Episode 393: The Horrors Persist But I Have My Little Crafts with Elinor Cleghorn

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Written By Forever 35 Podcast

Feminist cultural historian, researcher, and the author of A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, Elinor Cleghorn, joins the show to discuss how to understand women’s lives when history is written by men, the records of historical women fighting for the right to have choices, and what her vision of a radical future on mothering looks like.  

Photo credit: Lara Downie

Transcript

 

The transcript for this episode is AI generated.

Doree Shafrir (00:10):

Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.

Elise Hu (00:17):

And I'm Elise Hu, and we're just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.

Doree Shafrir (00:21):

And today we have Elinor Cleghorn Cleghorn on the show.

Elise Hu (00:26):

A historian.

Doree Shafrir (00:27):

A British historian.

Elise Hu (00:29):

Yes. And we go thousands of years back with her. We'll have to speed it along so that we have enough time for the show because we can't talk about thousands of years of history, but ...

Doree Shafrir (00:39):

It's true. I mean, as someone who went to grad school for history, I do appreciate a long historical view.

Elise Hu (00:49):

But you won't be getting that today. Well, yes, you will get the wide lens.

Doree Shafrir (00:53):

Well, I mean, I just mean in her book.

Elise Hu (00:56):

Yes. Yes.

Doree Shafrir (00:57):

She goes way back, which is very interesting, I thought. And also, we talked about this a little bit in the interview, but how she sort of got sources for her chapters on stuff that happened 2000 years ago about women. There weren't a ton of sources lying around.

Elise Hu (01:20):

Exactly. They just didn't keep track of us because we didn't matter. There just weren't sources on women. Because it was like, these people are incidental. They just bear the babies. Whatever.

Doree Shafrir (01:33):

Whatever. If they die in childbirth, no big deal. There

Elise Hu (01:40):

Will be another one. It's a fungible, yeah, fungible asset. Anyway, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Are you taking care of yourself?

Doree Shafrir (01:52):

I was feeling kind of off the last few days. And then I was like, oh, was this from the time change?

Elise Hu (02:00):

Could it be?

Doree Shafrir (02:01):

Maybe. That's the only thing I could think of. I was just like ... I don't know. I just felt sort of off. It did feel like my circadian rhythm was off.

Elise Hu (02:12):

It could affect you. I mean, they say it affects kids, right? It really messes up kids sometimes, little kids. So I don't know. Yeah. I mean, if so, hopefully you'll be back to normal just in a couple of days or you will have adjusted in a

Doree Shafrir (02:26):

Couple days, right? I am feeling more normal today.

Elise Hu (02:30):

Yeah.

Doree Shafrir (02:30):

So I think that that is like ... I'm getting over the hump, but- Good. Do you want to talk about how you've been feeling?

Elise Hu (02:38):

Oh, I'm feeling bad. I'm feeling so bad because I reliably get a 90 plus on my sleep scores and sleep a good seven and a half to eight and a half hours a night. I'm a great sleeper. And for the last four nights, I've gotten 60% sleep scores and five hours at best because when I lay my head down to my pillow at night, it triggers coughing so severe that I wind up having a full-on asthma attack and cannot breathe. It's very scary.

Doree Shafrir (03:14):

That is really scary.

Elise Hu (03:16):

Yeah. And if I had food in my stomach at that hour, I would be vomiting. It's really intense and scary. And Rob, I think two nights ago was like, "I'm not doing this. I'm not sleeping in the same bed as you because you're ruining my sleep." And I'm like, "I'm ruining my sleep. My sleep is also ruined." Oh, wow. And so I finally went to see the doctor this week and she was like, "Yeah, ruled everything out. " She's like, "This isn't whooping cough, so you don't have a bacterial infection. It's not pertussis," which is whooping cough. It's not flu, it's not COVID. It doesn't sound like bronchitis because it's not a productive cough. So there's not a bunch of- Oh, just dry cough. Yeah. Which is worse actually because I'm just wheezing. And so she's like, "You'd have some sort of viral respiratory infection, just some sort of one."

Doree Shafrir (04:11):

Fun.

