Latest / Mama Making Podcast / Courtney Naliboff | Confident, Sloppy, and Loud: Motherhood, Punk Music, and the Postpartum Recovery Guide You Actually Need

Transcript

Courtney Naliboff | Confident, Sloppy, and Loud: Motherhood, Punk Music, and the Postpartum Recovery Guide You Actually Need · Mama Making Podcast

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: Hello and welcome to the Mama Making Podcast, where we share stories of moms making impact in their own lives and in the world around them.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Jessica, and each week I sit down with women who are building businesses, leading communities, shaping culture, and redefining what success looks like inside of motherhood.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because motherhood does not have to stop your own fish, it can transform it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's get into it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mama Making podcast.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Jessica.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you're new, welcome.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you're not new, then welcome back.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: I am so excited to have Courtney Nalabov on the podcast.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: She is a writer, teacher, musician, EMT, and an avid ocean swimmer who lives, works, and parents on North Haven Island.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: She's the co-author of Your Postpartum Body: The Complete Guide to Healing After Pregnancy, a book that centers the postpartum person in conversations about recovery, returning to movement, and mental and physical wellness.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: She is also the bassist and singer for Bait Bag, a feminist post-riot punk band with an extensive discography focused on Femme-centered catharsis.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Courtney is a freelance writer for Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors, working waterfront, and the Midcoast Villager.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: She is, in every sense of the way, someone who refused to let parenthood erase any part of herself.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome, Courtney.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited to chat with you.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so happy to be here.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me a little bit more about you, who you are, where you're from, whatever you're comfortable sharing.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, let's see.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in central Maine.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was born in Oklahoma, but I have no memories of that time, for better or worse.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um I left for left Maine for seven years to go to college and then grad school, and then found myself living and working on North Haven Island, which is about 12 knots off of the main Midcoast.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um the only ways to get here are boat or plane, or if you were really good swimmer, maybe, um, but it's pretty far.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been here since 2005.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the full-time music teacher at the school.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: I run the theater program, I teach some English classes, and since moving here, I've had a bunch of really serendipitous connections that have led to me becoming a writer and um to forming my band as well.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I would love to get into it wherever you would like to.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: Chronological, sometimes easier, but totally up to you.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, let's see.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I started wanting to tell stories from North Haven about, I want to say maybe 15 years ago.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there were just so many.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: The experience of living on an island is pretty unique.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: The people that you meet and the connections that you make and the ways that I was processing my experience there, which was um very challenging.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like up front, I want to say that moving from I was in Boston beforehand, and I had grown up in central Maine, so I'm familiar with a rural environment, but there's something about the island where everything is just so condensed, um, which can be really nice.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a nice centralized village, and all the restaurants and the stores are really accessible, things like that, different from where I grew up, um, which was in a village in the woods.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so we didn't have a post office, we didn't have many restaurants, everything was a long drive away.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the island is nice and centralized, but it's also like living in a fishbowl.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I moved there as a 24-year-old.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm Jewish, I'm vegetarian.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had come from the Boston Indie Rock scene.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: My husband at the time, um, he was my partner then, he's now my ex-husband, um, looked very much like someone from the indie rock scene.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so people made a lot of assumptions about his and our sexuality.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was a challenging environment to come into.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, 21 years ago, the the pervasive culture was really different, just around diversity, sexual diversity, gender diversity, dietary diversity, religious diversity, anything.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like we were maybe the most unique people to move there at the time.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the case anymore.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really becoming a pretty diverse place, a very queer friendly place, um, just a different environment and one where I've built incredible lasting friendships.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But that entry um in 2005 was really difficult.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so um I processed it, I processed it in therapy, I processed it every single day at my job, and then I started really wanting to write about it a little bit more.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a master's in journalism.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I went to BU for journalism, um, but then didn't know how to do something with it because the jobs that were available to me right out of grad school weren't gonna pay me enough money to live.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like$18,000 in Bill Ricca, Massachusetts, even in 05, wasn't gonna cut it as a career option.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so when I was invited to come and be a teacher, you know, not that a teacher's salary is like glamorous, but it's a living wage and has insurance and things like that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that then gave me the freedom to start to explore other creative avenues.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing a lot of songwriting and just home recording and playing a lot of music, mostly with my then partner, um, and then started doing a lot of writing.