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Pull up a seat at our table, where badass women from all walks of life—fashion, beauty, design, music, philanthropy, art, and more—come together to share honest stories, serve truths, and dig into the realities of modern womanhood.
Johanna Almstea...: Hello, everyone. It's your lucky day. It's time for a girl dinner with me. So coming to you live from back-to-school week, I wanted to take a minute and make a little dinner for myself. Tonight, my dinner's going to be more of like a real dinner than a girl dinner. I am going to make lemon corn pasta for myself. My lovely in-laws have a house upstate and brought down some of the last of the summer corn and it's sitting on my counter. And I decided that I want a creamy, lemony, cheesy, corny pasta. So that's what I'm going to make myself. And I think I'm going to have a glass of rose with that girl dinner, because I'm just holding on for the last little bits of summer, even though I'm wearing two sweaters currently because it's a little chilly here. So welcome to my girl dinner.
I wanted to talk to you guys today about seasons. I've mentioned this before on this podcast, that in the last few years, after having gone through some pretty difficult stuff, I have started to try to remind myself that life usually happens in seasons. It's always changing. It's not really ever going to stay the same. And so for the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, that it will evolve. And this is an actual change of real season, but also, I think it's a little bit of a change of season for a lot of people because if you're a parent, your kids are going back to school, probably. If you are a student, you are maybe going back to school. If you've been working and having summer hours and getting to do a bunch of fun stuff, and now maybe have to go back into the office. It just feels to me like a little bit of the grind starts back up around this time. And so I thought it would be kind of nice to make a couple resolutions.
I'm going to treat this as a little bit of a half new year. To be honest, this summer was a hard one for us. It's just been a lot. Nothing terrible has happened, don't worry. Thank you for your concern, if you're concerned. But no, we are renovating a house and I've been working a lot and my husband's been working a lot, and so we just didn't have a lot of downtime. We didn't have a lot of summer vibes as we usually like to try to do. And so I'm not feeling as rested and relaxed as I usually like to be at this time. But I can feel the grind starting, and the kids are back at school, and the schedules and the emails and the apps and the sports apps and the practices and the driving and all of that is ramping up. And as I'm saying these words, my stomach is starting to hurt. I'm getting a tightening in my diaphragm and things just start to feel a little bit more intense.
So I thought it would be good to just take a little bit of time and reflect on the summer, and then make a couple little resolutions for moving into these next couple months, because we have these next couple months, and then it's the holidays, which is another time of stomach aches for me. And so I just thought it'd be good to talk about it and talk about some of the stuff that's hard, talk about some of the stuff that's great. And if this sounds boring to you, go ahead and fast-forward, and you can catch me on the next one. So welcome to my girl dinner.
So we are day two for me of kids being back in school, and it feels nice. It does feel good. It's bittersweet always for me, because I actually do sort of miss them being around, but I also really love having the time to work again and to be alone and to not be racing around doing things with them for the summer. So day two. I'm trying to remind myself, and part of doing this podcast is sometimes reminders to myself, about some of the things I learned this summer. And as I mentioned, we didn't have much downtime, we didn't have much of a chill summer. We're not in our house and we both worked a lot, and the kids were very, very busy with a lot of things that were not necessarily relaxing for the adults, so it was not the most restful.
But I did have a glorious week away in my happiest place in the world, thanks to my very good friend, Abby, who invited us. Actually, I'm pretty sure my child invited us, invited ourselves to her family's beach house. But either way, we went. Whether we were invited properly or we invited ourselves, unclear. Abby, you can clear that up for me. Either way, we were very, very grateful for the time that we had there.
And one of the things that happened at this time when we were there, this is a place that I grew up going as a kid, Abby's gone for many, many years with her family, and it's really just genuinely like my happiest place on earth. My shoulders relax. The tightening in my diaphragm goes away. I take deep breaths there. I feel at peace. I feel joyful, like actively joyful. Just walking down the street, my heart goes pitter-pat. And so we had some time there. And this year was the first year that my kids were kind of big enough to enjoy some of the freedoms that that place can give. And so my youngest learned to ride a bike, which was amazing because that's been a huge goal. One that I was not successful in helping her achieve when I was trying to teach it. But she did finally get this big girl bike and she finally got to ride and learn that, literally the day before we left. And then we got on vacation and she was able to ride around with the big kids, which was amazing.
But we had this moment where we realized, okay, our kids do have phones so we can track them and we can be in touch with them, and we are in a place that is incredibly safe, and we are in a place that, knock on wood, many bad things don't really happen and it's not very crowded and they can have a lot more freedom here than they can have at home in New York.
