Motherhood, Boundaries and Finding Your Tribe
In this conversation of work family me I chat to Lisa, a Scottish former BBC television director who moved to SA to study a Masters in Marine science with the hope of making David Attenborough documentaries but instead became an accidental entrepreneur and founder of Lilah's Kitchen, a plant-based manufacturing company in a country dominated by meat eaters! And a mother at almost 45.
We talk about so much in this open and honest conversation when things feel like chaos in a relationship and parenting partnership.
Listen to hear more about:
- parenting and business growing with a partner with ADHD
- mentors, role models, generational imprints and friends
- anchors in the chaos
- the unspoken in a society and relationship
Prefer to listen to the full podcast? Click here Chaos, Boundaries and Mum Friends
Let's dive into the conversation for today. I'm so grateful to Lisa for this conversation. Lisa is a Scot in Cape Town. She has a background in television, in marine science. She is now an entrepreneur. She has a child.
She lives with her partner in Cape Town. And navigating a whole bunch in terms of entrepreneurship, parenting, partnering, intercultural differences, family generational pieces. And we have such an honest conversation around the behind-the-scenes of living with somebody with ADHD, thinking about finances and restrictions, thinking about mentoring and role models, and what we grew up with as generational patterns.And I'm really grateful to her for being honest with us also about this unspoken transition that can happen when two individuals turn into a family and what society kind of prescribes for women and men and how that might be defined. So there's so much richness in this conversation. I feel very lucky that we were able to have it and that I'm able to share it with all of you.
Welcome to the conversation today, Lisa. I'm excited to have you here. And I know we spent the last five minutes putting the world to rights. Before we even got into it, I'm not sure if you quickly introduce yourself where you are, what your job is, what your work is, and what your family situation is.
So my name is Lisa. I am currently sitting in my sausage factory in Cape Town, South Africa. I am not joking. I am actually sitting in the sausage factory, which just makes me laugh on so many levels because you know that phrase of, oh, you know, life is just like a sausage factory. Yeah, I live it.
I make vegan food in a country which predominantly eats meat. And I am not a sausage maker by trade. I have been many different things, the engineer, marine scientist and television director.
And the sausage thing happen sort of by very long story, which I won't bore anyone with. I live in a village called Kommetjie with my partner, James, my son, Hamish, who's four, two dogs, two cats, one of them isn't mine, but it lives there. And maybe nine or 10 chickens, can't tell you. And then a four point five square meter pond school of Koi fish.
I'm not from South Africa. You can probably tell by my accent. I grew up in Scotland and then moved my way around the UK and lived in Bristol before I moved to Cape Town.
Beautiful. So when you think about you have your own business, you have lots of living things depending on regular feeding. You have a small child. You have a partner. How do you do a regular week with work and family and everything else that's going on?
I don't. I do it very badly. Part of that is not my problem. And part of it is not my fault. But I describe the way that I live to people as chaos.
It is 100% unequivocal chaos. And there are a number of factors for that. The biggest factor is that my partner has a job which has regular hours. And it's absolutely fascinating because I used to work in an industry where I used to work in television. Your hours are all over the place. Your days are all over the place. And I realised that that was not compatible with wanting to have a family. But of course, you don't realise that the other side of that is he works in tourism.
So although his office is very organised at the end of his days, but my entire life has to revolve around somebody else's. My entire life has to revolve around everybody else's schedules. And those schedules move and they change.
And I'm also responsible for running a factory which has staff and those people can be unpredictable. And so everything just feels permanently chaotic. And it doesn't matter how many systems I tried to put in place.
Actually, I'll tell you what, at work, there are systems coming out my ears and it works very, very well. Because I have control over my working environment, I do see that as a big benefit. I am my own boss and I can control the space in which my employees work.
And it's very structured. And it's not a lot of chaos goes on in the factory. But aside from that, the rest of my life is just filled with other people's chaos.
So it sounds like you're saying the thinking about a regular week, there is no such thing. That doesn't exist in every week.
Every week is very different. And that depends on, is this all for my child? Has my husband got work booked in? What's going on with everybody else? So it's also the demands of how busy am I at work? What do I have to sit in? Is my child well enough to go to school? He's only four. And you know what they're like.
