Who’s Taking Care of the Women?

As women, we are so good at noticing. We notice what needs to be done, who needs support, who hasn’t had enough time for themselves, and how everyone around us is doing. But somewhere in all that noticing, we can forget that we need to be poured into too.

In this episode:

• Why our definition of fun grows up with us
• The magic of uninterrupted time with women
• Why being truly listened to feels so powerful
• Why friendship shouldn’t be something we squeeze in after everything else is done
• Why the same qualities that make women incredible can also drain us
• Wanting fun that you come home from feeling more like yourself
• Scheduling “time-ins” before you desperately need a break
• Why not everything enjoyable needs to become another wellness practice
• Why we need to stop silently rooting for women and start rooting for them out loud

Summit takeaway:

We are so good at creating connection, taking care of people, building community, and making life beautiful for everyone around us—but sometimes we forget that we’re supposed to experience the beautiful life we’re creating too.

If this episode resonated with you, send it to a woman you want to schedule a time-in with.

Continue the conversation on Instagram: @alannacrawford_

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Summit of Event, where science meets goal and you don't have to pick one or the other. Hi, I'm your host, Elena Crocker, osteopathic manual practitioner and viking after teacher. On the pod, we're talking about body wisdom, energy, intuition, and becoming an expert on your own feeling. Whether you're looking to find yourself again, create a new version, or see, just here for the results, you're in the right place. I'm here to demystify spiritual curiosities while adding a layer of humanness to the healthcare experience. No gatekeeping, no pedestals. This podcast is for the woman who is ready to take her power back. Let's do it. Hello everyone. Happy Wednesday! I hope everyone is having a wonderful week. This past weekend I had my sister-in-law's Bachelorette party in Perry Sound. To be honest, I was I was nervous about it. When you think about a Bachelorette party, I think we all go to the same place. Lots of drinking, late nights, hangovers, trying to rally. And I was really worried because that is so not the experience I wanted to have on my weekend off of parenting responsibilities. But I love my sister-in-law and would totally, I was gonna do whatever she wanted to do. My sister-in-law, both my sisters-in-law for that matter, the two of them are always the life of the party. And when I hang out with them, I tend to overreach on my fun limit and I end up suffering. But I was really looking forward to being in Muskoka. My body was craving lake and trees and breeze. So I figured no matter what happens, we're just gonna make the best of it. Um, and I know you're probably saying, Alano, just don't drink. And I would say, have you ever met my sister-in-law, Jen? Jen, if you're listening, I love you. I do also for the three of us, I think we're getting much better with age. Okay, we just have a lot of fun in each other's presence. Gets carried away. So today's episode is about how our definition of fun grows up with us and the power of female friendships. I actually, like when the weekend was over, I was having a hard time leaving on Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed the weekend so much. I felt so rested and recharged and full of joy. I wanted one more day there. And that was the opposite of how I thought I would feel headed into the weekend. I thought I would be rushing home, like clean up, get in the car, get out of there. So when Jen and I got in the car, I said to her, I have to write my podcast outline while I wait for you guys at the spa. Side note, they were going to uh Veta Spa on the way home. I was so jealous I couldn't join. Just with all my fertility stuff, I was foregoing like a hot, cold circuit situation. Uh, but she said, How about it's important to take scheduled time outs of life to spend with women? And my heart burst when she said that because we never talked about that concept over the weekend, but I know we all left feeling that same way. So I was like, Yes, that's it. Uh, because I think the older we get, the more that gets put on our plate, the more inevitable hardships we go through, because that just naturally happens, the more time we spend on this earth. Truly, the antidote to all the shit that gets thrown at you, both good and bad, is uninterrupted time with women. I want to paint a picture of this weekend because um, one, I planned the weekend and looking back, what was I so worried about? It was gonna be it was gonna be amazing. Um, so Friday, Jen and I drove up to the cottage. It was her maid of honors cottage, so she was already there. We get we get there about 1 p.m. and we tell Jen, just head down to the dock with a drink so we can set up some stuff. The theme was batched to the 90s. Jen is obsessed with all things 90s, so it was honestly a no-brainer. And I've only ever planned two bachelorettes in my life, but both of them were themed batched to the 90s. It just hits, okay? So if you ever have to plan a bachelorette, do this theme. It's amazing. So the Maid of Honor and I, we set up the decor, I get all these nostalgic 90s snacks. We have the chokers, the butterfly clips, the glasses, cute little cups that said, let's go, girls, because 90s country, hello, we cannot miss, you cannot miss 90s country as part of the genre. Then, without any direction, we all pitch in and throw together a charcuterie board, sandwich board, dips, like effortlessly moving around each other to get it all done