And so I guess it was one of the first nights, we had gone to a really, really early dinner in town and got back to the house, and the kids wanted to go bike riding. And we had this little lovely girl gang of girls. I was there with my friend and her daughter, and then another friend of ours was there with her daughter, and another friend of mine lives there and has two daughters, and then another good friend of ours from here was there and she has three daughters. Literally, all of us have daughters. So it was so cool because we would have these moments where we'd look over and there's 10 of them, just from ages, I guess the youngest is kindergarten and the eldest is seventh grade. So we had this girl gang that were running around town and running to the beach and getting to do stuff.
So anyway, there was a smaller contingent of that girl gang, and they said, "Can we go on a bike ride?" And my friend, Abby, and I looked at each other and thought, "Wait a minute, can they? They can." This is something that just can't happen where we live at home. The roads are too busy, it's just not really safe, there's not really anywhere for them to ride. And so we said, "Okay. You have to be back by 7:45, because that's when it's going to start to get dark. And take your phone and you're allowed to ride to this beach and back."
And so the three of them took off on their bikes and had this little adventure. And turned out they found money in one of the bags that they had and they bought themselves a lemonade, a blueberry lemonade and some chips. And they had this little moment and they had this little bit of freedom, which was so amazing, and which I remember as a kid having there, and I actually had it more in my actual real life too, not just my vacation life, because times were really different then. And we looked at each other, I said, "Did we just let our kids just go off and ride bikes with nobody?" And she was like, "Yeah, I think we did." I'm like, "Did we just give them a curfew?" She was like, "Yeah, I think we did." "Is this happening right now?"
And it was so beautiful because I didn't feel nervous, I didn't feel anxious. I knew that they were safe. I knew that they could figure out how to get home. I knew that they would just think this was the most amazing thing to have this amount of freedom and trust that we had in them to do the right thing.
So they made it back. They got back four minutes before their curfew, and we looked at each other and went, "Okay, this is a moment. This is a milestone. Our kids, they haven't been big enough to do this kind of stuff and we haven't been in a place that's conducive to it." And so that was, I think, one of the first or second nights of the vacation. And then the rest of the vacation was a lot of that, right? It was a lot of us sitting in restaurants with our kids sitting at another table all to themselves, and ordering their own dinners and having their own sort of experiences while we were just right around the corner at a table full of adults.
And it really, I saw something shift in my kids. I felt something shift in me of a little bit of detachment for the first time. They're big enough to do this, I don't need to hover, I don't need to worry. It's going to be okay if they don't eat enough or they order the wrong thing. I don't know, it was definitely a lesson in detachment for me. Maybe parents have been doing this forever, I just haven't. And in a lesson in just trusting them and giving them that space and watching them fill up that space with their own little personalities and their autonomy and their grace. It was very cute.
Actually, one evening, it was one of the last nights of our trip, and we had a really fun group of some other parents and older siblings that were not going to sit at the kids' table. And then the kids were sitting at a table in the restaurant, around a corner. And they were sort of at a high top, so they looked like they were hanging out in the bar. And we couldn't actually see them. And the server, who ended up being our server as well, and he came over and said, "I heard that those little people are with you." We said, "Yes." And I said, "Just let us know, obviously, if anything goes wrong," or please, they know what to do.
And we really didn't even hear from them the entire meal. And he came over at the end of the meal and said, "I just want you to know there's one other family that I've ever seen come to this restaurant, that their children are as well-behaved and organized." He's like, "They knew what they wanted to order. They understood what it meant to be in a restaurant. They understood timing." That they were polite and whatever. And I was like, "Holy crap. That's one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten in my life." He was very sweet.
But it was this moment of allowing some space, and as a parent, allowing some space and giving us a minute to breathe and giving them a minute to breathe. So, even though we're not on vacation anymore and they can't ride their bike to the beach where we live, that's my first little bit love lesson is that I'm going to try to remember to give them space and give myself space to be the best version of ourselves, right? We don't need to hover. We don't need to tell them what to do all the time. We have to trust that we've raised good humans and that they're going to make some good decisions or they're going to mess it up, but it's going to be okay, right? It's just going to be okay. So that's my September New Year's resolution number one, is to just give everything a little bit of space.