Elise Hu (04:12):

And it's triggering your asthma, which I have allergy related asthma. So occasionally I need to use my inhaler. She's like, "You're going to have to use that every four hours or so just to breathe." It was really funny. Because when she was having me take deep breaths, and she had the stethoscope on me, she was like, "No, take deep breaths." And I was like, "I am." She's like, "No,

Doree Shafrir (04:35):

Breathe." Oh no, it was

Elise Hu (04:37):

That

Doree Shafrir (04:37):

Bad. I was

Elise Hu (04:37):

Like, "I'm breathing." She's like, "You're taking such shallow breaths." I was like, "I'm doing my best here." Yeah. So anyway, I'm not getting enough sleep and then I'm not getting enough oxygen, I think. So I'm kind of just dizzy. Oh

Elinor Cleghorn (04:57):

Man.

Elise Hu (04:58):

Besides that, everything's great. My nanny had a dog bite. My ex- husband is- How is she doing? Sick also. It got swollen. It swelled a little bit. So we insisted on taking her to the urgent care. And I'm so glad we did because the doctor there was like, "This is in the early stages of infection, so we can knock that out real quick with amoxicillin or some sort of antibiotic." And I'm so glad. And then the guy, thankfully, the dog owner did pay for it.

Doree Shafrir (05:32):

Good.

Elise Hu (05:33):

Because

Doree Shafrir (05:34):

It was out of pocket expenses.

Elise Hu (05:35):

Yeah. And we were like, "I don't know. Do we go over there? Ah." And Rob's like, "I'm just going to text him." And then this morning he was like, "Okay, I got reimbursed." It was just nothing. And then I had stressed out about it like, "I don't want to ask anybody for money."

Doree Shafrir (05:48):

As someone who has been bitten by a dog twice, different dogs, years apart. You just want to see a doctor about that. Yeah, it's not something to kind of mess around with. It seems

Elise Hu (06:02):

Kind of deep.

Doree Shafrir (06:03):

Yeah. Yeah.

Elise Hu (06:05):

We're glad that

Doree Shafrir (06:05):

She's

Elise Hu (06:06):

All fixed up.

Doree Shafrir (06:07):

I'm glad she is fixed up and I hope she feels totally better soon. All right. Well, let's get to our guest, Elinor Cleghorn Cleghorn, who is a feminist cultural historian, writer and researcher living in Sussex. She got her PhD in humanities and cultural studies in 2012 and her writing on women's health and its histories has been published in The Wall Street Journal, BBC History, BBC Science Focus, et cetera, et cetera. Her first book was Unwell Women, and her new book is A Women's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering. And just quickly before we get to Elinor Cleghorn, just a reminder that our website is forever35podcast.com. We have links there to everything we mentioned on the show. Our Instagram is Forever35 podcast. You can join our Patreon at patreon.com/Forever35 for bonus content, including video, casual chats, ad free episodes, monthly pop culture recommendation episodes, our newsletter, and so much more.

(07:12)
And that's at patreon.com/forever35. Call or text us at 781-591-0390 and email us at Forever35podcast@gmail.com. And here is Elinor Cleghorn, welcome to Forever35. We are so excited to have you on this show.

Elinor Cleghorn (07:32):

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Doree Shafrir (07:35):

You are about to launch a book, which is not a period of time historically known for people's self-care. So I'm wondering what you are doing right now to take care of yourself.

Elinor Cleghorn (07:48):

Okay. So I don't know if you guys have seen this meme that does the rounds that's like a little creature and it says, "The horrors persist, but I have my little crafts."

Elise Hu (07:57):

Yes, I have-

Elinor Cleghorn (07:58):

I am the little creature and I have my little crafts. So anything I can do at the moment that's making a little thing that's kind of low steaks, be that a biscuit, a pie, a little bit. The thing that I really like to do is crochet. And I kind of come back to this at points in my life because it's just got this beautiful kind of repetition to it. And anything analog where you've got a lovely little thing at the end of it, or you're in the process towards making something lovely, like a little nexcarf or a beautiful salad. I don't know. It's just for the love of making or doing it or having it rather than ... Because my career depends on it, which is the kind of antidote, I think, to the anxiety that can come with a press cycle and a publication, eminent publication on a book.

(08:52)
Yeah.

Elise Hu (08:53):

I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but have you tried needle felting?

Elinor Cleghorn (08:57):

I've tried it once or twice. I did it a couple often. It's so fun because of the stabbing. The stabbing. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the fact that what you end up with is so unbelievably cute, but then you're kind of stupid in order to make it, you've got to worry about that. Stab your way there. You've stabbed your way there. Yeah, it's amazing. I feel like maybe I need to add to the repertoire of little crafts, get back into needle felting, for sure.