If he can go to school, can he not go to school? Is there after care at school? Will he go to after school after care that day? Because his favorite teacher, he won't go to after care when his favorite teacher isn't there. I'll just give you an example of this week was I think Monday was okay. Just the last from Wednesday, never mind this week.
One of the other issues that I deal with is that my partner has been diagnosed. I've known it for a long time. He has been diagnosed with ADHD.
And that manifests for him in a way that he is absolutely incapable of planning something that isn't intrinsically his heart, a heart thing for him. He can plan a boat trip. He can plan a surf thing. He can plan a windsurf. He can plan all those things to help him with his self-regulation. But when it comes to the rest of life.
I've communicated with his office. His office share his calendar with me because that's the only way that I can plan my life. Outside of that, there will be instances where they'll phone him up and say, can you do your last minute tour? And he'll waffle in and he'll say, oh, yeah, no. I'll say, right, you're taking Hamish, Hamish, you're going to after school.
He will literally halfway through a conversation on a Sunday night, turn around and say, oh, yeah, no, I'm actually working tomorrow. And the last time he did that, I have to plan and squash my work into the space that nobody else is occupying. And that day had been planning me to get to work at 6.13am in the morning.
And just everything my life is the one that implodes when everyone else makes changes. And he sent me a message on Wednesday this week. I knew what was happening on Wednesday this week. So I actually wasn't that surprised. But the way it's just an example of his mindset is he had a work do on, the work put it in his calendar. So I could see it. And I thought, oh, that's not a tour. But I go in and look at all of the details. I see what's happening.
They say he needs to be there at 11. He sent me a message at 10.30 in Wednesday morning saying, oh, can you pick our kid up? It's like duty gets picked up at one o'clock. That is how much foresight I am dealing with in managing my partner.
We're talking two hours. And that dynamic in managing my life makes it incredibly chaotic. It makes it actually incredibly chaotic for everyone that interacts with him, including his work.
It sounds like when you think about your biggest challenge, it's how do I be with a partner that is has number one work that is unpredictable and number two, a brain that works differently. And when we think about what you're putting out of what you what you can control, you're saying, I put a system in place where I'm actually looking at schedules directly with work so that I can find as much as possible. But at rest, I'm kind of squashing and changing and adapting.
When you think about support for yourself, are there other support structures that you reach for? Do you pay people? Do you hire help? What do you have to be able to negotiate those times where it's last minute and there's changes in a schedule?
So financially, I'm restricted with the amount of help that I can get. But we have a nursery. My son goes to a nursery. He goes five days a week. He now has access two days a week for aftercare.
He goes from eight o'clock in the morning till four o'clock two days a week and the other three days a week, he can go. But then there is a flip side to this. There is a flip side to this where actually because my partner is a tour guide, he has days off during the week.
So that does mean, and I have learned to put, of course, that's why I'm saying sometimes it always falls apart. I've learned to put some fairly hefty boundaries in place to save my own sanity because at one point I was going mad. I was literally losing my mind trying to juggle it all.
o one of the boundaries I've put in place is if he is not working, he is responsible for child care for that day. Look, sometimes it falls apart.
It wasn't working on Wednesday. It fell apart. But I always have to be present as a backup. But on the days when he is not working, I'm out. I need to get to work. My business is not growing because I am not there and I'm not present.
I guess that's something that other people can relate to. You know, women trying to further themselves in careers or get promotions or be present at work. Actually, if they enjoy work or not work, they just want to do it better.
But they can't because 50% of their brain, 75% of their brain, is diverted by life outside of their own sphere. Does that make sense? You know, crazy things like the animals, the cats, the dogs.
Yeah. Number one, I'm thinking it makes so much sense. And I share about this all the time with my one-on-one clients as well is when I'm trying to grow something, I need more time and more energy, right? But it almost, it doesn't magically appear for me.
So maybe I know I could make more money. Maybe I know I could grow the business. Maybe I know I could take a step up, but I almost don't have the space to do that.
And so I don't have the proof of that. And so it's like, oh, well, you're still working part-time where you're still earning less or your business doesn't make as much.
