Doug French: Yeah, I got to say, I made a huge, huge leap forward on Friday.
Magda Pecsenye Zarin: What happened?
Doug: I went ahead and got two terabytes of storage.
Magda: What are you going to put in there?
Doug: All the stuff that was making my computer slow down. I offloaded like 80 gigs.
Magda: You stored all that stuff on your laptop?
Doug: Yeah, because I want to have it. I don't want to trust the cloud.
Magda: I get it.
Doug: This thing here holds eight of my laptops.
Magda: It looks like a mini Etch-A-Sketch.
Doug: And I took 80 gigs of storage off this computer, and it's like it's a whole new animal. It's leaping around like a gazelle in the forest.
Magda: That's funny. I hope it doesn't leap away from you.
Doug: It's exuberant. It's quick. It's responsive. It calls me by my name when I turn it on. It's very happy.
Magda: “Hello, Doug. What would you like to type today?”
Doug: “I'm afraid I can't allow that, Doug.”
Magda: Exactly.
Doug: Yeah, just in time for AI to possess it and chase me around the room.
Magda: God, seriously.
Doug: Well, this is my question to you. Have you heard of dry needling?
Magda: Yes.
Doug: It's like a celebrity roast.
Magda: Come on. Celebrity roast.
Doug: That's exactly what it sounds like, though. It would be like a British tea party, dry needling.
Magda: You are such a weirdo.
Doug: Well, but I was talking to a friend of mine about my hip flexor. I've got a hip flexor issue now.
Magda: Right. Okay, so if you have a hip flexor issue, why didn't you go see Monica or Sara at Sub Rosa Acupuncture?
Doug: Well, because this is the point. What is the difference between dry needling and acupuncture?
Magda: Okay, so acupuncture is those little teeny tiny needles, right, that just divert your energy and it works on imagination and duct tape, right? And, you know, somebody like me, for whom acupuncture works really well, I don't know if it's because I believe it's going to work or whatever, but every ailment I've tried to fix with acupuncture has been fixed with acupuncture.
Doug: The power of the mind cannot be understressed. I get it.
Magda: Dry needling, I believe, uses bigger needles that go further into you and actually manipulates your innards. I think it manipulates the fascia and stuff under your skin with actual needles. So, I mean, I'm not saying don't try dry needling. I'm saying...if you're thinking about trying dry needling, just maybe lob in a Hail Mary pass with the acupuncture first because it's a lot less invasive and less painful. I'm guessing there's plenty of acupuncture to be had in Ann Arbor.
Doug: And plenty of stick and poke tattoos.
Magda: Yeah, exactly.
Doug: It's just the hip flexor is confounding because it defies everything you're supposed to do to fix it. It's the same improve your core, which involves squats, involves a lot of things that your hip flexor needs to do properly. And it's like, you know, you have a very sore, very tender area. So don't stretch the shit out of it and it'll get better. It's, it's, it's counterintuitive.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And until I figured out I'm limping around like a damn pirate, but man, this episode with Catherine, what a way to hit 50 episodes, huh?
Magda: Yeah, seriously, this was a big episode. She had a lot of change going on.
Doug: And she didn't even tell us that she's also losing her house.
Magda: No, she didn't. Okay, so after we recorded that episode with her last week, she posted on her Substack that her landlord is... What's her landlord doing? Selling the house that they're renting?
Doug: Yeah, just like your landlord did.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, out of nowhere. Like, I just think… Wow, all of that change happening, all in such a short period of time.
Doug: Yeah, the timing is just horribly shitty, just because it's all about these massive changes. There's grief involved because her mom passed away. There's bereavement because her daughter has launched. There's a lot of stuff going on, and, oh by the way, you got to downsize your house that you raised your family in for the last 11 years in L.A., which, you know, the real estate market in L.A. is robust.
Magda: Yeah, “robust” is an understatement. And, yeah, I mean, I think it's just a lot. And she is so kind of sanguine about it. I don't know if she just has figured out, like, if she gets upset about it, that that'll take her out. So she might as well just try to be as chill as possible?
Doug: That's kind of her way. She's always been really even-keeled and comes at things with a very academic sensibility because that's where her roots are.
Magda: Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: And I guess that that's the inspiration to take away here because like the poem says, right, meet with triumph and disaster and take those two imposters just the same. I mean, she's keeping an even keel and she has people around her to help, you know, soften up the rough spots, but it's a very transitional time. And she seems to have made peace with the idea that a lot of these things that were a part of my life are not meant to be in my life anymore. So, you know, you focus on care and feeding of the soul when you're raising your kids. And now she's like focusing her attention on herself, which I think that's where it was. That's where it belongs right now.
Magda: Yeah. Like, I really don't feel like there's anything else we need to say about it. We should just go into the episode.
Doug: And there was plenty of dry needling in there, too.
Magda: Oh my God, with the dry needling.
Theme music fades in, plays, and fades out.
Doug: Well, Catherine, I'm so happy you're here because you may not realize this, but here on our little “fiftypedia” podcast, this is our 50th episode.
Catherine Connors: Oh, my gosh! Congratulations, and I am honored to be your guest for the fiftieth episode.
Doug: Thank you. Yeah, it seems particularly golden on a number of levels. Well, it's so good to see you. And in fact, this is a sidebar. This may stay in and may go out, but I wanted to start with this because you do have a young adult son, and how old is Jasper now? Seventeen?
Catherine: He just turned sixteen.
Doug: Sixteen. Okay. Because we were our last episode was about boys and socializing and the fusillade of literature being created about loneliness of boys and how they don't have a place to express their feelings. They're either “your feelings don't matter” because you're not supposed to express them or “your feelings don't matter” because there are other people whose feelings matter more than yours. And it's gotten actually, I was surprised by it. It's gotten a lot of interest. I've gotten a lot of comments about it. But I was just curious about your interpretation. You've got one of each. You’ve got an older daughter and a younger son. Do you talk to Jasper at all about this? Or is this something that's on your mind? Is something that he'll have to figure out how to do?
Catherine: Yeah, of course. I mean, it's such an interesting question. I mean, we've had the unique experience. First, there's the younger brother, older sister dynamic, right? Which creates, I think, just a very interesting space for mutual learning between a boy and a girl, right? So Jasper's grown up with a very, very strong-willed, like very powerful older sister. He's also grown up with a professionally feminist mother. And so a lot of these questions have just been a part of what our household has been like.
He also was a young boy and pre-adolescent in the Disney years, and so it wasn't even just that all of these questions about how does one navigate the world as a boy or a girl or anywhere in between or outside were always present. Our household is also a world in which it was not only assumed or expected, but invited that my children would live outside of whatever constraints they might feel socially.
So Jasper's always been a very sensitive and caring human being. He had lovely friendships when he was young. He still has some lovely, lovely friendships. And we had open conversations about how it felt when he started to feel like he couldn't be as public about loving his best friend in fourth grade, for example, when he couldn't be as public about loving My Little Pony or tea parties or whatever it was that he liked, so it's an ongoing thing in our household. It is absolutely true that boys, I would say especially white boys, live in this environment in which they are being told consistently to be mindful of their privilege before they even really understand what privilege is. And that's a difficult thing to take on, right. It's not wrong, but it's difficult. It's difficult to expect a child whose frontal cortex hasn't fully formed to understand the nuances of power and privilege. And so it's definitely a dynamic and it's one that has in some corners, problematic implications of this messaging that they should sit down, step back.