Elise Hu (09:21):

Love that.

Doree Shafrir (09:22):

So we're just going to take a short break and we will be right back.

Elise Hu (09:34):

We are here to talk about your new book, A Woman's Work: Reclaiming The Radical History of Mothering. Tell us about the origin of this project.

Elinor Cleghorn (09:44):

So this book is my second book. My first was called Unwell Women, and it was a history really of medical misogyny. So a history, 2000 history of the ways that women have been oppressed, mistreated, misdiagnosed, mystified by the male dominated medical establishment. Now, while I was writing, researching that book, so often women's illnesses, women's health conditions, just their kind of states and conditions of life tend to be always indexed back to their reproductive function, like our assumed basic function as reproducers as mothers. So while I was working on this book, Unwell Women, I was also really interested in all these kind of messages and narratives around women's reproductive bodies, but also around women's reproductive function in society. I really thought I want to go back to the history of women like I did with Unwell Women. So big sweeping look at our history and women's place in history, but look at it this time through the experiences of mothers and through these sort of overarching narratives around motherhood that have evolved over the course of the centuries.

(11:05)
So like Unwell Women, I begin quite early. So this book, Women's Work, begins in the ninth century BCE, and then kind of a journey all the way to the present. And what I'm really interested in in this book is showing that motherhood is this sort of, it's been this kind of organizing principle in women's lives, and it's so often been seen as the state that exempts women from the world. Women are mothers first, therefore they can't work. Women and mothers have to be mothers, therefore they can't be political agents. They can't participate in their societies. What else has that meant? So as well as looking a bit like I did in Unwell Women at some patriarchal, like the construction of patriarchal ideas about women's bodies and social roles, I also wanted to look again at what mothering and motherhood has meant over the centuries. So what have men who've been in power told women to do by virtue of their mothering status, but also what have women and people who mothered achieved within those roles?

(12:15)
What's caregiving? What's mothering? What has maternity contributed to culture, to politics, to society? So yeah, it's a kind of journey through motherhood as a practice that's made the world. Mothers make the history and without mothers, there wouldn't be any history, and yet mothering is seen as this just commonplace, everyday ordinary activity that just gets done.

Doree Shafrir (12:43):

As you point out, history has generally been written by men. And so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what the research process for this book was like. I mean, how did you go back to the ninth century BC and explore mothering then and through the centuries?

Elinor Cleghorn (13:05):

It's a great question because you're right, history has been written by men. Men for many centuries have had access to literacy and education where women have very often been denied that. Men are the ones who've had the privilege of being able to write about their lives and also to record what is important about what's going on in the world. So we have this perception of history as being the wars, the invasion- About wars. Yeah. Battles, the kings, the great dynasties of men. What women were expected to do every day, raising the children of men, bearing the children of men was not of interest in traditional kind of historytelling. You have this kind of lack of evidence, as you said, Doree, because women weren't able to write their stories and write about their experiences in the way that men were. And then the question of what gets preserved, what material is even important and what gets archived, what gets saved in libraries, what stories get told again and again.

(14:16)
So it's always really important to me to, as far as I can, tell women's history through women's own voices.

Elise Hu (14:25):

Yeah. So how'd you do it?

Elinor Cleghorn (14:26):

Well, I mean, I went back. The reason I started in the ninth century BCE was because I was reading this museum, or do you even call it like a catalog of an exhibition that was in the Haraklian Museum of Archeology in Creek. And it was about this cave in Southern Crete where archeologists in the '70s had kind of done this huge dig and they'd found all these incredible objects like jewelry, axeheads, but also kind of handmade, votive, little beautiful objects. And there are a number of objects found in this cave that represented childbirth or pregnancy or things to do with childcare, like little tiny clay, swaddled babies, beautiful things like this that were thought to be handmade many, many, many centuries ago. And this site was known to be a part of Creek where ancient goddess of childbirth was honored. And there was this little model they found in that dig that was a boat, tiny little boat, and it had a clay model that resembles a little tiny fetus inside the boat.

(15:41)
Wow. And these little sailors that were female, so one has got one of her breasts bed and her arm up, really kind of defiant and powerful, but it's just this tiny handmade object. And I just became really obsessed with this because we don't know its purpose. Intended purpose can't be known for sure, but we can tell that there's a kind of culture around this. Women in the ninth century BC on Crete are making these little models because they want to protect themselves in childbirth or because they want to give thanks if they've survived and their baby is healthy. And it just was extraordinary to me. It's such a strange thing, a little shit with a growing baby inside. And then from that, you think, well, this object is going to tell me a story.