So it's almost that double-edged sword, which I think so many people can relate to. I'm curious to talk about these hefty boundaries because I know so many women in particular and many humans generally struggle to contain work or to contain family and switch focus. What has helped you get to the point where you're saying, when it's like this, then I'm at work?
I have an incredible mentor and she is my sister. She is an incredible woman. She's eight years older than me. She is a senior doctor in the NHS. She is very successful. She has also had senior husband who works in the NHS and she had two children.
And she hadn't even finished her medical training before she had her first child. So she was juggling. She had to go back to work when my niece was very small.
So she was juggling that thing, the pressure of breastfeeding and expressing milk and going to work. And her boss not getting her more than 12 weeks maternity leave and all of those things. And I benefit massively from my niece and nephew in our 20s because I had Hamish when I was really old.
I've really benefited from learning from her wisdom. And her wisdom told me because I would sit and go, I can't do this. I literally can't do this all.
And she's like, no, you can't do this all. So you need to put some boundaries in place. So you are not the one who is doing it all. It really helped me. And it really helped me to have someone else who is at a senior professional level who's a compassionate mother, who's brought up two amazing kids. And they are really, really lovely kids because that's the other thing you worry about.
You think, what are my kids going to turn out like if I'm not there and I'm not present. You know, all those pressures and the guilt. But she really helped me realise that if I wanted my business to be successful, I had to go to work.
And I know that sounds really stupid, but I couldn't fit my business around everybody else's lives because it wasn't going to work because it just wasn't working. I couldn't do it at seven o'clock at night or midnight when my kid had gone to bed because you know what it's like? You need that space to be able to focus, dive into it, get it done. So boundaries are really important.
Don't get me wrong. They won't fall apart, but they're there. Almost as the underlying structure.
And I'm also hearing how incredibly useful it is when we see people who have gone before us give us their wisdom and give us the permission. Right. Just set the boundary or to do things differently.
Maybe the families we see around us or, what other people are doing for somebody who you look up to to say, Hey, this is okay. You can take this time or you need to prioritise that. Or this is what really helped me is so, so, so helpful.
I wanted to jump in and take a pause with a couple of things that Lisa is bringing into this conversation that I think it's really useful to pick out and amplify as we listen to this behind the scenes. Lisa's talking about navigating what she calls living in chaos and different time tables, different capacities, different ways of working, different ways of functioning within a life and financial restrictions alongside that and trying to grow something in this instance, her business and looking at what are the challenges, what are the limitations and what's realistic. We often put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be building, creating, doing, and to continue to expand that capacity, even as other parts of our lives are potentially shifting and changing with parenting or with partners or with perimenopause or menopause or context in our lives, aging parents, whatever it is.
And I think this is such a useful reminder that our body budget is finite. The amount of energy resource we have is not, and it's a non-renewable. I mean, it renews, but it requires, you know, sleep and nourishment and movement and there's only so much that we have to go around.
So when we are putting into something, we are, by definition, not putting it into somewhere else. So when we're thinking about growing a business or stepping into a new role of work or creating change on a relationship front or parenting, being in a different phase of parenting, we need to be cognizant that the energy that is required for that is taken from somewhere else. So it's not just about time in the day, it's also about our energy, our focus and recognizing that that is not unlimited.
So that is the first thing I wanted to amplify. The second thing that I really love that Lisa is bringing is talking about finding mentors or role models who have lived a similar context to us, who we can turn to for advice or reassurance or guidance. And I think in this age of scrolling and Instagram and maybe a bit of a distance between us and people that we find inspiring, we forget that the context that we're in and the challenges that we have in our 3D existence make a big difference.
So what we may see a distant colleague be able to do at work or what we may see somebody be able to do on Instagram or on Pinterest isn't necessarily realistic for us in what we have and are negotiating in our partnership or our family or our financial situation. And so having mentors or role models or support or coaches or therapists that come from or can recognise or can understand and validate the reality that we are in is so, so useful. And it sounds like Lisa’s sister has negotiated working with young children and has gone through that phase of time and energy for career and for parenting.