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that turned into um an op-ed that I had published in The Working Waterfront, which led to an offer of becoming a columnist for them, which I started doing.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think the first couple columns I wrote were either about being pregnant or about having had a baby.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that really has just run in parallel to being a parent in a really nice way, because it really meant that that was giving me a way to tell that story and not stop writing when I had a kid.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had taken a book proposal development workshop and I spent quite a long time, I remember nursing with one arm and typing a memoir with the other hand, and then I'd switch um when she was really little because I was on a maternity leave and then a sabbatical.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've always felt like I had a desire to keep producing creative work, original creative work, um, while being a parent and never wanted to stop doing that.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And luckily, you know, was in a situation with work and in my relationship at the time where I could do that.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like I had the support structures to be able to do that, um, which is really a privileged position to be in.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But also I gave myself permission to do that.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like I didn't wait for anyone else to say I could do that.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I gave myself permission to do that because otherwise I think I would have perished, like at least emotionally, um, to to completely shift my identity in that way.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I think something that you're obviously your story is very unique, but I think the the one through line between all of us as as moms and women and and and working is that it's all constantly evolving.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: So like you went to school for journalism, it didn't really um work for you in that time sp in space.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it just like you still kept with the same idea.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: It just evolved significantly in in location and topic area.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then like as you become a parent, it's a whole shift, as we both know.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to talk a little bit more about what um what it looked like to you're you're in this newer how how long after you moved to the island did you have your daughter?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I had her in 2014.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so that must have been I can do math.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that must have been nine.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nine years after I moved to the island, I had her.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you were already working through what it looked like to kind of be yourself and and reinvent who you were on the island.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: How did becoming a parent shift that?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: What did that like?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: What did life on the island look like?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: And how how did you have to intentionally work to make sure that your self-identity wasn't quote unquote erased by becoming a parent?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in some ways, a lot of connections opened up as a parent.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: One of the challenges when we moved there in our early 20s um was that we didn't already have kids, and a lot of the people our age did.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a very different demographic than we were spending time with in Boston.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so, you know, to move there in your mid-20s and not have kids was pretty unusual.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so that meant that our peer group was a little bit hard to figure out at first.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Once you have a kid, um, you know, the same-age baby parents kind of become a peer group for you, like for better or worse.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And because our school is so small, um, the five kids who were born, you know, within a year of my kid uh are gonna be her classmates forever.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so as a group of parents, we're together forever in a lot of ways.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like they were together in preschool, we're gonna be planning their graduation together.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that um was great.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was really, really great because it meant that I didn't have to look for other parents to connect with.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're right here.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there was actually a parenting group that started right when Penn was a baby.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's my kid's name is Penn.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was really, really helpful.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I was pregnant at the same time as other people, and that was really so really supportive relationship.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: My best friend and I became best friends because we just had babies the same age, and it just kind of made sense, you know, to stick them in a room together.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that was an expansion in some ways.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, that was an expansion.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: But then um, you know, there's this piece of you that contracts a little bit too, because then you have this thing where you become Penn's mom.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and historically on the island, a lot of women stopped working um when they had babies.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a really interesting thing.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of my friends stopped working or took time off working, like a significant amount of time off working when their kids were younger.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't in a place financially where I could do that, but I also wasn't in a place emotionally where I wanted to do that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I we had six weeks of maternity leave only at the time.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's 12.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had her in early May.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: I had six weeks.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: That took me to the end of the school year, which was great.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then I had summer, and then I was able to take a half-year sabbatical.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I did a little bit of work for the school.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I became an EMT during that time.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I used some of that time to take the EMT class, which was great.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I did a lot of writing during that time.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: But by the end of that nine-month stretch, I was so ready to reclaim the part of my identity that was working and that was a teacher and go back into that role because that was the thing that brought me to the island.