But we're also living in a moment where I feel like everyone is offered so many more channels of expression and communication. There are more diverse role models for boys and for girls and for everybody, that we're sort of in this complicated time where there's a lot that will constrain them. I think that boys and men have a more expanded horizon of possibility than ever than in the past when those like archetypes were much more strict. So I think it's a very long-winded answer. I'd say it's like, it's a mixed thing.
Doug: There's no such thing as a non-long-winded answer to this. I mean, how succinct can you be about something so thorny and so complex? I mean, that's kind of required at this point to kind of express all you can. I know I'm thinking, I really hope I gave them enough to figure this out because they're going to be held to a very different standard than I was. And I'm hoping that they can adapt.
Catherine: Well, I think this is the challenge that I actually think there's not enough public discourse about in parenting, that we spend so much time, and this is how we all know each other, right? In the discourse of early parenthood, of new parenthood. And of course there is, because it's a space that people generally experience some profound disorientation when they enter this space. no such thing as being ready for parenthood. But we get to this stage when our children are older and the concerns are different. It's not just about getting them to sleep, getting them fed, keeping them alive.
It's care and tending of the soul and hoping that we've done a good enough job and hoping that we're equipping them in the right human ways for being a independent human in the world. And I've said to a few people that I feel like the early years were a breeze compared to this. I don't miss not sleeping, but the work of the soul was much easier.
Magda: Well, I think also the stuff from the early days of parenting, it's so immediate. The problem has to be solved right now. And also the feedback on it is immediate and you feel like you can kind of change course at any moment. And now, you know, with older teens and with kids who are halfway out of the house or all the way out of the house, it's like you realize, oh shit, I should have course-corrected on that 10 years ago. And there's nothing I can do about it now. Right. And any decisions or conversations or actions or anything you do now, it's too late. And I think that's for me the challenge of now, like, wow, did I do the right things 10 years ago? In time periods that I don't even remember right now? That's a big challenge, I think.
Catherine: I have felt that in my gut, that, because you nailed what a particular part of the sort of the existential crisis that I think many, if not all parents go through at this stage. Is that sense of everybody has a moment where they go, oh, I should have done something different two years ago, three years ago, eight years ago, nine years ago. And there's no going back. Right? And you're exactly right that, you know, in the early days, it's like it's military tactics. Right. It's like it's immediate. You can pivot. You can turn course. You can restrategize.
And there are very few things in that arena where it's like it's going to have a truly, truly lasting effect. Right. Or at least you think, right. Yeah. And then you get to this stage and you're like, oh man, there's this emotional transition that you have to go through when you realize that, kind of too late, that the job is almost done in the sense of hands-on practical parenting. You're of course moving into a new era of parenting, but I feel like we don't see the end coming, if that makes sense. We only realize we're done after the fact.
Doug: And then it's like, it's a ripe field for regrets and rethinks.
Magda: And the regrets that I have, the things that I wish I had done differently were not in any way, shape or form things that seemed even remotely important at the time. Yeah. Right. Like I was doing all these things that I was sure were going to have such an impact on my kids' lives and they don't remember it. It hasn't had any kind of long tail into their behavior or their decision-making or anything. And this stuff that I just didn't even give two thoughts to is the stuff that they are remembering that they have been holding onto that have affected the way they interact with other people.
Catherine: It's like, wow, did I completely miss the mark on this?
Doug: Are you thinking too tangibly, though? I mean, there's also just the overall essence of your example as a loving mom. You've had that impact on them. perhaps not in particular independent touch points that you can identify, like the things you may have planned. I mean, it's just like, you know, you buy gifts for your kids and they play with the box all Christmas. Right.
Magda: But I mean, I'm not trying to be like the bare minimum mom. You know what I mean? Like I'm not comparing myself to mothers who genuinely don't love their kids or who were unable to express that or something like that. I really want to be the exact mother that my kids needed at every stage and that they still need now. Right. You know, even if those decisions were the right decisions at the time that they've left a different, like a longer tail that is, I don't know, like swishing in a different direction than I thought it would. You know, I don't mean to say like I'm filled with angst about it all the time. But it is something that I had not really anticipated. And I think that's what makes these older teens, like parenting them difficult for me. Although I do still feel like the early years were much more difficult for me. But I think that's very specific to me and very specific to the fact that I had undiagnosed ADHD. And that one of the manifestations of that is that managing objects and things is incredibly stressful to me. And that's all you do for the first like eight years of your kid's life is manage all of their objects and like the things that you have to have with you at all times. Like, you know, God forbid you don't have this one specific doctor approved, you know, sippy cup on hand every minute of the day, you know? And like, that was incredibly difficult for me in a way that I didn't realize was more difficult for me than for other people.
Catherine: Here's the irony. And I think it's an irony that none of us escape. Right. Is that we all want or let's say like accepting the category of truly terrible parents within the range of the norm. I think we all want to be the best parent that we can be. We want to do it right. We want to get it right. You know, we want to do better than our own parents did or whatever our measurements are. We want to be the best parents that we can be. And the harsh reality is that none of us ever get there. It's an impossible standard. And so it's like Schrodinger's parent, right?
Like we're both equally good parents and bad parents, you know, all at once existing in superposition. Because, you know, it's like that Philip Larkin poem, this be the verse that goes like, they fuck you up, your mom and dad, they might not mean to, but they do. We all do it in some way.
And I think one of the existential difficulties of getting older and having your children get older is that you start to realize the truth of that, right? When your kids are younger, when you're a newer parent, you can tell yourself that's going to be different, you're going to do, it's going to be, even when you have all the anxieties, and I had like severe postpartum anxiety, and general anxiety. It's like even throughout all of that, you're galvanized by a kind of optimism. about your capacity to do the best job that you can and then you get to this stage and you're like, oh, shit, right the bus has left.
Magda: I also think that there's this culture now that is just so fucking maudlin about your kids leaving the house, right. Like I think parents who were Silent Generation and Boomers, they were supposed to rejoice when the kids were finally out of the house. And I think Gen Xers are supposed to be so sad, so maudlin, missing our kids. Oh, no. And so now people are pushing out these statistics like “90% of the time you spend with your children in the same room will be before they turn 18.” And so you're supposed to be just like desperately sad that you only have 10% of the time left with them in the same room. And then there are all these websites that are focused on kids leaving the house that are just so depressing. And they're talking about how we just can't let go and we're going to be so sad.
Doug: Well, that's the nature of the beast, though, isn't it? I mean, this is the most examined parenthood generation that there's been. So, of course, if we've been that involved in their development and everything else all these years, then, of course – the overall experience will be harder to put down.
And the mantra is always, this was always the goal. This is, we wanted this. We knew it would be hard. Yeah.