And so there's a real pricing here of what she is giving to Lisa as advice. So I would recommend that when we are calling on other people for support or when we hear people give us advice or guidance to check in and see whether it feels realistic and aligned for our context and our lived experience in that moment. And rather than taking it on without filtering it without checking that it is from somebody who might be a match for what we are navigating right somebody giving me advice from a 25 year old point of view who has wealthy parents and doesn't have any children.
For that to be received by a woman who is maybe in her 50s navigating to teenagers and needing to put food on the table because she's single, it just doesn't always translate. And so being really mindful of that can cut out some of the noise that we receive when we are getting in a whole lot of messaging from a whole lot of different people out there in the world.
You've hit the nail on the head by using the word permission isn't that crazy. I felt like I needed someone else to give me permission. Is it a societal thing? Is it a personal thing? I needed someone else to tell me that hey you actually need to freaking go to work and you cannot get your job done. And everybody else and it’s one of the things that she said which also true she's a hard task master my sister is that nobody is going to take my work.
I can hear that and I can echo that and I feel like it's going to give value to so many people listening. And I feel like the same can be said of health, no one's going to take your health seriously, no one's going to take your time seriously unless you do, not it's going to take your joy your sex or fun, your sensuality your body your work whatever it is seriously until we do and we've almost been socialised to negate that at in service to everybody else from so to the onwards.
So do you know what you're doing? Do you know what that also builds in me though. As you said I am so busy looking after everybody else.
And that's that the societal thing as women we are so busy looking after everything and everyone that you do then start feeling a bit of resentment of hang on a minute. Who is looking out for me. Who is the person that is making sure that I am okay and I think the older I get I know the older I get, the people that are looking out for me is other women and one of the such as you said that because that really resonates with my experience of collective care amongst female friends over years, over decades. But do you know that it doesn't feel easy and sometimes it doesn't feel comfortable because to be able to access that level of support from a tribe of people. You have to be really vulnerable because it's almost as though you're going to those women at your worst.
I mean it's fine with my sister but she's 6000 miles away and she's a really busy human being. And actually I try to moderate what I tell her because she worries about me in that big sisterly way. But what I have discovered is that when you have a child you can choose to be honest about the brutality of child rearing.
And I think if you are honest about it you will find the right people who will share in that with you and support you through that. I think I've found that I've been really lucky that is one of the amazing things that happened in lockdown. There were kids all over our street.
But none of us had really connected but because we were all stuck and locked and we were all sneaking out of our houses in those six weeks that we weren't supposed to. We found each other and that was incredible. It was such a beautiful thing.
And we now have each other and part of my one big bases of my support network that I've tapped into now is my mum’s friends. And that's partly because my kid has got older. So I've been able to I have a network of women who live in my street who I can say, I'm stuck, can you help me? With a little WhatsApp group? And actually the last time I really tapped into that was for me, which I almost didn't do. This was like one of the most vulnerable moments that I'd done was I'd arranged to go on a hike with a girlfriend of mine. And I hadn't done it for ages because my partner had worked six weekends back to back.
So all I'd done was work during the week, look after my kid on my own. And then it was that classic thing of I booked to go on this hike and then he booked to go to do something to go on a boat trip. And of course the responsibility is then, well, what am I going to do with our son? And I had two options.
I either canceled my hike, which made me want to cry. But actually I didn't have to because I called. I literally put a WhatsApp on message and said, who can look after my son for two hours so I can have some space? And there was instantly on a Sunday morning, three hands that went up.
One of them said, well, my child's been vomiting all night. If you're welcome to drop him round. And this is like, yeah, I'm sure he's had that already off you go. Yes, it's women. Women are keeping me alive.
I'm stepping in here to talk about this perception of or acceptance of hobbies or sport or leisure time, recreational time, Me time, unicorn space, different people call it different things. The time where we are ourselves without needs, the time where we do things that we enjoy, where we feel excited, where we feel embodied, where we feel alive, and how in many cultures, particularly in the West, I can't speak for everywhere, it's been quite normalised and accepted that that is part of maybe a fathering lifestyle and not so much that of a mothering lifestyle. And how do we feel about claiming, taking, creating, standing in, protecting boundaries around time that isn't quote unquote, caring or productive directly, right, where we have time where we are exploring our interests or doing things that feel fun to us.
