a tech-startup making online slot machine games. After the happy hour, Bryer began going over to Hanna’s desk more often. They sat diagonally from each other which made it easy for him to pepper her with questions…

Rossi [montage]:  “Hey I have a question about this symbol..” “Can I ask you some questions about this game we’re working on…” “I don’t understand if what we’re seeing on the screen has any math behind it...” 

Sanborn:  He was just like, so like encourageable. He was so relentlessly positive that he just had this, like, like the starry-eyed look at the universe 

Khrais: He reminded her of how she used to be. It’s the kind of eagerness that calls for protection.

Hanna: I tried to warn him a little bit. I saw how willing he was to jump through hoops, to go above and beyond. That anything asked of him, he was gonna make it happen, and I was like, “Hey,  don't do that.”

Bryer:  I was like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I get it.”

Khrais: When you’re 22 and someone is handing you a 65-thousand dollar salary, life can suddenly feel like it’s in technicolor. He wasn’t thinking about burnout. He could finally walk into a store and buy brand name clothes. He didn’t have to cut coupons anymore. And didn’t have to think twice about splurging on a 2016 Honda Civic. 

 Rossi:  It’s like a Camaro to me. Like it was the sexiest ride and I felt so adult and so accomplished.

Rossi: Work friendships are built in the in-between moments. The messages exchanged during a meeting, the whispered debriefs in the hallway. And then one day, without ceremony, you’re hanging out in the real world. Every Thursday, Hanna and Bryer went to their favorite Pho place. And on the weekends, they’d explore all the fauna and flora Texas has to offer. 

When you get that close to a coworker….soon enough someone in the office is whispering… “Are they…?” 

Rossi:  People in the office, people on our team definitely thought that we were  uh, an item or hooking up. I just didn’t let myself think of her in that way. 

Sanborn: I  don't know how to describe it, that it just never entered my brain as a possibility.

Khrais: Hmmm.

Sanborn: Like it just, it didn't. We were best friends. The best friends. The most friends, friends platonic of friends hahah

Rossi: Yeah.

Khrais: Then they unlocked a new friendship level. Hanna was going through a bad divorce and needed a place to stay for a few weeks. This time it was Bryer’s turn to help. “Please crash at my place, he told her, but don’t even consider paying me.”  

Sanborn:  Anytime I brought it up, he would just be like, I haven't even paid you for the phone bill yet because I would never, like, I would never tell him when the phone bill came. 

Khrais: While crashing at his place, Hanna insisted on paying for nearly all of their meals 

Rossi: Every time the check came, Hannah was like a hawk, like pick that thing right up, run right to the counter.

Khrais: Got it!

Rossi: Yeah. Like I didn't have a chance. She didn't give me a chance

Sanborn: Every now and then he'd be like, “Let me pay! You're paying for my phone.” 

Khrais: It’s the kind of friendship where there’s no mental scorecard. No venmo requests recycling the same $50 back and forth. Hanna made more, but it’s not like either of them were set financially. Bryer had 18-thousand dollars of student debt and Hanna was still digging herself out of 45-thousand dollars of credit card debt from her marriage.

By now, the give-and-take wasn’t just practical—it was starting to carry emotional weight.  I asked Hanna if covering those meals was her way of saying thank you for letting me crash at your place.

Sanborn:  I mean, everything. It was my way of saying thank you for everything. Spending time with Bryer I felt was really healing for me. The friendship I was receiving made me feel indebted to the extent that, like, I didn't know how to pay it back outside of, you know, buying food. 

Khrais: After her divorce finalized, Hanna got her own place. Then about a year and a half into their friendship, the pandemic hit. As the world fell apart, their friendship became an anchor. Bryer was co-working at Hanna’s apartment almost every day - sharing meals, sitting out on the front porch, quietly becoming each other’s rhythm. And that’s when Bryer’s work life started to go south. He got moved onto a new team that’s way more intense.

