Episode 33: Transcript

"We don‘t arrive at 50 on Plan A." - with Jessica Ashley

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: So, okay, so we have to record this kind of fast because you have to edit it, I have to do the transcript, and then we have to fill out the CSS, because of this whole FAFSA thing. So some of the schools now are asking for the CSS. And I've been taught to live in terror of the CSS, I guess, because it asks for both parents' financial info. But I asked a friend yesterday who had to fill out the CSS, I was like, “What do they need? Do they need all these different things?” And I reeled off, you know, like tax returns, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, no, all it is, is income and investments. It's not even taxes. So I had been thinking that it was just like the Roto-Rooter of financial information. And it turns out that the reason people don't like it is that the questions are worded strangely and confusingly, but the actual information they're asking for from you is not difficult to procure.

Doug French: I don't even know what CSS means. I was looking for it.

Magda: I don't know what it means, either.

Doug: I mean, to me, it'll always be cascading style sheets ... 

Magda: I know! It's the same thing every time I see it! Yeah, it's just another financial form that colleges can take, but it's not run by the federal government, so it doesn't have any connection to loans.

Doug: I don't like acronyms with no meaning. That's too sinister for me.

Magda: There's another school that our kid is applying to that has their own financial aid form that's inside the portal. So we're going to have to get him to go into the portal and get that financial aid form that we will then have to fill out without having any idea what information we're going to need from it. But anyway, we have to get that done like in the next two days.

Doug: But is that something we both have to do, right? Like you can't just choose a parent?

Magda: I don't know, because I haven't seen their form. It's the special form for that college.

Doug: Alright, we'll figure that out. Yeah.

Magda: It's been really interesting to me in this whole FAFSAgeddon process is seeing how the- 

Doug: FAFSAgeddon?? Oh my god.

Magda: It's a FAFStastrophe.

Doug: She's on fire and we're going to talk about this in a second because wow.

Magda: Okay, you didn't think FAFStastrophe was funny?

Doug: No, no, no. It's just, I tune into Facebook. I'm not on Facebook very much but whenever I do, more often than not, it leads with something that you've posted. I think part of it is because, you know, we interact so much. Part of it is because you post very often. I will see what you're up to. But you're posting, you're encouraging puns about beets. You're complaining about bad grammar. I mean, is my job done here? What happened? How have you been body snatched?

Magda: So we did use the borscht recipe that you recommended.

Doug: The Ukrainian one? With the beef stock?

Magda:  From Friday Flames a couple weeks ago. We didn't use beef stock because I'm not eating mammals. So we used I Can't Believe It's Not Chicken. Better Than Bouillon. You know what I'm talking about.

Doug: Oh, yeah, that's the shit. Better Than Bouillon.

Magda: I cannot comprehend that it's Better Than Bouillon. I keep calling it I Can't Believe It's Not Bouillon. Which, it doesn't bother me. I kind of think it's funny, but I think it's starting to bug Mike. He's like, it's “Better Than Bouillon.”

Doug: Well, you are three months in, you know, the honeymoon's over.

Magda: Four months in, the honeymoon's over.

Doug: Because I keep getting the number of months wrong. Alright, so okay, four months, but who's counting?

Magda: Right, right. So yeah, um, no. Okay, so, what I think is really interesting about this is watching how the different colleges are responding to something that is threatening their entire core business, right? If they can't get students to come to their school because they don't have the means to figure out what financial aid to offer and what loans their students have access to, they will not have any students. And I know people are like, “oh my God, the poor students and families applying to the FAFSA, this is a horrible nightmare for them.” Like, okay, we have to wait, which is inconveniencing. And it can be really emotional. And it can be really scary. But it's not threatening our existence, like it's threatening the existence of some of these institutions.

Doug: Colleges are thinking, “We have to pay our people overtime.”

Magda: Yeah, well, I mean, okay, so one thing that's happening is the people who are employed in financial aid offices, they were going to have a whole lot to do this month, they now have nothing to do. And then as soon as the information is released, they're going to be working 80 to 100 hours a week to get all these decisions made.

Doug: It's like accountants are like, you can't start work until April 10.

Magda: Right? It's really so disruptive. And I have a friend who works for a college that has a lot of students that are first generation college students or are lower income, that kind of stuff, who are not super-fluent in the whole college situation and don't necessarily understand how financial aid works. And for a lot of those students, this friend is worried that when they are not able to get a financial aid offer in a timely manner, like right now. Instead of knowing that if they wait, they're still going to get the same offer that they would have gotten anyway, which will enable them to go to that school, they are just going to abandon the process. And those kids aren't going to go to college. And that also means that the school that she works for could actually go out of business.

Doug: Which makes you wonder, this is all a big conspiracy, you know, because the right wing has been assailing education for decades and now to quote “simplify FAFSA” is essentially keeping a lot of people out of school and turning schools into pizza huts.

Magda: Okay, so I don't like to be a conspiracy theorist.

Doug: No, but I'm saying it's a funny thing to think about. I'm not fomenting that in any way.

Magda: There could be an argument made that it's strangely-timed that the first cycle of federal loans after Joe Biden attempted to have all the federal loans forgiven, now nobody has access to federal loans.

Doug: During an election year.

Magda: So she's got a Zoomer and she's got a Gen A kid and I don't think the whole college process is going to be the same at all. She's gone through the process, but are colleges even going to still exist in the format that they're in right now? Literally Harvard and MIT and HBCUs and women's colleges, and public state universities. That's it.

Doug: Well this is your key to happiness then, right? Because you can always think your stepchildren aren't nine.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And that's one of the great things about Jessica, because she's so smart and so experienced and handling so much stuff better than she should have to.

Magda: Well, you know the old Jeopardy category, potent potpourri?

