Webby Clare

Thoughts and other writings by Clare Conroy

Head & Heart #35

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Often I catch myself in ‘when/then’ self-talk, particularly in relation to parenting  – ‘when my kids sleep through the night then I’ll be able to get up early and go running’, ‘when we don’t have to pay for daycare anymore we’ll be able to consider upgrading the house/take a holiday’, ‘when the kids are older I’ll have more flexibility to travel with my work’, ‘when I don’t have to spend my evenings cleaning up vomit I’ll be able to write more blog posts’ (that was last night)…. It’s like life with little children, although very much planned and wanted, is some kind of temporary detour from the life I could or should be living. Lately, I’ve been trying to remind myself that this isn’t a detour, this is my life, and to lean into the experience rather than looking for what might be on the other side. So when I read this piece from Omid Safi this week his wise words resonated strongly – “Your life will not start down the road. This is life. Be here now. Have your heart where your feet are.” I love this so much and have added it to my collection of #stickywisdom (I’m trying to figure out the best way to collate and share my #stickywisdom, so I’m experimenting with a new dedicated Instagram account – sticky.wisdom).

E has decided she wants to be a geologist when she grows up (I think she’s keen on the idea of finding a heap of gold!). Despite doing at least a semester of university-level geology, I can’t remember even the basic info about the different rock types so we found some YouTube videos. Thank goodness for YouTube! But it was a moment when I kind of missed having a World Book encyclopedia on the shelf.

Apparently, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to a child, so instead of completely outsourcing responsibility for satisfying my children’s curiosity to YouTube, I’m going to view fielding questions as a highly effective way to enhance my own understanding of a subject. And it’s also got me thinking about how I can integrate the Feynman technique into the workshops I facilitate.

Mars is visible at the moment (as is Saturn). I only learned this from overhearing an episode of the Imagine This podcast that E was listening to. I’m rarely outside in the evening (especially in winter), but we’ve downloaded the super cool Night Sky app on our phones and have enjoyed rugging up and doing some planet spotting. If you’re in Canberra and have little kids you may be keen to check out this star gazing playgroup session that our babysitter Sami is running at the end of the month.

Last weekend we had an unexpected visitor – ‘Patch’ the bear from E’s pre-school. Basically the kids take turns taking Patch home for the weekend, and you’re meant to involve Patch in your weekend activities, and add some photos/text to a journal for your child to share with the class on Monday morning. Of course this means that someone has to remember to pack Patch for any weekend outing, and then photograph Patch, and print the photos and arrange them with text descriptions in the journal.

Our weekend visitor – Patch

Whenever we have one of these visitors I’m reminded of Annabel Crabb’s ‘The Wife Drought’ where she shares a similar story about ‘Chiquita the kangaroo’ to illustrate the type of work involved in managing a home/family – work that’s not paid (and often barely recognised) but that you feel emotionally obligated to fulfil (and super guilty if you stuff up). And it’s work that’s most often undertaken by ‘wives’.

 

Given my life stage it’s hardly surprising that my virtual feeds and in-person conversations are full of discussions and commentary that include many stories like those about ‘Patch/Chiquita’ including this piece – I decided to drop my family’s mental load for a week.

The ‘list’ also came up in this episode of Dear Sugars on emotional labour which was quite good. But, I feel like in this episode, and in many articles, there is a conflation and confusion of the terms emotional labour, invisible work, domestic labour, mental load etc. I wasn’t really aware of this until I read Please Stop Calling Everything That Frustrates You Emotional Labor. This episode of WorkLife on faking your emotions at work also helps to explain what emotional labor looks like in a work setting. Regardless, I do want an ‘I am the List’ t-shirt.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the 5 Things podcast. The premise is quite simple but a unique take on the traditional interview – guests bring in 5 physical things that they treasure or that are resonant in some way, and share the story of their life through these objects. The guests don’t appear to be particularly famous (Manoush Zomorodi was the only name in the guest list I recognised), but it’s so fascinating to hear about different stories/lives and I love how physical objects can be used to elicit such deep, meaningful, personal conversation and connection. Of course, it’s got me thinking about what my five things would be too.