Magda: But that's not, that's not what these content mills are saying. You know, they're all like–
Doug: Mills are trying to rile us up to sell papers.
Magda: Yeah. But that's what they're saying. They're like, “50 ways to stop feeling horrible that your son has left the house.” You know, like a listicle for our time. Right. Exactly.
Magda: And that's, you know, and I get people saying, oh, like, did you read this thing on blah, blah, blah? Like, no, I was actually kind of fine when my kid left because he was so excited to go.
Doug: Right. But that's a good segue point, though, because one of the things we were going to talk about with Catherine is that when Emilia did go to college, which was how many years ago now, she's going to be a sophomore.
Catherine: She's just finished her first year.
Doug: And you talked about how difficult that was for Emilia to launch in that way. Now that she's finished her first year out of the house, how are you feeling about it?
Catherine: I'm still not prepared. I'm still not prepared. Yeah, I mean, I think my experience of the discourse, I totally see what you're saying, Magda, but I think I've experienced the discourse a little bit differently in that I feel like I didn't see as much of that. I mean, I certainly saw the memes around, you know, the last time you pick up your child, you don't know it, right? Like the very Goodnight Moon, I'll Love You Forever, kind of like super-emotive, maudlin assessments of the existential condition of parenthood. Although I would also say, before I get back to my own experience, that I feel like those in some respects are like Doug said, a kind of symptom of Gen X having created a digital generation or laid the groundwork for a digital generation that is sort of cutting their wrists onto the screen right and sharing everything and like really digging into all the feels so there's definitely a digital economy around that.
There's a culture around that I feel like I didn't, perhaps it's just the way the algorithms work, wasn't as exposed to the stuff around “you're going to feel a certain way when your kid goes to college.” My experience was unique in that my mom passed away just like a couple of weeks before Emilia's high school graduation. You know, the last conversation Emilia had with her grandmother, I was in Canada with my mom and it was the day of her prom, right? My mom was dead by the next morning. It was a very-
Doug: On Mother's Day. On Mother's Day.
Magda: Oh, wow.
Catherine: Just to make it extra sucky. So I went through that whole season. Between Emilia's problem, and I was very mindful about missing some of these last days of high school, some of these like milestone things, because I was, you know, my mom was having a surgery, I was up in Canada with her, and then she passed away.
And my daughter's transition out of high school was very much mixed in with a more traditional grief. I wrote about this on my Substack last week, actually, because I feel like it was actually a gift in that the grieving that I was socially expected to go through with my mom was a permission to experience this transition of my daughter as a kind of grief. And to look for opportunities to create ritual around it, and to create memory around it, and to genuinely be very deeply in my feelings about it, to be really sad. Even though when I said, like, I'm still not prepared, you know, I feel like even when we dropped her off, I think somewhere in my mind, I was still telling myself, she's not leaving home. Right. This is not permanent. This is not the end. This is just, you know, she's going away for a bit. Right.
But deep down, you know, I mean, I knew and I was sad. And because it was so bound up in the loss of my mother, a very dear friend of mine said within one season, I was losing my identity as a daughter and losing part of my identity as the mother of a daughter. And that rang really, really, really true for me. And is in some respects a very sort of dark and difficult thing. But it also forced me into some very deep reflection on what I was losing, what the transition looked like, what it felt like to be going through a season of endings and to really allow myself to be sad about it and to have complicated feelings about it. There was like, oh, we got through this. She's been so happy. She loves it in Santa Barbara. She never wants to come home. And I'm thrilled about that. But yeah, I grapple with the sense of loss.
Doug: So when you reflected about that, was there anything specific that you concluded apart from what you've shared in terms of how to rise up from those endings and recognize that grief takes many forms? I mean, even though, as you say, she was just going to be away for a while. It's the end of an era. You know, I still have phantom pains when it's time to take Thomas to school.
Catherine: Yeah, it's that reflection on what it means to reach the end of an era. And that I think is something that even though we live in a digitized modeling culture that dissects all the feelings, I do feel that we don't talk enough in a substantive way about how it feels to reach or to go through the ends of eras, right? There's so much that we accept as I think, the norm in terms of the circle of life, right? Like we go through stages and it's things that are natural are supposed to be not that bad. If your parent dies, you know, when they're elderly, that's less bad than losing a parent young. And in a lot of very important respects it is, but it doesn't change that it's painful, deeply, deeply, deeply painful in no small part, because it does represent the end of a segment of your life, the end of an identity, and recognizing that there are some stages of our lives that when we complete them in whole or in part, we lose part of ourselves, right? We gain lots of other parts for sure, right? But we also lose parts of ourselves and that can make us feel a way.
Doug: It feels like the end of the Wes Anderson film, the film about the three brothers on the train. They've been carrying around literally their father's baggage. for miles and they finally just let it go. And so there's something about the end of something. If you can kind of twist it on its head and think of it as sloughing off skin or something that wasn't meant to be part of your life anymore.
Catherine: I mean, your analogy is a very good one, like, you know, pointing to that film and the idea of carrying baggage. Because it's in some respects, it's like there's a forced sloughing off of skin in the sense that everybody dies. You know, we all lose family, loved ones, homes, jobs. We all lose things. Right. And so the skin gets sloughed off no matter what. But I think that we often hang on to the sloughed skin.
Magda: That sounds kind of serial killer-y. I think it's more like the cicada shells that they leave, right? I like that. Because, you know, it's a super cicada year in Illinois and stuff like that. And I've seen all these people that are like making jewelry with the shells, which I think seems excessive. Even if you're a person who loves cicadas, and I am a person who loves cicadas, I love the noise they make, I don't want to hold on to their shells.
Doug: Especially this year when you're shoveling them. I mean, they're three feet deep in places. It's stunning. Anyway, I'm sorry. You were saying we were talking about serial killers. No. We were talking about… We were talking about the sloughing of the skin, yeah.
Catherine: Whether it's our own skin or pretty cicada shells or whatever it is, when we reach the ends of eras, inevitably we need to, or most of us realize we need to, let go of things. We have to drop the baggage, right? We have to leave the shell behind. We need to move on.
Losses happen to us, but they also demand that we give things up, that we participate in the loss. And that I think is the thing that can be really challenging is saying it's like, okay, I have to let go of my identity as the mother of a daughter who's like thinking about her every move. I have to let go of my identity as the daughter of a mother who I expected to take care of in her old age. I have to make a choice to release my attachment to those identities and to those moments and to my expectations about the world and my understanding about the world. And that's the thing that I think can be difficult. It has been difficult for me, but I'm working on it.
Doug: As I recall, your mom's passing was not expected.
Catherine: It wasn't.
Doug: That's the literature trope of all times when, you know, you're thinking everything's going great and then you get the phone call.
Catherine: Yeah. You know, there was a not insignificant mortality risk, but the whole point of the surgery was to save her life, was to extend her life. She had an aneurysm in her abdominal aorta and was at risk of having like a stroke if it wasn't removed. And the whole point, even though the surgery was risky, her surgeon told me the whole point is because she's got the prospect of a very rich, long life after this, and he wanted her to have it. So it was a risk worth taking because the aneurysm was almost certainly going to kill her. And even though I was very aware of the mortality risk, it was a shock.