Doug: No, no, no, you're thinking potpourri and potent potables.

Magda: What? Really?

Doug: Yeah, potpourri was the category. Potpourri, and then it was “potent potables,” which was about booze.

Magda: Okay, so you know the old Jeopardy category, potpourri, that I feel like that's Jessica. She's like potpourri of everything that hits you like a real ton of bricks when you're 50, right? I would say like 60% of the possible problems for 50-year-olds she's got right now.

Doug: Yeah, it's hard, but she seems equipped. Again, she shouldn't have to be, but she is. And so that's why I'm really glad she agreed to come on because I think we all profited from talking about it.

Magda: Yeah, I agree.

Doug: I agree.

Magda: On to Jessica! What kind of transition do you want? We need some sort of verbal equivalent of, remember that, like, the swish slide when PowerPoint first came out?

Doug: Alright, so visualize a star wipe and now here's Jessica.

Magda: This is actually something that I've been thinking about. Doug and I used to be parent bloggers. And then when our kids got into that sort of middle school age, like you kind of can't really talk about your kids anymore, and their specific stuff. And I feel like coming around the bend into parenting your own parents, it's sort of that same question of how do I tell the truth of what's happening to me without telling my parents’ story, which isn't my story to tell, it's their story to tell. But how else do you explain the chaos of your morning without saying, “my dad thought the remote control was the cell phone”?

Jessica: I get this, this is sort of precarious. My mom died in April. And when she died, you know, I tagged her in the post on Facebook, and a lot of her friends reached out as a way to stay in touch. And I felt this desperation and fear, like franticness that all of these people from my life that were connected to my mom, were going to be suddenly gone. And I wanted to know where they, I mean, I asked her friends, “Please stay in touch when you're in town. Can we have lunch?” because I needed to hold on to that part of my mom, but I also was so fearful that I'd never know what happened to them again. So I tag my mom frequently. She doesn't care. I tag her on Facebook to keep her friends informed. My dad is not on Facebook, but my dad has not chosen to share his diagnosis or what's going on with many of his friends. However, they stay in touch with me and reach out and ask what's going on. So I have to kind of walk the line between sharing his health information, but also being able to say, “Hey, I need you to step in and call him. I need you to ask him to lunch. I need you to know things are really hard right now.” And so there is a lot of walking that line, but I think I'm of maybe a different thinking, like “now I hold this story.” And I don't need to tell every single detail of my mom's death nor my dad's diagnosis to be able to share the story because I'm the person in the family who holds all of it now.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And that's the fundamental irony of the whole situation as we're all realizing in our 50s, the more there is to say, the more of a minefield it is to say it, because there's just so much more real life happening, but it involves people whose stories are not ours to tell. And you want to figure out how to express yourself, and that means maybe not going online with it, maybe being more intimate or more specific with your IRL friends, and recognizing that's the best engagement you can conjure for yourself anyway, yeah? Do you have a lot of peers in Chicago you can talk to and blow off some steam to?

Magda: I mean, I've got some pretty fierce Marco Polo threads going of parents who are like, “Oh god, it's the dead parent club.” Like, you have to kind of find the way to connect and laugh and share and commiserate about it. There's also this weirdness to now I'm my dad's power of health. I'm his primary contact, period. But I talk to all the doctors more than he does. Like I have a relationship with his doctors and have to be able to have side conversations with them, and so there is that precariousness too, I think of not just sharing the story, but participating in the story and then the agony. Grief. I'm the oldest daughter.

Magda: Oh, there you go. It's like all the joy of having to navigate it with siblings, but at the same time, all the like carrying all the emotional weight of it.

Jessica: Yeah, I have a brother, he lives in Virginia, he has become more involved. And, but there's only so much he can do. And he's there with his wife and his in-laws who are also requiring care. So he can come into town, he was just in town, he'll come on a dime. But ultimately, it's me. Yeah.

Doug: When you're talking to doctors, you also have to walk the line between the emotion of caring for your father and the clinical lack of emotion of just understanding what the situation is and how to approach decision making as unemotionally as possible, right? Because they're the ones who are going to take the external viewpoint and just say, this is what needs to happen now. Have you ever come to the point where your heart and your brain are kind of fighting each other out when you have discussions with the doctors?

Jessica: Yeah. About a week and a half ago my dad was in the hospital. My dad gets hospital delirium and he starts hallucinating, and he's, it's very common in older people. He's a very obstinate person, period, but especially in the hospital. And I walked in at one point and my dad was looking so small and frail and it just, that's my dad. Yeah, that's my dad. My rock. I mean, my dad saw me through my divorce. Every hearing, every attorney call, everything. My dad knew my case in and out. He has been my dad. So there's that part of it. And then the doctors coming in to talk about “at what point do we have him declared non-decisional? At what point do we do this or that?” and there it has to kick in, like, because of that love, that rock, that I have to do for him what I think was hard for him as a parent to do for me. So it is a head in the heart. There are some doctors, he has a primary doctor right now who's amazing, amazing. Thank God we found him. We had to work really hard to find him. But he has a neuro who said to me in the hospital, “you're doing a great job.” And I said, “I'm in hell.” And he was like, “All right.” That was it! But the primary doctor's like, “I know, it's a slow train crash. What are we doing? How are we working together? I'll call you next week.” And then he calls. So I think it's just very different with different doctors.

Doug: And how did it hit when someone said you're doing a great job? I don't imagine you get the chance to hear that very often. Did that even have a chance to sink in a bit? Because I know in the right circumstance, it would just kind of knock you flat.

Jessica: I get, from him maybe differently. I really rely on my friends and my brother to tell me that. In my heart of hearts, I know I am over-functioning and I am making absolutely the best decisions that I can. I trust myself. I'm the right person. I trust myself implicitly. But when I'm at home and exhausted, and my house is a wreck, and my daughter needs me, and I don't know how much I have to give, like, that doesn't feel like a good job. It feels like hell. Yeah. So it's hard to say you're doing a good job in agony. But it is. It is.