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the way that I served the community in a lot of ways.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so, you know, there's sort of this desire from the outside to say, okay, you were all these things, but now you're this, and now you have to do this and look like this.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I just really chafed against that quite a lot.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was very happy to go back to work.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Even when I was on sabbatical, I was still working at the school one day a week because they couldn't find a band sub for me.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I was writing the whole time and just kind of did most of the things that I wanted to do just with a baby.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that was successful, and sometimes that made me so frustrated because it's not necessarily what the baby wants to do.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they're a person with like loudly and sometimes very smellily expressed needs and desires.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I remember this was like a baby-centered thing, but trying to take her to the kinder music class that they had at the community center, which is this wonderful, nice, sweet.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was like 45 minutes, and the woman that led it has been doing it for so long and it's so good.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all babies are there, and I could see my friends.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And she spit up every time she ate, and we would just get into these endless cycles of like, nurse, spit up, change every piece of linen.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, now she's hungry again.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nurse, spit up, change, and like sometimes we couldn't get out of the house to go to kinder music.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: How, like, how do I rearrange my expectations around this?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was hard and I didn't like it.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and eventually she stopped spitting up so much.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, to take the EMT class, which was, you know, I had been a first responder already, but I wanted to up my license level and it was a perfect opportunity because I wasn't working.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it was on the next island.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't on this island, it was on the next one.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I would do like a month's worth of didactic like book work that was all sort of asynchronously online because it was pre-COVID, so we didn't have video chat.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then uh one weekend a month, I would spend the whole weekend on the other island.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: But she was nursing.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so she and my then husband would go and he would just sort of drive around and take photos.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then as soon as she got hungry, they'd show up and I'd nurse her in the middle of class, and I'd take her and we'd go again.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, it was worth it to me to find hacks basically to be able to keep doing these things.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think like what you're explaining about like the picture you're painting about being on an island.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think to like I live in a large suburb.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: To me, initially, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so limiting.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: But it's quite the opposite and that like you're able to do so many other things.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like you said, they couldn't find a band replacement for you.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I think, I think in a way, someone could see it as like, it seems limiting, it's hard to to do all the things that you want to do.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel like it sounds like it was quite the opposite, that you were really able to figure out a way to kind of do it all.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I total, I totally identify with the the idea, like prior to having kids, I had this thought that like I would just do all the same things and just have a baby on my hip and didn't account for the fact that there's so much more in between that.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm very big on like, we're women, we can do it all.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the the shift that I had to make was like, we can absolutely do it all.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: It just looks different than what you expected.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what you're saying is like exactly that.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think it's really dependent on what kind of support system you have.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, my husband at the time was totally on board for whatever I wanted to try doing and help me find ways to figure it out.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had the preschool program actually expanded for my kids' cohort because we were kind of the first wave of parents where both parents wanted to go back to work right away.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there was suddenly a need for a one-year-old program four to five days a week, which we didn't have access to for previous cohorts of kids.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and because again, everything's really centralized, so it wasn't hard to find a person to take her at the times when I didn't have daycare or before she was old enough to go into the preschool program.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that resource was just, you know, a Facebook post or a phone call away.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was able to do all kinds of things.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to be in a musical when she was 15 months old.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I was still nursing her at that point.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to remember like what that looked like.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a little foggy, but I was still nursing her until that fall.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I must have just planned it around rehearsals and performances.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and that, and we made that work.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and someone would come and watch her at the house and put her to bed, and we just made it work.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then as she got older, she, and again, some of this is just luck and privilege.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like I really need to reiterate that.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: She was a really chill toddler relative to toddlers.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I could bring her to rehearsals, I could bring her to meetings, they could bring her to band practice once I started my band.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she would just hang.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And like that was what we needed to have happen.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, summer is a less busy time for me.