A new recipe that’s getting a lot of use in our house – ‘boost your basic’ double choc chip cookies from One Handed Cooks. Yes, they are choc-chip cookies so they’re not really a healthy snack, but I prefer these to the usual ones that are heavy on the butter and sugar. I’ve probably already shared it before but their carrot cookies (with no refined sugar, eggs, nuts or dairy) are a lunch-box staple at our place.

Head & Heart is an occasional update about the things that have engaged my head or heart recently – things I’ve been pondering, articles I’ve read, podcasts I’ve listened to etc. If you’d like to receive the updates via email, you can sign up here. 

Head & Heart #34

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My big baby turned 5 a couple of weeks ago! Ella’s birthday is always a time of much reflection and this year I’ve found myself considering how becoming a mum, and Ella’s mum specifically, has changed the trajectory of my life. Her arrival felt like an asteroid had rammed into me and thrown me from my orbit leaving me lost and spinning out of control. But now, as we traverse further into this new identity and relationship I feel more confident that this path I’m now on is providing me with the lessons and opportunities I’m meant to have. In the lead up to her birthday I also found myself filled with enormous gratitude for all the wonderful people that have come into my life that I probably wouldn’t have connected with otherwise – my mother’s group, working at YWCA Canberra, the She Leads students and facilitators, Lead Mama Lead, my new colleagues at the APSC…

With each birthday it’s interesting to notice how parenting challenges shift from the basic needs around sleeping, eating etc, to deeper ones around raising a decent human being. This post on fitting in vs belonging was one worth reading and will be something I try to remember as Ella gets older and continues to navigate friendships and social structures.

I love love love this idea! If you’re expecting a baby, or know someone who is, why not skip the baby shower and throw a post-partum party instead?

Recent favourite podcast discoveries that I’d recommend include Self-Helpless (3 comedians discuss various self-help topics/books) and Briget Shulte’s Better Life Lab (on the art and science of living a full life). I’m also excited to see that Jamila Rizvi’s new podcast, Future Women, is launching next week. I also really enjoyed this episode of Hidden Brain – The Edge Effect – which includes some fantastic stories about diversity and creativity.

Some people in my network who are doing great things and that I think you should know about….

  • My friend Zoya Patel‘s debut book, No Country Woman, is coming out next month! I’m so excited to read this and share it. Zoya is one of the smartest, most insightful people I know and her writing about race, feminism and identity always makes me stop and think. She’s doing a number of events over the coming months – including a launch in Canberra on 19 August, and the Melbourne Writers Festival!
  • Julie Boulton has an excellent weekly newsletter, The Greening Of, about her journey towards more sustainable living. I always learn heaps and I love her honest, engaging, humourous writing style.
  • Lead Mama Lead founder, Summer Edwards, is running the next intake of the Overcoming Overwhelm course in September. This is an online course for mamas who are struggling with and/or feel like they’d like to get better at dealing with feelings of overwhelm, guilt and exhaustion in their life. It’s a supportive, gentle program (designed to fit in around the lives of busy women). I’m about 2/3 through the pilot program and it’s definitely led to some increased self-awareness around the priorities and values in my life and the habits and practices that help and hinder my wellbeing. (You can also get 25% off if you sign up before 1 August).
  • A couple of months ago, my friend and former colleague Stefan Kraus from RGB Collective took some wonderful portraits of us (and did incredibly well to capture the easily-distracted and not-always-compliant kids). Getting some more family photos on the wall was one of the things I really wanted to do this year, now I just have to get them printed and framed…. (I’m also thinking about getting one turned into a custom illustrated portrait from Able & Game)
My feet (and pregnant belly) – 3 July 2013
Ella’s feet – 15 July 2018

On the topic of photos, Ella uses an old iPhone to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. She’s recently discovered the camera function and has taken (quite enthusiastically) to documenting her life and creating movies! It’s been fun to look through the pictures and videos and get a glimpse of what the world looks like from her perspective. There are lots of selfies and posed pictures of toys and hundreds of walls and windows and floors and ceilings (some quite artistic, some not so much).

I particularly love this one – mainly because exactly 5 years and 12 days earlier I’d taken a very similar shot (in almost the identical spot) as I paced my lounge room in early labour about 10 hours before we met Ella.

