Baby This is Keke Palmer: How a Pop Culture Podcast Saved My Sanity

It was 2:14 PM on a Tuesday in late October, four years ago when Leo was just a tiny, furious newborn. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my Honda CR-V in the Target parking lot. I was wearing these black maternity leggings that smelled faintly of sour milk and sheer desperation, desperately avoiding making eye contact with a woman loading diapers into her SUV. I had an iced coffee in my cup holder that had completely watered down into a sad, beige puddle of regret.

I was supposed to be listening to this highly recommended audiobook about infant sleep cycles because some momfluencer with perfectly aesthetic, unstained living room furniture told me I needed to track his REM sleep. But I was so tired. Like, bone-deep, soul-crushing tired where your eyes feel like they've actual sand in them. And instead of playing the sleep book, I just... didn't. I just sat there in silence, staring at the steering wheel, realizing I had absolutely no idea who I was anymore.

Before having kids, I honestly believed that the moment they handed me that slippery, screaming potato in the hospital, the old Sarah was legally dead. I thought I had to mourn her. I thought I had to pack away my magazines, delete my pop culture playlists, and transform into this serene Earth Mother who only thought about purees and developmental milestones. When Maya, who's now seven going on seventeen and currently rolling her eyes at my existence, was a baby, I suffered in silence because I thought being a good mom meant full, unadulterated martyrdom.

And then I discovered this audio lifeline. You probably know the viral meme, but the actual Wondery podcast—the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer show—became my absolute sanctuary in the dark. It wasn't about sleep regressions. It wasn't about how to properly chop grapes so your kid doesn't choke. It was just Keke, who had recently become a mother herself, having these wildly authentic, hilarious, adult conversations about career reinvention, identity, and pop culture. It was exactly the lifeline my melting brain needed.

What my doctor actually said about my melted brain

A few weeks before this parking lot breakdown, I was sitting in Dr. Miller’s office. She’s our doctor, a saint of a woman who has seen me cry without a bra more times than my husband Mark at this point. I was explaining to her that I felt incredibly guilty because I just wanted to check out. I wanted to stop being "Mom" for like, twenty minutes a day. Dr. Miller handed me a crinkled tissue and basically told me that my mental health is the actual foundation of my baby's health.

I don't know the exact medical science behind it, she mumbled something about the AAP guidelines or maybe a World Health Organization study she read, but the messy gist I got was that if the mother is a stressed-out husk of a human being, the baby’s nervous system goes haywire too. Like their little baby cortisol levels spike if yours do, or something terrifying like that. I'm definitely not a scientist, but the point is, she essentially prescribed me a mental time-out. She told me I needed to find a way to engage my adult brain before I completely lost my mind.

The absolute hell of constant baby talk

I need to talk about the absolute hell that's the modern expectation of constant vocal engagement with your infant. Who came up with this garbage? You read these parenting blogs that are like, "to build their vocabulary, describe everything you're doing all day long!" Oh god. I tried it for exactly two days with Leo. I was walking around our apartment like a deranged, heavily caffeinated tour guide.

"And now Mommy is scraping dried avocado off the high chair, look at the green crust! Now Mommy is staring blankly into the refrigerator hoping a block of cheddar cheese will magically manifest!" It's EXHAUSTING. You're just talking to a tiny, non-verbal roommate who occasionally spits up on you while maintaining unbroken eye contact. You run out of things to say by 9 AM. I felt like my brain was slowly leaking out of my ears from the sheer lack of adult vocabulary, and do you know how hard it's to narrate your fourth load of laundry without weeping?

I mean, think about the sheer volume of unsolicited advice we get. My Instagram feed was a minefield. One post tells you that if you don't do baby-led weaning, your child will never learn to chew and will go to college eating pureed squash. The next post says that if you let them watch ten minutes of a cartoon so you can shower, you're frying their dopamine receptors. It’s a miracle we don't all just walk into the sea. We're so overly educated on the mechanics of parenting that we've completely lost the instinct of it. I'd lay in bed at night, furiously Googling "4 month old sleep regression" instead of just going to sleep.

Meanwhile, wiping down a changing pad with a Clorox wipe every single time is a complete waste of energy.

Let's discuss the gear that survived the newborn trenches

Because we're talking about survival, I feel like I need to confess what actual physical items kept us afloat while I was wearing a path in the hallway floorboards with a baby carrier. When Leo was about four months old, his skin just absolutely rebelled against the universe. Eczema everywhere. Red patches. Pure misery. I remember standing at the changing table, trying to wrangle him into this tiny baby t, like one of those ridiculous graphic shirts that cost more than my own clothes, and I realized the synthetic fabric was just making him break out worse.

