Being Uniquely You

There are some family holiday traditions that are 100% unique. They may start out as cultural traditions and then evolve into things passed down through generations of family in their own unique way. And as they get passed down, each one of us has the opportunity to add our own unique flavor to each tradition. As we start our holiday traditions, we’re reminded of the power of our own unique individual expression. In this episode, we explore how our uniqueness strengthens our family bonds and gives us more to celebrate. Join us as we celebrate the beauty of being authentically ourselves.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Start your week smiling with your friends Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette. It’s time to get ready for some weekly motivation with WP motivate.

Happy Friday, Kathy.

[00:00:15] Speaker B: Happy Friday, Michelle. How are you?

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Good. TGif. It’s been a very busy week and I am looking forward to my couch this weekend. How about you?

[00:00:25] Speaker B: I’ve had a very interesting week and it’s been a good one, though. It’s been like, that’s good. Kind of chill.

I’m going into the weekend. Just kind of like feeling satisfied, feeling good.

That’s awesome. Not too busy.

Kind of like I’m Goldilocks this week. I just got a little bit of everything and everything’s aOk.

[00:00:51] Speaker A: There you go. Well, I have a topic and I know people, we tell people all the time. We talk a little bit before the show about what we’re going to talk about, but I haven’t talked to you about my idea, so I’m just going to lay it on you right now. So this reaction is authentic. It’s not that exciting, actually. But you know how everybody that makes a turkey has their stuffing and their stuffing that they love and their family recipe? You’re looking at me like you don’t have one. But most people do. Okay.

[00:01:21] Speaker B: Not Kathy, but everybody else for us.

[00:01:23] Speaker A: Okay, well, that is your stuffing then. If I had to eat stovetop stuffing, I would go on a hunger strike because I hate that stuff so much. But I grew up with two stuffings. So my mother had a traditional stuffing that her mother had passed down. The recipe that was swedish in heritage and it was based on apples and it was this apple stuffing. I hated it. It was the reason that I hated stuffing almost my entire life is because that stuffing was so awful. My mother loves it, don’t get me wrong. And other people loved it, too. It just was not my thing. My father’s stuffing, on the other hand, that came down from my grandmother and the french canadian side of our family.

The only stuffing I’ll eat, I love that stuffing so much. It’s got ground beef and ground pork and sausage and mushrooms and it’s just like, it’s a casserole in and of itself, right?

My daughter was unable to spend thanksgiving with me this year. They went to her husband’s family, which is fine. So I didn’t make a turkey this year because it was just me. I wasn’t going to make a turkey for myself. I opened a bag of shrimp and I picked out on a bag of shrimp this year by myself. I could have whatever I want.

But the next day, my daughter called me, and she’s like, I was thinking about Christmas, and I know how you usually like to make lasagnas, but do you could do Thanksgiving dinner for Christmas dinner this year? I said, oh, why’s that? She goes, I miss your stuffing.

So she’d been over to her in laws for Thanksgiving, and their stuffing was fine, but not mama’s stuffing, right? And it really got me thinking about the fact that we all do the same thing, but we all do the same thing differently. And maybe not all. I know not everybody makes stuffing, right? But you wash clothes. I wash clothes. But we have our own way of folding clothes. Right? The way my mom taught me how to fold clothes is how I still fold clothes. It’s very different than the way my ex husband folded clothes. Right. It’s just that we all get things accomplished that way. So I got to thinking about the fact that there’s no right way to do WordPress. There’s no right way to fold clothes. There’s no right way to have turkey stuffing, but there’s right ways. As long as the end result is what you’re happy with and that you’ve accomplished something. Right. Like, I love building WordPress websites. It used to be with Divi, but now it’s with cadence because I love how I have much more versatility and things like that with cadence. Other people are die hard elementor fans or Astro fans or.