The other big news to share since my last H&H update is that I’ve returned to (paid) work following my maternity break. I’m pleased to be facilitating some of the core skills and graduate development training programs at the Australian Public Service Commission, and I’m also doing some freelance facilitation, coaching and training. Helping individuals and groups to learn and change and to see themselves and the world a little differently has been a pretty consistent thread through my work for the past 8 or so years, but facilitation has been a somewhat peripheral part of the various jobs I’ve had. I feel so excited to be diving deeper into this work and to commit to building my own skills, knowledge, experience and practice – it feels like the work I’m meant to be doing. I have some availability for work for the remainder of the year, so if you need some support with running meetings, workshops or training, please get in touch. All the details are over on the Sticky Note Consulting site.

Finally, I’m going to trial sending out Head & Heart updates as a newsletter which may make them easier to follow (for the handful of dear friends that actually read them)! If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. I’ll keep posting them to the blog too!

Head & Heart #33

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Parenting milestone achieved – surviving our first family bout of gastro!

Last week, in addition to my daughter starting pre-school, we achieved another family milestone – our first bout of gastro through the household – and the experience got me thinking about change.

When you’re in the throws of a gastro bug often all you can do is wait. Although you feel absolutely horrible, there’s some comfort in knowing that things will change and in 24-48 hours you’ll almost certainly feel much much better. All you have to do is simply survive (and try to maintain some humour and perspective). Similarly, in parenting, what I’ve learned 4 1/2 years in is that sometimes just waiting it out is just what you have to do to get through a period of discomfort, pain, frustration or suffering (whether that be related to sleep, toileting, eating etc). Often trying to initiate, force or speed up change is ineffective or just not worth the effort. It makes me wonder how often I’m getting stressed and trying to intervene and change something in other parts of my life, when I’m better off just having faith that the hard stuff will eventually end? But on the flip side, how often am I clinging to some hope that things will be different without making any (or sufficient) effort to bring that change into being???

In other news, I’ve taken my friend Summer’s recommendation and started using some bluetooth headphones (well, I’ve appropriated Jason’s AirPods) and am finding evening chores much less painful with a good podcast or audiobook to listen to. A few new podcasts that I’ve been enjoying over the last week or so are Women At Work from HBR, The Pineapple Project (which actually makes personal finance interesting), and Anecdotally Speaking (a business storytelling podcast).

I read this article – Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read – and saved the link in my journal. A day or so later when reviewing my saved links, I couldn’t remember what the article was about, or why I thought it was important to save, which just kind of just proves its entire point! On re-reading, the key takeaway was acknowledging the difference between simply acquiring information and actual knowledge. Often I’m sucked into seeking out new information and the momentary experience of feeling like I’ve learned something, without actually learning. So one thing I’ve decided to do, instead of always focusing on the new article/book/podcast, is embracing re-reading and re-listening. This week I’ve relistened to Episode 1 of the brilliant 3-part Making Oprah podcast series (if you’re searching for it in your podcast app search for ‘Making Obama’ – the new series name), and I’ve just started re-reading Sarah Ferguson’s The Killing Season Uncut. So many life and leadership lessons from both (and plenty of #stickywisdom too) that I plan to blog about separately.

Stephanie Coontz (a historian who studies family and marriage) has been popping up in my feeds in several places this week – in episode 2 of Women at Work on couples that work, on the most recent episode of Hidden Brain (When Did Marriage Become So Hard?), and she also wrote this NYT opinion piece – For A Better Marriage, Act Like A Single Person. Date night always feels like enough of a logistical challenge to try and organise, but this article has inspired me to try and schedule in a few double dates this year!

Finally, I’m really enjoying walking Ella to and from pre-school. It’s so nice to live within walking distance from the school and it’s great to have the opportunity to chat. Asking ‘how was your day?’ is a hard habit to break, but I’m trying hard to ask better questions that get her sharing more. This list gave me some good ideas to try.

**Head & Heart is an occasional capture of what I’m thinking about, doing, reading and listening to**

Head & Heart #32

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Whenever E wakes in the night to tell us that she’s scared of monsters, spiders, or a Backson (thanks Winnie the Pooh) we tell her that we’re nearby and that ‘mummy and daddy won’t let anything bad happen to you’. This shooting in Las Vegas just makes me realise that of course that’s a promise that is impossible for us to keep. Pain and hurt and fear and disappointment will inevitably be part of our kids’ lives, and I need to remember that it’s not our job to protect them from it, but rather to ‘assure them that when the turbulence comes, we will all hold hands and get through it together’ (and keep serving the peanuts!).