Doug: And you were there when it happened?
Catherine: I was there. I was holding her in my arms when she died.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: You talk about a paradigm of sandwich parenting in which you're sacrificing the rites of passage that your daughter is going through graduating high school to be with your mom and having to choose between the two. We've had discussions about that. And again, it's not like you had a choice. You were where you needed to be. But you were close to her anyway. How did you maintain that long distance relationship?
Catherine: We were extremely close. I described her as my best friend. She was the person in the world that loved me most. This is an interesting thing about not everybody has the very great privilege to have this with their parents. Both of my parents loved me to the moon and back and were tremendous. Like the Philip Larkin poem, they messed up some things, but my most important parenting lesson from them was the most important thing you can do is love your children dearly and make sure your children understand that you also like them, right, that you enjoy them. My parents didn't just love me. I was their favorite person to spend time with. You know, my dad passed away over a decade ago, and it was a very, very hard loss, but my mom, throughout the years, ‘til then and after then, has always been the person who not just loved me but liked me the most. You know, more than my own children, more than my partner. Yeah, I say this to Emilia sometimes. It's like you're going to realize like one of these days, you're going to realize. We play this game back and forth and like we text every day and the close off is always “love you,” “love you more.” And then it goes back and forth for a bit. “I love you more.” And that's like, no, girl, like one day you're going to understand truly that I do indeed love you more. My mom loved me more. And we spent a lot of time on the phone. We talked almost every day.
She was for a time, like when I was blogging, she had her own blog. I was Her Bad Mother. She was Her Bad Grandma. I visited whenever I could. I just spent a couple of weeks with her a month before we got the news. She had to go into the hospital and it was pretty urgent.
So she was a really important fixture on the landscape of my life. And I was looking forward to taking care of her. We were going to bring her down to California, you know, once her husband was in care and take care of her. And like, I was looking forward to, I knew it was going to be hard, but it was part of my future that I expected to have. And so it, part of the complication of the loss was that goes along hand in hand with the “loss,” scare quotes, of my daughter to college is that, okay, my future has changed, right? I knew that my daughter was going to college and she would no longer be living at home and I would no longer be day to day taking care of her. But I had expected I would be taking care of my mother. And so my whole identity as a caregiver shifted.
Doug: Yeah, you had that backup system in place. Yeah.
Catherine: Yeah. And as you know, I've, you know, Jasper's still at home. We've got a couple of more years and I sort of, you know, I suspect he might—
Doug: That's different though. Yeah, I get it. It's different, but it goes to how complicated it can be. The whole dynamic of a sandwich generation is, is that, yeah, it's hard. There are burdens that you want to carry. There are burdens that you don't want to carry. There are burdens that you are ambivalent about. But, you know, our burdens around our loved ones, there's a respect in which I feel like I've been liberated, right? I wouldn't choose this. You know, I'd rather have my mom in the world. But it's like now I have this like open landscape ahead of me. It's a little bit disorienting, frankly, because I was expecting there to be more constraints on it. These changes, these transitions, these liminal states, these losses can just be really disorienting.
Magda: It's an interesting topic to me to be considering how we thought we were going to age and then things come out of left field and change the way we thought we were going to age. And those things are sometimes horrible and sometimes they're just, they are, and sometimes they're really good and I mean, I had this plan in place for what was going to happen when my kids left the house and I was by myself in my house. And then I fell in love and got married. And now I'm in a physically different place doing different things. Just my day-to-day life is so different than I anticipated it would be. And it's a wonderful thing, but it's still disorienting. And I think that's something that it almost feels like we're told that we were foolish for making plans because of course things change, right? But that doesn't mean that, you know, if we hadn't made plans, that would really be foolish because then we would just sort of be waiting to see what happened and not have any way to respond to it, you know, not have set ourselves up for any kind of success in what we were going to be doing next.
Doug: Well, as we've seen, people planning retirements, not having a plan is a lot worse.
Magda: Well, yeah, that's true.
Catherine: Well, it's the rich, beautiful, terrible complexity of life is that you have to plan, but your planning doesn't matter. It's like Schrodinger's plan. It's both. You have to do it. It's like it's there and it's not all at the same time. We sometimes believe the story that as we get older, as we mature, we become more wise. We become more knowing. We become more adult with a capital A. And there are some ways in which that's true. But I think for the most part, we actually don't. We continue to discover, right, we continue to unearth things that we don't know, and we don't understand, and we continue to enter into unknown territory.
And maybe, you know, our muscles are better developed. And, you know, we've developed some more orienteering skill, but it's still an unknown territory. And we are always disoriented when we come on to when we sort of move out of some wood or over some hill and see something completely different from what we expected. But that's what life is. And I think it's sort of a, in a way, it's a perpetual surprise to me that I am in this persistent state. Over the course of last year, I lost my mom, lost a number of things, lost my job. And in the state of a kind of unemployment, I sometimes say to people when they ask what I do, it's like, I'm trying to just, you know, figuring out what I want to do when I grow up. And I genuinely mean it, right? I genuinely mean that I, like, in some respects, I feel the same way I did when I was 18 or 19 years old. And it was like, well, what are you going to do now? Right? Where are you going to go? You could do anything, right?
Doug: That's kind of a gift to feel that level of potential and that level of options.
Catherine: It's a gift and it's a burden. And we all have kids that are around these ages, kids in their periods of launching or under, like experience a lot of anxiety and stress. And yeah, I think that we forget the anxiety and stress that can come with, “Oh, gosh, the rest of my life is on my shoulders.” And that's a big deal. It's a big deal whether you've got 60 to 70 years in the rest of your life or whether you've got like 20 or 30 years in the rest of your life or less. And like parenting, we want to do the best job of it as we can. And like with parenting, we don't want to, I fear getting to the end of my life and having the experience that we were discussing earlier about launching your kids and feeling like, oh shit, I wish I'd done things differently.
Magda: I think there's value in the planning because planning is also problem solving. And the more practice you get, you know, this idea that you're always going to be disoriented is very, very true, but you have gotten yourself oriented almost every time you've been disoriented in the past. And the more often you experience being disoriented and then reorienting yourself to the better and faster and more efficient and more clever you get at it. It's hard to appreciate the value in the planning when something completely different comes down the pike for you.
Catherine: No, I think that's exactly right. I think it's fundamental to how we human to be able to say it's like, how am I going to navigate the space I am in? How am I going to travel this path that I am on? How am I going to get to that mountain or that forest or that village or whatever it is? It's the exercise of doing that to your point, Magda, that helps us build our muscles. It helps us build our experience. Even if I don't even want to say it helps us get better at it.
I think it's just we become more attuned to to the dynamics of planning and more comfortable with the uncertainty that attends any kind of planning. And that allows us to perhaps move in the world with more grace, perhaps allows us to, I don't know, navigate with greater self-awareness. But in some respects, it facilitates our development as humans who are humaning in an uncertain world.