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, it was a more busy time for my husband because he worked at the community center and really ramps up the programming.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we'd, or we'd both be doing the same thing and she'd have to just be there.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she was the kind of kid that I could just give her a book or a drawing pad or something, and she would just sit and hang.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: She came to um a teacher's conference with us.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: She did three days of um, you know, the teacher workshop days before school started.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: She just we just had to do that.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that was just what we had to do, and so it was what she had to do, and we created expectations for her that she had to be a little bit independent in that way.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I also fully acknowledge that not every kid will do that.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like I say, like, oh, you know, we just created the expectation.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But she also was able to fulfill it like emotionally and I don't know, cognitively, whatever it is.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she was a Velcro kid, like it's not like she would be happy being separate from me, but we just made it work and she understood the expectation and she just kind of did it.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's a lot of really great videos from the first year of Bait Bag um where she's just there with us.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was four when that started.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like, she's helping us make t-shirts and she's helping us make posters, and she's in the background of a couple music videos with like the can headphones on, just like bopping in the background, and you know, and and again, a lot of that is the person that she is and was.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also just that it was what we were doing.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so she needed to be on board with that.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was what we were doing as a family.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I I identify with that as well.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: Are we very busy people?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: My my husband owns a business.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: We are constantly on the move.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: I own a business as well.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're we're constantly doing something, we're always somewhere.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think if from the beginning there's no option but to like everybody needs to be flexible, everybody needs to adjust.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I have a a gonna be four-year-old boy who is like busy and nuts and crazy, but can also like sit with me in a coffee shop on Friday mornings so I can get emails done and and is a uh a body double for me sometimes.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: But I think it is there is something interesting about like it sh it just is what it is.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I think we always talk about how resilient kids are, but I feel like us as parents have had to be really resilient as well.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but what you were talking about was a perfect dovetail into the whole concept of creating art and making music and how like reclaiming what that looked like for you now that you had a child.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit more about how you well, one, how the band started, everything about the band, and then what that has given you in parenthood and in the whole topic of kind of like reclaiming who you are and who you were before and how it all kind of melds together.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, music's always been a part of my life.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I started piano lessons when I was five.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: My father is a doctor, but he's an amazing musician.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so playing music with him and with my sisters was part of my whole life growing up.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then became I was I was reluctant to make it an academic focus at first.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: I had done it mostly for fun, but at a very high level, like music camp and festivals and this and that, mostly for jazz, but also classical piano, and I'm a singer.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when I went to college, I was reluctant to study music because it didn't seem like a good career path.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: But when I um did not pass organic chemistry, my parents gently suggested that it might be something I consider studying because I am good at it, as opposed to the hard sciences, which I am less good at.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: But like as an egg as a concept.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I switched anyway to the music department.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a music degree and a theater degree.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then when I moved to Boston after undergrad, before I started grad school, I moved to Boston without a plan.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: The plan was just like everyone's moving to Boston.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I worked in a music store and then wound up joining a bunch of bands.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think at one point I might have been in nine different bands.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like some of them was just like, I'll show up and play a little trumpet sometimes, you know, or like I'll show up and sing a song sometimes.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I was writing for one and then playing bass in two and singing in another handful and playing keyboard in another one.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um pretty, pretty much all the time.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and somewhere in there I snuck in grad school.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we moved to Northhaven, I, you know, at first I was like, well, maybe that's the end of that, but then it could, it just couldn't be because it's such an inherent part of myself.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: So at first we were just sort of writing and recording in our house, and then there was a really, really good drummer who moved back to the island at the time.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he had been away at school, and then we started playing with him some and doing some fun cover projects with him, and then started a chip-hop band um that played like Nerdcore, and there was a guy who rapped and I sang.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was really, really fun.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: That lasted for a couple of years.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: One of the bands I was in in Boston had me come back and play keyboards a couple of times.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I still had those things going, but I didn't really have like a band that was my project for quite a long time.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like we would do these pickup cover bands or whatever, but nothing that was really mine.