Magda: Well, and then also, like, from that doctor who then when you said I'm in hell, and he was like, “okay Right, like it seems so hollow. It's like the same way, I don't know. On Mother's Day, like, every dude I've ever met is always like, “Hey, Happy Mother's Day! You're doing a great job!” like okay whatever.

Doug: That's exactly how I phrased it. It's amazing you remember that after all these years.

Magda: And I mean, I think for some people who don't ever feel validated as a mother, it might be useful to hear Happy Mother's Day from other people. But the only person I ever want to hear Happy Mother's Day from is my actual children and their other parents. I don't want to hear it from anybody else because they're not in the middle of it. And it seems like if that doctor wasn't going to offer you any other help, the compliment just seems kind of hollow, like throwing you a bone, like he feels good about himself because he's validating his patient's families. But at the same time, like, he's not actually doing anything that's useful for you in a human way.

Doug: But what else is he going to say in that scenario? I mean, there's another interpretation that just says, I'm in hell, that could be a signal to shut down the conversation. I mean, I don't know where you go from there. I don't know. You know, it's like, I mean, he could have gone and said, I understand. I can empathize. I can sympathize. We're here to help you. Or you can interpret that as saying this is not something she wants to talk about right now. And that's right. He could have gone either way. At least I think so.

Jessica: Well, and he's a neuro. And the neurologist is, in my experience has been it's much more functional.

Magda: They’re like the surgeons of the specialty world, right?

Jessica: Is this an official diagnosis? He's like, does it matter? And I'm like, yeah. There's something just a lot more functional about that situation than maybe the other doctors. And maybe also the reality is we want things sometimes from providers that they cannot actually provide. And that's where our friends and other people have to come in. But it honestly feels like, I think in terms of my dad's care and in terms of my own emotionality, like it's a well that can never be completely full because it just takes up so much resource.

Doug: Well, we're going to talk a lot about that today, about women and caregiving. I imagine this came up a lot in your studies and in your master's degree. As you know, I've been in this business of trying to get men more involved in caregiving for years now. But it seems to be women will always be the default and I bet you have some real interesting insights into that given the studies. Also given the fact that you are caregiving a lot of people right now. You've got your father and then you have this nine-year-old daughter from a subsequent relationship and that seems like, you know, how many plates can you juggle?

Jessica: More than one is too many. And I'll be really, like, vulnerable and honest, that I have had a moment the last few weeks where I've thought, over and over, I felt really emotional, like: I have given entirely too much of my life to centering men. And I, like, I am a feminist. What the hell? Like, do you even know who I am? And my brother, my dad and I have had conversations where I've said to them like, Hey, y'all, you've had women taking care of you your entire life. And I'm the default here. Let's pause. And they're like, what do you mean? It's like Jessica will do it. And that feels sometimes like a betrayal to who I am and what I've worked so hard at in my professional life and my personal life. But here I am, I've really centered my relationships and those men's success and those men's well-being. And I've done a lot of therapy to move on from that. And as soon as I felt like I was in a really good place, then my parents' health just really rapidly declined. And so I have a lot of feelings about it. Just in terms of what I know intellectually about why women are caregivers and how they are the “kin keepers” of family, which my Master's degree thesis is on the items we pass down from family member to family member, woman to woman, and what they represent about the family, the stories that they hold. It's because, in part, proximity, that women are more likely to be physically nearer to their own family and the elders in the family. They are more likely to be at home. They are more likely to have the understanding and have learned from their mothers how to do it. And then they're just, they are the people who are keeping the stories going, they're keeping the items, they're making sure the legacy is continued. And that includes care of items as well as care of people. And there's the economics of it as well. I do think there's still this perception that the income that men bring in needs to continue to be brought in from outside the home. And so women will continue to do more and more emotional labor.

Magda: Yeah, I mean, I'm noticing it myself. I wasn't married. I wasn't attached to an adult man. I was only in service to my two male children for 15 years. And now I'm married to a man again. And I am just stepping into this void that my husband doesn't necessarily perceive. And I am, I find myself stepping into it unhesitatingly. And I am wondering why this system still exists in which stepping into that void is something that's on me to do or resist.

Doug: The similarity both of you have is you're the oldest child. And well, I am an oldest child as well. And so when I think about what you said, Magda, about just stepping into a caregiving situation, I do think part of that, speaking as an oldest child, I feel predisposed to fulfill that role. And when you think about any predilection for caregiving, how much of that is female and how much of that is your birth order?

Jessica: That's a great question. I don't know if I could distinguish it. I mean, I think I learned how to do this at the kitchen table with my grandmother and my mom and them laughing and telling stories, but also talking about those people like I always knew. I'm being prepared to carry the stories. I'm being prepared for the next part. When my own grandmother got Alzheimer's, my mom took me to her house and was like, let me show you how to go through everything. When my grandmother had Alzheimer's and we were going through all the items, my mom wrote the story on a note attached to all of the things that she gave away. And that's what launched my thesis, actually. But I was there doing it. Nobody invited my brother in. Now, maybe he wasn't the right kid, but my mom very clearly taught me how to do it. And when my mom was really only a few weeks from dying, she was in the ICU, we didn't in any way think she would die. We had a conversation about me showing up for her in the ways that I had. And she said, “how do you know how to do it?” And I was like, “you, you taught me.” And that was very powerful. And there's something that's an honor about it. I don't want anybody else to decide where my mom's jewelry goes. I don't want people suggesting like bring in a service. I'm like, no, no, no, that's me. But there's also the burden of it and the huge time and energy commitment of it. So I don't, I don't know what's older and what's female, but some of the stuff and the showing up, I think that's inherently female right now, as things have been gendered.