The lack of fun is something that I see so often in the one on one coaching that I do of women actually pausing and saying to me, I don't know, I don't even know what's fun for me right now, this version of me than ever before. It's not the same kind of thing that I used to do in my 20s. I don't enjoy the same things.
I don't think I've had time to explore that. I don't even know what to say as an answer to that question. And so, if that speaks to you, number one, interesting to think about, can I negotiate time for or schedule time in for exploring what is fun for me.
See the exploration of what feels alive and what feels energising and what feels like a place that I can source energy from as a bit of an experiment. And maybe it's checking out a dance class, maybe it's going to an art gallery by myself, maybe it's watching a comedy show, maybe it's a long walk on my own on the beach. And so seeing that as a bit of detective work that you could do with yourself, what might be an activity or a space that you could create to source energy from as you are in all of the holding and the doing and the thinking and the planning.
Where are the gaps where you could start investigating?
There's the seeing, seeing time apart or leisure time or time and nature as a hobby, but it's also seeing that as a need and a sustenance for ourselves to be able to hold all of the stressors and all of the different things coming up.
And we're also looking at that in a slightly wider sphere in terms of community. So when you think about relationships that your friends are having or that people around you, your peer group, your colleagues are having, do they also have relationships where both parents are earning, both parents are going to work, what does that look like?
No, I have to say most of the relationships that I see in my immediate circle because we have small children, most of those women are working. If they're working, short part time work. There's no space for them to have anything other. Some of it's by choice. But then there are other women, like actually, you know, that's not fair.
There's a broad spectrum. At the moment, the mostly women I see because we've got small children. And you know how you kind of gather with people with the kids of similar age because you're all living the same experience at that moment, and that's really helpful.
But no, that's not fair. Actually, there's a broad spectrum. There's a broad spectrum of people I know from stay-at-home moms to really high flying professionals. And all of us take on the family burden, all of us. Like we're living in 1950.
Do you think that is, though, you know, you talked about being in South Africa and living in a places that are doing it differently?
Yes.
Yeah, I do. I see it very, I see it differently in, I don't think it's perfect. But I actually have one friend who is the the primary caregiver for their child.
They both work. We all worked together. So we all did a similar job. And he became the primary caregiver for their child. And although it's still seen as slightly unusual, it's not seen as, whoa, you know, eye-watering as here. I see situations where in South Africa, I see a lot of situations where women work. And the primary caregiver role is still theirs. Their partners might not be working, but then the support structure is provided by, and part of this is because child care is so relatively cheap. Here in Cape Town, child care is so relatively cheap compared to Western countries, the UK, US, all of those kind of things.
So if a woman goes out to work, the person that looks after their child is a nanny, not their partner, that just doesn't happen. And one of the other things that I think is, I find really interesting is that argument of, I guess, and then it makes me question, are my expectations unrealistic? Am I just being unrealistic? Am I being unfair to think that my partner should take 50% of the load? I think in my head, because he will come back and say, well, I do way more than anyone else I know. And it's just like, yes, but they're really shit.
You're just a little bit shit. Do you know what I mean? In that sense of, and that is what feel like realistic expectations or what feel like, and that is particularly culturally the South African patriarchy in terms of the expectations of men. And the thing that makes it, I think particularly difficult for women is nobody is holding them accountable outside of their partnership.
There's no support for a woman to say, you know, for example, they go, oh, well, this has happened, and they go bitching to their friends or whatever. They don't have a friend network to say, oh, well, you know, I do that. This is normal, although they don't have a parental structure, they're going to be structural, South African parents.
They don't have a parental structure, which is actually, you are now in a relationship and you're a partner, and this is what is expected of you, and this is what you need to do. And then the lessons, I do worry that you know that our children learn not by what we tell them, they just don't. You can tell them bumpkin and they just look at you. They learn from what they see. They learn everything from the way that people treat each other and what they see. And my four year old knows that I cook and I clean. How do I teach him to be a better version of the men that I have to live with? How do we do that? How do I do that? I'm going to listen to other chats in case anybody's come up with an answer to this one.