Doug: And I think the real challenge indication of how well we are existing in the world is we're making plans but we're prepared to tweak them when we need to tweak them or throw them out entirely when they become unviable or recognizing that we need to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. And when you talk about abrupt changes, I see a lot of similarities with you and with Jill Smokler, who was on a few weeks ago, who's had a horrific piece of news since we talked to her. You talk about an abrupt change in your outlook.
Catherine: That's a big one.
Magda: Let's mention for people who didn't listen to that episode, Jill Smokler a couple weeks ago was diagnosed with glioblastoma.
Doug: But the parallels I see clearly, I mean, she created something and then had an exit and received some new level of freedom in her life and still wanted to create things. But when you think about where you are professionally, because you mentioned now that job is over. So now you have a new bit of freedom to kind of branch out professionally. What are you thinking about doing and how do you think you're going to have to do it to adapt to a new media landscape?
Catherine: Well, as I said, still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. Yeah.
Doug: And we're all in that delusion. You were talking about that, like, I feel like I'm 18 years old. And I do kind of, except when my back kicks up. But I walk past a mirror and I'm like, oh, yes, I am not 18.
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Catherine: That's been part of the work for me, though. The transition from blogging to corporate entertainment executive was a strange one. I went from academia to blogging. Blogging turned into my own business. That turned into being invited to join Babble and helping create what we did there and then being acquired by the Walt Disney Company. Those were things that I didn't plan for, but they were things that I can say in hindsight that I was prepared for and that I was able to navigate because I had been sort of building pivot muscles. And because, you know, a lot of the skills and expertise I developed to date were well served in those spaces.
I left Disney of my own accord some years ago to build my own thing. It was a difficult decision to make. It took me longer than you would think. And then I built something that was so, so important to me that was based on work that I had started at Disney. And then I lost that. I've been doing a lot of work, shifting strategy within Disney around women and girls, in particular, the princess narrative. And there was a project that I'd wanted to develop around cultivating or expanding space for especially girls and young women, but any kids who don't see themselves as existing in an empowered space to be able to define their own empowerment.
So I started a company that I called Demeter Media after the goddess of the harvest. I describe her, Demeter, as one of the first female disruptors, with the intention of first doing a lot of research into what it takes to create space for young people to define their own creative empowerment. That became a nonprofit, and then that in turn became a venture-backed startup. We acquired a space in West Hollywood. Vince Vaughn was our landlord. I was a very, you know, Beyonce's company was invested in our company.
It was like, it was very flash and very… It was kind of beyond my wildest dreams of something that I could create. And it was based on this work that I felt was really, really, really deeply, deeply important. And it unraveled in such a way that I again had to make very hard decisions about whether I could stick with it. It was existential torture. I might have cried more the summer I was trying to make that decision than I did last year when I lost all the things. I can remember I still hadn't gone public about having walked away from it. We were named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in the world. I was getting all these congratulations from people about like getting this extraordinary accolade for having built one of the world's most innovative companies, according to Fast Company, but it was no longer mine. It was gone.
And then I had to take, like, I took a lot of time after that to really do a lot of soul searching around what had happened and how do I, scare quotes, make sure it doesn't happen again. Honestly, it felt like it was a gut punch, but it also felt strangely like a bit of a gift because it was a thing that I needed to lose. I needed to lose Maverick. At the time, it didn't feel like that. It was devastating. But I could say now I'm at the point where it's like, oh, I can recognize what these shifts mean for me and how I wrap my head and heart around them. I knew I was there because it was safe.
Maverick had been because it was exciting and it was a big dream and it was manifesting. And now I'm at the moment where the question is, what do you want to do for you? I really did force myself. And this is part of the gift of my mother's loss and the tumult of last year of like, no, no, no. Now is the time when you actually should sit and reflect not on what can you do, but what do you want to do? And those are often not the same thing. Right.
Doug: Well, especially, yeah, you ask somebody what they want to do. Sometimes they don't have the answer. Like Good Will Hunting. “I ask you a simple question. What do you want to do? And you don't have an answer. You're a smartass because you don't know, because you're terrified to choose.” And I've always been very interested in your stint at Disney. I may have told you this, and I'm not even sure I'll leave this in, but I met Jennifer Lee when she was just a single mom living in Brooklyn.
Catherine: Really?
Doug: Yeah. She was a friend of Alice Bradley's.
Catherine: I knew she was a friend of Alice's.
Doug: So we were hanging out at Alice's apartment, and this single mom comes in. “I'm working on this screenplay,” which turned out to be Frozen. And now look at her. When you look at your life as a Disney executive and the lessons you learned, all that behind the scenes stuff, what skill sets do you think that you took from Disney do you think are the most relevant when you decide what to do next?
Catherine: Disney was an extraordinary education. I've sometimes described myself as a reluctant Disney executive because it was never in my life plan. I mean, I used to do lectures on the Princess Industrial Complex. I went into Disney because I was bought. I went in like with an ego being “I'm going to teach them how they should be thinking about fairy tale and folklore and women and moms and families and all these things.” Right. And I came out feeling like, wow, I just got the equivalent of a very, very unique MBA and an education in creative business, you know, in creative economy. It was also an education in corporate politics.
Corporate politics are not as complicated as academic politics. If you can survive academic politics, you can survive anything. It's outright warfare. I learned a lot about healthy generative compromise. You know, I could see like it was part of the brass ring for me at Disney was like, oh, you can actually affect real cultural change through an institution like this because it's, you know, not only does it have the scale that it does, but because it is really leaning hard into rigorous, sincere architectures of making people feel a certain way.
You're absolutely right, Doug, that media is not only has changed, it's changing literally day to day. But my biggest teachers are young people. I am fascinated by their culture. I stay on top of their culture. I cannot inhabit it, obviously, because I'm an old, but I think they're doing the best, most interesting stuff. I love TikTok, right? There's all sorts of problems about TikTok, but I think some of the best feminist discourse is on TikTok. And I feel like, you know, honestly, we're in an era where there's so much creative generation. I'm honored to be a student of it.
Doug: You're right. You had good canoeing skills so that when the new tributary presented itself, you could steer.
Catherine: Yeah.
Doug: And I think we're getting into the whole Swedish Death Cleaning approach here in terms of the emotional side of things, like when to lean into something and pursue it with gusto because it's what you love and what you know how to do. Or, do you just say like, you know what, there's a new river to put my canoe in. So when you're thinking about what to hang on to and what to get rid of, which is kind of where we are as 50 year olds, we're all just kind of sloughing off stuff and acquiring new stuff. What appeals to you in terms of where you want to steer your canoe next?
Catherine: The one thing that I know that I wanted to and I'm in the process of sloughing off is doing things just because I'm good at them. I think media is broken, but I can also see lots of opportunities in its brokenness that I'm interested in exploring. The other is my own creativity. Like this is where we're in sort of midlife crisis territory, although of the best kind.
Doug: Here we go. This is where the ratings just spike!
Catherine: This is where it's like, writing things for myself. And I've probably done some of the best writing in my life as a blogger in the past. I missed out.
Doug: Well, given all you've been through the past 36 months, you're a much more interesting person.
