Full Episode Transcript

Ashley Blackington: 

Hello and welcome to the AND/BOTH podcast. My name is Dr. Ashley Blackington and I am excited to have you listening today. So today is our very first episode. It is something that I have been looking forward to doing, starting, stressing and planning about for a very long time. And it is something that has been kind of stopped and started a few times and… 

Considering that this is a podcast that is really aimed towards moms, you know what that means in terms of best laid plans- somebody gets sick, someone's home from school, someone, all of that. So finding a time to quietly record a podcast in the midst of having 4 young children has been an endeavor all on its own. But we are finally here, finally hit record, finally getting these episodes off the ground and putting this out into the world. So since this is the first episode, I wanted to just give you a little bit of background about me and kind of what the gist of it is gonna be here. 

So I am a mom, I have four kids. In my pre-mom life, I was a full-time inpatient occupational therapist. That is my background. I did it for a long time and loved it. I had a job that I really loved and I worked with some awesome therapists and the people that we had coming in were amazing and it's incredible to get a chance to help people do the things that they want to do. 

For those out in the world that don't aren't familiar with occupational therapy are we are part of the trifecta with PT and speech in the allied health world. And our superpower, I guess you can call it that, is to help people figure out how to do the things that they wanna do that are important to them and that motivate them after something has happened, or on the other end is learning how to do things that they wanna be able to do, adapting activities and so on.

Ashley Blackington (02:21)

So I'll give you some examples because the thing that Occupational Therapy does really well is help people. The thing that Occupational Therapy doesn't do very well is talk about Occupational Therapy. So I worked with mostly adults that were coming in and meeting an OT for the first time, 99% of the time the first thing that anybody says to you when you tell them that you are an OT is that they have a job. What we are talking about is the occupation of your daily life. The things that you get out of bed in the morning to do. And that can be as simple as learning how to get dressed to all the way up to like having a family and what that looks like post injury, post illness, current illness, all of that.

The OT does work across the lifespan. I did not ever get involved in pediatrics because quite honestly, I was scared of parents. And maybe that's kind of funny, but maybe it is kind of foreshadowing for later along. So anyways, I had this great job. I was a therapist. I helped people. I worked with people. I had a thing that I could talk about when I was out in the community and all of that. 

Then I had my first child. When I was pregnant I didn’t look for childcare because the math didn't math on how we were going to pay for childcare and bring home any sort of reasonable or meaningful income on top of that. I know that I'm not the only person, especially as a woman working in healthcare in this country that struggles with that. So the decision preemptively was made to not go back full time after my daughter was born, my oldest. And so at around 10 weeks, I called my boss and said that I was going to come back in in a per diem position.

Ashley Blackington (04:42)

So for a little while, you know, I had the week to spend with her. And then I still got a chance to do the thing that I really loved to do on the weekend. And then, you know, you have, I had more kids. So I had two years later, I had another child. Three years after that, I had another. And then at that point in time, my oldest had started kindergarten and we were really in a spot where it wasn't making a whole lot of sense to keep this schedule up. I was gone all weekend and my husband was gone all week. So we existed as this two ships passing in the night, without time to all do something together as a family. 

When I made the decision to leave full time and switch to per diem, I had also started my own business doing OT consulting at home. And that was great. So when I left the hospital, I transitioned into more time building that business.

It was another pivot and another transition. And the lovely thing about my career and my profession is that we can do a lot of pivoting and still be working within our scope and our training and all of that. So very cool, great job picking that career. I wanna say that I thought it all the way through, but I really did not. I just wanted to work with people doing the things that they cared about instead of just telling them what to do. 

And so… you know, it was this gradual progressive, like morphing into motherhood as the all-encompassing thing while also doing the thing that I liked to do. For me, that involved working and especially working for myself. But once I gave up the structured role inside my corporate job the boundaries became less and less rigid. As I stepped down in my career outside of our home, just gradually over time, that piece got smaller and smaller until...

Really the pandemic when I closed consulting. My consulting work involved helping people plan to age in their homes, which was very timely for the pandemic, not timely that I had a brand new baby. My husband was considered an essential service provider, so he was gone. He never stopped working in the pandemic.

Ashley Blackington (07:01)

He, you know, the world shut down on Friday and he went to work on Monday. Um, and so I was home with four kids. I had two kids in school. I had a preschooler and I had a brand new baby. So everything for those two and a half years, became about trying to keep the wheels on the bus in the madness that was 2020, 2021, and part of 2022. 