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there were two women on the island, one's quite a lot younger than I am, one sort of splits the difference.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And they had both left and then come back.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it was 2018, which politically was a very challenging time.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I started to have the desire to write my anger again, um, which I had done when I was writing songs in Boston.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had not historically written a lot of music, I should say.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mostly played in other people's bands.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was that one band that I was doing songwriting for, and that came from a place of anger.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: The first song that I ever wrote as an adult came from this intense place of anger from an encounter I'd had with a person in grad school.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that that was where my well of creativity was.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not the part of me that was writing like cutesy, like E B white personal essays about island life, but the real cathartic urge to create was coming from this place of anger.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2018, I had a lot of that and started to have ideas for songs.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And these two women had moved back to the island and they had talked to each other about playing together, and I had talked to each of them about playing together.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just closed the triangle and got together in the late spring of 2018.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the guitar player didn't own an electric yet.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: She's an incredible, like, songwriter, finger pick style, um, folk guitar player, beautiful, amazing, just singer, like incredible and songwriter, but had never touched an electric guitar in her life.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: The drummer, um, I don't know if she had really played a lot since high school.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: She'd been in this punk band in high school, and then there was me, um, all like doing music all the time, but not in this way.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I brought a couple songs that I had written again, just from this like desire to really scream on stage, which wasn't a kind of music that I had really spent a lot of time doing before.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like in Boston, I'd done a glam band and a shoegase band and a garage band.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: But this really we wanted to have that, like, and you read the description that were post-riot, like the to have it come from that riot girl tradition, but understand that like it's 20 years later or whatever it was at that time.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it just worked so well.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like the three of us worked well together.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: We were shy at first and like then got to know each other, and then fortuitously, like this electric guitar sort of manifested into our lives, this like cheapo, weird, like Frankenstein electric guitar that's still the one that she plays.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we recorded three songs really quickly.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: So just so we had something.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then um that EP wound up getting written about in the Portland Press Herald, which is the so Port Portland, Maine is the biggest city in the state, and they have a pretty big newspaper with a good music column in it.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow the music writer for that paper picked it up and wrote about it right off the bat.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so, right away, we were getting a little more recognition and a little more opportunity than honestly, like almost any other project that I'd worked on.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in Boston, it's funny because there's like Boston is its own music scene.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And even within that, there was like the Boston metro area music scene, and then like the Austin Brighton music scene, and they were all kind of like, and the JP music scene.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly we all traveled around, but like it was such a small geographical area with so many bands in it.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the whole state of Maine, in a lot of ways, is kind of one music scene.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there's southern Maine bands and there's down east bands and things like that, but by and large, it's a statewide music scene.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so for us to be out on North Haven, not in Portland, not in Bangor, not, you know, not anywhere really, um, didn't matter in in a way that it would have, were we, you know, I don't know what the analog would be in Massachusetts or something.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we were given a couple of good shows right off the bat.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it took a couple months.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: We like played a couple of bad shows on the island that were just like we knew eight songs and three of them were Joan Jack covers kind of shows, but you have to play those to like get brave.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we came up with our motto, which is confident, sloppy, and loud at that first one.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um because it was a little scary.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, for Fiona, the guitar player, she'd been playing her like incredibly beautiful music for a while.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And like that's how people thought of her.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And like, you know, for I'm the music teacher, like I don't want to get up there and look like I'm just crashing out.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I did want to kind of also just free myself from any worry of perfectionism or expectation and just be those three things, um, and really express the feelings that I had that were leading to this kind of songwriting.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it just kept going from there.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I don't want it to sound like, oh, and then we got signed by EMI.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're not on a label.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we did a beautiful self-supported tour a couple of years ago.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: But um, you know, I don't know.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: We have sync representation, our music's been on um the radio in a lot of places, even around the world.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: We got to go to Spain and play a show in Spain, and we've opened for like a lot of our favorite, favorite bands we've gotten to open for, like Laura Jane Grace and Deerhuff and um Downtown Boys, and it's just been so much fun.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my daughter was four at the time when we started the band.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I said earlier, like she just kind of had to be there for a lot of it.