TONTS. - Your Own Kind of Girl with Clare Bowditch

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Clare Bowditch is an author, singer and gifted story teller, a troubadour and advocate for those without power or voice. Her songs and work have meant so much to so many in our Australian community. She is an ARIA award winning musician for best female artist, won Rolling Stone’s Woman of the Year (for contribution to culture), a Logie-nominated actor for her role as Rosanna in Offspring and a former ABC broadcaster. Clare's memoir Your Own Kind of Girl is an honest, big hearted coming of age story punctuated by grief, anxiety and the battle with her inner critic, Frank. It's also full of vivid memories, tiny bits of joy that make life what it is, bloody beautiful. This is the work of a woman who has found her true power - and wants to pass it on. Happiness, she discovers, is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves.For more from Clare you can find her at www.clarebowditch.com where you can find links to her memoir Your Own Kind of Girl as well as a list of what she calls FUN STUFF like a recipe for her mum’s Dutch Apple Pie to songs you can play with 3 chords on guitar. For more from me you can head to www.clairetonti.com or @clairetonti on instagramYou can email me with suggestions for episode topics and guests to [e-mail].A big thank you to this wonderful team:Editing - RAWCollingsTheme Music - Avocado JunkieGraphic Design - Emma HackettPhotography - Anna RobinsonStyling - Hilary Holmes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Tonts here. I'm Claire Tonti and this is a podcast about feeling all of it, about our inner critic and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. At the time of recording this interview, Melbourne, the land of the Wurundjeri people, had just been plunged into an even greater level of COVID restriction. To combat this, my lion-hearted guest today, Claire Bowditch, cut her dog, Charlie the Wonder Groodle's fur, into the shape of a lion. And goodness, we all need to take this energy with us, I reckon, at this time in the world. You'll hear him throughout this episode rolling his ball and clambering to get out of the room while Claire's beautiful teenagers romp and play video games

upstairs. This is a podcast of its time, with all the mess and the magic of parenting while working through lockdown, and I think we can all relate. Troubadour, advocate for those without power or voice, author, singer, and gifted storyteller, Claire Bowditch has had many names. She is so valued in our Australian community. As an ARIA award-winning musician for Best Female Artist or Rolling Stones Woman of the Year for Contribution to Culture, she's a Logie and nominated actor for her role as Rosanna in one of my favourite TV shows, Offspring, and she's also a former ABC radio

broadcaster where she told stories to thousands of Australians. I put my one-year-old to bed last night and I picked up her memoir that I've read so many times again. It's called Your Own Kind of Girl and I wanted to thumb through it again in preparation for our interview and I was just stopped in my tracks. On the back cover it says, happiness is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves. It sounds corny and not true, but I hadn't realised that this podcast that I'm making is in direct response to Claire's writing and words that I've absorbed over so many years of being a teenager who felt out of place and too big and too loud and not enough. Something else she writes about is the myth that real life only begins once you're thin and beautiful, or that thought that good things only happen to other people, or that you are not enough as you are. Claire calls her inner

critic Frank, and I call mine Maud. The premise really, though, is exactly the same. That in naming that voice that tells us those stories of unworthiness, of fear, of body shaming, of not good enoughness, we can begin to separate from them and really see that voice for what it is. That it is not who we are. That it is made of words, of stories that we may have picked up from the external world and internalised, and we can put them back down, let go of some of that load we've been carrying. Frank or Maud are not who we are. And in order to create, to be whole and contented in our own skin, we need to be able to say in moments when that voice is so loud, as Claire would say, Foff. Fuck off, Frank. As she says so perfectly, the broken world we are living in is going to

need creativity. If we are ever going to make sense of any of it, move through it, find joy in the years to come. For many of us, creating is a lifeline, a way through the maze, a way to make sense of it, find joy, to get past the grief, the loss, confusion or fear. Whether that creativity looks like cooking a Dutch apple pie or writing a song or maybe making a paper hat with our kids or even making a podcast, putting the feelings into phrases, sorting the chaos through creating. If we start small, we can land somewhere big or at the very least somewhere different. And don't we all need a little bit of that being stuck in lockdown with every day feeling like Groundhog Day? As my Relly Paul Kelly sings from little things, big things grow.

And so too can you. My hope is you find a gem of wisdom and comfort in Claire's stories. I know I bloody did. Here she is, Claire Bowditch and occasionally Charlie the Wonder Groodle. It is a glorious day here in Melbourne. So I'm here in Melbourne, Wurundjeri country. I'm coming to you from a very sunny and glorious day just before we tip over into spring official. And around me, there's light and there's, you know, the family are all safe and we're all here doing our thing. Inside me, I feel disturbed like everyone else, I think, who's watching the news at the moment. Because at this moment in time, we're in a situation where from last week to this week, our COVID numbers have doubled. Our Delta COVID numbers have doubled. We've got the state to the

north of us full of the virus and seemingly unable to control it and there's some talk of us going into even a deeper lockdown than the one we're in which I struggled to sort of imagine what that would look like. Does that mean child care closes? Does that mean building stops? I don't know. So there's this disturbed sort of uncertain feeling in me and at the same time this knowledge that in my little bubble of my home we're good actually how are you the same right the same god I know there's Afghanistan as well all the layers of everything happening around the globe and when you're a big feeling person there's a lot of big feelings to be had, right? But in our little cherished bubble, we are safe and happy. And the kids are little, I've got little kids, they're one and five. So tiny kids, tiny problems. And we're just keeping that little bubble, you know? So that's precious.

But what a tricky time. It's a tricky time and you cannot help but have a sore heart about the world. We've had the IPCC report as well. It's just a big bloody time. Often at times like this, the story of helplessness, the story of my inner critic who I call Frank and have for two decades now, and apologies to anyone who has a name Frank, it's absolutely not personal. I just didn't have anyone in my immediate world called Frank at the time I named my inner critic. So my Frank at times like these gets very loud with the story of hopelessness because the truth is I don't know how to help those good people who supported the idea of peace

and freedom in Afghanistan. I don't know how to get them out. Nobody does. We don't know how to get them out of this situation we're in, they're in. So there's all these sort of, you know, I trick myself all the time into believing that there's nothing I can do, but there's always something I can do. There's always something I can do. I can find an organisation who have more of an idea of how to support those people on the ground and I can find an organisation who have more of an idea of how to support those people on the ground and I can share my money with them and I can sign an open letter to the government. Even in hopeless situations like this where there's, it feels like there's very little that we could possibly do.