I think there’s still some people out there who like Beaver builder. Beaver builder, absolutely. I love beaver builder, too. But they’re all different, right? In the different ways that you can use those things and how there’s not really one right way, but we all make up this huge community of people who do things their own way and still end up with some pretty awesome stuff at the end. Or stuffing even.

[00:04:25] Speaker B: There you go. I see what you did there.

[00:04:28] Speaker A: A little dad joke every once in a while.

So what do you think? What are some thoughts? What are some of the things that you think that when you look out across our communities that are interesting ways that you’ve learned from other people to do whatever it is and still come up with something that maybe the end result looks pretty much the same, that has a different flavor, whatever. I don’t know. It’s just a thought. I told you it wasn’t as shattering.

[00:04:55] Speaker B: Parenting.

[00:04:56] Speaker A: Oh, parenting is a good one.

[00:04:58] Speaker B: Parenting is something. Well, first of all, mom and dad, thanks for everything, but no, not doing it. However, no, still in therapy. Mom and dad.

[00:05:14] Speaker A: And our kids will be in therapy because of us someday, too.

[00:05:16] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. No, I told them when they were younger, and they would get mad at me, and I’m like, if you’re not in therapy by the time you’re 20, I’ve done something wrong. Right? That was, like, my mom joke. And sure enough, both of them have had, not necessarily because of me, but life happens. We believe in therapy. Therapy is a good thing.

[00:05:37] Speaker A: Harkening back to our first ever episode. There is a lot of compost in the world we have to deal with.

[00:05:42] Speaker B: There’s a lot of compost. And being a teenager is hard. I don’t think I realized, I mean, I realized. I remember my teenage years, and they were extraordinarily difficult, but I didn’t really realize how much my kids were going to need me because they could take care of themselves, and they’re grown up, and they can clean their own rooms, that kind of thing. But, boy, they need you more. They’re navigating so much more in terms of challenges in life and stuff.

There’s a different way to parent. My way of parenting, I don’t think would work for most people, and I’ve learned from other people, and I don’t think I’m a perfect parent. I know that I’m not. But parenting is one thing where it’s just like, I got my way of doing it.

[00:06:33] Speaker A: Everybody else, hands off. These are my kids, and I’ll raise them like I want some of the.

[00:06:39] Speaker B: Tailor it to them.

[00:06:40] Speaker A: Absolutely.

They’re not separate children. They don’t all have the same personality and the same abilities and the same likes and dislikes and skill sets and everything else. Yeah.

When Lydia was little, my mom would say, don’t you think she needs a sweater? And I looked at my mom and said, oh, you know, if I thought she needed a sweater, she’d be wearing one. Like, don’t you think she needs a sweater? So passive aggressive way of saying, you’re not parenting. Well, your child is cold. Put a sweater on that child. No one. Just because you’re cold doesn’t mean my kid, who’s sweating because she’s running around right now needs a sweater. Right?

Don’t you think she.

[00:07:20] Speaker B: If I thought she would, yeah, definitely.

[00:07:25] Speaker A: Parenting is a good one, actually. And I was a single mom, so I did it differently than a lot of other people did. For many years, kids come home from school Mother’s day and father’s day with things that they create for their parents. And not every kid has a mother or a father, and yet they have these gifts that they’ve created. And so she would come home and she’d hand me the father’s day gift. And even really young, she’d say, because you’re my mom and my dad. And I thought that was really sweet. And then she got a little older and she’s like, lady, why did I get a dad?

It was like, you’re my mom and my dad. To later, like, I only got one parent, why kind of thing. Why was I cheated? Kind of thing. But now we have a great relationship and she’s grateful. We text almost every day and talk to each other. And she wants to make Thanksgiving dinner for Christmas with me to this year.

[00:08:13] Speaker B: That is so awesome.

[00:08:15] Speaker A: And we get on each other’s nerves all the time because that’s normal too.

[00:08:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I have to remind myself of that. Well, I’m kind of a single mom too now because it’s like my husband is more like, love him to death, but he’s not a child.

[00:08:34] Speaker A: He’s not taking out the trash and helping make decisions because he doesn’t have that ability right now.