and presented, music set up on the dock. Men could never, you know, and I know that we talked about it later, but I know when that was happening, everybody was thinking it. Men could never execute this without speaking so flawlessly. So we get down to the dock and we just jump right into a beautiful conversation. I don't know her maid of honor really at all, but in true female fashion, we just get right down to the real shit, you know? And sometimes I get self-conscious about that because I'm just not a surface level person. Hello, Leo, Sun, Scorpio, Moon, Scorpio rising. Okay. I want to know your hopes and your dreams, your life stresses. I don't care what you watch on TV. So I know that I can be a lot sometimes, and I get in my head about that, but it just worked. And right off the bat, there was really deep listening going on. And I think that as women, one of our biggest struggles is that we don't feel listened to, or we become the last priority of who gets listened to. And women just innately understand when you need to listen and when you can offer advice. I think it's like in a man's DNA to try to solve a problem. I know everyone listening can relate to a moment or many when you're telling your male partner something and they're just interjecting with a way to solve it. And they'll say, like, I don't understand why you're stressing about this, just do XYZ. And you get so angry because you're like, that's not the fucking point. Just let me be mad or sad or whatever it is. A woman always knows what version of her you need. And for the most, the most times it is truly to listen. And I think we can all relate to that. The cottage was on Crane Lake in Perry Sound. It's the most beautiful lake. You guys, I don't, I don't know what it is in this lake water, but I swear it's infused with magic. It was healing me. So we're chatting and we're eating, we're having a couple drinks, and her maid of honor says, like, we have to get in this water because it's so magical. Just trust me, it's gonna feel great. So we go in, and again, it's life-changing because this is just magic lake water, and she says, Oh, I know everyone here loves exercise, so why don't we just swim across the island, like across the way? And I was so jazzed because I hadn't really moved my body all week and I was feeling very off. I had I had an insanely stressful week. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Let's let that live in the past. So then we just naturally take this little workout break, and it was so lovely. And then the evening, we played one of those games where the groom answers questions about the bride, and you have to guess his answers. You guys, I think we played this game for over three hours, and it was only 20 questions. But we went on all these side quests that came out of answering these questions, and it just had us howling. Like I had to hold my face because my cheeks hurt so badly from laughing. Mind you, I did have a very, very small bite of an edible, which I never do. But regardless, I think edible or not, we were all crying for hours. I woke up and my cheeks still hurt the next morning. And I think the difference was we weren't on a schedule. We weren't rushed, we didn't have like one eye on our kid, one ear on a conversation, no phone alerts were going off because there really was no reception. We were just present and on no timeline and truly able to just immerse ourselves in conversation. So when I was falling asleep that night, I was almost sad because I was wondering, when will I get to do this again? And while I was lying there thinking, when am I gonna get to do this again? I had this other thought that actually kind of made me angry. Who is checking whether the women are having enough fun? Like genuinely. Because I do this for my husband all the time. I notice when Jay hasn't seen his friends enough. I notice when he's working too much, I notice when he's getting burnt out. I was encouraging him to add football. So he already plays hockey once a weeknight. And that's tough for me because I do every single morning, and he does a little bit of the evening until I'm done work because I work later because I do the morning. So I said, you know what? I think you need to join this flag football team. So that would add another evening night and then Sunday mornings. But I said, like, you need something that has absolutely nothing to do with work or being a dad or being a husband. You need to be a guy with the guys for a few hours. And I want to say, like, I don't resent doing that. I do truly want that for him. I really do. It's important, it's it's honestly changed our dynamic, it's made everything better. But sitting at this cottage, I suddenly thought, who's doing that for me? And I don't even mean Jay specifically, I mean culturally. Who's watching the women? Because I think women are really fucking good at noticing. We notice when the groceries are getting low, we notice somebody's birthday's coming up, we notice the kids need new shoes, we notice our parents or partners seem stressed, or our parents seem stressed, we notice our friend hasn't been herself lately, we notice somebody at work who needs support. We can read the emotional temperament of a room. We're constantly scanning the people we love and the people we surround ourselves with, and we're asking, what does everyone need? But how often does somebody look at a woman doing all of that and and all of that noticing and go, hey, when was the last time you had fun? And I don't mean when was the last time you exercised, I don't mean when did you watch a show while you're answering emails or making the family calendar schedule? Not when you went to Costco by yourself and called it me