I'm always looking for the thing I can do because it's the only way to make Frank be quiet. Absolutely. I think that's such beautiful advice. I want to take you back because I want to talk about Frank more. This show is all about inner critic and feeling all of it and all of our emotions, which I think is the only way forward, right? To feel them and let them be with us and then move us into action. But I want to take you right back to you as a three-year-old because I have a theory that being three is kind of who you are and then the world can kind of tell you stories and hopefully eventually as a grown-up person you can be led back to that person. I deeply agree, I deeply, deeply agree with that. I've been reflecting on that this week in fact, that very

concept of, so the thing that's getting us through this moment in time seems to be creativity at its basis. You know, people telling stories, people speaking truths, people entertaining us, stories, songs, books, TV. And I was thinking about, so when was it we were most creatively free? So three for me was a glorious, free and also deeply complex time in an unusual way. So three, if I go back there, I'm going to kindergarten for the first time. I'm living in Sandingham, Bayside suburb here in Melbourne. I'm the youngest of five. My dog bouncing is born in the background. I had a dog called Sam at the time and a big backyard and I sang a lot and I loved organising things.

I liked putting little shoes next to each other and I loved asking questions and I loved dancing. I was very, very lucky to have a mother who was very, very encouraging of these things. She grew up in Amsterdam. After the Second World War she was born just in that period of time. They played in the street a lot and she passed that on to me. So there was lots of street play. There was very little TV. We weren't really, I think we used to watch play

school in Sesame Street and that was kind of it, if we were lucky. So times were good when I was three and I, as a three-year-old was I've got lots of different tapes of me singing, telling stories and feeling very loved in this family that I was born into. I love in your own kind of girl where you talk about in the being in the water and you said this little line that kind of really stuck with me that you felt powerful and a bit magical at that time do you does that still resonate with you now what did you mean by that when we there's a moment that comes when we're doing something that matters as an adult that you know it might be like making a you know moment a

song is born or you know the moment you give birth or the you know these big sort of moments in life might be a really fucking good cup of coffee but whatever it is you know, the moment you give birth or, you know, these big sort of moments in life. Might be a really fucking good cup of coffee, but whatever it is, you have these moments where you zoom in on something that's true. And I had that feeling a lot as a kid. And I especially had it in the water where my body felt light. You know, one of my big dreams as a kid was flying and being a superhero and having a balloon that would look down on the world and see what was going on and be able to fix things. And that desire in me, I felt most close to that desire when I was swimming, when I was in the water. And I didn't have to, around three, four, five, I began to be quite conscious of my body and the fact that it was a bigger body

in the world compared to my friends and that there might be something wrong with that. So that was one of the big stories that I picked up young. But in the water, that story didn't exist and I didn't feel it. I didn't have any external idea of what other people thought of me and that was a deep relief. Some of us at three, you know, three to five, they call it this, you know, the age of magical thinking. And Joan Didion wrote a beautiful book of that title, but long before she did, there's this sort of theory around psychology that the age of magical thinking where magic and reality are kind of still quite blurred. And that also happens to be in our

family at the time that my sister Rowie got sick. So Rowie was two years older than me and she got really sick and had to move to hospital and lived there for two years and passed away there when she was seven and I was five. So when I think about three as well, and I just sort of say that quickly and I talked about it a lot in my book book but it's a difficult thing to talk about but I can just say to explain it you know that was the water that I was swimming in psychologically at that time and that is why I would have these dreams of being a hero and that is why I was quite porous and thin-skinned and open to other people's stories of who I was so I changed from three to five my job was still to be cheery and cheering people's stories of who I was. So I changed from three to five. My job was

still to be cheery and cheering people up, but I realised I had a job in this family. We all do. So what happened there, and my mum tells me this, is that all of a sudden I didn't sort my shoes in the same way. I was really, really organised as a little, little kid. And then at three, you know, chaos happens when someone gets sick in any family, especially when it's that level of sickness. And I look back and go, how fascinating that all of a sudden that chaos externally, which was very well held by my parents, I must say, but I changed a lot as a three-year-old. And I'm not sure that there's no detangling from that there is always a part of me still that is very stuck in three to five and will always be and that has some difficult parts to it and some very beautiful

parts to it too I'm connected still to that kid what are the difficult parts of that the grief so really um spending the rest of your life trying to untangle profoundly difficult emotional and philosophical concepts around why we're born, what are we here to do, why do we die, is life fair, what has meaning, am I an arsehole, guilt, survival guilt. They're the difficult parts. You know, they're embedded in me, big questions that I was too little to be able to handle. And I think the same could be said for any sibling who's gone through grief and indeed any adult.

So in my book I say that grief is a vessel and, you know, you carry for the rest of your life the hope that you can find some proxy to bring back the thing that you, that felt like home, that's no longer here anymore. And so those things are big, you know, they're big and heavy in a kid's chest and a kid doesn't know what to do with them. And so, you know, we talk about this cliche of where are artists made or born or so on there's no doubt in my mind we are all born creative some of us need to hang on to that in different ways and what you will see happening here in our world in the next few years there's a whole series of generation of humans who are going to need

creativity and the ability to make sense of complex questions through creativity in a brand new way. Like we are on the verge of a boom in interesting ideas and deeper conversations. Right now, it just feels a bit shit. We don't have any perspective because we're in the middle of it. Absolutely. How are you now dealing with the shit? What do you do to help with that while we're right in the middle of it? I keep my world really small and I concentrate on the things that I can do. I am very vigilant about telling Frank that now's not the time and off you go because our inner critic is basically our survival brain, our lower brain, the brain that we inherited over

generations that sticks with us. It's very strong and very potent and its story that everything's fucked is really very tempting to believe. The best way that I know to counter that, because it's not true actually, everything is not fucked, but it feels that way, you know, and that story gives me all these hormones to try and do something, you know, run from the tiger, but I can't see the tiger.

