Being Needed Podcast: This episode is a spoken reflection from the essay Being Needed from the book Ghosts of Parenting. It explores what it really means to be needed across years, not as a role or identity, but as a lived condition that quietly reshapes time, attention, and inner life. Moving from early physical dependence to the subtler emotional forms that arrive later, this piece names the ongoing readiness, weight, tenderness, and unseen intelligence that sit inside everyday parenting. There is no advice here, just clear recognition of a reality many parents already live: the long, uneven presence of being needed, how it drains when unrecognised, and how it softens slightly when finally given language.