Rossi:  you know, I, I get up to speed really fast. I can show them I work really fast. And so they really, they were like, “Oh, you mean, you can crank it up to 10 every day? Then you better crank it up to 10 every day.”

Khrais: Hanna watched as his glow started to dim. He was smoking weed a lot more, fueling himself on fast food. And it’s not just the workload that was overwhelming - or the fact that he was developing muscle pain in his hands from all the typing. He wasn’t gelling with his bosses and was overthinking every interaction. He started having panic attacks. Hanna tried to rescue him. She’d throw impromptu dance parties in the kitchen. Gave him a book called “Work Won’t Love You Back.” She even convinced him to play hookey to take a road trip together. But nothing worked. 

Khrais:  why did it feel so hard to detach yourself from your work? 

Rossi: I had to prove that I earned this job, that I can keep this job. I'm surrounded now by the pandemic layoffs. Like I'm, I'm worthless if I can't keep a job. Like, I failed. I failed my parents, I failed myself. And I didn't want to, I didn't want to have to face any of it.

Khrais: Ugh, it's so heavy to carry all of that. And I'm imagining, Hannah, from your perspective, you're hearing a lot of this and…

Sanborn: Yeah and feeling really powerless to stop it because, you know, as much as I love Breyer and I knew his value was more than the identity that he placed at his job and being good at his job. Nobody can tell you that you're worth more than your job, when your job is what pays your bills and keeps you alive and pays for your lifestyle. 

Khrais: Yeah.

Sanborn: There was nothing that I could have said to have stopped the train, the runaway train, that was his mental health at that point. 

Khrais: Yeah. 

Sanborn: And so all I was focused on was just  trying to slow it down as much as possible.

Khrais: But a runaway train eventually has to crash. Bryer had this punching bag in his apartment, stuffed with rice. One afternoon, after a brutal day at work, he punched the bag and then punched it again. And again. It wasn’t enough so he slammed it on the ground. Rice spilled like confetti - raining down the loft onto his bed, into his shoes, down the cracks in the floorboards.  His breaking point had materialized right in front of him. It would take months before he picked up all the grains of rice.

As Bryer weighed his next move, Hanna was diving headfirst into hers. At this point in the story, Hanna, determined to be a single mom, has just done IVF.

Sanborn: Pregnant on the first try, pregnant with twins on the first try. 

Khrais: And with that came her own unraveling: Preeclampsia. Emergency C-section. Two babies in the NICU. And barely any maternity leave. 

Sanborn:  I cannot afford daycare, and I cannot afford a full time nanny. 

Khrais: Bryer had been with her every step - at doctor’s visits, at the NICU and visiting her on the weekends. He saw firsthand how exhausted she was. How hard it was for her to live with her mom. Now they were both at their limit, searching for a way out. 

Bryer desperately wanted to quit, do a 180 on his whole life. But quitting meant losing stability - no health insurance, no income, no clear plan. One thing he was especially worried about was losing his hormone therapy. Bryer is trans and without job coverage, it would cost $500 a month. 

Bryer: I was unwilling to stop my, my treatment. This was as essential as groceries to me.

Khrais: So he started doing the math, breaking down how long he could live on savings. Meanwhile, he pulled out a white board and scribbled down options: He could walk dogs, work at a frame shop again, tutor college kids… maybe he could livestream video games?? 

Rossi: being like no not that no not that no I don't think I could do this…. no that seems stupid or hard or not what I want and then like…

Khrais: And then there was that joke…the one where he quits his job to nanny for Hanna. But…what if that wasn't just a joke?

Rossi: I wanted to help her get out of that as fast as possible, get her back at home as fast as possible. I knew that the biggest roadblock was getting childcare.

Sanborn:  I was feeling the same way. I was like, what can I do to get Breyer out of his really bad situation? 

Khrais: It was a choice that felt both obvious and impossible.