So, over time, there's this shrinking of self that happened with this increased role and responsibility of motherhood. And then when you combine that with the isolation of the pandemic was a tricky spot, we'll say that. And really for a long time, you know, one of the things that I clung to were podcasts and listening to podcasts - hearing stories from other people. 

And, you know, I never really got into the podcasts that were like the, you know, how to be a good mom and how to like do all the things right and fold the napkins and like all of that stuff. Because my desire was never to be fully engulfed in motherhood. My desire was to, be in a partnership and to be working together to raise our family and raise our kids and not give up this identity outside of that. 

Which, for those of you listening who have children are hopefully head nodding that that's really not the way that it's designed, right? Like you have, you're a kid and people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, and then you get to be older and then people ask you when you're going to get married and buy house and when you're going to have kids. And then people just sort of stop asking you- people stop asking you like how you are and what you're doing and what you're working on. And they just ask you how your kids are. And so you just become this like vehicle for childcare. It's really isolating. And it's hard because I think that a lot of us know that that's what's happening, but we sort of exist in these like silos where we can't really relate to one another, although we need to relate to one another.

Ashley Blackington (09:22)

And these stories, this is where all the weird social media pieces, I think, get weaved in there, where people talk about the highlight reels and you go online and everyone looks like they're doing it flawlessly. But you know that behind the camera, it's like a total dumpster fire of trying to get pictures taken. All of that stuff and it's just so polished. And that's just not, that's not the truth. And so I looked for podcasts that talked about that stuff. You know, I have, I launched Dovetail in the middle of the pandemic or the beginning of the pandemic really. And that was designed around helping people to organize and schedule and plan and do all of those things for their family and for themselves so that at the end of the day there was this space for you in the mix that it brings you to the table. 

I will forever be trying to wedge myself, me as an individual and as a person into the conversation and the planning and the things like that, because it's so easy to just assume that the way it's always been is the way it's always going to be. And this is, this is what you do. Like when you're being a good mom, you just like exist for others. And at the end of the day, you know, every, uh, every kid that I've had that's gone through kindergarten reads the book about, you know, filling, filling buckets and emptying buckets. And, if your bucket is empty, you can't fill another. 

So that's why I think it's important that we always make sure that we keep track of our own bucket. And so with the creation of Dovetail, because that sort of all ties into this, I mean, all of this stuff is connected, is that I wanted tools that I could use so that I didn't have to be the one that was always holding the pencil. 

Ashley Blackington (11:41)

I didn't have to be the one that was always making the plans, checking the boxes, keeping track of everything. And that just didn't exist. It did not exist out there. If you look at planners, I mean, I've got, I don't know, piles of planners that are all geared around being able to have everything look really nice, but there's not really a function where you can still incorporate yourself into it. So I created a system that has goals that go from habit tracking all the way to a five-year plan and where the focus is on making sure that you've got the bigger picture at the same time as the, you know, boots on the ground situation is going on. 

That you're creating opportunity and creating space to do the things for yourself that need to get done, but also acknowledging that you are doing the best that you can and when you are doing the best that you can, that it's not necessary that you complete every single task in order to have success. And so that's where those pieces came from. It's grown from there. It was never intended to be an online business, but when you're home and stores are closed and you've got products sitting in your living room, you figure out how to launch a website and a store and do all of that. 

And it's just sort of grown from there. And so the next iteration was writing, writing about these pieces and trying to put the education out there behind it and talk about the strategy and the OT side of it. And I always sat down to write these things and never really felt like it translated super well with what I was trying to say and how I was writing it. If anyone out there has, if you've done writing blog writing before, sometimes it's easier to come up with the idea, write a few sentences, but then you're not really sure how it's going to land. And so there's that.

Ashley Blackington (14:01)

And then there's also opening up these conversations with friends as we moved in back into the world and reconnecting with people because, I mean, I will be 100% honest, I had my head down for all of that time. You know, there was, I sort of fell off the radar of life and my own life. And so figuring out how to go back out into the world and reconnecting with people meant that having these conversations was important. 

AND/BOTH came about as a way to highlight and talk about the and both aspect of us as women and as mothers and how people out there are honoring themselves and how people out there are striving towards this equality of self, not necessarily equality of role. Like I'm not going to sit on a microphone and say that you have to make a giant list and draw a line right down the middle and split everything 50-50 because I think that's, that doesn't take into account people's own individual situations and what goes on there and the ebb and flow that happens with stages and phases of life. 