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it made me so happy to be able to show her that and to really show her that like I could express my anger in this creative and productive way that was community building and not community destroying.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that I could collaborate with other women, that I could be, I must have been 37 or just turned 38 when the band started.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I remember being in Boston, and my very good friends would lie about their age because they didn't want anyone to think they were older than like 25 or something, which is so silly.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, not lie about my age, wear whatever I wanted.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um collaborate with other women, I think is so important to show people because a lot of times, and it's gotten much better even since we started playing um eight years ago, but 20 something years ago when I was in Boston, one of the bands I was in was my two roommates and I, and then a really good friend of ours who was a guy.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: But we were a girl band, and people wouldn't book us on a bill with other women in bands.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was a whole thing.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you had the one girl band, and then the other bands that were guys, like the default band status was male.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like to see that shift really intentionally, and we actually now tend to get booked with other women, which is so cool and so nice, or people just don't think about it and just put us with, you know, sound alikes or whatever.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've gotten to play like just really great venues all over the state.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our tour was so, so, so fun and amazing just driving around in a forerunner with a bunch of snacks.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we went swimming every day, and like most of the shows were really fun.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think to model that for my daughter is as important as just the act of doing it for myself.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the songwriting has shifted a lot.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So at first it was just like angry, angry, angry, like um pushing and kicking and like using that sort of physical diction in the songs.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then it's evolved to be more about interpersonal relationships and less more, less about politics.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, partly because we're just exhausted like by the constant barrage of bad news for the last eight years plus.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also because I think just because of internal shifts for me too, and the ways that I have experienced interpersonal relationships over the last couple of years leading up to my divorce, um, but also the way that they feel important in a way that maybe they didn't at the time when everything was just sort of newly acute and scary.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also given me a way to write about parenting and to write about being pregnant, um, and the experience of have giving birth, like the physical experience of giving birth that I found really powerful um as a tool for processing those experiences that actually directly led to writing the book that I co-wrote.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's so cool to see that you kind of took the chance to be like, I want to pour more into myself.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and you you got this group together and it just kind of flourished almost immediately.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's such a testament to like really pouring into yourself and going with what feels right at the time.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously, in that time frame, and I mean, we could say the same for now, the the political landscape is um jarring to say the least.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: But your life changes so much from point A to point B.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that while it started with like this political angst, if you will, allowed for the opportunity for you to like go back and think more about this postpartum and birth and pregnancy and being a parent.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the perfect segue to talk more about your book.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I mean, good art comes out of bad times a lot, right?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think that that is almost true.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: The happier I am, the fewer songs I tend to write.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so um, one of the songs that I wrote in the maybe second or third year of us being a band, and we did a music video for it, was a song called Tear Me in Two.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it was a song that I wrote a couple.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at that point I might have been like five or six years postpartum, but I was still processing the way that my body had changed and my mind had changed through being pregnant and then giving birth and then not being able to find my way back physically to where I was before.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Up until getting pregnant, really into my second trimester.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was running.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was an avid runner starting in my late 20s and then going into my early 30s.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I did that.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: I had energy, my hair didn't fall, you know, like I didn't always feel like I was gonna pee my pants, like those kinds of things.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I had these very commonly experienced, but not talked about, and also not proactively talked about um experiences, like so many people do, and then go, what happened?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: What how do I fix this?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so anyway, so the chorus of the song Tear Me in Two keeps repeating the phrase, nobody told me.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody told me, nobody told me.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that was really the main sentiment that I wanted to write that song about was this idea that like I knew so much about being pregnant, and I knew so much about the baby, and nothing about what was gonna happen to me afterwards.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I was trying to navigate these physical changes and get back to running and stopped feeling like my bladder was gonna fall out of my body every second, and all of these things, I looked for a book to read because I had read, you know, what to expect, and I had read Enamake Garden, and I had read everything I could find.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had read the sleep books and the baby-led weaning books and everything, and there was not a book for me that was about my experience as a postpartum person.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are a couple of things out there that were more spiritual, that were more about mental health exclusively, but I literally wanted to read a book that was like, you have a pelvic floor, you've always had a pelvic floor, this is what happened to it, this is what to do.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: So because of my personality, well, however you want to frame it, I'm a Taurus Virgo rising on very type A.