Our little bushwalking guide!
On a happier note, we got out for a family bushwalk at Tidbinbilla and it was great. I’ve mentioned it before, but bushwalking is really my happy place and it’s so nice to be sharing this with E. I listened to a recent episode of the Australian Hiker podcast on hiking with kids (#40) and used some of the tips on this most recent outing – getting E to be the guide, hold the map and look for the trail markers, and to carry her own water and snacks. She really took to the leader role (which won’t be a surprise to anyone that knows her) and managed to walk 3.3km herself (although there was a fair bit of whinging at the end and we had to pull out the promise of an icecream).

1. How Honesty Could Make You Happier

…one of my biggest takeaways was that we shouldn’t lie to children when they are asking us about grown-up words or ideas — otherwise, they will just ask Siri. If it’s between YouTube and me to explain prostitution, I pick me.

Part of supporting kids through hard stuff is being honest (in an age-appropriate way). While I try to avoid lying to E (as I know she’ll figure it out eventually and I want us to have a relationship that has a strong foundation of trust), I find it difficult to find truthful and acceptable alternatives to ‘we won’t let anything bad happen’, and the more innocent ‘I don’t know where that picture/bag/toy is’ (when it ended up in the bin during last night’s clean up)! This piece has prompted me to pay more attention to those moments duing my day where I have to make a choice about honesty.

2. Terrible, Thanks for Asking

This is my latest podcast discovery (thanks to Carly Findlay’s recommendation). I started with the latest episode (#14 – Best Friends Forever) and I’ve been thinking about it for days. It made me cry and reflect and filled me with gratitude for the wonderful friendships in my life. I’m now making my way through the back catalogue. Such a great podcast about love and loss and the hard and beautiful parts of being human.

3. Step into the sunlight

Most of us, I think, have had this experience: behaving quite differently according to the people in the room at the time. With some people we feel in perpetual shadow; with others, the sunlight seems to angle in and we are aglow.

This piece by Richard Glover was published almost 5 years ago, but it’s one that I think and talk about often. This week it came up twice in conversations, so I thought it was worth sharing here too.

 

Head & Heart #31

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“We don’t go on because we’re ready, we go on because it’s 11.30”
~ Saturday Night Live producer and mastermind, Lorne Michaels.

Here I am writing a post, not because I have three things ready to share, but because it’s Monday. I wonder if the reason I don’t have a number of articles, posts or podcasts to share is because I didn’t come across anything that engaged my head or heart, or because my head and heart were distracted or weren’t as open this week? Regardless, I’ve decided that the habit and practice of regular writing, no matter how scrappy, is more important than being ready with something I feel is worth sharing.

That said, one of the things that I did enjoy reading this week and that is making the rounds of the internet is this amazing story by Dr Mary-Claire King – The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1.

I love stories which remind me of how many things in this world, including those we take for granted or seem inevitable, are actually products of people being in a certain place at a certain time and the small interactions they have along the way. I had a similar feeling when I read Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street earlier in the year and was struck by how many conversations, collaborations and people saying ‘yes’ were necessary for the Sesame Street we all know and couldn’t imagine life without, to actually come about.

Head & Heart #30

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I feel a bit like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day at the moment – reliving an experience over and over until I’m finally able to reflect and learn some lesson. But instead of watching Punxsutawney Phil emerge from his hole, I just keep getting sick – over and over again!

In my quest to figure out the lesson, I’ve been thinking about ‘me’ and ‘my body’ and the connection (or lack thereof). I tend to think of my body as something that serves me – or that can fail me and let me down, and that something that is somehow separate from ‘me’. I don’t think that this is particularly uncommon. Just the way that we talk about someone’s relationship with their body implies some kind of distinction between the two. By definition, a ‘relationship’ requires a connection between two or more things. I’m not quite sure where this thinking will lead and I haven’t tied the ends together to make a neat and coherent answer, but I do wonder if I could be healthier and happier if I was able to integrate my body and physical health more with my sense of self.