So it's invisible. It's an invisible virus. It's a war that's on the other side of the world. I stick to the tiny little things that have always kept me sane. I go to the music that makes sense to me. I go to the recipes that bring me comfort. I ping pong back, and this is something I've realised that I ping pong back to the little tiny things that feel like home. I create little routines. I remember that mum and dad were really good at creating little routines that helped us

all feel or me, helped me feel safe as a kid and so I go back there and you know I I sort of keep going and I acknowledge that the fear is really present and it's big in my chest and I give a little windscreen wipe and I keep doing little tiny things now for me at this moment in time that's actually really it's easy because I am designing a new kitchen. It's bizarre that life goes on in the middle of this. But I'm designing this new kitchen and it's a small thing. It's a modest little kitchen for a woman who has always longed to have a kitchen where there was enough room for everything and a mind where there was enough room for everything

and a heart and a world. But I get to do it with the kitchen and the drawers, the soft closing, you know, like just tiny little thing. And that is one of the ways that I am moving, you know, solidly through absolute uncertainty. I'm finding a little thing that's certain for me. What you're also finding in the world more broadly is everyone's looking for a little thing that they can control and where they can feel safe. That is one of the reasons why at the moment there's been an explosion in eating disorders, in disordered eating, disordered thinking, the things we do with food, because food is one of the places we go for security or it's one of the things we deny ourselves of if

we are, you know, unwell and sort of prone to that kind of trying to find control so my focus is on trying to find healthy good feeling ways to just carry on and still be useful oh gosh it's so huge there's so much in what you just said it strikes me that we're living in a time where there are these small griefs as well as these big griefs. And I know for you, grief has just been an ongoing thing, which I know is obviously that's being human. But for you, you know, it is. We just all lose people and lose things, right? But COVID is a time of grief for lots of different reasons.

I know you lost your mum as well over the last year or so. And I wanted to say first, I'm just so sorry for your loss because I mean, I've lost my dad. I know the depth of that is just hard to describe. How has that grief changed you? So this time last year, it's been a year since I lost my mum. I lost her during COVID to pancreatic cancer, one of the cruelest cancers that can be because it's quick and swift. And it often takes people who were otherwise without symptoms and quite healthy. And then it appears and then there's not much you can do about it. Negotiating grief in a COVID situation is sort of the last thing that you get to sit with because you're negotiating a hospital system and an attempt to be with someone who is dying when there are rules

that say that you can't touch them you can't that your closeness to them which is our normal way of helping people you know being with our loved ones when they're dying, in normal ways are dangerous. So it was and will be something that I sit with forever. There's no getting around the profundity of losing parents. I've lost both my parents now too. And Claire, you know what this means to lose those anchors, those great humans. So my mum, to consider how losing mum has changed me, I sort of, it's like just having a mum like that formed me and will continue to form me because

like all good parents, what my mum did was she planted little seeds in me as a kid little ideas you know and I sometimes think I'm a parent of three myself and they're teenagers now and I sometimes think I used to be able to feel I had a lot more control over you know what I could protect them from and and how you know how they how I could shape their experience of the world it's all bullshit the best thing we can do and the only thing we can do I feel now as parents is plant enough of those good little things those normal things in their childhood that they have a place to come back to and so in my experience of missing mum I just keep

going back to the little things that she normalized that were good in me that is a good parent you know and they're tiny things they're little blue and white delft things you know that were from Holland to little recipes they're sayings and that's how I'm trying to keep carrying my mum and so the experience of losing her and grieving her, I will struggle to make sense of that forever and I just damn miss her. But the way it's changed me in the immediate moment in time is that my life is smaller. It's also COVID and all sorts of other things,

but I'm just more and more concentrating on the little things that make our world feel like home. That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that too. Okay, so in the messiness of us growing as people and becoming humans and all of the difficult stuff that happened to us, there's also really joyful stuff that happens right along the way what so let's go there what are your sort of some of your favorite

memories I feel like I'm living in my memories a lot at the moment what are some of the things that bring you joy thinking about over your life to hear speaking of joy as you're asking this question there's this little Burmese cat that's like just in the background running around and this is one of the things that's always brought me great joy is animals and pets it's they're these little personalities in our world in and out of our homes that have a very small agenda and easy easy to satisfy and bring so much pleasure. And it reminds me, when I was a child, I had guinea pigs and I had a rabbit and I had a dog called Sam and I had pet snails. Little creatures were always a great source of joy for me

and they were these companions at our family gatherings. You know, we were a family who really knew how to celebrate life because we, I think, innately knew the deal, you know. Yeah, it's fragile, right? It's fragile. Yeah, and the Mary Oliver quote, I don't think she'd written this poem by them, but about, you know, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?

Well, enjoy it, you know. So there was that too. So I loved my favourite days were sort of sunny days like this and we always got together on on birthdays with our cousins um we had one one of my mum's siblings here from Holland she was one of 11 and that was auntie Ina and that'll come uncle John then we'd have my dad's five siblings. We'd all get together and Uncle Tony might bring the guitar and he might play around a campfire and you would just sort of stuff your face with like, you know, apple tart.

And one of the things I've been doing lately is cooking these old recipes like the cheesecake between biscuits kind of recipes. So they were always really happy times for me. And as a kid I also just absolutely loved singing and dancing and I would record these tapes for you know for my own entertainment cassette tapes play press play and record one of the best things my mum ever taught me to do we'd make tapes for Roe that she could have it in the hospital to play because she lived there. We would make tapes for our family in Holland so they would know us and they would send tapes back.

So playing with recording equipment and instruments and songs, I mean, these were really, really happy memories for me. Playing with Cabbage Patch dolls, oh, my gosh. Oh, the best. Big love of these stupid dolls, you know. I don't know what that was like. I don't know what happened to the society there, but every child wanted a Cabbage Patch doll.

They were bloody expensive. Most of us had to go through a few fakes that, you know, Dad bought from Box Hill Market or whatever it was. And then if we were really lucky and our parents could save the money, we would get one Cabbage Patch doll on our birthday or on Christmas. And I will always remember that day when Alita Denise came into my life. Alita Denise. Alita.

Alita Denise. Alita. Sorry, Alita. Thank you. You're welcome. And then even a year later, a second Cabbage Patch doll came into my life, Veronica Claudette. So I thought I was the only one who carried this story of secret,

you know, like true secret passion for these dolls. I would go to the op shop, get clothes and then re-sew them at home and, you know, really was really into mothering these poor dolls. I posted something on Instagram a couple of weeks back, and I think it's one of my most responded to texts ever. Sorry, messages ever. It was one of the most responded to messages ever. Hundreds of us still remember the name and the feeling of that cabbage patch doll.

Oh, it was something about their little chubby cheeks and their hair. Oh, my gosh. I just, I don't know. In it. Right, this? Ow. It's just gorgeous. I just like, oh, my God, I love it so much.