For young men, how do I give him a better role model? If I don't have that available in the house, right? If we're still living quite a traditional relationship through the agreement or just through keeping the peace, how do I show that it could be different? How do we talk about that? How do we raise that in a different generation, which is making me think about the generational pattern that you both grew up with. Did your mother work? Did your partner's mother work? What did that look like in your modeling that you received in your origin family?
My sister and I have had a recent conversation about our family structure and part of that was prompted because my dad appeared on TV in the UK. It showed archive footage of when he was a racing driver. We new he was a racing driver, but we went looked and the internet made it much easier. We found the races. We found race cards of when he was racing. He stopped racing in 1975.
Mum was sat at home with three kids, two of them under the age of three. While my dad was working a full-time job, in his spare time, he was pissing about with racing cars and every Sunday during the summer, he would go to a race meet. And my mum, unbelievably, worked.
She had a part-time job and I remember being one of, you know, early memories. I remember me and my middle sister sitting in the back seat of the car as we'd go down this little lane in Edinburgh and she'd have to run into this office to go and get the typing work that she was doing. And then she had another child, so there's four of us.
My poor mother. If she were alive today, I would go back and say, yes, sorry, I would apologise because before my mother died, she had raised four children with a husband who went to work seven days a week from eight o'clock in the morning until nine thirty at night. He still does that, by the way, he's eighty, you wonder if he still does that. She raised four children and she ran her own business. And she was miserable.
She was a really, really, really magnificent woman? She was miserable. And of course, is that magnificent? Was that magnificent to do that? But that was her job. She had absolutely no choice.
That was the generation she lived in. And we needed the money. Yeah, there's been such a modeling of that almost like martyrdom as good woman, right? As what we described as good woman.
And so when we're raised with that, and then we are at the forefront of working and living and wanting to do that differently, what have we had come before us?
What did your partner grow up with. Did his mother work?
Yes she did work, I don’t want to say inconsequential jobs, because that's not fair. But she didn't have a career as such. In fact, she still works. It's a job that fits around life and family. But he came from, I guess, a very, very, very traditional family.
It's nothing traditional. Where his family dynamic is really interesting. We've been to relationship counceling for a year, and it got discussed a lot.
And it is non-functional. And I see his parents' relationship completely mirrored in ours. And they have not had a connection as a married couple for decades, but still live together, but just separately.
But won't ever do anything different. And the sad lesson for that, for my partner, is he thinks that's normal. And I was really fortunate that everyone thinks their family upbringing is normal.
Because you don't know anything different. You've never lived in anyone else's family. It's not until you start getting older and looking at other things.
You can have a choice of self-reflection. You can turn around and say, yeah, no, that wasn't right. And mine came from, actually, at counselling sessions when I thought I was going a bit mad because of sleep deprivation, because of a noisy neighbour.
I literally thought I was going mad, it was before kids. So you don't realize how sleep deprivation is torture. And I went and saw her, and she said, no, no, you're not going mad, you're just sleep deprived
And then we talked a bit about family dynamics. And she was the first person that ever sat there and said to me what you went through while you were growing up was neglect.
You and your brothers, your brother and your sisters were neglected. Because you cannot have two parents that work full-time and four children without something being dropped. And it was us.
I have memories of looking after my five-year-old brother when I was 12. I mean like for a whole day. And it's come up in conversations with childhood friends of mine when their children reach that age.
I remember being at a friend's christening and last looking at her five-year-old son just saying, I cannot believe that you were left in charge of that when you were 12. And it is a form of neglect. And I understand where it's come from.
My parents had their own horrific models of upbringing, so they can only bring what they can to the party. And I think one of the things which is really important for me is to look at their model and think, look, I'm not judging them. I'm not saying that they did a shit job.
They did the best of the job that they had the ability to do with the tools that they had available to them. But I am going to look at my life and say that actually I recognise that's not the way that I want to do it. I'm giving myself credit here because I think that takes an immense amount of strength that I haven't seen in, I see other people either not recognising that their family structures are completely fucked.