The other thing that happened on that trip was a whole lot of ease. It was very easy to stay in someone else's house, to be a guest, which was lovely. And again, I'm very grateful for being invited to be a guest in someone else's house. As someone who hosts a lot and has a lot of people in my house all the time, it was really nice to not be the person doing that for a little bit. So I recommend that, be a guest sometimes. And we really just decided every day our biggest decision was... Actually, my host, Abby, had already decided where we were going to eat dinner. She had gone ahead and made dinner reservations for everyone for most of the nights. Or we had a rough plan of where we were going to go for dinner, and that was kind of set. And then we kind of just built our day around what we felt like and the weather, depending on the waves and how big they were going to be at which beach, and where we could go. And it felt so nice to not be structured at all.
I'm also a very lazy vacationer. I am not really like a tourist. I don't like to do many things. Surprise, surprise, I like to eat good food. I like to have drinks, cocktails, nice wine. I like to see my friends. I like to sit around a table. I don't really want to see lots of sights. And so even when I go to Europe, most of the time I go to Europe and I hang out with my friends, I don't go and see all the things. I hope to see them sometimes, and sometimes I'll do one, but especially for my kids, it's more important for me that my kids absorb the lifestyle of where we are, less than the sights to be seen. My hope is that they'll go see those sights when they're older, but I don't know how many old churches can kids look at.
So that's sort of always been my philosophy. But anyway, on this trip, it was so nice because, between all of us, we had, like I said, we had probably four or five houses of people doing different things and everyone had different schedules. And we would just decide basically, where are we going to meet up and where are we going to eat lunch? How are we going to feed ourselves? And that was lovely. And our lives definitely are so, so, so, so structured when we're home and so busy, that it was really, really, really nice to just feel that ease in my body. Even just saying that word is making my body relax. So I think that for me also is I'm going to try to, even though my kids are already over-scheduled and I am already over-scheduled for the season, I'm going to try to find moments of ease and space during these times.
It was really sad because I came back and literally the night I got home, I had really tried to disconnect. I didn't record any podcasts. I barely looked any emails. I barely looked at my phone. My kids didn't look at any devices hardly the whole time they were there. Like I said, we were riding bikes and jumping waves and eating good food. And I got back and started to try to deal with my inbox and the travel sports and the 17,000 emails that come just to get your kid to school and the different activities and the different pickup times and the different sports apps that you have to put on your phone in order to be able to track the different teams that everyone's going on.
I'm like, first of all, people, million-dollar idea, someone fucking invent something that aggregates all these sports apps, please. Someone, just one app. Make it like Google, but for apps or whatever. Uber, I don't know, but fucking figure it out. Because I have two children and I think I have seven apps on my phone that all are to do with sports and scheduling and information. Come on, guys, somebody who is techie, I am not techie, but somebody do better, please.
But I could feel my diaphragm constrict. I could feel my brain start to explode. I could feel my breathing get shallow. I could feel it all. And it was instantaneous the second I got back on my phone and got back on my laptop, and started to have to manage it. And it made me angry. I got angry and I got sad. I got sad for my kids, because I had just witnessed this freedom and this ease and this luxurious amount of time that they had to play. They just played. They just goofed around and played, and jumped waves and buried each other in the sand. And it just felt so restorative and good.
And then the minute I got back, I started to just feel like, oh, God. And it makes me sad because, of course, no one is forcing us to do this. I don't want anyone to think that I feel... But this is part of the world now. This is part of, at least particularly in the place where I live, if your kids want to play a sport, even if they only want to play the sport that's at the school, all the other kids who are playing that sport are playing that sport year-round, because they're joining club teams and travel teams. And then those travel teams are practicing over the summer. And then now the school sports are starting two weeks before summer vacation is even over, so summer vacation is over for those kids who want to play.
And it just to me feels like too much. What are we doing, guys? I mean, really, is your kid going to play soccer in college? And then what, if you play soccer in college, where? Is your daughter going to go to the Olympics for gymnastics? Come on, it's not that serious. It's okay to let them just play. Let them play a sport, let them suck at it, let them be good at it. Not everybody has to be gunning for a scholarship and training for the goddamn Olympics. It is insane to me that seven-year-olds and nine-year-olds are on travel sports teams, on teams that none of them are particularly gifted. We're not talking like Michael Jordan and David Beckham. We're not. We're talking about kids who are good at sports. So that makes me crazy.
And I would just like everybody to take a minute and think about it. Why? Why are we doing this? The answer I keep getting is, "I want to just provide every opportunity for them." What do you mean? What, one in like whatever. I need the statistics. Somebody who knows more about this I'm sure will yell at me in social media. But what's the statistic of kids who actually go to college to play a sport? And then is that a good experience or is it a bad experience?