When I’m sick I also do more mindless scrolling and Netflix viewing than reading, but I still found three things worth sharing this week…

1. Feed a cold, don’t starve it

Related to the above thinking about my physical health, I’ve also found myself asking ‘why?’. People who have worked with me will know that I’m always trying to analyse failures and improve systems/processes, so I’ve naturally being asking ‘what went wrong?, what could I have done to avoid this?’. It’s impossible to know for sure, but one of the possible answers I’ve come up with is sugar. In my subsequent Googling I came across this piece which reveals that glucose can dramatically impact the type of inflammation that different infections cause.

2. The great nutrient collapse

The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.

This is a long but fascinating (if rather depressing) read on the impact that increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are having on plants and the potential implications of this for human health. It also makes me wonder how we can get more smart people to solve problems that matter.

3. A mother-daughter tradition worth sharing

Teenage girls now live in a world where reality is warped by Instagram filters and Photoshop, where friends look like models and models feel like friends. They exist in a society that values ‘likes’ and ‘comments’, ‘follows’ and ‘shares’, one where beauty is defined by brands that profit from your insecurity.

So what does all this have to do with hiking? Everything. Because hiking can dismantle it all.

Although E is only 4 I already feel a little anxious about how best to support her through the social/emotional challenges of being a teenager! In recent years I’ve been noticing more and more just how beneficial walking in nature is for my own mental health, and I’ve loved beginning to share the joy of bushwalking with her (the 800m Koala Path at Tidbinbilla is one of her favourites and manageable for little legs without too much complaint!). This piece makes me feel excited and optimistic about continuing to build on our little nature strolls.

Head & Heart #29

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On Friday evening I drove into town for my Genius Bar appointment (sadly nothing could be done to revive my Mac, so this is another post from my phone) and I saw the huge, bright moon in the sky. I’m rarely out at night anymore so when I am I try to make an effort to look up. On nights when the moon is full and huge I like to think about who else might be looking up and pondering the same thing. This feeling of connection to people I’ll never know makes me smile. (Just like those night feeds at 2am when you feel some kind of invisible bond to the other unknown women you know are doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.)

One Sky Project by Women Who Draw (Sophie Beer, Brisbane (79) and Rachel Chew, Melbourne (80))

So I was particularly delighted to read about the One Sky project in Austin Kleon’s newsletter this week. Eighty-eight women from around the world all looked up into the sky at exactly the same time and drew/painted whatever they saw. The result is this lovely wholistic capture of what the sky looks like from different perspectives. It’s a great metaphor for how a simple change in position (physically, but also mentally) can provide new perspective and change what we see.

There are so many things I could share this week that have made me stop and think/feel, so it was challenging to just pick 3….

1. How Friends Become Closer

as time goes on, friendships often face more hurdles to intimacy than other close relationships. As people hurtle toward the peak busyness of middle age, friends—who are usually a lower priority than partners, parents, and children—tend to fall by the wayside.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about friendship lately with the sudden shift in demands on my time that full-time parenting with a new baby brings. In many ways the constant hands-on work means that I have less freedoms to catch up with a friend for a meal or coffee, but in other ways, without the constant intellectual stimulation of work and the interpersonal connections that work brings, I’ve felt a loneliness and longing for connection with friends that has often being hard to satisfy as they deal with their own ‘peak busyness’. This piece has some interesting insights about the contexts and containers that adult friendship exist in, which makes me appreciate the complexity and requisite effort required to sustain these relationships.

2. The Power of Anti-Goals (via Adam Grant’s newsletter, Granted)

…problems are often best solved when they are reversed… it’s often easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do

Our new nanny started today (yay!) and so I’m right in the thick of figuring out what ‘work’ might look like for me over the next 6-12 months. Without a functional computer I was limited in what I could do this morning so spent some time with a pen and paper using this technique to brainstorm what I don’t want my work to look like.

It’s a technique I’ve used before (and have blogged about) particularly in relation to business improvements, but this was the first time I applied it to my own life design.

3. How to fix the person you love (via Emi Kolawole’s newsletter, E is for Everything)

To make us feel loved and valued, our spouse must convey appreciation for the person we currently are. To help us grow, he or she must emphasize the discrepancy between that person and the person we can ideally become, typically by casting a sober, critical eye On our faults.

I feel I’m frequently navigating (often awkwardly and painfully) the tension between playing the role of supporter/empathizer or coach/advisor in my own marriage, so this piece particularly resonated.