Catherine: I would like to think so. Yes. Like everyone else, I started a Substack and I'm committed to just doing that, not with an eye to building a following again or doing any of that, but just to see what it feels like to write for myself and then hit publish. And that's been a lot of fun.
Doug: Have you noticed anything different about your writing now versus when Her Bad Mother came about?
Catherine: It's interesting. From this vantage point, I look back at the archives and I see, okay, here's where I was in performative mode. And then I can see the things. It's like, here is when I was really digging deep. I'm more willing now to be rigorous with myself. about trying to pursue quote unquote honesty, which doesn't necessarily mean confessional, but means like, am I digging deep enough for what I want to say? That kind of thing. Do you know what I mean?
Doug: Well, the whole performative thing. Yeah. There's like fewer stakes just because if you're aiming for a following, you're not going to get as big a following as you might've had 15 years ago, just because The landscape is too fractured and too balkanized. You're going to find your people. Your people are going to find you and subscribe to you. That felt a lot less intimate.
Magda: I think it's more than that. I think blogging, parent blogging 20 years ago, 15 years ago, really rewarded the voicey performative stuff. Like it really made superheroes out of the people who could convey the most emotion, just the most intensity. And I think those of us who were in the middle of it back then are just exhausted and don't have any patience for it anymore. And I think the younger generations, and by that, I mean Millennials and Gen Z, because they're the ones who are consuming a lot of media, they were never fooled by it. Whereas for us, like we came into blogging and we were like, “Oh my God, you mean I can just write something and press Publish, and other people will be able to see it,” right? It was like that same feeling the first time you made or read a zine. I think a lot of us didn't see this whole performative wave coming because we thought everybody was like us, just sitting there telling what was our honest truth that day.
Catherine: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that, I mean, this is, you know, the former student of postmodern philosophy wants to say that in late stage capitalism, whereas Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air,” our relationship to truth got eroded through the acceleration of widely distributed, independent digital media that was chasing an economy that is more Gen Z than Millennials. I think Millennials have had their own version of visual performativity on platforms like Instagram. I do think like one of the things I love about TikTok is that it's both performative and anti-performative. It's like pastiche. It's like, it's Dadaist.
Magda: And it's, it's so meta. Like everybody on it knows that, you know, I'm only doing this video because I will get more hits and, if I do something synced to the “I don't know how I did it, but I did it, it was hard” music clip.
Catherine: We went through all those iterations of seeing the artifice. And I think now, like, they're saying, “look at how great my artifice is.”
Catherine: It's beyond self. It's meta aware. It's hyper conscious of the stage and the screen. But because of that is sort of not afraid of absurdity. I like seeing TikTok. I have no desire to be on TikTok. Maybe I'll eat my words someday. But I do think that there's that hyper self-awareness has something valuable there. If not for the output, then for the exploration. You know, the Substack I started is this odd pastiche of writing about grief and story and honesty, but also recipes. In some respects, it doesn't make any sense at all, but it doesn't need to.
Magda: Right. Yeah.
Catherine: There's a sense of freedom. There's precedent now for people just like putting out whatever online. It goes against the grain of anybody that's been trained in content strategy and brand strategy and all of those things. But it's been interesting just to see where the explorations are taking me. And the primary reason for it to be on a Substack or to be out in the world is so that I'm forcing myself to hit Publish, to think like, what does creative output look like for me? if I'm approaching it as honestly and curiously as I can.
Doug: And it's comforting to think that the internet is now becoming a whole new bastion of postmodern absurdity that Meta can train its AI on.
Catherine: I mean, honestly, it's if anything, you know, the fact that it's it's been accelerating into a bastion of postmodern absurdity, I think promises very, very interesting things for the future of AI, which is going to be consuming all sorts of weirdness.
Magda: You know, the memes that 20-year-olds think are hilariously funny and they cannot explain why they're funny at all. And if you hang out with 20-year-olds enough, you see those memes and you get why they're funny, but you can't explain why they're funny. I don't know how AI is going to get to that.
Catherine: That's the core question, right? AI is capable of highly sophisticated mimicry through machine learning, figuring out that something is popular and the AI actually doesn't have to understand, right? It just is grokking that it's popular and it can deconstruct the components of what makes it popular and replicate them. So I think that it could replicate what has already become popular, but what it can't do is lead the way on what could be, right? Because it doesn't have that capacity for human appreciation for absurdity. It can only copy. It can't originate because it can't understand the why. It can only do the what.
It can never, I think, at least within our own generations, and never say never, it can never generate in the way that a deeply feeling human will. Because to your point, Magda, a lot of the things that 20-somethings find funny in terms of memes are things that there's a deep undercurrent of feeling to them that can't be explained. And that is the thing that animates the best and most interesting storytelling. I had a conversation with someone a little while ago talking about how they were making the proposition that what the thing that AI is good at is being an editor. Right. It's being like you put your content into chat GPT and it spits back a better version. And I said, I actually think that's the worst thing that it does. Copy editing, maybe. Right. It can fix your grammar, but it actually cannot edit. do the work of collaborating with the deep meaning, right?
The absurd stuff that is the soul of creative work. And that's the thing that I think when we think about the future with AI, it's recognizing that if anything, I think, I hope, it's going to make that human work, creative work, and creative voice more powerful and more valuable.
Doug: I wonder about AI just because what I've seen currently is its power for its mimicry to sound like it's extrapolating. I can write a poem. So even if it's not being creative, it can be easily mistaken for that.
Catherine: Well, that's Jean Baudrillard called Simulacra. It's a condition, you know, of the post–
Doug: I’m with you. I saw The Matrix.
Catherine: I'm right there with you. I didn't think I'd be quoting Jean Baudrillard as much as I am in like 2024 as I did in the 1990s and when The Matrix came out. But here we are. But it is like AI creates a simulacrum of artifacts of creativity and the very, I think, great human risk, creative risk that it can create that sense of non-reality. Right. That we become so accustomed to the simulacra of poetry, of art, of creativity, of spirit that we forget what the real thing looks like or feels like or sounds like. I think you're absolutely right that that's that if there's a creatively existential threat of AI,
that that is it. That this is where I wonder whether as long as there is a persistent like AI needs like it needs to feed to grow. And there's already conversation about how AI is running out of content to learn from. And it becomes recursive at some point where all it can learn from is the content itself creates. As long as there is genuine human storytelling, creative output, presence and voice in the world, we will, I hope, recognize the difference that there will be space for the difference and if there's not, then you know the older ones of us will just go into the woods and, you know, yes, we'll make zines again. This will be the thing. We will be mixtapes, we'll be Baba Yaga zine makers.
Magda: Oh, I have a friend who made a zine about Baba Yaga.
Catherine: Oh my gosh. Please tell me.
Magda: I can't remember the Substack offhand, but I will find it and we'll put in the notes. But yeah, she made a zine about Baba Yaga and she's got one coming up about the summer solstice now, but like an actual zine. Although I don't think she cut and pasted with her hands. I think she typed it in.
Doug: Good God. Well, yeah, the whole thing sounds super simula-crummy.
Magda: Doug, come on now.