Rossi: I was like, look, your leave’s coming up, like, two weeks, like, I'll put in my two weeks,  and, like, I, like, we'll just, we'll just start it, we'll just do it. 

Sanborn: I was just like, let's do it. We're doing it. We're getting you out of this situation. We're getting me out of this situation. You tell me how much your rate is, and I will pay it every week. 

Khrais: They’d spent years bailing each other out. But this was more than a favor, it was a turning point. That’s after the break. 

[Break]

Khrais: Bryer’s only credential for becoming Hanna’s nanny was trust. 

Rossi: I had no experience. I wasn't trained formally in any way, and like just generally didn't have hands-on experience with little kids or babies

Khrais: Hanna and Bryer both did their own research on a fair rate and settled on $700 a week. Very much on the lower end of market rates

Sanborn: But I had already made the determination in my head that I was going to take care of Bryer no matter what. 

Khrais: So not just paying his salary, which was enough for both rent and hormone therapy, but also making sure she kept food at the house, and paying for their meals when they went out.

Khrais:  were you all nervous at all about how money could complicate or change your friendship?

Rossi: I know she never did. Uh, I feel like I did because I mean, I felt a growing debt personally of just like, you keep giving me money, you keep spotting me, you know you're gonna pay for food, now you're gonna pay me this, this salary. I kept telling myself, this is a kindness.//She's doing this because she's your friend. She doesn't expect you to pay back. But a part of me was like, you have to remember because you can't just keep taking and taking and taking.

Khrais: hmm But you're also working! 

Rossi: Yeah. I, it's, yeah, it's, I was definitely doing a job.

Sanborn: I could tell that he was kind of gen, generally uncomfortable with the idea of me writing him a check every week. 

Rossi: Yeah. That did feel weird. Every time you gave me a check, it was super weird.

Khrais: Bryer had defined work hours, he’d come in at 10 and leave around 6. He’d spend a lot of time with Hanna and the twins in this tiny bedroom that had a bed and her office set up in it. 

Sanborn: There's this, a little patch on the floor where Bryer would sit with the kids and play with them while I was working so that I could be like feeling like I'm interacting with them while I'm still working.

Khrais: Bryer loved playing with the twins, making silly noises at them, hearing them erupt into laughter, his phone at the ready to record those moments 

**sounds of him playing with the babies and they’re laughing**<<FADE UNDER>> 

Khrais: Lots of cute moments, also a lot of work. 

Rossi: It was very overstimulating. It’s constant. 

Khrais: The twins were always on top of him. Always crying, laughing. Being babies. 

Rossi: And you're always anticipating their needs or trying to plan out what the next hour looks like. I need to do laundry, I need to do dishes. Can I fit this in? Can I sit down for a few minutes?

Khrais: He felt bad that at the beginning he needed a lot of Hanna’s help during the workday. Like when he’d change their diapers at the same time. 

Rossi: I’d just be like “hold them down!”

Khrais: Eventually, he learned how to swaddle. He learned about tummy time. And he perfected the art of moving a sleeping baby from a rocking chair to a crib. He became confident in his role as a nanny, but there were parts of his job he couldn’t control, like how the world saw him. Whenever he was out with the twins, pushing them in their stroller, he felt like he had eyes on him. 

Rossi: I don't know if that was actually true, but a man taking care of kids, especially on his own, people zone in on that right away. And like the bar is so low for men and child rearing and childcare, that like the bare minimum people applaud. And that felt really gross.  

Khrais: it sounds like you were very aware of other people's perceptions of you as, um, a male caregiver. Did you have any complicated feelings yourself that you worked through?

Rossi:  I think so. This has partially to do with my transition because I felt like, at one on one side I was kind of breaking gender stereotypes, but on the other side I could see like, you know, a very conservative backwards thought process of being like, “You can't deny your biology! You're really that woman underneath at all.” And like that, like that frustrated me.  

Khrais: Like you had that voice in your head every now and then? 