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I guess it, and I'm a writer, and I said, I guess if it doesn't exist, I'm gonna have to write it myself.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started a Google Doc in 2019, I think, that was just a list of complaints.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: My body used to do this and now I won't do that.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: And here's how I feel, and why didn't this happen?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then I sort of forgot about it for a minute because I realized the whole problem was that I didn't know the answer to these questions and I needed help.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I had been, you know, I knew about pelvic floor PT because I had a friend who was one, but then I went to see one and I wasn't happy with it, and it wasn't answering my questions.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized that what I needed was my friend, who is pelvic health PT, to co-write the book with me.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um not and like almost in a question and answer model.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't wind up really looking like that in the end, but like I was the lay person who had had this experience.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: I knew what the questions I had were, I knew what information I wished I had had while I was pregnant, or at the very least after I gave birth.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she had a lot of the answers already, just from her professional background and a really good industry sense of where to get the rest of the information.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So in 2020, because it was right on the cusp of the pandemic, I approached her about co-authoring it with me.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: She was on board.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then um, you know, the thing about North Haven, and I talked about how everything's kind of condensed, is that the access that we have to a really skilled, talented variety of people is unparalleled because there's the island population and then there's the summer population.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of us on the island, our job is island, like our job is teaching or working at the clinic or working at the transfer station or what working for other people, whatever.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then like a thousand other people come in, and most of them do something really cool at a really high level.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a woman close to my age who was a literary agent.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, So sorry, everybody you know must do this, but would you read my book proposal?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the book proposal in question was actually for the memoir that I'd written when I was nursing.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and she very graciously read it.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'd gotten a couple of rejections on it, and I was like, I just need like help.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: She read it and she was like, it's fine, I don't want to rep it.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And also a global pandemic just started, so it's probably not what's gonna sell right now.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: What else are you working on?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, well, I've always got, you know, this going, this, going, this, going.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I also had this idea for a book that would explain everything that happens in your body postpartum.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she was like, that's the one.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Put all of your energy into that one.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want first refusal, and I will help you with the proposal.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, whoa, okay.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I went back to my co-author and I was like, okay, this is a real project now, and we have to actually do this.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we got cranking right away on the proposal, um, which had, you know, you have to write a couple sample chapters and all the blurbs for all the table contents and everything and a really, really good pitch.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as she promised, our the woman who is now my agent um helped us craft it and we were able to sell it like that.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we got so, so, so, so lucky.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it, I mean, obviously was life-changing, and I hope it's life-changing for other people.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I learned so much writing it and researching it.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, my co-author Ruth Macy is an absolute genius.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just the best in her field, honestly, like so compassionate and so good at what she does.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: But the, you know, but the the thesis statement of it is that yes, things have changed.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you may need to let go of the person you were in your head, like not the person you were, sorry.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: You may need to let go of the exact way that your body was before you were pregnant.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many, many, many ways to return to movement, fitness, sport, however it is you like to live in the world, um, picking up grocery bags, whatever it is, that in ways that are safe, that actually promote healing, um, that aren't going to overtax your energy levels and the physical muscle and fascia of your body.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like there are ways to heal from this experience that almost half of the globe has, and very few people know as they're heading into that experience, what real healing can look like.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that is, you know, all of the different, like the culture of toxic productivity and the culture of toxic like body image stuff that we are just always coming back to.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: There was a minute where I was like, maybe we're really doing it, maybe we're really doing body positivity, and I we are so far away from that again.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um maybe we'll get back there.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there are so many voices inside of the postpartum person's head and then coming outside from society that tell us it needs to look a certain way.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: You should work, you should be productive, or you should only stay home, or you should go back to the weight you were before you were pregnant.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: And weight is the measure that we're gonna use for you, or it's your pants, or whatever it is.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is really, really hard to quiet those voices.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was hard for me, it's hard for a lot of people.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so we hope that we've generated this tool that people can use that will teach you how to reintegrate breathing in your whole abdomen and teach your, teach you how to know what it feels like when your pelvic floor is resilient, not too tight.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not too loose.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what kind of practitioner to seek out for?