Me too. There is so much of your music that I know is the soundtrack to so many of our childhoods and lives and coming-of-age stories. And you have a beautiful song, Your Own Kind of Girl, and there's a lyric in it that I love about the real world needs real girls to love themselves enough. Why did you write that? And what does that mean, do you think? I was thinking of this as I wrote my book which was also called Your Own Kind of Girl and Your Own Kind of Girl was you know firstly a sort of thank you to my parents and my sisters and my brother and my dad for instilling in me the idea that you know as much as I could be an

annoying arsehole as a kid we all can. I was my own kind of person and that was a good thing. Most specifically, I struggled with the story of my body in the world. You know, as a kid, I was a fat kid. I use that term because that's exactly what it was, a descriptive term for a kid who had a lot of feelings and a certain physiology that would survive beautifully in any famine situation. Solidarity with you. I was a fat kid too, and I feel like it was a gift in the long run. I don't know if you felt this at the time, though, Claire. It didn't feel like a gift to me. I felt different. I felt weird. I got called all sorts of names. And even when I didn't, I had this feeling, just again, a metaphor of it.

I was too much in the world. It was too much was too much. I was too much. There were not enough places for me to fit all these feelings and things and loves and desires and passions in. And my bigger body helped me accommodate that in many ways. But at a certain point, I was jack of feeling different. I was also very tall and, you know, European stock. I felt different. There's nothing I could do about my height but i'd heard about this thing called diets and i was very young far too young to be thinking of these

things and at the age of 10 i told my mom i'd had enough i wanted to be smaller and i picked up stories about health and you know fitting in and they're all unconscious but the only pictures i saw there were no heroes who were fat. Fat Albert was probably the closest we had in terms of a cultural icon. They were always weird and goofy and, you know, the butt of jokes, and I didn't want to be that anymore. So I was tired of it.

I could see my friends sort of starting to come into puberty and something clicked in me and I asked my mum please take me to the diet doctor and my mum said why you know you're beautiful you're she said you're perfect you're so sweet you're a little peach you know but I insisted this time and the doctor you just wouldn't get away with this anymore but that doctor put me on a really strict diet as a kid and it worked you know that's a magical thing about first diets they often work and we get hooked into the praise and the attention um being thought of as the new girl suddenly you know people want to ask me out on

dates and i just felt good and normal and life was easier. So that's the, you know, I tell this long story because that rollercoaster then, because a diet is not something we can sustain and live in the world and have a full life attempting to do all the time. It robs us, you know, that strictness and that othering really robs us of a lot of things and trying to rollercoast up and down pleasing other people with the size of my body was something that happened then for years and we got to about um you know we got to our mid-teens and the thing is we think we're the only ones who have this experience and what I've realized isn't that obvious it's absolutely not

so and I remember my mum saying to me you know you're going to be your own kind of girl you just she would put this she would try and encourage me she put a she found an old-fashioned postcard of a you know a show girl I guess doing a muscle sign and you know she was a big strong girl like me and she put it on the fridge and these were her ways of trying to say, hey, you know, there are places, there is, you know, your body and heroism, your size of body, these things are entwined, you know, she's trying to give me this message. And in a way I guess Your Own Kind of Girl, the song,

which I wrote many years later, was an attempt to pass on that lineage, that baton of reminding people that the stories around our bodies are not things we made up. They're our experience of the world and how we treat women and how we value women and their worth so often. And it's often not spoken. We're better at it now. So that song 12 years ago, I did not hear anyone speaking into that space yet.

There were some writers. There was no pop songs that I, there was no sort of Dua Lipa or there was nothing about, you know, maybe I like big butts and I cannot lie was the only conversation, you know, to start to say you're going to be your own kind of girl. You get to define define despite what the stories the world tells us you get to define why you matter and it's nothing to do with the size of your body no your body and also it's such a false idea isn't it that to be loved is to be one type

of body because but in my actual real life experience, I was put on a diet in the same way in grade one and told to write down everything I ate. And my mum was doing the best that she thought at the time. And I wrote it all down. I had to take every week this little sheet to the doctor and show him what I'd written down of everything I'd eaten that week. And I remember losing the weight and then the world responding to you differently and you learning about that kind of reciprocal thing. But as I've gotten older, I've realized that the worry that people had around me of me being a bigger girl was not actually to do

with my worth in the end. And in so many ways, you know, I found love and acceptance when I loved and accepted myself, not because I lost weight or put on weight, but because once I could love who I am then other people respond to that I think yeah and maybe that's naive but do you know what I mean I think I do and also the we are doing that in a context where you walk into a shop and if you can't find your size of course you feel alone of course you feel like you don't fit in. And that is where our strong mind and our learning to tame our inner critic

and our actually concentrating on the stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them is so clear. Because what you said is absolutely true and the world still gives us the message again and again and again and again that our worthiness depends on being an acceptable size you know it's very hard to get outside of that paradigm cerebrally we almost have to live it you know and yes keep each moment each little challenge going oh well I have the right to try you know for me it was that simple at the start I had the right to try and what you find when you do and you let people you know in on

how awesome you are is they they feel you know like it's it makes everyone around you feel brave and it again passes that baton along and it's not because it's an ad and we're trying to you know we've seen this rise over the last 10 years a bigger or five years really three years a bigger conversation about you know inclusive bodies and including our bodies and and such an important conversation to speak into diet culture and see for what it is and to to listen to people speak about the political movement that is body positivity that has enormous roots and importance. And then we see that conversation hijacked and minimized and neutralized and put into advertising campaigns where, you know, manufacturers think that, oh, yeah, all right, fuck, there's a market here. Let's include these, ah, let's call it what it is,

normal bodies in our campaign. And then again it sort of all gets diluted again and we have to go, hang on, it's good that that's part of the conversation, that's a part of it. It's good it's moving towards there. But I want to go beyond all of that to the place where a little kid like you and I, Claire, has a sense of how to speak back to the story the world tells us about our bodies. Absolutely.