And just repeating that generational nightmare, or they don't want to see it, or they don't know how to change it. But I was severely damaged by my, not severely. That's not fair. I was really badly influenced by a quite destructive family dynamic that existed from my entire life until my mom died. And it was based on the fact that my dad got to do whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it, under the guise of, I'm making money. Yeah, you've also made a family. So you've sort of got a bit of a responsibility to that, dude.
Bringing up money. And I know it's one of the things that often gets quite heated and quite laden, and can be one of the things that comes up repeatedly in relationships, when both partners are working, how do we do money? So what are you and your partner doing?
I'm almost embarrassed, actually. I'm going to share with you in a moment a hundred of the things, because I hope it's something else. I'm embarrassed with the way that we do money, because we don't do it. I am in a situation where I live with someone who will not, just will not talk about money.
And he has it all right now, which is absolutely infuriating. He has it all because I have sunk 800,000 rands into building a business for our future. And he has a job, and I currently, I make a pittance, literally make a pittance, but my job is mentally a lot more demanding, because I've got staff, and I've got people, and I've got this factory, and I've got the rent.
I am the boss. And the mental load of that is crushing. Normally, at three o'clock in the morning, when you wake up and it's just like, I haven't gotten something, which he has a job, which actually pays him very well, but it's organized by an office of people.
He literally just has to rock up. That's all he has to do, all the instructions, all of the stuff, all of the bookings, all of the everything that's done for him. But because he has the money, it feels like I have no say.
And the other part, which is very difficult to manage, is we live, we've been together for, I'm going to say nine years, and we live in his house. And I say that quite pointedly because it is his house. I live there, but it's not our home.
It is 100% categorically his house, his money, his house. And that is not the way I'm just saying from a perspective of a nearly 50 year old woman, that is not for advice for anyone else. That is not the way that you should live your life. You just shouldn't.
If you would go back and do it again, in this situation with this partner in this life what would you do differently, what conversations would you have, what different things would you take?
I would say no. I would say that I am happy to put money into a shared pot. I'm happy to pull money. Look, don't get me wrong. He pays for the house. He pays for the electricity. I pay for some bits and bobs like internet and Netflix and Spotify or music and car and the kids' nursery fees and stuff like that. But when it comes to it I am really poor right now.
And part of that was I did have my own money. I have a property in the UK that brought me in money. But the global economic crisis, wars, COVID, all of that, meant that the interest rates went up so high in the UK that the extra money that I had as an income has gone. I literally have nothing. So he gets money. I mean, this is how bad it is. He gets money. He gets cash tips from clients. And he puts the money in a bag. And I do most of the food shopping. I do most of the organising. And I need money to buy food.
And that money is used from the cash. Sometimes there isn't there. Sometimes there isn't cash there, so I can't buy food.
I cannot buy food unless I go and ask him for money. And it's just like, whoa, there's something inside me that makes, it's like a little volcano inside me that wants to explode at the situation that I've got into about having to ask for money to buy food. It sort of feels a little bit controlling, but it's not.
I genuinely don't think it's done from a place of coercive control. I think it's just done from a place of someone who has very, very, very poor financial literacy. And then that brings us back to a cycle in our relationship where I'm not allowed to be cleverer than him.
Lisa is really honest with us about her behind the scenes in this whole conversation, and particularly at this moment where she mentions to us that she and her partner do not talk about money, that it's been something that it has been difficult for them for her. And that if she would do it again, she would do this very differently. And so for anyone who is listening here who can really resonate with that, an invitation to take a few breaths, to feel and seem and witnessed, I know that Lisa is not the only person that I know that has some thoughts about maybe how they would do this differently next time around.
And then thinking about what choices do you have? What actions could you take around your financial well-being right now? So taking a few deep breaths, money can often be a big trigger, a big worry, a big fear for so many of us, because it literally goes to our fundamental baseline safety. Do I have a place to live? Do I have enough food to eat? Can I provide for my children in the way that I want to? So it can bring up a lot of tension in our bodies. So maybe if that's you right now rolling out your shoulders a couple of times and taking a few deep, deep breaths just to reset and create a bit of calm in the nervous system.