That's when we switched almost exclusively to the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao. I'm not usually someone who preaches about organic everything, but I'm telling you, THIS THING was a game changer for his skin. It’s got this perfect stretchy envelope shoulder situation which is critical because when the inevitable up-the-back blowout happens, you don't want to pull a poop-covered garment over your child’s head. Ask me how I know. I washed these bodysuits roughly four hundred times and they actually got softer instead of turning into that weird crunchy texture that cheap cotton does.

Because I was also a sucker for an aesthetic Instagram ad at 3 AM, I bought the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. Look, I’m going to be completely honest with you. They're fine. They're non-toxic and they look cute on the shelf and they don't have those obnoxious flashing lights that make you want to throw them into the sun. But Mark stepped on one in the dark last week and I honestly just hate picking them up from under the sofa. They're blocks. They do block things.

But the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy? That thing is practically a religious artifact in our house. When Leo's first tooth started coming in, he turned into a feral badger. He wanted to gnaw on everything, including my collarbone. We gave him this little panda teether and it was like a switch flipped. It's lightweight enough that his clumsy little hands could actually hold it without dropping it on his face every five seconds, and I could just chuck it in the dishwasher when it inevitably fell on the floor of a public restroom.

If you want to see what else kept us from completely losing our minds during the dark days, you can just explore Kianao's organic baby clothes and blankets to find something that really works for your chaotic life.

How Keke Palmer brought me back to reality

The turning point for me really was just accepting that I didn't have to be "on" all the time. Mark, my husband, bless his heart, handles stress by aggressively organizing the garage. He goes out there with his little label maker and just goes to town on bins of winter coats. I handle stress by disassociating into pop culture.

I started putting Leo in the carrier, sticking one Airpod in my right ear—always the right, I don't know why, maybe my left ear is just lazy—and going for these incredibly long walks. I remember one specific episode where Keke was talking to Emma Grede about the reality of juggling billion-dollar businesses with four kids by just aiming to be one percent better instead of perfect. It wasn’t a lecture. It was just brilliant, funny women reminding me that the world is bigger than my living room.

I was standing in the kitchen at 6 AM. The sky was that bruised purple color it gets in the winter, and I was holding a bottle under the warm water tap, just staring blankly at the frost on the window. And the podcast was talking about how you don't have to be locked into one version of yourself forever. It hit me so hard I almost dropped the bottle. Here I was, mourning my pre-baby career, feeling like I was just permanently benched from the real world, and this voice in my ear was basically giving me permission to just... pivot. To let the old me go without resentment and figure out who this new, tired, yoga-pant-wearing version of Sarah really was.

You should just grab a coffee that might seriously be hot for once and throw your headphones in to shop Kianao's sustainable baby essentials before your kid inevitably wakes up from their nap and demands a snack.

The messy reality of podcast parenting

Is it selfish to just put headphones in and ignore my kid?

Oh god, please stop listening to the internet guilt trips because honestly, if you're safely watching your baby and they're fed and clean, putting in a headphone to listen to adult conversations is literally self-preservation. You can't pour from an empty cup, and my cup wasn't just empty, it was cracked and covered in sticky handprints. A sane mom who occasionally zones out to a pop culture podcast is way better than a mom who's present but silently weeping from burnout.

What did your doctor seriously mean about the medical guidelines?

Look, I'm absolutely not a doctor and I barely passed high school biology, but Dr. Miller basically told me that babies are like little emotional sponges that absorb our stress. I think the AAP officially recommends that moms take mental breaks, but my version of a mental break isn't a bubble bath—it's listening to Keke Palmer dissect celebrity culture while I fold endless piles of tiny socks. If you're a miserable wreck, your baby definitely knows it.

How do you physically listen to anything with a newborn around?

The single Airpod strategy is the only way I survived, honestly. I'd keep the right one in with the volume on medium so I could still hear if Leo started making his pre-cry pterodactyl noises, and the left ear was free for reality. Also, long stroller walks are your best friend here because the motion puts them to sleep and you get a solid forty-five minutes of uninterrupted audio time.

Did listening to pop culture really help your anxiety?

Surprisingly, yes, because when you're entirely consumed by the terrifying responsibility of keeping a tiny human alive, your world shrinks down to the size of a bassinet. Hearing adults talk about adult things—careers, boundaries, pop culture drama—reminded me that the outside world still existed and I was eventually going to rejoin it.

Are those organic baby clothes you mentioned genuinely worth the money?

I used to think the whole organic cotton movement was just a scam to make tired parents spend more money, but then Leo's skin completely freaked out. Once I saw how much less red and irritated his eczema was in the Kianao bodysuits compared to the cheap synthetic stuff we got at my baby shower, I was totally converted. They just hold up better in the wash anyway, and when you're doing laundry at 2 AM, that's all that matters.