Rossi:  yeah, like sometimes it would just be like, am I, am I fulfilling some weird, like, backwards prophecy of like, “you can't deny what you were made for.” 

Khrais: It’s a pretty vulnerable thing to share… how his own thoughts could turn against him. But overall, he was happy. Caring for Hanna’s babies was satisfying in a way he’d never experienced. 

Rossi: It was already leagues better than a gambling company. Like the moral implications of this job were much more lofty, much higher than was  felt, like I was working towards something that like

Khrais: It was kind of a dream for Hanna too. 

Sanborn: I was able to work and get things done. It just, it kind of felt like the best of all worlds. Like I had my family, I had my kids, we were home. I had my best friend. It was a pretty incredible time.

Khrais: There’s something inherently intimate about the rhythms of caregiving. Navigating chaos and exhaustion side by side. Being in the trenches together can either pull you apart or draw you into something deeper. For Hanna and Bryer, it brought them closer. Once they put the twins to bed, they’d plop on the couch and binge watch Top Chef. Bryer started bringing a duffel bag over so he could crash in the guest room. The boundaries got softer. And somewhere in all that closeness, something began to shift for Bryer. 

Rossi:  My romantic attraction to Hannah, uh, starts to become really, uh,  undeniable, but I am still denying it. 

Khrais: Wait, I need a, I need you to, I need to pause you for a second. So you did have romantic attraction for her, that was?

Rossi: I did. I like, I can't, well, I, I, I, I, I, I  I  very specifically remember, you know, Hannah’s taking a bunch of pictures with her and the kids, and there's a whole, you know,  album, like Google album, and I get stuck on some of these pictures where I'm like, “She's so hot. Oh my God.”

Khrais:  Wait, wait! And had you ever had these thoughts before? 

Rossi: Briefly in the past. I know, early on in our friendship, I joked, I was like, “Oh, you wanna, like, make out?” Um, and Hannah very, very politely was like, “No, sweetie.” 

Khrais: We're not doing that, no, mm

Rossi: Yeah *haha* 

Khrais: When Bryer realized he couldn’t keep this in any longer, he sat at his kitchen table and interrogated himself out loud:

 Rossi: I like, how could I be so stupid? How could I be so dumb to not think that I didn't like her? Or how could I, how could I not see it in myself? 

Khrais: And, and were you afraid of telling her> 

Rossi: Yeah.

Khrais: and how that… Yeah, how that might impact your friendship?

Rossi: Yeah I thought How that would impact my friendship…. 

Khrais: and your employment? 

Rossi: I mean, I didn't, I kind of didn't care about that at, when I was thinking about this. Like I was so scared of losing the relationship at all or like it being weird or it being awkward now.

Khrais: Right right. You can't take that back when you say that. 

Rossi: Yeah exactly.

Khrais: This person had become his world. His best friend. His employer. And now, he's bursting knowing he's in love with her. And if she doesn't reciprocate, he might lose it all.

One Friday night, he builds up the courage to tell her. They’re hanging out on the rocking chairs on her front porch. He’s about to say, but he can’t. She tells him goodnight, she’s going to sleep. He’s crashing in her guest room that night. And while sitting on the bed, he pulls out his phone. 

Rossi: And I craft a text to just be like, “I love you in a romantic way.” And I like, I'm sobbing. I am beside myself with emotions here. I'm so scared I can't even let myself feel hopeful.

Sanborn:  and so I'm just like laying in bed. I think I'm like watching TV or something, and I get the text message and just like, it felt like my entire brain, just like blue screened. Just,  just nothing happened.

Khrais: “Error.”

Sanborn: No thoughts. And because I have not had good relationship luck in my life, my first instinct is to shut it down, shut it down, make it go away. Pretend you’re asleep. 