I mean, because at the end of the day, and I think this is a problem just broadly, it's all about money, right? And consumerism and whatever that they can they can do to make money on us in securities and even oh look hello gorgeous cat it's bloody expensive speaking of consumerism jeez cat and dog prices have gone up so yeah everyone's you know at the base of that everyone's trying to make a living a dollar yeah exactly that is so it is so true isn't it I know but it struck me actually I was supposed to be a bridesmaid this year oh and I remember I remember going I just had a baby and we went to this bridesmaid shop and this

is when we could and I walked in and I didn't fit a single dress that was there on the shelf and none of the dresses that the other girls kind of wanted to wear and I at the time I was a size 16 which is that feeling it that is a normal size you know common size a good it yeah and I it just really made me think it was hard and it was hard like it's bullshit to feel like that because an average Australian woman is a size 16 and then it made me feel this kind of intense rage because I thought I'm now a 35 year old woman I have perspective I understand that bodies come in a huge spectrum of sizes and shapes and abilities. Why am I walking into a store in 2021 where they know they're catering for a lot of different women and their size range doesn't go beyond a 14? Can I ask you what they said? Like,

were you able to bring that up with them or did they, or was it just, did you feel that shame that we get taught to feel as women when we don't quite fit in and I mean often I would just say nothing and go oh no I'll get mine made you know it's just the most awful feeling when you're in a group with other people who probably probably love you and no one wants anyone to feel awkward and the bloody shop doesn't have any size did you say anything no I No, I was pretty mortified. I did say to her, so, like, I can get something made. And she said, oh, yes, we can get you something made.

Let's measure you. I'll write down your measurements now. Oh, great. Let's go find everyone. She's feeling, yeah. Yeah. Thanks. And then we can get it sent off and and made because she said you know for our

bigger girls or whatever oh we like and I just thought oh my god I'm a that's an average size and also why does it matter but it was yeah it was such an awkward situation and awkward for my friends who were there and then made me just full of rage for the whole thing that we're still kind of coping with that did you feel there was any sensitivity with the sorry but did it was she sensitive at all to the fact that this might be a very difficult squeak you know squeezy situation that you were you're in not really I think she was quite a tiny person herself and so there was a sense of like, I don't know, something about like women on the day.

Like there was even an underlying message of, well, girls lose weight. So, you know, we might measure you again in a couple of months if you order it and I can always take it in for you. And I was post-baby. So you think, what is that messaging that sits with that? You know, it's interesting. Yes. Yeah.

And here's your. Yeah, and I mean, I have a baby girl who's one, and I know the world has shifted, but clearly it hasn't shifted maybe as far as I like to think. How are you feeling about raising a girl now in that world my girl as she's 18 um she's been brought up in an era where there is much more understanding about the impact of emotions of mental health what mental health is how it's formed in the basis of um you know there's genetics and so on that are involved, but also the stories about the world, the stories that the world gives us about

whether or not we fit in, the stories of hope and hopelessness. So we're much more emotionally articulate in the year 2021 than we were when I was growing up, which was in the 80s, really. So this generation comes in with half a chance, but also a compounding pressure, because they, you know, we've got the language now, we know the symptoms of anxiety, they're taught to, if they're lucky, to meditate, watch their breath at school. But when it happens to them, when they meet that challenge of not fitting in, or having a thought that, you know, a scary thought that they take seriously. There's also that pressure of, oh, we should know better. Knowing what the world asks of us as women and knowing that it's a very small story quite often

is one of the key through lines that I've, you know, I've tried to allow and model for my daughter. I want her to know that, that if she does feel that, if she is getting that message and she will from the world and she will from her survival brain, that she has a choice about what happens next, you know, how she tells the truth in the world, where she asks for help, all of those things. Having said all of this my girl um who was also brought up with a father my husband marty who they have very steady temperaments these browns you know and um you know so on a personal level asha you know it's not to do so much with how I brought her up.

She was brought into the world with a very steady intelligence and a lot of gifts, you know, a lot of gifts. And that is still with her now as an 18-year-old. She's just on the cusp of all these new things. As a mum, your question was how do I bring up a girl like that? Well, I just make sure that she has counters, you know, that she has enough of those little seeds in early childhood, that she has enough.

I do the thing I can do, which is I have freaking great friends and they are aunties and I have wonderful sisters and they are part of this and I have good men, you know, in our life. And I almost think the greatest thing we can do in bringing up kids is allow them to see adults and have images and experiences of adults who are awesome and it's weird because you know we feed them we clothe them how do we teach them what matters well we live what matters to the best of our ability and we speak openly about the shit we're going through when it's appropriate if it's appropriate if it's useful but the rest of the time we just sort of out of their way allowing them to have half a chance in

a world that is um and an experience being human it's fucking difficult and beautiful and amazing and boring. Yeah. And so it's such a roundabout answer, but I have in my house a girl who's grown up, who's having driving lessons and has a job and is going to uni and, you know, is awesome and is disrupted in her, very disrupted in her experience of normality and will go on to make interesting things of that inside herself and inside the world and that's what this generation will do I sort of feel that's the only way to think about it to frame it I was really scared

about becoming a mum I was quite young not many of my friends had done it I'd always wanted to do it and I was in love and then I was pregnant and geez it all happened really quickly I wasn't yet established in my career in any way shape or form I'd never toured I'd never released a solo album and I was at the time doing a thing called the new enterprise incentive scheme so NICE we called it it was small business training where you got from the government then 12 months' worth of financial support for your small business, you know, modest financial support. I did that and it meant I could access this counsellor,

chief counsellor at uni and I sat down pregnant like this and he just said to me, ultimately, you know, I came in with all my anxieties, this and that and what if this happens, she falls off a cliff and then I, and then what if I, you know, this, that with all my anxieties, this and that, and what if this happens? She falls off a cliff and then I am, and then what if I have postnatal and everything, you know, this, that and the other. And he was like, well, do you know of the concept of the good enough mother? You know, that's it. As parents, our influence is significant and also limited.

We can give them, they'll go through shit, they absolutely will. They're inheriting a difficult world. You give them enough good stuff when they're little and that is, that's going to have to be good enough. The good enough mother. That's so true, isn't it? That imperfectness of us is actually a gift, I think. I think it's dangerous as a parent to think you need to be perfect, right?

Because no kid is going to live up to that perfection at the end of the day and so the more we can talk through our emotions and who we are and what we find difficult the better you know keeping that communication open it's finding that balance isn't it because at the same time maybe we as a generation of parents can overdo it a little in terms of, you know, there was something delightful in Les Enfers about being a kid who I didn't know that much about my parents' emotional life. To be honest, you pick it up.

But I didn't know what my dad was feeling half the time. And there was sort of in there there's sort of some freedom too like it wasn't always you know um intense and emotional sometimes it's like oh whatever life's not fair on your go you know there was that too yeah and i've found finding that balance in this world of emotional you know we're emotionally articulate we know about mental ill health we know about mental good health almost that's part of the trick. We're doing two things at once. We're normalising.