time, uh, not did something that was technically self-care but had no outcome attached to it. When was the last time you laughed so hard your face hurt? When was the last time you sat with your friends for three hours and completely lost track of time? When was the last time nobody needed anything from you? And as I am kind of digesting these thoughts, I realize I have been waiting for those moments to happen organically in my life. The thoughts of like eventually there's gonna be a weekend where nobody needs me, work isn't busy, there's nothing going on at home, everybody's schedules line up. Magically, I'll have this giant opening in my life, and friendship and fun can come in there. And you realize, guys, that day is not coming. You have to put it there. I have to put it there. And I think that's what Jen meant when she said scheduled timeouts from life. And we're not taking a timeout because we hate our lives or we're trying to escape our families. But we the things that fill us up deserve a place on the calendar before we're running on empty or before we have that need, like I need to get the hell away from here. And I think this weekend made me realize that I've been treating my friendships and fun like rewards. Like once I've taken care of everything else, then then I had can put this on the schedule. Or, you know, my time's really busy with work or pursuing um, you know, like continuing education. I don't want to take time off to like then fill up my social cup. I only get so much time, you know. Maybe friendship is one of those things that makes the rest of life sustainable. And I have not been viewing it like that or seeing it that way, and I think it really viscerally sunk in for me this weekend. So back to the bachelorette. The next morning was honestly what dreams are made of. We all took our tear coffee down to the dock. We read our books for fun. I wasn't learning anything. Well, I guess a little bit, it's political, but it was for fun. Then we did a group workout on the dock, and we ran stairs, and I would pay big money to have a Saturday morning like that. And again, it hit me. Like, this isn't that big of a thing. Yes, it feels in this moment monumental to be doing it because I don't have it in my life currently, but it was such a wake-up call that my life is just missing moments for me, and moments that are not about productivity or achieving something, just honestly putting pause on my life and doing things just for the sake of how they make me feel and not what I think I will produce from them. Lastly, and this was the cherry on the cake, Jen's favorite playlist is called Divorced Dads. And I'd seen this reel on Instagram. I'm sure you guys might have seen it, where for a bachelorette, they all dressed up as barbecue dads. So essentially 90s-looking dads, and they surprised the bride. So, of course, when I saw this reel, earmarked it when Jen gets married, we're gonna do this. So I go to Value Village and I bought all of the outfits. I got wigs, glasses, mustaches, like the whole shebang, and we surprised her as 90s dads with her divorced dads playlist. It was epic. We were crying, crying, like actual, when I look at the pictures and the videos, there are tears streaming down our face from how hard we were laughing. It is the best money I have ever spent. So we become barbecue dads or divorce dads or whatever you want to call it, which sounds, this is gonna sound like a strange transition here, but stay with me. We're walking around this cottage with fucking mustaches and wigs on, standing with our bellies out, saying dumb stuff, fully embodying these men. And it was funny because there was something like weirdly cathartic about it. We got to like exaggerate all of these things that drive us insane about men, the way they stand, the shit they say, the things they somehow don't notice. And underneath all of that, all of the making fun of men, I had this realization. I would never trade being a woman. I love being a woman. I love how deeply women connect. I love that three women who barely know each other can somehow discuss our deepest fears an hour later. I love how women care for people. I love how women notice. I love that nobody had to say, like, okay, Elena, you make the charcuterie board, then clean this up, then you grab the drinks. We just moved around each other. Someone notices something that needs to be done and it gets done. If somebody needed to talk, we were there to listen. If somebody needed advice, we gave it when appropriate. Somebody needed to laugh and we were suddenly wearing fake mustaches, pretending to be somebody's dad at a barbecue. Like there is something so fucking magical about being a woman. And I think that that's also the conundrum of being a woman. Some of the exact qualities that make being a woman so beautiful are the qualities that can absolutely drain us if we don't protect them. Like our ability, our ability to care, to notice, to anticipate, to hold space, our ability to carry 700 billion things at once. Those are gifts. But a gift that is constantly being given away eventually gives the giver with nothing. And maybe that's why as women we feel so exhausted. It's not necessarily that we need to do our gifts less, that we need to care less or notice less or stop doing the things for people we love because we do like doing them. Or it's not like saying, okay, F this, I'm putting myself first from now on. I don't want that either or situation. I actually like those parts of being a woman. I think it's what makes us amazing. So I don't think the answer is to become less of who we are. I think we have to get better at making sure women are doing all of the pouring that that gets we do all of that