[00:08:39] Speaker B: No, he doesn’t.

Claire kind of lost her dad in a lot of ways. So now it’s just the two of us in a lot of ways. And, I mean, he’s still there and there’s still interaction. It’s not like she doesn’t have a dad, but it’s not the same.

[00:08:58] Speaker A: He can’t go pick her up at the mall. Things like that.

[00:09:02] Speaker B: Yeah, you’re reminding me of all the.

[00:09:05] Speaker A: Things that are so hard.

[00:09:06] Speaker B: It’s just like, why do I have to drive everywhere? I only got this car so that.

[00:09:11] Speaker A: I could drive her places. Just like as soon as she’s able to and responsible enough to drive herself. You’re going to be so happy.

[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I’ve started that. Scare her how to drive, which is.

[00:09:24] Speaker A: Like, yeah, I remember those days.

[00:09:27] Speaker B: Not how cars work.

[00:09:28] Speaker A: Cars don’t. That way back to the different ways of doing things. Sometimes they don’t work right. So my very first car, my parents used my money to buy my first car when I was out of town. They found a good deal. They spent the money. I came home from a summer job, summer camp. I’d been away all summer to a car I didn’t know how to drive because it was a standard transmission, not an automatic, and I didn’t know how to drive a standard transmission. I loved the idea of having my own car, but I didn’t know how to drive my own car. So my stepdad was out at work and my mom said, I’m going to teach you how to drive this car. So we get in the car and she’s explaining, you push down with 1ft as you let up with the other. And I would lurch forward and the car would stall and then she’d say it again and say it again and say it again and say it again and say it again. We literally got 20ft from the driveway. Didn’t even get all the way around the corner yet. When she said, get out, I’m driving us home, she was so frustrated with me and my inability to learn how to drive a car, never once occurring to her that she wasn’t explaining it in a way that I could understand. My stepfather comes home from work and I had to go pay my bill for college. And so he says, we’re going to go up, I’m going to teach you how to drive that car. We’re driving. It was, what, 15 miles away? Get in the car. I’m teach you how to drive it. I go, I don’t want to drive it. I don’t want to drive my own new, brand new car. He goes, get in the car. I’m going to teach you how to drive it.

Okay, right. So we get in the car and he basically says kind of the same thing, but said it in a way that made me understand what he meant. He used his hands to explain. He said it slowly. He wasn’t trying to be like, you have to better figure it out. And I drove all the way to college and only stalled it once on a hill. It. I drove it all the way home and I was like, I get home and I said to my mom, my mom’s like, how did it go? I’m like, oh, I drove all the way there and back. She got madder.

Instead of being happy that I could drive my new car, she was angry that I didn’t learn from her but learned from him. They both were trying to teach me the same thing in their own ways. And one worked for me and the other one didn’t. Fast forward. Now, my daughter has heard this story from my mother all over the years. So Lydia gets her license and I have a standard transmission car at the time. And she said, I really want to learn how to drive the car. We also had a van. She could drive the van. That was easy. It was to. I said, I’ll teach you how to drive it. She says, I’m afraid for you to teach me because I’ve heard about how you and grandma. I said, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to have a sense of humor about this. I am not going to get upset. First of all, we will go up to the high school. We will do it in a parking lot where there’s no scary traffic, like my mom was trying to teach me on a real road. Right now, it was a subdivision. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but it was still a real road. And so I said, we’ll go up to the high school, we’ll switch spots, and I will explain to you how it makes sense to me. I said, and if within five minutes you’re frustrated and you can’t figure out, we’ll just come home and we’ll find somebody else to explain it to you. She’s like, okay, we’ll see if that’ll work. She was doubtful. We get up to the high school, and I explained it to her in the way that made sense to me. She gets out of the car, she goes to drive it. She stalled it once and drove all the way home because I was able to explain it to her in a way because I understood how she learned and I paid attention to that, and I knew how I had learned, so I was able to. Well, that just made my mom madder, too. But that’s another story altogether.