Magda: I really think there is so much that's so gendered about it. And Doug and I talked a couple months ago. We did an episode with a friend of mine who wrote a book about cleaning out her parents' house. I think her mother had died and they needed to move her dad, something like that. And she lives outside Philadelphia. Her parents' house was in Arizona. It had to be done in a hurry. And she was feeling overwhelmed by it. She had been volunteering on this archaeology site in Center City, Philadelphia. And so when she went to have to clean out her parents' house, she was the oldest child, the daughter. It was all on her shoulders. And she put herself into the place of the archaeology dig to be able to emotionally move through this cleaning out of her parents' house. And so she was consciously assigning value to those items, according to the way an archaeologist would within a family system, a historical preservation mode. And it sounds to me like that's what we're all doing, right? And like what you hit on in your thesis that you wrote, whether or not you've had actual training in archaeology, you have had training in the culture that you grow up in. And that's how you prioritize what to give to whom and what to dispose of. Like it's all so culturally located.

Jessica: Yeah.

Doug: I'm so glad you posted about what you're going through on Facebook. That's how I clued into it. And I was also taken by the voluminous feedback you received from lots of other people who either offered their sympathies or empathies having gone through something similar, recognizing too that when you're in this situation, there's really no end to even visualize. It's just get up every day and get from A to B and try to get some sleep in there. So do you want to talk about what else is happening as far as your children and how your relationships with their fathers are? Or I can just ask an entirely different question right now if you want.

Jessica: Okay, how to how to like bridge it? Well, I have a 19 year old son who's a freshman in college, and then a nine year old daughter almost exactly 10 years apart. And, you know, I was just thinking, you know, I'm going to be so curious to see who kind of steps up to that role in terms of preserving the family history, because it wouldn't surprise me if it was Ethan, because he's heard so many of the stories and just been around more.

Doug: So, Ethan's your son?

Jessica: You know, like that's a thing for people. I noticed like on the dating apps, a lot of times I'll hear like, “Oh, you have two kids and two dads.” And it's just funny. I always say we don't arrive at 40 on plan A, any of us, especially not at 50. So it doesn't seem like an anomaly to me, but it seems like still a thing for some people. But it's been something I didn't anticipate navigating as two kids, two dads. Same attorney.

Doug: So let's hope he didn't give you a punch card.

Jessica: I mean, she knows it in and out. She knows me really well. She knows when to say like, Jessica back off or Jessica buck up.

Doug: When Ethan was nine, I'm sure you were in a much different place. Than now that your daughter is nine. When you think about those two experiences, what contrasts leap to mind right away?

Jessica: Um, well, I'm more tired. Definitely more tired. I'm a different parent to these children because I knew that I could be a parent. I didn't doubt it. And I think something like something I say with my divorce coaching quite a bit is that divorce has helped me see very clearly what my superpowers are, where I need to get accountable, where I need to grow, where I need help. And I think that's sort of the same thing with the parenting, that I was just very clear and aware at the time when I had my daughter, Grace, that it's not all pretty, it's not all perfect, but I know where I stand. So there's that. And really, it's been interesting because he was an only child for 10 years and now he's away at college and she has kind of that only child experience as well. So my relationship with each of them is so different. It's different being one of the older parents versus one of the younger parents. Like I'm not worried that my kid has a Kleen Kanteen or a Stanley Cup. I'm not worried that they do 10 activities. I'm not worried that she hates this sport. Like, I'm not worried about a lot of things I think those younger parents are concerned about. I also think my career is so different now. And what we talk about at home and what is present for her is very different than what was present for him. You know, he wanted to see every day what I wrote about him on the blog. And she wants to talk more. She loves to talk about my divorce coaching clients. Talk more about relationships.

Doug: Interesting.

Magda: I mean, you know, like, I think we all sort of grow up in the family business of whatever it is that our parents do, right? You know, like, if your parents feel open enough to be able to talk about what their work is with you, like we all sort of grow up in whatever that family business is. And, you know, my dad did a lot of work with management, and I do a lot of work with management. And so it just was sort of this thing that we always talked about. And it's interesting to think about these careers that didn't exist when we were kids, like divorce coach, right? And how for your daughter, it's completely normal for her to be thinking sort of like the long game of how you interact with people, how you can get out of a relationship that's not working for you, the things that you have to consider, all of that. She's probably not going to go into relationships as an adult with the same amount of fear that people our age did, because for her, it's not this impossible thing to get out of a bad marriage.

Jessica: This kid has the best boundaries I've ever seen in my whole life. Like the universe sent her to me and I was like, okay, I get it. Um, but there is that, but when she was in pre-K, she liked these two little boys. One was like a wild child, rock and roll type of kid. And the other one's like all American blonde hair. And those are really just the best stereotypes I can put on them. I remember she used to say, “you know, I like them both. And when I grow up, I'd like them to be my boyfriend, not my husband. And I'll live in a house with cats and they can each have a house on either side.”

Doug: Are you sure Grace isn't 19? Because

Jessica: When she hears things about divorce or she hears people question, she's like, well, it's always an option. Like there are just some things for her that I think are different. That makes some people uncomfortable. But this is the reality of my children's lives and my clients' lives and my professional life and my life. And so always knowing that you have the option to choose yourself to me feels good and healthy. And man, that kid loves to talk about healthy relationships. And that's been really growing for me as an adult too.

Magda: I think there's also something about the idea that divorce is just a renegotiation of a contract. And when people get really upset about the fact of a divorce, it's because I think a lot of people don't understand that getting into a relationship, whether you have the piece of paper that you're married or not, is a contract. And so they're not treating it as a boundary of any sort. And so like the idea that you would feel like you could renegotiate and that part of that renegotiation might just be walking away. Yeah. You're always negotiating boundaries of relationships with everyone. And ultimately, unless it's your actual child, you can always walk away.