And then thinking about what is the first thing that I could do around money? Could I get to grips with how much I spend or how much I need? Could I make a list of any assets that I might have? Could I think about different ways to make money? Could I ask somebody to help me with that? Could I have a conversation with the bank? Could I potentially ask my partner something? Could I have conversations with friends? So when we are in a calm, regulated state, we might have different ideas about what we could do to start untangling or unpicking or surfacing any choices that we have around finances. This is something that comes up again and again in the work that I do. Because money is so linked to stress, it's so linked to baseline wellness.
And it's something we don't often talk about in that regard of the opportunity and the choice that it gives us in both professional and personal capacity. So sending you lots of love, lots of deep breaths and lots of grace as you turn towards this big topic in your own life.
Because then as seen as you're telling him what to do, going back to the beginning, when you think about doing this differently, you'd say from the beginning, I would have different boundaries.
I would say, no, I'm not going to do that. It's a plain sight. I'm not going to pay that whole thing of my side to do. It's almost laying a different foundation along the way. The situation that I'd managed to get myself into. And he turned around and said, well, you know, you were paying rent to that place.
You could just pay me rent. I should have and I said, well, actually, are we living together or is this a share? Then he was like, well, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I just let it slide because I just thought I can't be arguing about this.
But if I was going to give advice to anybody, argue it and argue it early, stand your financial position in a relationship early, because unpicking it later is an absolute nightmare. I actually stopped paying him rent. Well, I tried to have the conversation about the rent thing saying, look, I stopped paying him rent when I opened the factory, because the factory sooner than I opened the factory, which was five years ago, just like, there was no more money.
This thing has costed me an absolute frickin fortune to set up. I'm borrowing money. I have my property in the UK.
There is, you know, and he has a very, very, and I know where it comes from. He has a very individualistic, his whole life mantra is individualism. And he bases everything on that.
So †hat is what matters to him? His rights. He's not. I think there's two, there's different kind of people.
And I see the rise of individualism more and more and more. And I don't know if it's a social social media thing that's making that become more apparent. But I see people becoming more entrenched in the individualism rather than a social cohesion thing.
Does that make sense? A collective? And I think for harmonious life, you need to live, you need to live in a collective. You want to live with other people. You have to, you have to have a collective attitude, not one of individualism, where it's my money. And I'll do this. And I'm happy to give you money for food. But that money is a hundred percent not seen as our money.
Whereas hilariously, when I was the one that had money, and he didn't have money, which is actually the situation when we first got together. It was our money. You know, it just wasn't wasn't really a thing.
So when you think about being in the situation where you're saying, look, I would do it quite differently. You know, they're the things that feel really challenging, they're things that feel really tough. What are you most proud of in most pride in holding these and being?
The place that I despise being the most at the moment, isn't that bizarre? I'm actually really, really proud of the business I've built. I'm an incredibly proud of the business that I've built because we have gone through three absolutely horrific years of business. And when I sit and I watch other small producers, shut their doors and shut their businesses because they simply can't do two years of COVID and an entire year where the government were trying to seize all of my food, we're still here.
And I've got the strategy in place. I've got the equipment in place. And I feel as though I've done all of the hard work that is actually now going to be successful.
It's the first time in five years that I can actually turn around and say, yeah, I actually really think this is going to be successful now. If you asked me six months ago, I would have had the same conversation of, if we're not breaking even, I'm closing it down. But I've actually extended my leads.
We're doing a bit better and I can see a light on the horizon. And the other thing, of course, the thing that I most proud of is I in the last four years have grown an absolutely amazing human being, despite being frazzled and despite being feeling the pressure and the guilt and I'm on should I be at work or should I be with him and what do I need? Because I cannot spend 24 seven with them because we don't gel if I spend 24 seven with them. And despite all of that and everybody, I love people complimenting me on my son, which they do.
Lots of people tell me what a lovely little boy I've raised. And I think business is a bit more personal. But I've created a really nice little kind human being.
So beautiful. Thanks for being so honest and for sharing so many different pieces of what's challenging and what's turned out okay, what's even turned out beautiful and I love all of that. Thank you so much, Lisa.
"No one is going to take your work seriously until you do"
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