What do you mean you were able to teach how to drive? I think suddenly mom realized it was her teaching and not my inability to learn.

But we all can do the same thing and still have different outputs as well. Like, my stuffing tastes very different than my mother’s stuffing did, and people like one or the other better. And that’s okay, too, because it takes all kinds and we all do things very differently.

[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And people learn in different ways and they resonate. Like, you can have ten teachers teaching the same content, but you just resonate with one. There’s one community that I joined just as an experiment, and lots of great teachers in this community, but there’s one guy who I just like, whenever he does a class, I’m going to show up to it if I can, because I just love how he teaches. I learn from him, I vibe with him, and that’s okay, and that’s perfectly fine. And anybody who wants to tell you or that you have to do it in one way or that it has to happen in a specific way that doesn’t. Yeah.

Everybody’s so different, and I think it’s great that we can embrace all of our different ways of doing things.

[00:14:17] Speaker A: Yes. Wrapping gifts is another one. I think that I was taught to wrap gifts one way my stepfather joined the family taught us a different way. My mother was like, well, that’s not the right way. And I was like, oh, that’s easier. I like it. Look how pretty it is kind of thing.

Ultimately, they’re wrapped under the tree. Doesn’t really matter how the tape is applied or which flap goes over what flap or any of that kind of stuff.

Which also reminds me that I haven’t wrapped any of my gifts yet, and Christmas is a week from Monday, so I’ll be busy this weekend.

[00:14:48] Speaker B: Fun.

[00:14:49] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.

[00:14:50] Speaker B: There was one job I had that had a secret Santa, and so my secret Santa was, like, wrapping presents, using a glue stick to wrap the presents instead of tape. And I’m like, this has to be a guy.

And then I’m like, I have to figure out who this is, because it was just so intriguing. Then I’d get the next gift, and I’m like, who buys this book for anyone?

It’s got to be somebody so out of. So then it was like, I was like, the crazy person in the office. I’ve got to find this out. I think that’s why I made a good security professional, because it was like.

[00:15:37] Speaker A: Sherlock holmesing the whole office.

[00:15:39] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I had everything. Like, finally I figured out who it was. It was pretty funny. It was a guy. It was a guy in it. I was in the marketing department. He was in it. And I figured it all out because the gifts were just like, no woman would buy this for a woman.

What is this? What is the glue stick thing and this?

[00:16:00] Speaker A: Wrapping paper.

[00:16:02] Speaker B: But different ways. But, yeah, it gives you a way.

[00:16:06] Speaker A: That is so funny. I used to work at a christian college, and I still joke about the fact that when I left that college to work at a different university, my very first meeting, we all sat down at our registration admissions meeting, and I bowed my head because every Christian at the christian college, every meeting started with prayer. And then I went to work at a secular college, and like, all right, let’s get started. And I immediately folded my hands and bowed my head, and I looked up like, people don’t do that here.

[00:16:38] Speaker B: It’s not like that.

[00:16:40] Speaker A: But at the christian college, we had that secret Santa thing, and there was a table at the end of the hallway where when nobody was looking, that’s when you’d put your gift out with the person’s name, and then they’d find it that day. Whatever. One of the admins, the dean’s administrative assistant, took baby Jesus away from the scene. The crash scene that we had. Because in her family, you don’t put Jesus out till Christmas day because that’s when he’s born.

I was like, what’s the point of having a whole nativity scene minus the baby? I’m like, no, he’s born like 2000 years ago. He could be there now. Right.

So I took a milk carton and I replaced one side of the milk carton with a. Have you seen this child? A picture of the baby Jesus?

Put it on that table. I don’t know why this is coming up. It has nothing to do with the topic, but it just remembered that story and I thought it was really funny and she didn’t, but everybody else did.

[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s hilarious.

[00:17:34] Speaker A: Have you seen this child?

[00:17:36] Speaker B: Anyway, too funny.