Doug: Yeah. It's an emotional refi.

Jessica: Yeah.

Doug: You want to really lower your borrowing rates for sure. Actually, I'm also really glad you're on here because of the unique experience you have. You've untied two very specific relationships that resulted in children. You were married to your first partner, you weren't married to your second. Divorce, in its way, it can be a much more simpler enterprise because it's a very specific structure that you're undoing. But if you are in a committed relationship without that piece of paper, that can actually be a lot more amorphous and blurry when it comes to custody issues, when it comes to a framework to adhere to. When you compare and contrast ending a marriage versus ending an unmarried relationship, how would you contrast those two?

Jessica: The structure for a divorce, including custody, parenting, is very specific. Like there's a real template for that. And not that there isn't in terms of parentage when you're not married, but it kind of all goes together. You know, I think both of these situations in my life were very difficult. And the first one I was learning as I went, as most people do when they get divorced, because we're not supposed to be experts in it unless we're like kooky enough to be in the actual industry.

Doug: It's kind of a macabre thing to do to get married and then open a book on divorce law the next day.

Jessica: Right, that's weird. But with this situation with my daughter's dad, I'm a divorce coach. I have been for a long time. I know who I want to show up as. I have a lot more legal information and process information, but I also have the experience of walking my clients through and have put myself through lots of tests to see like how would a client respond to this. So I feel a lot more organized and able to kind of get myself together. So I think that was maybe not fun for the other party. Like I'm showing up with my agenda, my talking points, my binder. I'm showing up well prepared and I know how to read all the legal documents. That custody process took about almost three years.

Doug: With Grace.

Jessica: With Grace's dad. Yeah. And that was entirely ridiculously too expensive emotionally and financially and too long. There's no reason it had to go that way. And I had to just continue to show up. And in the end, it came to a close because I went outside of our attorneys to him to wrap it up. And fortunately he complied. It was important to get that done because he is in the military and was being deployed. And so we had a timeline that was really important so that he wasn't leaving without some of this being settled. And so he is deployed now. My son's dad is very present, you know, Wednesday nights, every other weekend, all of that kind of stuff. And that's different for my daughter's dad, who lives out of town, and then now is overseas for a year. And this is a second deployment during her life.

Doug: You roll the dice on emotional health, don't you, when it comes to the people you partner with and procreate with and it's just shocking how the tables turn.

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, I think something that I'm comfortable including here is I really wholeheartedly believed in both of these relationships. I was full on. I worked my ass off for these relationships. I was madly in love. I thought my daughter's dad checked every box and that was astounding to me. Most of the women I work with now are women who are leaving and healing from emotionally abusive relationships. There's a surge right now, not just because we talk about it quite a bit, because we see it in the media, we see it in politics, because we have the language for it, because social media gets more information out there. But I also think that COVID and other stressors that came along with the pandemic have really built this opportunity for personality disorders and personality issues and abuse to exacerbate in homes. And so it's maybe not a surprise, but there are these many layers. Over and over again, I hear those women say, like, how did I pick so poorly? And I feel so terrible. And what did I do? I really believe in these situations, women are chosen for their characteristics. And there's research behind this that shows women are not chosen because they're empaths in these situations, but rather long term heterosexual cisgender relationships, women are chosen because they are ambitious. They are the kin keeper. They are connected. They are self-aware. They are nurturing of their self-care. They're professional. They're ambitious. And those are characteristics that that abusive partner wants to emulate and wants to reflect back. But that only lasts for so long. And eventually, especially when kids are born, the mask comes down and the real person comes out. And then you can find yourself in an abusive relationship very easily that you've been in all along. You just didn't see it manifest yet.

Doug: I imagine once you navigate two breakups, there's an instinct to not deal with it at all because these stories only add to the emotional trauma? Or does it actually feed your soul more to pay it forward and recognize that your experience and what you went through, you can try and make it less painful for future sufferers?

Jessica: When I found divorce coaching, I went into this training and I was like, I'm just going to get the little letters behind my name and write a book. Like that's what all of us bloggers, a hundred of us who've had those moments, like, I'll just, I'll just write the book. And I sat, it was the first day in the training and I thought, “That's it. This is my calling. This is what I am supposed to be doing.” I so wanted to change the narrative of divorce for women. And I really strongly believed that if we could help women through this, moms in particular, we're changing their lives, their kids' lives, their girlfriends' lives. When their friends come to them, like, how are you at this place? And then their friends' friends are like, let me tell you about my friend who actually is doing great on the other side of this. And so to me, that was the way to impact change and to be an activist and to do something with what I've been through. And that happens every day. And I feel really fortunate. Women trust me. After one conversation, they trust me to walk with them through that process. And it makes me feel incredibly hopeful. I do have to have some real boundaries on my own well-being through it, because it's a lot to carry. It's a lot. And on Fridays at 5pm, I'm cooked, man. I'm done. And sometimes I get a lot of like divorce content on TikTok because I'm on there, but I just a lot and sometimes, nice algorithm. Thanks a bunch. You know, it's just the caregiving instinct steps in but I've also really had to pull back about like I can't be the care for them. I can walk with them well.

Magda: Some of the tension and the stress is when they're making decisions that you can see very clearly are not going to make things easier for them. Even if you warn them against the decision, they still sometimes walk right into it. And it's just hard to watch, right?

Jessica: It's like, you know, we've had our I'm sure you all have had friends that you're like, oh, that is not a good call.