pouring back into us that we do to others. And I think we have to, or for some of us, we have to remove the expectation that somebody's gonna do it for us and take initiative of doing it ourselves. And that was probably my biggest realization this weekend. No, nobody's stopping me from doing this. Nobody's stopping me from pouring into myself. Like if I said, Jay, I just need a day for me, he would be like, Oh my god, yes, babe, take it. Like he wouldn't stop me. It's just that he wouldn't tell me to do it out of compassion because he just wouldn't notice. I wasn't prioritizing it. I somehow decided that taking an entire weekend away to laugh with women was indulgent. Meanwhile, I come home feeling more like myself than I have in weeks. And that's the conundrum. We are so good at creating connection, taking care of people, building community, making this beautiful life around us, but somehow we forget that we're supposed to experience the beautiful life we're creating too. And maybe that's what fun looks like now. And this is what I meant at the beginning when I said our definition of fun grows up with us. Because we still drank this weekend. We had drinks, not like crazy amounts. I think I maybe had four drinks in one day, but nobody was trying to escape themselves. Like nobody was trying to get obliterated to make the weekend fun. The fun was already there. There was copious amounts of organic fun. And I think that's the difference for me now. I don't want fun that I have to recover from. I want fun that I come home and feel more like myself because I made this time to just experience fun and realize that's what I need to start scheduling. Not another wellness practice, not another thing I'm doing because it's good for my cortisol or my hormones or my nervous system, my productivity. Can we please stop making every enjoyable thing another fucking health intervention? Is it just me? I don't know, because that's what I feel like. Sometimes sitting on a dock with your girlfriends is as valuable because you're sitting on a dock with your girlfriends, and that's that's it. That's that's the wonderful part of it. That's enough. So I think my challenge for myself this week, and I will throw it out to you if this is hitting with you, is look at your calendar when you're not burnt out, when you don't desperately need a break. Just look at the calendar and say, where is the fun scheduled here? Where is the thing that serves absolutely no purpose other than making you happy to be alive? And if you haven't found that scheduled already on your calendar, I want you to go ahead and schedule that in. I'm doing it too. I almost think of instead of saying you're scheduling a time out, you're scheduling a time in. You're scheduling moments that remind us we're actually living in them. Time in. The point is not what you do, the point is deliberately stepping outside of the roles you would perform every day. And again, I'm just gonna say this here. It's probably more for me than it is for you, but your worth is not tied to your productivity. Also, before I wrap this up, can we can we talk about how good it feels to get a compliment from another woman? That is elite. There is something about another woman being like, you look amazing, or I see what you're doing and you're killing it. That just hits differently. I've actually been trying to really intentionally do this lately. If I'm scrolling on Instagram and I see a woman doing something, she looks amazing, she's starting something new, she's putting herself out there, she's going after something she wants, and my inner voice gives her a compliment. I'm going to use my outer voice and tell her. Because how many times do we think something lovely about another woman and we just keep it in our heads? Send it, say it, do it. And I don't mean this in like a fake women supporting women, everybody's amazing, toxic positivity kind of way. I mean when you genuinely think something nice about another woman, tell her. You have no idea what kind of day she's having. Maybe she's doubting the exact thing you just complimented her on. Maybe she almost didn't post it. Maybe she's wondering if anyone notices how hard she's working. And she just needs another woman to say, hey, I see you, girl. You're you're crushing it. Keep going. That costs us nothing. So, in keeping with the theme of women being fucking awesome, here's another challenge for you this week. Use your outer voice. Use that when your inner voice goes, use your outer voice and express it in whatever way you want to express it. And let's stop silently rooting for women. We're gonna root for them out loud. Okay? Okay, now I can wrap this up. What I'm taking away from this weekend, I need to schedule more time-ins. And it's not because I hate my life or I need to escape it. I actually think that's an important distinction. I freaking love my life, but I don't want to get so busy maintaining my life that I forget to participate in it, live it, be present, have joy. And I don't want friendship to be something I get to have when everything else is done. And that is huge for me because everything else is never going to be done. And we all know that. So why do we keep lying to ourselves? There won't always be a summer where you are the age that you are right now, sitting on a dock, healthy enough to swim across a lake, laughing until your face hurts, dressing up like divorced dads. The time is now. And I think sometimes we forget that. We think we'll make time later. The time is now, ladies, for so many reasons on so many levels. Being a woman is elite, period. Okay, that's it for me this week. Go call your girlfriends. I love you guys. I will talk to you next Wednesday. Bye bye.