(16:38)
This one was sort of poignant enough that it felt like it held a story that was somewhere to begin. So I kind of worked on that principle. I found the stories that are available to me through which kind of wider stories could be told. So for example, going forward in time a bit, I've got a chapter in the book about the treatment of unmarried mothers in London in the 17th century. So the way that these women who got pregnant out of wedlock was stigmatized the way they were treated by their societies and by the law. So for that, I found the stories through the old Bailey, which was the courts of law, through the archives of the court testimonies, the hearings. And you'll get these little snapshots, tiny, tiny glimpses into who a woman was and what her situation might have been. So you might hear that she had had a baby or that she'd abandoned the ... You get these kind of hurrying stories, but from that, you begin to think, well, what was her life like?

(17:48)
What were her circumstances like? And even though that's not a woman's own voice, it was a really crucial insight into what the kind of real life experiences of many, many thousands of women were.

Elise Hu (18:01):

We're talking about this wide expanse of time. And you mentioned obviously these testimonies in the 17th century coming from these women being in trouble, being in trouble with the law because they were unwed. And so I'm curious what you feel in your research has really defined what motherhood should mean. Has it been governments and legal systems? Has it been norms? Has it been religion? And if there's anything overarching there that you found in the sweep of time.

Elinor Cleghorn (18:34):

Yeah, I think it's been a real combination of all those factors, those kind of systems of power that over centuries have conspired to control people's lives and especially women's lives. So if you think we've lived, at least in our western part of the world, our global north under patriarchy, four centuries. And the patriarchy is upheld. It's not just an ideology, male supremacy that underpins it is upheld by, as you say, at least by the law, by all those systems that are still dominated by male power. So the law, religion, societal norms and customs and culture as well. So writing, art, all of those systems have sort of reinforced this idea that women exist to give birth, they exist to raise children, but they have to do that under certain conditions. So being married to a man who has power over them, raising their children within a marital family, these are all also kind of ideas and laws, ideas that have turned into laws that have really issued this kind of set of controlling circumstances around what the best way is to mother or the right way is to be a mother.

(20:00)
And one of the things that has struck me that I think is really consistent still today is that women bear all the responsibility for pregnancy and birth. It happens to us, and yet so much of it has been out of our control.

Elise Hu (20:16):

What do you mean by that? Which parts?

Elinor Cleghorn (20:17):

What I mean is, for example, it's been really difficult for women to mother historically, not so much now, but historically to mother as on their own, to mother and queer partnerships, to mother in different kind of kinship networks and families that aren't this kind of traditional marital nuclear family. If women have in the past transgressed sexual codes, like for example, getting pregnant out of wedlock, as they used to call it, or women who haven't got the kind of economic security of a male partner or from their own women who are in economically precarious situations as well. So I think what I'm trying to say is unless women have conformed to these kind of male patriarchally dictated sets of circumstances around reproduction and mothering, it's been really difficult to mother in a way that is right or safe or secure outside of those kind of conditions of marriage and nuclear family.

Elise Hu (21:26):

Oh, boy. Well, it's only ... I mean, and I say that, I guess the natural follow-up question is like, what do we do about it? Because we are in this time, especially in the United States where there's a real reemphasis on traditional marriage and traditional nuclear families, even after women had made gains in the '70s and '80s and getting to be able to buy our own homes, for example.

Elinor Cleghorn (21:55):

Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things I think that I'm always interested in trying to communicate, and that's that as women, our rights, if our rights have been hard won, they're always precarious and we have to keep fighting for them. It's such hard work and it keeps us working and it keeps us and it's exhausting to keep when we've made gains, to keep return, knowing that all this stuff is still so present, this old stuff, these old ideas, these old fallacies about what women are and what men are and what our bodies are for are still with us. And it does seem like when you suddenly like, "Oh boy, yeah, it does feel like that. " And when we look at the way that rights around mothering and around reproduction are eroded and think really about what it is that is important to say the current administration in the US and the encroaching far right stuff that's happening over here in the UK as well, it's exactly the same rhetoric.

(22:59)
It's like, "Very hold my beer."

Elise Hu (23:03):

Yeah,

Elinor Cleghorn (23:03):

Control of women's body. Yeah.