Magda: Exactly. And I think, you know, like I did a little bit of divorce coaching before it was an actual thing. Man, I did it twice, like two rounds of people and then was just like, I can't watch people there on the edge. It takes so much fortitude, I think. And you have to have so much faith in yourself to be able to do this with women day in and day out and just know that you are not them and they are not you. Like, that was the part I could not get past, I think.

Doug: Well, that was a while ago. Could you do it now?

Magda: Well, yeah, now I could.

Doug: Because I think part of it's the distance from it, right?

Magda: That might have been it. What do you do when somebody comes in week in and week out and tells you that they're doing the same mistakes and they're making the same decisions and they just don't know why things are not getting better for them? Because I would say “Stop being a fucking dumbass, dumbass.”

Doug: I would think there's some kind of a soundproof room in your home Jess that's basically you just go in there and just scream your brains out, and there's things you can punch, and you just haul what's left of your body out of there, and sit on the couch for about an hour afterwards to just purge what you've absorbed all week.

Jessica: You know, I really wasn't doing a lot of releasing and then over the summer or I guess fall I went to go see a psychic medium.

Doug: Oh, this is a bonus episode. Excellent.

Jessica: After my mom died, it was like six months later, and a friend of mine reached out and she's like, “This isn't gonna heal everything. But go to this lady. Just go.” Okay, so it was fascinating and intense. She kept saying to me, I'm really worried about you being a divorce coach. And I was like, why? I like love what I do. I feel like I'm making an impact. And she's like, you're carrying too much emotional burden, and it's gonna  start showing up in your body, you have to light candles and you have to go for a walk every day to clear the energy or you're going to get sick. I started walking the next day. I walk every single morning and really to clear. So I think maybe I've taken more of a meditative approach to it. But I think if I was in a boxing ring, I could probably do the same kind of thing because it just feels heavy, more than enraging. I'll get enraged about systemic misogyny in the family court system. However, most of the time it just feels like a heavy cloak. 

Doug: And heavy is worse. I mean, anger comes and goes, but heavy is just a steady force, right?

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, and you know, the anger can serve us. I have many clients that get to the place where they were like, fuck this. I'm doing something different. And with myself, with my custody case, that was, there was a judge and three lawyers in a room deciding how I was going to parent on a daily basis. 

Magda: I think sometimes you have to have anger to push you through the process, because the process of getting divorced or going through custody or whatever, it's just so fatiguing. And you kind of just want to like sit down in the middle of the sidewalk and like, refuse to keep walking. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you entirely that anger at the beginning can kind of derail you. 

Doug: Sure. But the real skill is learning to recognize that anger has its use, but it also can, your mom died rather abruptly right?

Jessica: She did. Both of my parents were in and out of the hospital for about six months. And then my mom who'd had a quadruple bypass and valve replacement needed that valve replaced again. So she began having issues with that and a surgery had been scheduled. My mom was actually at the cardiologist. She'd been having a hard time and they advised her to go to the ER and she opted not to. And she went home and then that night my dad helped her stand up to get ready for bed, and she died. She just died. My mom would have been real pissed off. She would have been. I gave the eulogy at her funeral. I was like, “I'm so honored to be here, and my mom would be so pissed off all these people are in the room and she's not here.” Because she was very intent on living until she was a hundred, and had much more to do, and I think believed very strongly that she would, could keep on. And her heart just could no. And so she was only 76 and it was, it was very sudden. It felt sudden even though there'd been that downward trajectory.

Doug: So that was consistent with her character, to refuse the care that night and to go home instead?

Jessica: I think it had been tricky. My mom had just been in the hospital and then rehab for like physical therapy rehab and then out of the hospital and then back in and in the ICU. There were things and things, and I think she thought, “I just need to go home. I don't feel great.” Her blood pressure was low. “I need to eat, I'll be okay.”

Magda: Well, the ER is genuinely no fun. And it also kind of feels like they're saying to you, oh, just go to the ER, right? I can completely see somebody who had been in the hospital and out of the hospital and all this kind of stuff being told “go to the ER” and just being like, I can't face that to get not an answer.

Jessica: Yeah. Right? You know, it's been very hard to reconcile some of the medical care and health care choices that my parents have made. And that, that's one of them. I think it's been something that's been hard for my dad, who still likes to refuse to go to the ER when he needs to, for him to reconcile. And the way that I think I've made sense of it for my head and my heart is, I think my mom wanted to be at home. And had she known in some internal knowing, some spiritual knowing that she was going to die. She died exactly where she'd want to, in my dad's arms, at home. And I think that my mom's heart condition was so poor that I don't really believe they could have saved her. And the idea of my mom dying alone in a hospital in the middle of the night is heartbreaking,  literally heartbreaking, you know? And so as sad as the reconciling of the medical care situation is, as sad as I am that my mom died in the way she did, I think it happened the way it was supposed to. And that sounds like weird and vague, but I think that it happened maybe in the best way it could have.

Doug: Right. And I'm wondering now, since your dad is alone, I mean, there are plenty of stories of parents who, once they lose a partner, they start to reassess their own, you know, existence. How do those circumstances of your mom's passing affect the relationship that you and your dad have when it comes to convincing him to do things or, in any other way, preparing for when it's his turn?

Jessica: My dad has just been lost. My dad never lived alone. He's never made meals. He's never had social relationships the entirety of their 57 years being married on his own. I mean, his friends from work, but they were still tied to my mom in some way. And so that has been really

confounding to my dad. And there were a couple of months where I was just at his house every single day, I didn't want to leave him. And so I think in a way, there are things I can talk to my dad about that other people can't, you know, I'm, I'm the person in the family who will bring up the difficult conversation. So I can say to him, like, I'm real pissed at mom right now. And he can, you know, open the door and talk about it. Or, are you sad? Talk to me about it. What do you want to say? You know, and he will open up to me in that regard. My dad was a social worker. So there is a connection that he and I have about making space for when things are hard for people. And I can, I feel like I can get to that with him. There's a different dependency that he has on me now, which he's not, he doesn't want to have. So it's a little difficult when he says, I couldn't have gotten through this without you, Jessica. And I wish that he could. And so I think that's hard. He goes to the ER yelling and screaming every time. It's not fun. And it's very hard. And so I don't know, I don't know what that's changed about us, except for I have to keep asking him all the time to trust me.