Different ways of doing nativity scenes.

[00:17:41] Speaker A: Absolutely.

Oh, my gosh. And there’s even two different ways to sing the first noel. There’s two different versions of the melody. Really? Yeah. There’s two different ways to do. I’m not going to sing it right now. You’ll have to google it later.

[00:17:55] Speaker B: I’ll have to look it up.

[00:17:58] Speaker A: No, it’s way in a major. I apologize. It’s away in a major. There’s two different melodies that go with a way in a major. So maybe I’ll sing it to you later, but not on the podcast. Sorry, folks. If you want to hear me sing, you’ll have to go to my website and order a singing telegram.

[00:18:13] Speaker B: That’s it. That’s it.

[00:18:16] Speaker A: Anyway, so, yeah, that’s all I got. Just a little bit of weird meandering today. But, I mean, that’s kind of what we do.

[00:18:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that is what we do. Well, I like the meandering. And the thing is.

Yeah. I think people should just embrace who they are. That’s your motivation tip for the week is embrace who you are. Do you? Do you different. Embrace what’s different about you? Like the family recipes.

We do have some family recipes.

[00:18:47] Speaker A: And even if other people say that you do, and even if people say you do that weird still do you weird is fine.

As I’ve said, more than when you do. You love what we both talk at the same time. Go ahead.

[00:19:04] Speaker B: Well, I was going to say, when you do, you.

You become unique. You become the trendsetter. You become the one that all attention goes towards. Because there’s nobody else doing it like you.

[00:19:19] Speaker A: Exactly.

[00:19:20] Speaker B: Here’s to the weirdos and the unique people and people who do things different. I’m all for it.

[00:19:26] Speaker A: I have a sticker. I think I gave you one. If not, I’ll send you one. If anybody else wants one, let me know. I have a couple I can send out, but I have a sticker that I made that says I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. And I’m okay with that because you can’t be everything to everybody and you can’t make everybody happy all the time. And your personality isn’t going to jive with every single person on the planet. And that’s okay. Still be you. Yeah.

[00:19:48] Speaker B: And I have so many people who, as we going into 2024, so many people who are like, I want this to be my most productive year ever. I want to make sure that I’m getting in shape or I’m going to be on the diet or whatever. And so they look outside of themselves for all of the inspiration to have this be the best year ever. How about if it’s like the best year of you?

[00:20:12] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

[00:20:14] Speaker B: That’s what I’m all about.

[00:20:16] Speaker A: Same.

Just don’t make the apple stuffing. Or do. It’s up to you.

[00:20:22] Speaker B: Just don’t invite Michelle to dinner.

[00:20:24] Speaker A: I will skip the stuffing. I will eat the turkey. I like turkey and gravy. And if anybody wants, I will share the recipe. Let me know. I’ll put it in the show notes. I have it in my grandmother’s handwriting. Not the apple one. I probably have that somewhere. But the other one I have, and I will share that with you. The mushrooms aren’t on there because that’s what I added. That’s what made it special for my touch on it. And then after my father had it a few years, he insisted that was the way it always was. It wasn’t, but it’s good, and that’s what’s important.

[00:20:52] Speaker B: Nice.

[00:20:53] Speaker A: We have one more episode this year, which we’ll be recording next week. And then we’re taking the week of Christmas off. So we won’t be recording the week of Christmas. We will see you the week after that. But we’ll have one more unless something comes up. But I think we’re planning to record next week. So, yeah, we’ll have one more motivation for the end of the year, and then we will see you in 2024. Until then, be yourself. Do it fun. Be crazy. Be wild. Be unique. Don’t be everybody’s cup of tea. That’s okay.

[00:21:21] Speaker B: I love it. Yeah.

[00:21:23] Speaker A: All right.

[00:21:24] Speaker B: Bye bye.

[00:21:27] Speaker A: This has been WP Motivate with Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette. To learn more or to sponsor us, go to wpmotivate.com.