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of a problem?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: People don't even know pelvic health um PTs exist necessarily.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: And again, you know, and we really tried to identify places where health and healing is a function of geography and privilege and give some sort of, again, like hacks almost to find that support.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: But hopefully the book in and of itself is a hack.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't get out the door, if you can't get to that kind of health um care for whatever reason, there's exercise programs in there.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are photos in there of Ruth and I doing the different exercises.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had almost this little hair, actually, when we when we took those photos.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, that is the book.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it it is out there.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's been out there for two years now.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we really hope that it continues to sort of snowball and reach.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like we envisioned it being this like big splashy thing, and it has been sort of a slow build.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we really believe in it, and we really believe that this information is just warehoused and so hard for people to find.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're trying to overcome with it.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think the work that you guys are doing with the book is uh it's a larger like cultural societal shift, and that I think everything revolving women in that like motherhood time frame, and then also in that like post-motherhood time frame, everything for decades has been just hush hush.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like, don't talk about it.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's embarrassing.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: You should be embarrassed of your body, your body isn't doing XYZ anymore.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: You sh it it should be looking like whatever it might be.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I mean, I largely experienced that in pregnancy and postpartum of like, oh well, you you had a baby, your body's gonna feel like this now, or or or yeah, ping your pants is normal, you just had a baby, or your your body's never gonna look the same, you just had a baby.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there's so many things that are like trickled down from generations of like, yeah, we all experience this, but still under that, like, hush, hush, don't talk about it.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: You're not special, don't read into it too much.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like what you guys are doing is providing like a real practical guide for all of us who are like, what is happening?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: What is go, what is about to happen, or I'm going through this.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: How can I reclaim myself?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like a lot of it is that.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we it takes us a lot of times so long just to get back to to who we are, figuring ourselves out and then getting back into our body is like, I mean, I'm I'm three years postpartum and like I still don't understand my body.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: I still don't know what's happening.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_02: And for someone like me to have a book that was like, here's what could happen and why, I think that that is a crucial part of the work that you guys are doing, and that like it's not just a guide of like, here's what's gonna happen, and here's what you can do.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: There seems to be a why to it.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think having a better understanding of ourselves will make it easier to get back into ourselves.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: I hope so.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that is such an important piece of it, is just naming the fact that there's still a person.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like you are still a discreet person, even though you were pregnant.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like that shouldn't feel like a radical thing to say, but it kind of is.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and even, you know, the shifting your name to be a parenting name, like a mama or a papa or a daddy or anything, and like even that, like that can subsume identity a little bit.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so just to really make the book, to make a book, any book, about the person who you are, and to acknowledge that not every pregnancy results in becoming a parent too, but the body that maybe is not a parent, the person that maybe is not a parent after being pregnant, is was still pregnant and still is experiencing these postpartum things.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really essential to us, that it really reached out and embraced anyone who's been pregnant, regardless of their gender, regardless of their parenting status, because the body goes through often like the same set of things or like a grab bag of the same kinds of sets of things.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so to really center and name the person that you still are, I think is so, so powerful and not done in enough contexts.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for the work that you're doing in in this area and in all other areas.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think that um your story and experience of like really pushing through and and continuing to invest in who you are and and being loud about it.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that it is very inspiring for myself and then hopefully other women who listen to to really give themselves the gift of getting back to who they are or who they want to be, or whatever it might look like for them.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you so much for sharing your story.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate the opportunity.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, tell everyone where they can find you, where they can find your book, website, social media, all the stuff.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, okay.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the book should be wherever books are sold.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if it is not in a bookstore that you like to frequent, please ask about ordering it.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is on Amazon, it is on Bookshop, um, and we love Bookshop in particular.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am spending a lot of time right now on my Substack, um, which is called Mudpuppy, and it is Courtney Nalabov.substack.com.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have breast cancer at the moment.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: I am very bald, um, which if you are listening, you can all see.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a really great prognosis that I'm on a curative treatment, which is awesome.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: Today I feel super normal.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I'm doing a lot of writing specifically about the experience of having breast cancer on an island just while getting divorced because I had to do all the midlife things all at once in that substack, and I'm really excited about that.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: I am on Instagram and threads and Facebook, and that's at chnaliboff.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of it is pictures of flowers or cats, but also sometimes I post things that are more exciting.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my band is called Bait Bag, and we can be found on Instagram at BaitBag Um The Band, and we're on Bandcamp.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's the moat, that's our favorite place for people to listen to our music, and that's baitebag.bandcamp.com.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: But we're streaming everywhere except for Spotify.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we should be pretty easy to find.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I also play bass and sing in another band called Deary, um, which is at Deary Band, D-E-E-R-Y band.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been really fun.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not writing for that project at all.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's really nice and beautiful music.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, let me think.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like those are the places that you can find me.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, other than swimming in the ocean, which I'm gonna do later today.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds beautiful.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we'll we'll put all of those links in the show notes so people can find you.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and just thank you again for sharing your story.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's really inspiring.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I appreciate your time.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Jessica.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: It was really fun.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: It was such a pleasure.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to follow the podcast wherever you listen and share it with another Mon building something meaningful.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you want deeper behind the scenes reflections that I don't share anywhere else, join my email list at themakingpodcast.com.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for being here, and I'll see you next time.