I have a friend who was a, I don't even know if it was division one, but he played two sports in college. And upon reflection in his 40s, he's like, "It sucked. I had no fun in college, I trained all the time." And there's other ways to get scholarships, people. There's other ways to get grants. What is it? I don't understand it. It makes me feel crazy and it makes me really frustrated, because my kids are good at sports. They're not extraordinary at most of the school sports that they play. They're good, they're athletic. Okay, they're fast, they're fine. I'm not sending them to the Olympics.
But there's this pressure and this expectation that if you're going to participate in a sport, you participate in it fully, which is at great expense, number one, financially. It's at a great expense to the family's time. You're traveling to places that are very strange, not always places you want to go. They're super long days on the kids and on the parents. Long weekends. I mean, it's really a lot. And I just don't know why we're doing it. I understand there are exceptions and I understand that there are kids who are extraordinary and super passionate about a sport. I have a child who is that about one sport that she does, and so we do our best to foster as much as we can with that. But that's about it, guys. We don't all need to be doing this.
So I don't know if this is a resolution or just a rant, but I'm trying to take into this season at least a little bit of like, who cares? Does your kid need to play division one lacrosse? Really? What happens then? I don't know. Tell me. Someone tell me. So I'm trying to just maybe have those conversations and level-set at what we need to be providing for our children. And I don't necessarily think that it's a whole bunch of structured, really intense competition. I don't think that that's it. I don't think that that's going to make the world a better place or make our kids better people. Maybe one or two, I don't think all of them need to do it. Okay, well, that wasn't really much of a resolution.
But my fourth, it always comes back to cooking and hosting for me almost all of the time. One of the things that I realized in this summer has been that we were not living in our house. And so the house that we're living in, I think I've mentioned this many times, if you guys are regular listeners, you're probably sick of hearing how crooked my stove is in my rental. But our rental is, I'm very grateful for it, we are happy to have a roof over our head, but it's not really a great kitchen to cook in. And literally, the stove is crooked, like it slopes down in the back. So whenever you try to saute anything, all the oil or butter or whatever it is, all goes to one side of the pan. Things burn on the other side of the pan. So it makes cooking, for those of us who really enjoy cooking, not as enjoyable and a little bit frustrating.
And I realized part of what made my summer feel not like a summer much was because we didn't host people at our house. We have a pool at our house and we love to cook, and we have a garden, and we have big appetites for fun and appetites for food and wine and all those things. And so a lot of our summers usually are having people over and not huge parties or anything, just like a few people come over. We're going to throw food on the grill, jump in the pool, hang out, listen to music, and have a drink and connect and talk and relax. And I really, really, really missed doing that this year. So this podcast has been a little bit of my way of getting that out of my system, which has been so lovely and I'm very grateful for.
But it did also just remind me that in this next season, which hopefully, by the end of the season, I will be back in my home with a brand newly renovated kitchen, so it'll be so exciting. So get ready for dinner invitations. But just as a reminder to find the ways to connect. Even if I'm not cooking big family dinners or hosting lots of people, to remind myself to sit down, eat a meal with people I love, eat a meal with my friends, laugh, make time for us, make time for ourselves, and make time for the space and the ease that so quickly disappears during this time of year.
I think that's all I have for today. I'm feeling a little tired, I have to say. Day one of school was a lot of adrenaline and a lot of getting ready for and a lot of excitement. And today I'm feeling like, whew, okay, I don't have a lot left in the tank today. So I hope if you're still listening, if you haven't turned this off, I hope this will be a reminder to you all to take a minute, give yourself some space. Give your kids some space. Give your partner some space. Give your team some space to do what they're good at. Give your parents some space to be crazy. Give each other some space. So that's number one.
Number two, give yourself some ease. Give yourself some softness around the rigidity of your schedules and your time and your responsibilities and all the activities and all the things. So try to find some ease. Try to soften those edges where you can.
And number three, I don't know, ask yourself why we're doing all the things, right? Make sure you have a good reason. Make sure it matters to you, it matters to your kid. Make sure it really matters. You're not just doing it because people say you should. Maybe I'm saying that more to myself.
Okay, well, that's all I got for today. Thank you, as always, for tuning in, for supporting me in this, guys. It's so crazy. People are so unbelievably nice and so unbelievably supportive. So thank you, thank you, thank you. And please let me know what else you want us to be talking about, who else you want us to be talking to. We have amazing guests lined up for this fall this season, so I'm really excited for you guys to get to meet them. And I think that's all I got for today. So breathe, give it some space, take a minute, have a good meal, connect with a friend, and I'll catch you on the next one.
This podcast has been created and directed by me, Johanna Almstead. Our producer is Sophy Drouin. Our audio editor is Isabel Robertson. And our brand manager is Mila Bujna.