Doug: Come up with that, AI! Yes, as soon as AI can write dad jokes, we're all done.
Magda: I'm going to go into chat GPT and say, “tell me a dad joke in the style of Doug French” and see what it comes out with.
Doug: Yeah, good luck, AI. I wanted to ask you too, you mentioned that your father passed away a while ago. And it's always interesting to talk to your parents about grief. I've talked to mine a lot just because I remember dad took me aside and said, once you buy that black suit, it's a real gut punch when you just start your living and you're thinking, when am I going to get the call that another one of my friends has died suddenly? And when your mother lost her husband, I get the impression that if any mother-daughter combo was going to talk intimately about this, about what your mom was going through, it would be the two of you.
Catherine: Sure.
Doug: Did you talk about it much? And if so, how did that prepare you for when she finally crossed over?
Catherine: Oh, we talked about it a lot. My parents were divorced when my dad died, although they were still very, very close. It's a longer story.
Doug: Can't relate to that. Not at all.
Catherine: They stayed each other's best friends. They loved each other. And just the marriage ended, but their friendship and esteem for each other didn't. It was a hard loss. And, you know, Dad's death was... all consuming for a while. It was sudden and unexpected.
I had to spend a long time sort of managing his things and going through his things. And at the time, I wrote about it a lot on the blog when I went through it. You know, it was devastating. I was very close to him. It was part of our discussions. And I will say that...
Between the time that she died, when she had the surgery was about almost three weeks. And I would sit with her in the hospital pretty much every single day. I timed it from like before the night shift of nurses ended so I could get their assessment. And then after the night shift began so that I could talk to them. So I was there more or less around the clock. And she was so deeply, deeply afraid of dying from the surgery. We talked about a lot before she went in. And then when she survived it and was improving, we talked a lot about the new lease on life that she was going to have. You know, there's this period of time in which it was like just looking really good that she was going to go home. And as it happened, they were very clear.
She's probably going to be able to go home and be like five or six days. And so at that point I said to her, this was just about a week before Emelia's prom. I said, mom, I'm going to go back to LA. I'm just going to spend a couple of days. I'm going to make sure Emilia, she didn't have her, like hadn't decided on a dress. I was all sorts of, I'm like, I'm just going to go home and like be there for that. And then I'm going to come back and I'm going to take you to your house and I will stay with you indefinitely to get you sorted at your house for proper recovery. I had been back in LA for maybe 10 hours when I got a call from the hospital saying “You have to come back. Your mom is dying,” and I had never gotten on the plane so fast. I'm like, I literally was like, back at LAX and on a plane like in under two hours and got there–
Doug: And completely discombobulated
Catherine: Completely discombobulated and you know I can remember having the conversation that the doctor who reached me and just saying like “Is it like I get on a flight now, or I like get on a flight tonight or?”He's like “Get on a flight now.”
Magda: Wow.
Catherine: “Is there like is there any chance you're wrong?” He's like no like this is happening you like get back. So I get back, you know, I get back in the middle of the night. They let me sleep in her room on a like cot beside her bed and she's unconscious. And, you know, the nurses are saying like, you know, the doctor would love for you to have the conversation with her tomorrow. And so, you know, the next morning I wake up and she wakes up and, you know, we have to have a, I'm going to get a little bit emotional. It's fine. We have to have like literally the worst conversation I've ever had in my life, which was to sit with the doctor and tell her that she was going to die and that it was going to happen sometime next 24 to 36 hours. And she was, she didn't like that, understandably. She and I spent that day talking about being in this weird hybrid state. She was very insistent to the doctor.
Like she'd said to him a couple of times, she's like, is there any chance? Is there any chance? Is there any chance? He's like, no, no, no, no, no. And then finally he's like, okay, look, look, look, fine, Judy, there's always a chance, right? There's always a chance. I can't say anything for a hundred percent.
So no, you're right. My mom was stubborn. No. So we're still in the bargaining stage. We're in the bargaining stage. And she's decided she's going to fight for that, like, whatever, like that infinitesimal chance. And I had to be in conversation about her. It's like, okay, like I love you. And I want that too. But also we have to actually figure some things out right now,
because if you want to like die at home, if you don't want to die in this terrible ICU, if you want, like we have to talk, like I have to be the person here who's talking about the operate, the logistics of death. Right. So fingers crossed Mom, but like, we have to talk about this as though he's right because he's saying he is right. And it was, awful like sitting with a social worker sobbing talking about whether we could get my mom home while like keeping her out of the conversation so that she could stay clinging to her hope, I will say as a bizarre sidebar that both of you will understand, I got a call from Taylor Lawrence, Washington Post columnist on the creator economy that day, and I picked up the phone because I was just very disoriented, and she told me that Heather had died. Heather Armstrong.
Magda: Oh, my God. Any other day you maybe could have cared, but why would you…
Catherine: Any other day, it would have been a very different thing. And it was just, you know, I was in a state of like, I'm responding to texts and messages because I've got like, I'm the chief communications officer for my mom's death as well. Right. You know, and anyway, so it was it was a bizarre day that was all about me managing the logistics of death and having as frank conversations as I could with my mom about her impending death. And that included talking about my dad's death. And talking about how like she and I shared together privately just an absolutely wild supernatural moment that we felt was very obviously a message from him. Like it was one of those things that's a whole story in itself that was just so clear. Like it couldn't possibly have been anything else, right? So I was reminding her of that and saying it's like so – “You've got to send me messages, Mom. Let's figure out what our communication channel is going to be from the afterlife.” Right? Because we know from our experience with dad that there is one, but obviously this is like, she's dying. So this is, like, hard and brutal anyway.
She literally by the next day has turned herself around so much that the doctor who she had nicknamed Dr. Death, and he took it with grace so much, that by the end of the next day, he's like, “I don't know how you did it, Judy. I think you did this just to spite me, but we can actually move you out of the ICU.” She turned herself like completely around. It was a mind-boggling miracle because she was supposed to be like dying the next night. And the next night they're moving her up to a regular floor and saying, you actually might go home. You would think that I, my headspace would be, “thank God.” But it was actually just the worst. Like I was so grateful for it, but it was like, I had done so much intense emotional work the day before in conversation.
Doug: I get that. I get that. Absolutely. Yeah.
Catherine: I'm like, what do I do now? Like, what do I do? What do I do? Like, it felt so dangerous to hope. Right. But it was also, it was so awkward to be so, it just, it felt so dangerous. I have never felt so emotionally, and this includes compared to after she died. I had never been so emotionally at a loss and confused as in that period of time in which she was, they said, you're dying, you're dying within 24 hours, let's get ready for it. And I'm doing like all the logistics around it. And then all of a sudden she proved them wrong and she wasn't. And it took me a couple of days, the day before Mother's Day. I'm like, I guess she did it. Like she's a freaking superhero.
Magda: Oh, my God.
Catherine: I went and I bought her a plant. I bought her a new robe. I bought her a Mother's Day gift that I was going to give her the next day. I was going to smuggle in some wine for her because she was complaining about, you know, that. Yeah.
Doug: So you were taking it on. You were thinking, this actually might work out. She might be fine. This actually might work out.