But I want to create a space where people can talk about what they do for themselves, you know, where there's so many times when these conversations start or when I would, you know, meet with people and you say to them, what, like, so what do you, like, what do you wanna do outside of this? Or like, tell me about the thing that you're interested, you know, now that your kids are at this phase or this stage and people would be completely exasperated and say like, well, you know, I really love my kids, but it's like- I want to create an environment where people don't have to say, I really love my kids. 

Let's just put it out there that we all love our kids and that it doesn't have to be a choice between being a good parent and being your own person. We need to make it part of the conversation that because you have done this thing, which is an immense life change and an immense amount of effort, that you are still a person at the end of the day.

Ashley Blackington (16:24)

One of my favorite things from when I was an inpatient therapist was you go into a room with people and in acute care, in acute rehab, they've come to you from acute care. So something happens typically, something happens and sort of like the bottom falls out, right? And then they're in the hospital and everything is just like happening to them, around them, through them, all of that, and then that person transitions to acute rehab, and that's where I would meet them. 

When you see somebody who might have been in the hospital for a couple days, a couple weeks, where I was, we didn't typically see people that had been in the hospital for a couple months, but a couple weeks, there's this whole big shift that's happened. People that haven't seen their face since they've had a stroke, people that haven't been dressed since they had surgery, people that have just sort of become, they've become a patient or become a number. 

And so when you see them and you start to work with them and you're like, you've gotta pull out the person in there and they're not their diagnosis and they're not the level of assistance that they need in order to do this, and this task. That at the end of the day, they are a whole person alongside whatever is going on with them. So my favorite question for patients and people that would come in would be, what do you do for fun? And it's a simple question, right? What do you do for fun? You ask your kids, what do you do for fun? And they're like, I like to play this game, or I like to ride my bike, or I like to do that.

But I can't count on one hand the number of times that I asked an adult, what do you like to do for fun? And they had an answer in, I don't know. I don't even know how many people I saw. 12 years I worked in inpatient in either a full-time or a per diem role, 12 years. I can't count on one hand. People will say, oh, I don't really do anything. It's like, okay, well, what would you like to do? And how do we start to flesh that out and it's that seeing somebody for the person that they are and not just where they check those boxes.

Ashley Blackington (18:42)

So that's really what I want to do here. That's really what I am striving for mothers because we are this siloed generation of people that we put our kids in Halloween costumes and put a picture on social media, but at the end of the day, there's 57 steps that lead up to that picture. And do you get a chance to enjoy that moment? What do you want that to look like? I only say Halloween because this is all coming out shortly after Halloween. But when you talk about the holidays and things like that, so it's thinking about ourselves and what we want as people versus as facilitators and what that all means to us.

I wrote out of all these notes of things that I was gonna say and then just sort of pressed play and went off script, very on brand for me. I really want people to come on here and talk about the stuff that lights them up (forever an OT, I guess). But I want to talk to people about the things that they are working on. And that does not mean in any way, shape or form that if doing that stuff, if doing the Halloween decorations and doing the... It doesn't have to be a big complicated thing, I guess is the way to say that. It doesn't have to be a big complicated thing where it's like, I'm going to launch the next Fortune 500 because I have to do this in order to feel whole. It's like, sometimes I feel like a whole person when I have put all the laundry away. And sometimes I feel like a whole person when I have just pitched Dovetail® to 200 people or whatever it is. 

It's going to change. And it's also going to change as you grow, you know, as you have, if you have a new baby, you're going to feel like a whole person and you've really got it going on once you've had a shower. But when you have kids that are older, that may or may not change. No judgment here. So I hope that you come back. I mean, clearly, I hope that you come back and join me. And I hope that there are people on here that you can relate to. As many variations as possible as many as many varieties of mothers I would love to hear from. So if you are interested in appearing on the show, please, please come on, please send me an email at info@dovetaileddesigns.co or you can also find the sign up the survey on the website at dovetailsdesigns.co/podcast and talk a little bit about just a quick intro about what your and both is and what that all means.

Ashley Blackington (21:46)

So next week we are going to start with guests. We'll have predominantly guests on here, but from time to time you're going to hear from me as well, just me hanging out. And so I just want to, I want to create a space for moms and those in motherhood to be fully seen and to be fully acknowledged for who they are outside of that role in a space that does not force them to caveat everything that they have to say. So thank you for joining me this week. If you are interested in appearing dovetaileddesigns.co/podcast, and there is a link right there for you to fill out. And I will see you next week.