We're trying not to lie about our experience, but when we're parents, it's absolutely not about us. They couldn't give a rat. I mean, they might have my kids read my book. I've got enough, you know. No. I asked for their permission. I'm like, your mum's about to talk about some really personal things

in public. I'll try and keep you out of it. Is that cool? I'm like, yeah, it's fine. They're not embarrassed that their parents have gone through episodes of mental ill health. That's good. But nor does anyone want to fucking talk about it all the time.

Yeah, I know. My five-year-old's constantly like, Mum, I don't want to talk about my feelings anymore. Stop. You know, but, you know, it's a balancing act, isn't it, this whole parenting thing? It's an experiment. We're all trying.

Yeah, exactly. And on that, can you just talk me through Dr. Claire Weeks? Because I know that she, for people who haven't read your book, like that chapter on her was such a gift, I think, for people who go through anxiety. And I just loved Faffle. I think Faffle is brilliant. Do you want to just talk us quickly through that?

So I'll tell you a little story. I love it. I was a kid who had big, big dreams in my heart about what I was going to do with my life. I had that sort of inheritance that comes with losing a sibling where you are fire charged and at the same time paralyzed in moments. You've got this sort of restlessness inside you. I certainly didn't. I had a lot of songs that I wanted to sing and I was far too scared to say any of these things really out loud to myself or the people around me. I was working

at a call centre and at a certain point I dropped out of uni and I didn't know that I was someone who had experience and would go on to experience acute anxiety. I just thought there was, you know, a bad weird feeling inside me a lot of the time. I didn't have language for that. I didn't recognise myself as someone who struggled with mental health. I just thought, I don't like that feeling. At the call centre one night, I came home from work. I was having a beer and the idea with some housemates at the back and the idea came to me that I would just leave the job and go to England and over there I would become wildly famous and thin and rich and I'd come back amazing. And it's off the back of a really bad breakup

and my heart was broken and my pride was bruised and I was, you know, I was cooked. And so this exciting adventure seemed great and off i went to england bye everyone have a good time i'll see you later bye-bye ex-boyfriend oh bye i'll come back no that you know in my head i'm like yeah well i'll be sorry in reality i didn't have the emotional skills the financial skills the savings or the self-knowledge at that point in time to be able to take on that adventure and I was still hiding. I wasn't open with my family or friends about what was really going on inside because it just felt too difficult and I didn't want to go there. Overseas I had

wonderful adventures. I played my first gig. I turned 21. I played my first sort of gig as a solo performer. I'd been in band since I was 16 and there I was. And that feeling of badness that I had no name for became much louder. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating well. I was, of course, dieting, God bless me, which left me feeling very weak and scared, you know, as it does. I didn't know what I was doing. My friend Phil collapsed on the tube and I had an acute panic attack. Not at the time,

at the time I grabbed him, took him off the train, chatted, went and got help. Turns out I thought he was dead. Turns out he had just fainted from dehydration perhaps because of the night before you know all was well he was fine but I wasn't from that point onwards then I was having recurring panic I didn't know it was panic what I felt inside me was the bad feeling the fear of the bad feeling like everything was wrong foreboding something terrible is going to happen I would shake I would sweat lose my appetite need to go to the bathroom unable to sleep all of this trying to hide and not show anyone and I decided to go to Oxford where it would be a bit quieter and you know I could connect with my scholastic youth

dreams there in Oxford unfortunately the backpackers it only got worse and now I started to become acutely at the time I thought I was going mad actually I sort of had an experience in the backpackers where someone was yeah really inappropriate with me and I felt really really scared I thought he was following me all the time you, my thoughts were very racing, rolling, and I didn't know what was going on. And I thought I had a virus. And I went to the doctor and the doctor said to me, I think you're depressed and I think you should go home and get some support and help. And I went, people like me do not become depressed. You don't know what you're talking about. And she did. She knew. And luckily, my friend Chado got me on a plane home. And luckily, I friend Chowdo got me on a plane home.

And luckily, I had parents who could buy me a plane ticket. You know, they had a credit card just for such emergencies. How lucky that I could come home. But I still didn't know what was wrong. And at the airport, I'd lost half my body weight. My mum looked at me and said, where have you gone? And then I realised I was really sick. But I didn't know how to recover or I didn't know how to contextualise it.

And I was scared a lot of what I might do to myself, what my future was, etc. I look back now and very clearly what was happening there was that I was having panic attacks, which is a fearful feeling and then the fear of the feeling and then the physical symptoms of adrenaline and then being afraid of them and then that spiraling and spiraling and rumination and so on and I was stuck in it I wasn't leaving the house I was too scared to go to the post office or the post box and finally a friend of my mum's said I know what this is and she sent a book to our house it was called self-help for your nerves by Dr Claire Weeks and I tell you what if I'd look and on the cover was a picture of a little old lady with pearls and great hairdo and I thought you know she looked like by

the queen to me and I thought this is not the kind of book that's going to be able to help me but I was that desperate I was so sick I really could hardly read. I could hardly eat. I opened that first page of Self-Help for Your Nerves, and it said to me, if you are experiencing, and then named all the things that I was experiencing very directly and clearly, she said, you can recover. You will recover. I will teach you a way to recover. And I made the best decision of my life, which was to believe her and keep reading. The voice in there spoke to me in a way that nothing else had. And I understood from a bird's eye view, oh, I'm having physical symptoms. The devil is not inside me. These are thoughts and feelings and physical physiological symptoms

and that was helpful the thought that i could recover i decided to believe her that was helpful that was a story that she told me that i allowed to be true by living it and her technique is as follows she's not here anymore i'll just say she's she's gone she was dead i think by the time i had her book. But she was a woman much like yourself and I, Claire Tonti, and many of your listeners who had many dreams. And, you know, she lived them. She was the first woman to get a doctorate at Sydney University

in the 20s. She was born in the 40s. She got that. She was a singer. And she had this technique for teaching. She became a GP and she had this technique for teaching as she became a GP and she had this technique for teaching her patients how to deal with a thing that didn't have a name then which was PTSD from the war. So many people were shocked coming out of the war and we'll have the same

coming out of COVID in their different circumstances but what our body does with fear she allowed people to recover from that by saying you have to first understand that you can recover also understand that it's the second fear not the first fear that's going to cause you to panic and have what she called bad nerves or you know generalized anxiety disorder we call it now you would face the feeling accept that you were feeling it float so not tense up she was very clear and realizing when we tense up and we have shallow breathing it becomes worse so she's like relax and tell your body secretly with a message of breathing that all is well so face except float

and let time pass it's so simple and that is the little simple thing that I practiced they got a little moment of light with and then I forgot to get you know then I had the panic again but over a few weeks and then months and then years I was able to remember that acronym by calling it the faffle I'll call it the weeks and this playfulness was one of the things that helped me recover from what was and remains my one very acute episode of mental health. Now, since then, of course, I've had feelings of anxiety, you know, all sorts of abnormal, natural human emotional struggles. And I go back to this simple technique. It wasn't a, you know, she didn't offer me medication

that would have to be adjusted and those things are incredibly useful, but that's a whole other, you know, journey and complex journey that needs serious, you know, ongoing assistance and so on and should for many people very much be a part of their recovery from mental health. What Dr. Claire Weeks gave me was just something that was on me at all times. I could do it. I could do it quickly. I could faffle. So that playfulness and that ability to face, accept, float, and let time pass was key, and it's been key for millions of people throughout the world.