Doug: Oh, and you've built reason to trust all this time. If he was a social worker, he's got some level of emotional health there, right? Somewhere in there. You know, beyond the ornery father is someone who at least knows what it's like to help people and what it's like when people need help. Is there an aspect of his personality there that you can appeal to or is he kind of too removed from that at this point?

Jessica: I'm trying every angle at this point. I'm really trying to get him to assisted living and to get him in a more supported environment where I actually think that he would be greatly relieved to be. And that's hard too. I have a lot of compassion for him. He's lived in the house that he's in right now for 46 years. It's, that's a big deal.

Jessica: He hasn't lived in an apartment since, you know, he was fresh out like, and since my mom was pregnant for me, it was like a long, it's a lot. I do try to appeal to him by saying like, if this was me, you'd be telling me like, Jessica, get it together. It's hard. You have to do it. And so I'm working on it.

Magda: I think a lot of that also is generational in some ways, like getting a house was such a big deal. And it was such an accomplishment. And it was such a milestone. And the idea of giving up that house, it almost feels really transgressive.

Jessica: Yeah, I think it feels like a failure to him. Yeah, but it's not a failure. And I have positioned it like you've earned this. You've earned going down the hall to have happy hour every night and sit with the guys and watch the game. You've earned somebody making your meals and cleaning your place and doing your laundry and reminding you to take medication. You've earned it. It's not a punishment or a failure.

Magda: I wonder if it's going to be easier for us in 25 years to go because to me, every time I've had older relatives in assisted living, I come in to visit them and I'm like, oh my god, this is just like being at college, but you don't have to do any homework, right? It's like everybody's your same age and gets your same references. Somebody else is making your meals. There's always somebody to hang out with. You know, you can play cards.

Doug: And the game's on down the hall.

Magda: So I am hoping that when it's my time, I'll just be like, “yes, can you guys move my stuff so I don't have to?” And I wonder if it's a whole generation of us that it will be easier for us, or I wonder if we also will just be like, “no, no, no.”

Doug: Well, it'll be easier for you because you're going to be the cruise director of the hall regardless.

Jessica: Sign me up for that hall.

Doug: You're going to organize all the card games and all the knitting circles and all of the book clubs.

Jessica: I'm so curious, too, how the changing nature of marriage and partnership, how that will impact our generation, millennials, Gen Z, in terms of choices that we make in that part of our lives. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of single mom friends who are like, well, I never need to live with a man again, or I never need to, you know, let's all get a house together. Let's have a community of friends. And that to me sounds so much better than a lot of other options. That to me sounds fantastic. Yeah, I don't think my parents’ generation, I don't know anyone from their generation who have been like, let's basically have a commune, even though my parents were hippies.

Magda: My parents lived in a commune for two years and they wouldn't, you know, like now they wouldn't anymore. It was a Christian commune. It was called Thanks Community. Oh, it was like in 1969 and 1970. So like, I think that when the Golden Girls came out, the Golden Girls was this really funny thing, like ha ha ha. And everyone I know who's my age is like, “Sign me the fuck up right now. I am happy to be Rose if I have to be Rose,” right? Everybody I know now whose parents are going into higher levels of care, it's either their parents are together, one of the parents is gone and the other one's trying to navigate without them, or their parents had the kind of divorce that they're now having to navigate through the parent's new spouse to even have access to their parent. And I just don't see that happening to us. Like, I can't imagine my kids ever having to navigate around somebody else that was around me.

Doug: No, but that kind of emotional gatekeeping, yeah, that's really common, unfortunately. I've had some experience with that. It was really hard.

Magda: I mean, *I*'m resentful of it, and Doug and I were already divorced by the time it happened.

Doug: Well, that's you and your empathy strings. You've got some serious hardcore empathy energy with that.

Magda: I'm still mad at that kid who was an asshole to you at Boy Scout camp when you were like, fourth grade. I can't remember his name, though. I see this a lot, with kids who don't have a direct line to be able to talk to their parent.

Doug: Yeah. Which is interesting when you see the parent is willing to sacrifice so much. They've invested so much of their happiness in partnership to the point that they would sacrifice previous relationships in order to maintain the current one. I mean, I'm not going to sit in judgment because every situation is different, but it's just hard to watch.

Jessica: Doug, do you think you, like you and your guy friends are like talking about having the bro house? The retirement pad? Like, is this something guys talk about?

Doug: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Sure.

Jessica: Your men friends talk about that?

Doug: Assuming we all live that long. I mean, we're kind of resigned to the fact that, you know, all the women are going to outlive us anyway. But sure, I just I found an article that I posted in Friday Flames a couple of weeks ago about how current trends being what they are in terms of both real estate, health care, just how hard it is to live as a 50-plus-year-old for all sorts of reasons. Roommates among 50 plus are on the rise. So I'm all for it. As long as they say, Doug, you're talking too much. Give us a second. And I'll be fine.

Jessica: I think that's good. I think that's very good. And I'll definitely be a Blanche. I feel like I've earned it.

Magda: Rue McClanahan was like 51 or something when the show started.

Jessica: I know.

Doug: Wow.

Magda: And she was supposed to be this like old lady who was unnaturally interested in sex. Like what? Come on.

Jessica: No, it's unnatural. Yeah.