(23:06)
And I look and I think from where I serve, from what I do as a historian or a communicator of history, I always think it's really important to revisit our history, not just because it tells us where all this stuff comes from, but it also tells us that we have resisted and made it through and created new worlds for ourselves. And I think when things feel bleak and things feel really difficult and the fight feels too much, to look back at history and say, even in the biggest ways and the smallest everyday ways, women and people who care for children, I think have found ways to survive and live their lives really beautifully and to, from their vantage point of mothering, even under really extreme states of oppression, have made change for themselves in their own lives and for others. And that's the kind of other part of the story that I wanted to tell too, was that mothering and reproduction, while it's definitely been a root of women's oppression over the centuries, and there are people working very hard to try and make that the case again, that mothering is, I think, a source of incredible power and incredible strength, and also of community and connection.

(24:26)
I think a lot of what we see happening politically is about isolation and the isolation of don't speak to each other, don't share. It's about isolating and silencing. That's a lot of that at work.

Elise Hu (24:42):

Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back. I would love to see a world in which it was not an imperative to bear children or to be a mother at all. And so I'm curious what your deep study of mothering and how it was defined and its history, how that connects with a world in which women are free to not mother at all if we don't want to.

Elinor Cleghorn (25:15):

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really, really interested equally in not just women's fight to be able to mother in the ways they want, but also women's fight for the right to not want to be mothers. And that's when over history, women are told from every conceivable mouthpiece that being a mother and having children is normal and healthy, and that if you don't want it, there's something fundamentally wrong with you or if that you can't, if you face fertility challenges and struggles that you're a broken or a failure. When this is so drummed in by medicine, by culture, by law, to actually stand up and say, "That's not what I want. " Or to explore all the ambivalence and all the questioning that comes with it, that it isn't just this sort of sacred, amazing thing that is natural, is written into us by virtue of our biology somehow.

(26:24)
Challenging that narrative is an important part of the history that I write as well. And we see a lot of this coming through in the 20th century with activists who were campaigning for things like birth control, sex education, reproductive healthcare, abortion services, like activists who were really, really campaigning for the kind of rights that were still-

Elise Hu (26:50):

Or choice. ...

Elinor Cleghorn (26:51):

Defending today, choice. Exactly. That's the point choice was so important to this because women's rights, I think since the beginnings of the sort of organized women's rights movement in the 19th century has always been about women striving for the right to be recognized as people first. And that means having the agency to choose what they do with their bodies and lives. And if that means not wanting it, that means changing your mind. If that means identifying as having no maternal feeling, just giving women the kind of permission to have those kind of thoughts, to express them and own them is such an important part, I think, of the history of women's rights. So while on the one hand, I want to look again, revisit what mothering is. Mothering is a really important part of social, cultural, political history. It's also not just about ... Women don't just come into their power by having children and mothering them.

(27:57)
They also do it by rejecting that. By creating another way is by having the lives that they want.

Elise Hu (28:05):

Of course.

Elinor Cleghorn (28:05):

Of course. And you mentioned kinship

Elise Hu (28:07):

Networks as well. So there's plenty of ways to be a parent or be an adult that matters to a child or the next generation without having given birth to them.

Elinor Cleghorn (28:20):

Completely.

Elise Hu (28:21):

I

Elinor Cleghorn (28:21):

Think that's really important. And I think the more we recognize that mothering as a practice is not something that's confined just to a primary biological parent or parents, the more we can think about how mothering can be possible for more people because it kind of opens up the ways in which it can be done. Is it something that you share with friends? I'm always often thinking about these kind of, what would it really look like if we could make this sort of future, if we could imagine a future in which mothering was this kind of practice that could be really done and supported outside of the kind of traditional nuclear family. And I often think mothering with friends or having different kinds of caregiving and re-imagining a family is really integral to that as well because we still have so much stigma around who gets to parent in the first place and what that looks like.

(29:27)
So I think that being able to opt out of biological parenting of the traditional kind of parent-child form of mothering and expanding out what mothering is a means and how significant it is to how we live and who we are is part of how I can imagine a positive and hopeful future. It's really integral to that, I think.

Elise Hu (29:52):

Okay. All right. I was going to ask you, you wrote the radical history of mothering. I'd love for you to Share your radical vision. And it sounds like you kind of did it. You painted that picture, a

Elinor Cleghorn (30:05):

World

Elise Hu (30:05):

In which there are many ways to mother.