Khrais: For Hanna, love had always come with conditions, with disappointment. She had built up walls …without even realizing it. And now her best friend—her support system, her employee— was asking her to see everything between them in a new light. Her brain short-circuited. But once the fog lifted, she realized… some part of her had been waiting for this.

Sanborn: I powered through that because the honest truth was is it was kind of like finally. It took you [BLEEP] long enough. 

Khrais: That night, Bryer came into the bedroom…

Sanborn:  and we made out a little bit. 

Rossi: Yes.

RK: Yes, that did happen. 

Sanborn: That did happen. But after that, we like, we took a couple days just to like talk about it and what it was and what we were doing. Like, are we together? Does this mean you're gonna be dad? Do you wanna be stepdad? Like, are you still gonna be uncle to the kids? Like what does this mean for them?

Khrais: If you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking…wait what…dad? Stepdad? Like talk about an escalation. But they both knew - it was that serious. 

Rossi: Oh, yes. 

Sanborn: Oh yeah.

Khrais: It wasn’t long before they started talking about marriage.

I’ve never heard a story quite like Hanna and Bryer’s. Two people slowly building a life together, playing house before they could even admit they were building a home. It’s like watering a seed every day, without thinking much about it, and then one day noticing that you’re standing in the shade of a tree. 

Two months after confessing their feelings, Bryer boxed up his things and moved into Hanna’s apartment. And then came the practical part. They looked at their life, and realized: we need to renegotiate the terms. There were three big things to figure out. First: would Bryer keep taking care of the kids? 

Rossi: My answer was, uh, very strong yes, because I was not ready to go back to work, like in, uh, any capacity really.

Ok that’s settled. That brought them to the second big thing, their financial arrangement. 

Sanborn: He was just like, “you, you, you can stop paying me now. You can just stop.”

Khrais: Hanna stopped giving him paychecks. But as the breadwinner, she insisted on putting him on her credit cards. She never wants him to feel financially trapped. So Bryer still has his own savings account, and whenever he needs money, he just asks Hanna to transfer it or does it himself. He sometimes feels a little weird doing that, even though Hanna always reassures him it’s ok.

Sanborn: I think the recent one was we had a power outage here and our battery situation is not good enough. We need a new battery. And he's just like, “I'm gonna buy the expensive one…” And I was like, buy the expensive one! Don’t care! 

Rossi: Well, yeah. I'm like, it's like a thousand dollars and she's like, okay. 

Khrais: Why do you feel that hesitation, Briar? 

Rossi: It's not my money. Um, and I know that it is ours, it is the family’s, but I know Hannah has the job and Hannah makes the money. Um, so I kind of, like, give her the opportunity for veto power, if she feels like she needs to do that.

Sanborn: I don't really know how to explain that I always considered the money that I earned our money, early in our friendship. 

Khrais:  And have, had you ever felt like that with anyone else? 

Sanborn: No.

Khrais: Is that like? No? Because I'm trying to gauge how much of that is… 

Sanborn: I never even merged finances with my ex-husband.

Khrais: Whoa. Really?

Sanborn: Really. 

Khrais: Oh, wow.

Sanborn: They were both in uncharted territory. They had to figure out a new rhythm and let go of old narratives about who brings what to the table. But that took time, especially for Bryer.  

Rossi: I'm like, okay, so what am I doing with my time? Like, shouldn't I be working? Shouldn't I be providing, shouldn't I be adding to, uh, you know, to our finances in some way? And the answer is, I maintain the house. I am a homemaker. 

Khrais: And Hanna backs that up. Loudly. 

Sanborn: Just because somebody doesn't have a paycheck does not mean that they're doing nothing or that they're not contributing or that they don't have value. And I mean, part of it is because I was raised by a stay-at-home mother, and it was a privilege, certainly, but it was something that I think shaped me in a lot of ways. And I grew up, I mean, I told you about my dream of being a mother, and like deep in my heart, like maybe a stay-at-home mom would've been a great job. And I know now as an adult, that is not the job for me. I, I like my work and I like my job and I like what I do, but I'm so thankful that our kids have a stay-at-home parent whose, whose job, whose livelihood is focused on raising our kids to be the best kids they could be.