Doug: Well, yeah, when you put her in contrast to Dorothy's baleful glance, that's going to raise the stakes a bit because everyone lived in judgment of what Dorothy thought.

Jessica: Right? Yeah, I guess that's true.

Magda: So okay, let me ask you a question. So, um, can people read your master's thesis? Like, have you turned it into a book?

Jessica: Oh, it's actually a video documentary, made in an old-fashioned way. And then there is a written portion of it that is in the Oregon State Archives. First video documentary ever entered into the library there as a thesis, which is fun. So I don't know if you could check it out. But thank you for asking. That's nice.

Magda: Well, I mean, I don’t want to give you any extra projects to do. But like, we've done so much talking to people who are in this exact spot and things our parents have, objects, are absolutely confounding to people. And I think more thought about it and more help for people, people would really be interested in that.

Jessica: Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I feel just personally, a lot of responsibility. It was a panic for me when my mom died, like she hadn't told me all the stories yet. And I'm lucky to have a cousin. Sometimes I'll just send her a picture. “Who's this from? Who is this person?” And thank God I have her. Because otherwise, it'll be a lot of guessing. And that's, that's part of it. The things are important. I love that your friend wrote that book, I'm going to check it out, about approaching it like an archaeological dig. Because the business of it, I don't know that I could divorce myself from the emotional part of it.

Doug: Well, do you have conversations with your dad about his stories?

Jessica: I do, I ask him a lot of questions and I'm trying to ask him a lot about also me. When I was a kid, when we were kids, my brother and I, to hold on to as much as that. He doesn't remember as much anymore, but it's good to ask and keep that going. I think that part is really important.

Doug: Yeah, we have another guest, my friend Jeff, who wrote a book about questions to ask your parents because his father died without them having that conversation. There are so many things he wanted to ask his dad about his experience as a younger man that he never got. So blogger that he is, his thought was like, let's create the content that we wished existed. And it was like a template of things to say like, where was your head when I arrived? What was it like in the Madmen years? That's what my father tells me. He was like, “You know what, I was down the hall with a pipe in my mouth. I didn't see anything.” Now, given the fact that blogging is, you know, it's still finding its audience. I mean, I'm very grateful for the people that I met during its heyday that I can still have conversations with. But it's conversations like this that are going to carry us through because that's the real shared experience that we need to rely on so that we can recognize that we're all in this in one form or another and we're here to support each other.

Jessica: Yeah, and those are long term relationships. So I think I do think there's a trust that we, we shared stuff about toddlerdom with each other, and that there's a trust built to talk about that stuff. I'll tell you, I teach a class, a graduate class at Northwestern, a communication class. And whenever I introduce myself to my students, and I'm like, I'm an OG mom blogger, they're like, “Oh,” like, “Oh!”

Doug: Wasn't that your experience at business school too, Magda, when you first arrived? They were like, “wait, who's the mom blogger?”

Magda: I know, it's true. They were like, they didn't know what to do with me. Yeah, super funny.

Doug: Well, now assuming that Jessica's master's video will be digitized and available for mass distribution, and she's also an adjunct professor at Northwestern, go Cats. Where else can we find you online? Where do you write? Where do you post? And where can we hear more about your experience and offer whatever support we can as these days get weirder and weirder?

Jessica: My site is divorcecoachformoms.com and I post every day on TikTok at divorcecoachformoms.

Doug: Do you like TikTok?

Jessica: I love it. Oh, I love it. It's my favorite.

Doug: And why is that? I actually had a conversation with our son about TikTok last night. Because, you know, as fast as other platforms are trying to mimic what TikTok offers, what is specific about TikTok that they think still maintains its attraction?

Jessica: Your people are there. I love that I can flip through and I can see on the street reporting in Gaza and then I can see something about why my plants are dying and then I get a recipe and then I hear from a Black woman therapist. I just feel like the richness of content. The creativity is astounding. I love it. I also love how engaged my audience is there. And that, of course, comes with trolls. However, I've gotten a lot of clients from TikTok. A lot, because they say they feel like they know me. There's this opportunity to truly connect, and I love it. I just love it. That's where everybody is. That's right.

Doug: Except for you. Well, except for you.

Magda: Hey, I watch TikTok vicariously when all of the reels make it to Instagram.

Jessica: Yes. Right. You know, there are those moments, you'll remember this from being a blogger, when somebody random discovered your blog. And my daughter's art teacher, who I've known for many years, was like, oh, hey, I heard a familiar voice coming from my phone in the other room. And I realized TikTok was playing and you came up. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's me. But even more so my son's good friend. I saw a post of his and I liked it. And he was like, oh, man, I was like, it comes around really does it comes around. Funny. Wow. Ruined.

Doug: I'm so grateful that you came on to talk about this Jessica. I'm, I think everybody who's in your care is in good hands. I don't know if that's good news or bad, but you know in many ways it seems like you can be the victim of your competence but you're keeping it all together somehow. And I wish you all the strength in the world, and I hope people can gather something from your example, at least that, you know, it's possible. It's not fun, but it's possible.

Jessica: Yeah. Thank you very much. This has been great. I love talking to you, too. I think we could have a whole bunch of other stuff to talk about, but it's been a great conversation. Thank you.

Doug: These are the best conversations. Yeah. The ones that end and it's like, okay, let's get her on three more times. And it's going to come to that because we've had great conversations that are like, yeah, it's not ending now. You gotta be kidding me. This is like, this is just chapter two.

Doug: And thank you for listening to Chapter 1, which is also Episode 33 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Jessica Ashley, who identifies now, I guess, as a divorce coach, but there's so much more to her than that, as you have hopefully learned from this conversation. 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 there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and a newsletter every Friday, Friday Flames. If you listen to us on Apple podcasts, please leave us a review. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back next week with episode 34. Until then, bye-bye.