Listen to her audio books here on YouTube. She speaks like this in a very reassuring voice but it was simple and i could carry it with me and it wasn't long-term therapy which is also really really useful this is just how do you deal with the physical symptoms so there was that and then it came to the big thing of getting that other support you know looking to philosophies for answers and that's how i came to name frank i was reading a book by uh jack cornfield who's one of the greatest buddhist talkers because he has a sense of humor and in my experience of mental health and emotions generally everything's clustered together you know the good and the bad and the black and the white and the yellow and the green that i didn't know at that point i was so sensitive and sensitized that I had no idea how to name a single emotion because

every time I'd try to be like no that's wrong no that's not right what hang on no okay I can't meditate what what's that. So as a joke one day or as a playful technique I decided to name that entire bad feeling Frank. Now this is I just named it a name and then I could externalise it, I realise now. This is now a common, and was probably at the time, but I'd never heard of it, a common CBT technique for helping to externalise, you know, those parts of us that are not integrated and allow us to have conversations or dismissals at certain times with them. So I named it Frank. And when it was loud and dangerous, I said, fuck off, Frank. So, you know, that forms the basis of how I learnt to tame my inner critic

and still do. I had to first see it, then I had to name it, then I had to find a way to tell it to go away. And then I had to call in that strong voice, Claire Weeks' voice, the voice of the champion in me and so that's you know my joy in life now and has been during COVID is teaching organizations people humans having this conversation and reminding people that we have places to go when our stories get overwhelming and you can tell Frank to fuck off anytime you like you can and now you

know that exactly but the hope is as we mature as adults um that we are able to come into more integrated conversations with those parts of ourselves that we you know that the world tells are don't fit in or that we you know overwhelm us sometimes however you're just going to go and do a audition for offspring or you got to show up at the school pta meeting and announce something or you know or enough's enough you know you that's the loudness of frank to just be able to dismiss it when you're spiraling into a panic dismiss it that's really helpful it's just one part of how we can deal with the difficult bits. But ultimately we want to get into conversation with that bit

and be able to understand it's a protective measure. It's there to attempt to protect us. It's from the lower brain and we get to use our higher brain to say, now, now, darling, shush, shush, in the corner, no, no, we don't need that kind of thing around here right now. What happened for you after you'd kind of found that and felt like you were recovering and you named Frank? What happened in your life?

When you discover that you are prone to anxiety and that there is a way to manage it and you will find your way, if that is you, I assure you, you will find your way to manage it if you are able to keep making little little daily choices so my recovery was very very slow learning to manage your inner critic or your survival brain or your anxious brain is a great and very helpful technique because at the basis of all meaningful living is a notion of risk even if that risk is You know, for me a risk at that point would have been to go to the shops and come home again or to eat a meal or, you know, things that were scary and good for me.

Now I think, well, there's no fear in those things for me anymore, but there was at the time. So it's meeting yourself where you're at. And it's going back to what you said at the start, right, that you start small. Very small. And each small little tiny step leads you somewhere new, but you've got to make those tiny steps to get to the big steps.

It's not like you just suddenly end up being a musician on stage in front of thousands of people. You take that tiny, tiny step to show up in the world as you are. And I just wanted to say thank you so much for the for who there's so much happening and I love it it's just all in the mess isn't it we're gonna roll with it because this is this is life at the moment yeah it is right it's totally it is because there's magic in the mess right that's life I'm sorry about the noise interference but yes there is no don't be silly there's magic in the mess, right? That's life. I'm sorry about the noise interference, but yes, there is. No, don't be silly.

There's magic in the mess. If you have time for this funny last question, I was raised Catholic and I resonated a lot with so much of what you said about Catholicism because I also think deeply about God and the spirit and who we are in the world in that way. And I find it really hard and really sad that I'm so angry at the church. And that's such a huge thing. Where are you now with your crush on Jesus,

but you're kind of like anger about the Catholic church? Where are you with that, with the spirit? This has come off the back of just watching second season of Fleabag, which I absolutely love, which is a, I won't spoil it for you because it's quite clear at the beginning where the main protagonist, Fleabag, falls in love with the priest, the hot priest. The hot priest, the hot priest.

I have to be clear and say, yeah, I've not had the experience, an experience like that, so the hot priest. I have to be clear and say, yeah, I've not had an experience like that, so many hot priests. So, yes, being brought up in a Catholic home was very normal and common when I was young and my experience of it as a family and having parents who had faith was that faith was a bloody useful thing to have in an experience of difficulty in the loss of Rowena. It gave our family hope and my parents particularly,

and I was looking to them to lead. But you can't be someone who has grown up a Catholic without constantly wrestling with the damage that the church has done. And so I have not for a long time been someone who thinks or tries to think or tries to solve questions of the church. We need to hear truths about things that have happened in the church, have them discussed, have people held accountable for the horrors that happened as children, as the sexual abuse victims in church that occurred under their watch started to be talked

about. And people still, there's still much work to do there. But if I concentrate on faith, this idea of faith, as I said in Your Own Kind of Girl, I need hope. I need hopeful stories. I've got no fucking idea about where we came from, where we're going, but I know I was born with a love and a longing in my heart and wanting to do something useful and responding to people who were kind and good. And that's not

the Catholic Church. It's not any church that's with us. Now, where that impulse comes from, if it's just a survival impulse or something bigger, they're things that I explore and continue to explore for the rest of my life. But I know that feeling of faith when I hear a song that just kicks in or, you know, someone does or says something that is just wise and true. There are people from all walks of life, philosophies and religions and non-religions who are doing that now and have done that in history and I maintain the right to access all of it under the banner of the one key central thing that still makes sense, which is love.