Catherine: And we had had these conversations. And again, I raise this all because you asked about the influence of my dad's death. We were doing this hard prep work. And then it all changed. And it had completely messed with my head. But it was a radically different landscape. And then, of course, I went back to my motel across the road that night around 10. And then at 4 in the morning, I got a call saying, no, she's actually really dying this time. And she was.
Magda: Wow.
Catherine: I'm deeply privileged to have been able to be there with her and for her and after and all the things. I got to wash her body. I got to spend hours with her after she passed. But we had had this window of time in which the conversation about her death relative to my dad's death, relative to my nephew Tanner's death that we'd gone through a few years before, it was all on the table. And it was the most brutal series of conversations to have but also the richest i think people overuse the term trauma i think that i'm still traumatized by those conversations yeah they were such a rich and powerful gift and even to have it so bizarrely intermingled with like hope and defiance and all the stuff that made her who she was i really feel like the universe was like giving me The utmost grace in letting my mother go, like it was her time and the universe was making sure I just like I was going to live all of the nuances of it with her. And I did.
Doug: That's amazing. But I'm thinking, having been through that emotional bad, but how do you feel about yourself having come out of that in terms of your own emotional fortitude?
Catherine: That was power lifting with emotional muscles. You know, and I think all of us understand this experience when we survive something difficult. No matter what that survival looks like, there are things that I would have done differently, maybe, if I could have a do-over. But for the most part, I feel like I lived that experience and worked those emotional muscles in the best way that I could. And so now I have the muscles and have this sense of... Oh man, I did a really, really, really hard thing. I am capable of doing really, really hard things. And there's all of us know that we, you know, we've raised children, right? We've experienced, we've all experienced losses. And we know that when you not only get through the hard thing, but get through the hard thing with some self-reflection about it, that it makes you feel both more vulnerable and more strong at the same time. And that that feels powerful.
Magda: I get that.
Doug: I'm not sure where to go from here. That's extraordinary. I mean, it's a great way to end. I'm so grateful to you for sharing that. We're going to cut all the Disney shit out because …
Catherine: Well, thank you for letting me tell that story. Not everybody wants to sit through that kind of story.
Doug: No, the whole point is that it's empowering. I really think that we can do hard things. It's one of my favorite podcast titles out there. But it's something that we 50-year-old people need to tell ourselves because whether we realize it or not, as grown up as we all feel, more grown up because of the losses we've endured, it's not like this is going to stop. It's just something now to be prepared for as things get smaller and smaller and we hang on to the people we have left and make sure they know they're loved and make sure they know that we're there for them when they need us.
Catherine: I think it's crucial what you're saying. It is that dynamic of... recognizing our own strength of feeling like, oh, I have a sense of this, right? It's like when we teach our kids to ride bikes or whatever, swim, what have you. It's like that. There's the understanding the motions of like learning, like what way you move your limbs or how you pedal. But then there's that moment where we're willing them or openly telling them, it's like, you know how to do this now. Like you can do this and it's just a matter of doing it.
And it's that level of awareness when we remind ourselves that sometimes we get so accustomed to doing things that we forget that they're real skills and that they're real powers that we stop and go, Oh God, I did a really hard thing. I did an amazing thing. And that matters because there's going to be another hard thing for me to do. It's top of mind because it was just today I reposted a story on Instagram, the quote from Joan Rivers that said something to the effect of, you know, “people ask me when things get better. And it's like, things never get better. You get better.”
Doug: I saw that today, too. Yeah, that's apparently the algorithm is feeding me that.
Catherine: The algorithm knows us. But it is. It's like life is hard, but it's part of why it's beautiful. And this goes to like letting our children go. One of the great gifts of losing my mom was that it was like the hardest but most powerful reminder of how privileged I was to have loved another human so much and to have been loved so much by another human.
Doug: Yeah. Don't be sorry it's over. Be really happy it happened.
Catherine: Exactly. Exactly. Another thing that the algorithm shows us because they know we did.
Doug: Yes. Well, I'm getting a steady diet of that shit now. Absolutely. Yeah. But it is.
Catherine: Epigrams of uncertain sources.
Doug: Yeah. I'm sure that. Lincoln said that. I'm sure someone will tell me. Yeah. And then Jim Henson said it. And then And then Lincoln did.
Catherine: And then Schopenhauer said it.
Doug: Right. Well, Catherine, I'm so glad you have your Substack now. Why don't you tell us about that? How do we find you online now? Where are you most active?
Catherine: I am at Her Bad Mother on Instagram and on Threads. I bailed on Twitter. No more Twitter for me.
Doug: Twitter, what was that? Is that a thing?
Catherine: We've erased our memory of that. My Substack is called Holy Doodlebug. It's called that, I'll just tell you quickly, because it was my mother's exclamation for anything that she found sort of extraordinary or unexpected or worthy of note. Holy doodlebug. Holy doodlebug, Catherine Ann! I know she said Holy Doodlebug.
Doug: I think you really need to transition everything to Holy Doodlebug. Her Bad Mother, that was a long time ago. Now you're in your doodlebug phase, I think.
Catherine: I am in my doodlebug phase, thank you, yes. I am a holy doodlebug because there's a whole, right, not just a secular doodlebug. Yeah, I send woo and weirdness and what the hell do we believe in anyway? So yeah, it's a holy doodlebug.
Doug: I can't tell you how much I am in love with that title. Especially now that I know what it means. It hits me right in the feels. So congratulations on that. And thank you so much for sharing all of this. I look forward to this conversation and it paid off in spades. Great to see your face again. Great to talk to you and really eager to hear how it's all going from now on.
Catherine: Same, same. It's been such a delight to chat with you both.
Doug: Everybody, thank you so much for listening to episode 50–and what a cracker it was–of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Catherine Connors, author of the Holy Doodlebug Substack, which you should go over and look at right this very second. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe to us for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review. Thanks again for listening. We're going to be off next week, but we will see you with episode 51. And until then, have a great couple of weeks. Bye-bye.
Magda: Okay. Now, to go make a soft dinner for my husband, who was texting me to tell me that he was going to go out and drive to get Tylenol so he could alternate Tylenol with ibuprofen. I was like, we have a number of children with their driver's licenses in the house who would be thrilled to go buy you Tylenol.
Doug: You've got a blender. You can make anything and just whiz it up for him.
Magda: I can't make Tylenol in the blender out of non-Tylenol.
Doug: Make a pot pie, put some Tylenol in it, and then whiz it all up and he can drink it.
Magda: Oh, wow. He just texted me that the pharmacist just called and said there was a third prescription for Vicodin with Tylenol. He wanted to know if I wanted it filled. What's the answer to that question? The answer is yes. If somebody prescribes you Vicodin, it means you probably need Vicodin, right?
Catherine: Always say yes, yes.
Magda: He says, “I said, ‘hold it.’ I'd call if I needed something stronger.” This is what I'm facing. This is what I'm up against. He is the love of my life, and God, he has the hardest head of anyone I've ever met.
Doug: When someone asks you if you want Vicodin, you say... Yes!