Khrais: And that leads to the third big thing they had to figure out: Bryer becoming a dad to the twins. Legally, they were still sorting it out, but it was more than title shift. It was something Bryer wanted to consciously step into 

Rossi:  I definitely had personally overt moments of like where I held the kids and I would like look at them and be like, you are my daughter. This, you are my child. Like you are my son. Like, I am your dad. And I like contextualized that with like how I looked at my dad growing up and like that's how he looks at me, and that's how he feels about me. I didn't let myself do this before, 'cause I, that wasn't what the… 

Khrais: That would not be appropriate. 

Rossi: Yeah. That wasn’t appropriate.

Khrais: It’s been three years since Bryer sent that panicked text confessing his love. Today they’re married and they’re done with the adoption process. 

Khrais:  I'm curious, like,  do you think your love story would've unfolded the same way if it weren't for economic pressures you both were under? 

Sanborn: I think so.

Rossi: No. 

[laughter]

Rossi:  Nice. 

Khrais: That's amazing. 

Sanborn: Excellent.

Khrais: Okay. Explain.

Rossi: Sure. I think that  I  was forced into a  corner, like needing to quit, needing to get another job, eventually becoming  a caregiver and eventually realizing my feelings. If I didn't have the, the push to, to make some of these pretty big leaps of faith, um, that I would've definitely done had a more conservative approach.

Sanborn: I just don't buy it. I don't, I don't… Maybe it would've taken a little bit longer for him to come into his feelings. But Bryer, I'm gonna be completely honest: I think if you were flush with money and you quit your job because you didn't need a job and you didn't like it anyway, I still think you would've watched the kids.

Rossi: Yeah.

Sanborn: You maybe might not have taken my money for it, but I think you still would've watched the kids.  Bryer taught me how to love just wholeheartedly.

Rossi:  I know that no matter what I do or what I say, that Hannah's always there. And that like the people that really love you, the people that are really there for you, don't care about the surface level, don't care about what job you have or how financially well off or how attractive you are. Like if they love you, they love you.

Khrais: I’ve talked with a lot of couples over the years about how their trust issues get tangled with money and create fractures in the relationship. It’s so common that honestly a part of me, as I was talking with Hanna and Bryer, kept wondering if some version of that might happen here. 

But there’s a special kind of strength in relationships that are born out of necessity. Out of one person saying “I’ve got you” when the other person doesn’t know what to do next. It started with a small favor - adding Bryer to the phone bill - followed by another favor, and then another one. Without trying, they built the infrastructure of a shared life and then somewhere along the way, the love revealed itself.  

Alright that’s all for our show this week…

If you want to reach out with any thoughts about this episode, you can always email me and the team over at uncomfortable@marketplace.org. 

Also before we go I want to share this new resource we’ve got for you all -if  you’re sharing your life with someone — could be a romantic partner, or even a family member or even a roommate — and you’re stuck on some uncomfortable financial conversations, we have a new guide that I think you’ll find really helpful. It’s a short ebook, pulling together the best advice we’ve gotten about mixing money and relationships over 10 seasons of doing this show, including step-by-step guides from financial therapists about working through hard conversations before they turn into fights. It’s totally free, and it’s at marketplace dot org slash relationships. Be sure to check it out!

Alright this episode was lead-produced by me, Reema Khrais. Zoë Saunders is the show’s senior producer. Jasmine Romero is our editor. Alice Wilder is our producer. Our intern is Zoha Malik. Katie Reuther helped produce this episode. Sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. And Caitlin Esch is Supervising Senior Producer. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. And the theme music is by Wonderly.

All right, I’ll catch you all next week.

Sanborn: We were best friends. The best friends. The most friends of friends, platonic of friends hahah