Elinor Cleghorn (30:08):

Yeah, I think so. And I think that mothering is, I say it in the introduction, our culture for many, many centuries has tried to create this one norm of idealized motherhood. Who's a good mother? There's this really consistent idea. A good mother is a good wife who's a good domestic. She puts her own needs away. We see it now. We see this kind of thing really glorified. On our Mother's Day in the UK, there's still a lot of cards that are celebrating mom for all the sacrifices she makes behind the scenes. I think this whole thing that mothers toil away in the background and never ask for anything. And they're the sort of unsung angels. I think this is still with us very much.

Elise Hu (31:01):

My feminism is one in which I can parent like John Draper.

Elinor Cleghorn (31:06):

Not

Elise Hu (31:06):

Betty Draper. I want to be like Don Draper, not Betty. I want the freedom and the license.

Elinor Cleghorn (31:12):

Yeah. Come on mom Draper.

(31:16)
But no, this is right. But it's like mothering is also an incredibly complex experience for everyone who chooses to do it and however they do. And to be kind of laboring under all these illusions that it should be fulfilling, it should be automatically fulfilling, that it should be all you kind of need as a woman. I think this kind of stuff is still with us. It's really pervasive. These myths really, they really get in, they really stick. And mothering is not monolithic. And the more we can just consign all this idealized mother bullshit to the past, the more we can move forward. But it's not easy to do because these myths, these kind of old hat ideas, they serve. They serve people. They serve the kind of men in the kinds of power that want to control our lives in a certain way, right?

Doree Shafrir (32:14):

Yeah.

Elinor Cleghorn (32:15):

Yeah.

Doree Shafrir (32:15):

Well, Elinor Cleghorn, it was really, really great to get to talk to you about your fascinating new book. Yeah. Congratulations. It really is quite an achievement and I think will be really make a real impact on the way people think about the history of motherhood. So thank you.

Elinor Cleghorn (32:33):

Well, thank you so much for having me and thanks for your brilliant questions.

Doree Shafrir (32:38):

And where can our listeners find you?

Elinor Cleghorn (32:40):

I am currently on Instagram far too much, so come and find me over there. I'm @Elinor Cleghorn.

Elise Hu (32:47):

Okay, fantastic. Elinor Cleghorn, thank you.

Doree Shafrir (32:50):

Thank you.

Elinor Cleghorn (32:51):

Oh, thank you.

Doree Shafrir (32:56):

I do always love talking to our British guests because they often have very soothing voices.

Elise Hu (33:01):

Yes, yes. Eleanor, you can teach me stuff anytime.

Doree Shafrir (33:05):

Yeah, exactly. Well, let's go into the intention zone. Last week, my intention was just to have a good parental visit, and I'm happy to report that I did.

Elise Hu (33:20):

Oh, good. Good.

Doree Shafrir (33:22):

And this week, I want to keep cleaning the office zones.

Elise Hu (33:26):

Yes. Zone by zone.

Doree Shafrir (33:28):

Yeah. I can't remember if it was on a casual chat or mini app where I mentioned this, but Matt came up with a plan to clean my office that involves dividing it into six zones. And we did the first zone the other day. I sent a picture to Elise. It's very satisfying.

Elise Hu (33:45):

Yeah. It's impressive.

Doree Shafrir (33:48):

So just keep keeping that up. Elise, what about you?

Elise Hu (33:52):

My intention was to foam roll because I was exercising so much more after my tennis trip, my tennis retreat to the sensei. But then I stopped exercising because I fell ill. So I haven't really been foam rolling my body so much because I haven't been doing much with my body due to just being proned out most of the time trying to sleep. So my intention this week will be healing. I haven't been sick in a long time, knock on wood, until now. And so gosh, you really take your health for granted because when I'm not feeling well, I'm like, wow, I am not operating anywhere close to even 80 to 90%. And I need to. Man, I got too many kids and animals and jobs in order to be at sub 80. So just hoping for some more oxygen and healing. So send good vibes.

Doree Shafrir (34:46):

Okay. I'm sending all the good vibes.

Elise Hu (34:48):

Thank you.

Doree Shafrir (34:49):

All right, everyone. Forever35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir, Elise Hu, and produced and edited by Samee Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partner is Acast. Thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you soon.

Elise Hu (35:03):

Talk to you next time.

Doree Shafrir (35:04):

All right. Bye.

 
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