And it's kind of that simple for me. I couldn't, I can't wrestle with or alienate other people for the things they do and don't believe. I don't like any space of fundamentalism ever, whether it's within religion or atheism or anywhere. Fundamentalism doesn't work. But what does work is can I take the bits that make sense and can I explore and play with them and can I accept

that there's been great evil and great good done in the religion of my childhood and that's sort of about as simple as it is now for me complicated and simple really at the end of the day how do you do that with your kids though because that's one thing I worry about that I grew up with so much richness in a way of text and conversation but then you're parenting and I worry my kids are missing that missing that you know singing morning is broken at church and yeah but those memories classic oh yeah couple rich so my kids um are they knew that they grew up with a grandmother for whom the catholic faith was central and solid and part of their culture and they knew they're also growing up with parents where marty is a was agnostic atheist you know he's he's got

his he he sees the catholic church, he sees the Catholic Church from the outside or any churches from the outside. It's really clear on that. But I was brought up in the cult, so, you know, it's always got all that joy and love stuff as well as all the, you know, disgust and weirdness and stuff, right? How do we synthesise that? Well, I would say kids, you know know go more towards oma's style of

of faith if you know like let her oma the person lead you as an example of of uh of how faith can be useful and part of that was negotiating so which of these traditions are we going to include in our children's lives you know as like like most good couples we were pregnant out of wedlock and the part about do they get baptized if they not get baptized you know that's their faith journey but I'll say that we allowed them to have those choices and my mother was not backwards about incentivizing those choices with various parties and things like that. And that is part of their cultural inheritance. As for their relationship with God or meaning or goodness,

they are each on their own journeys and they have been blessed with having some choice there. But I can't, it's not simple for me to be able to take my kids to church in the way that I was where church is good and we are all part of this and this is who we are their experience thank goodness is much more diverse than that I don't want to take them to places where sexuality and gender you know where, where there's a hierarchy there, where there is places where basic human respect is spoken about but not offered. So I'm really, you know, really careful about that with my kids. But, of course, as part of being brought up in a Catholic family,

they have access to those songs and, you know, from their aunties and from me but i think they couldn't think of anything like they just look at it and go what what why would you yeah why would you be a part of that yeah yeah yeah and at the same time i don't let them be bigoted themselves you know i don't i that's not what i want for them i don't want them to judge people who find good solid grounding faith i want them to call out dickheads but also accept that we actually have different ideas of what makes sense to us and the most interesting bit is being able to have conversations about so why do you think that way why do you feel that way all right i get that and hopefully come to some common good really fucking long answer no perfect really long answer perfect answer really perfect thank you and super wise I think because they're people on their own journey right you can't make

this parenting be perfect or a cookie cutter you know I think there's a there's a misconception that people who are in the catholic church, who are members of the Catholic Church, who go to church on Sundays still and bring their kids up in Catholic schools, buy in hook, lung and sinker to the cliche of what a Catholic is. Within that community, and I went to a Catholic school, my children have not, Within that Catholic school community, there's so much conversation and argument and standing up for and goodness still there too.

Now, some people would say, look, you're buying into a system that is inherently corrupt and doing that is, you know, that would be a fair enough argument. In reality, we're human beings who have found an access to community and meaning and support that only a place like a 12-step group or, you know, a religious organisation can offer or does, you know, does offer and does it. Yeah.

And does it sort of freely. So I guess the point that i'm trying to make is the experience of being a catholic in this era is far more complex and nuanced and interesting than people think and i don't know how to define myself anymore except that you know i don't go to church and i believe in something I can't explain. Yeah, I hear that and love, right? All right, well, on that note. Can you hear the dog?

I can hear the dog. He's like, let me in, let me in. Last thing, favourite song getting you through lockdown? The favourite song that I used to get through COVID is the same song that I have been using and it's not a particularly appropriate or so-and-so. It's a song that I often play with my audiences. We sing together very often when I'm playing live.

It's a song that for whatever weird reason lifts me up and out and it is Eye of the Tiger. A classic, a goodie. I don't know why but if I put that on, I'm ready. It's like me being backstage. We've got the fight coming and I've got my dressing gown on. Game face on, yeah. And we're on.

And we're on and we're playing. So Eye of the Tiger, I mean, I could just pop it on now and I would immediately change my feeling state. And that is what music gives us. That's why it's so important. That's why we fight for it. That's why we're longing to get back to shows and we're allowed to enjoy it. I love it.

All right, well, let's all put Eye of the Tiger on and embrace all the mess. Do-ka-do-ka-do-ka-do-ka-do-ka-do-ka. Yeah, I love it. It's so great. It's so great. Embrace the mess. Ton, thanks for the chat. You're welcome.

Thank you. Fucking good luck editing this. I'm very fucking sorry. mess. Ton, thanks for the chat. You're welcome. Thank you. Fucking good luck editing this. I'm very fucking sorry. Truly. Oh, God. Thank you so much for that. I know that was really challenging and you were brilliant. I can't believe how brilliant you are dealing with, like,

noise and dogs and kids and all the things. Just honestly, so great. You were exactly the same. You've been listening to a podcast called Tons with Claire Bowditch. For more from Claire, you can find her at www.clairebowditch.com, where you can find links to her memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl, as well as a list of what she calls fun stuff, like a recipe for her mum's Dutch apple pie,

or songs you can play with three chords on the guitar. You can also follow her over on Instagram as well. For more from me head to at Claire 20 on Instagram where I occasionally tell stories and I release this podcast every Tuesday. I also have another podcast with my husband man James that comes out every Thursday where we talk movies and TV shows and recipes and recommendations for things that have been giving us joy throughout the week. So we also just make fun of each other and have a lot of laughs. That comes out every Thursday.

And if you wouldn't mind doing us a favor, chuck us a rating and review in iTunes. It really helps this show to be discovered. And as I always say, if you found it valuable, I would love you to share it with a friend. Share it with someone that you think might really enjoy it. You can just pop the link straight into a little text or however you want to do it. Totally up to you. But sometimes I think podcasts, particularly when we're at home and if people are parenting little kids, are a really great way to feel connected and feel supported in the world, especially if you're parenting while also homeschooling, while also working.

You can do the washing up while you're listening. So if that's you, I'm right there with you, mate, sending you all kinds of love. Okay, that's it from me this week. Till next time. Bye.