What is it that enriches life. A great many friendships, family and contacts, believes Jane Caro.
Money, status, objects, a big house- it may make you richer, but it won’t enrich your life. “It’s other people who enrich your life and overcoming difficulty enriches your life and learning new things enriches your life,” said Jane.
Jane is currently surrounded by family at home. There is the comforting sound of conversation and laugher in the background. A walkie talkie goes off several times. She is relaxed and loves being a grandmother, a role far removed from the responsibilities of raising her own two children. For Jane, being with her grandchildren, her main task is to have a bit of fun with it. Be with them. Love them.
Her daughter has called her the ‘Human Jukebox’ as she always has a story to share. She likes the stories, the cards, the puzzles, yet she is passed the patience for imaginative games. “I play shops for a bit, but once I’ve got my coffee I say thanks, got to go, bye.”
“I mean bloody Bluey and the way he plays- honestly, what a bar to set for the modern parent,” she laughs.
For Jane, having children was something that revolutionised her life.
“I felt very strongly after I had my first child that I hadn’t just given birth to her, I’d given birth to myself as a mother and that brought a whole new level of responsibility, complexity, difficulty- but also joy and a sense of importance and purpose and connection.”
Fathers too feel this, but Jane found the experience of giving birth, and what the body goes through, profoundly changed her.
The author, writer, broadcaster, Walkley award winner, life-long learner and enthusiast believes in being honest and authentic, expressing what is real and felt. From that, what grows is trust.
Jane expresses how particularly crucial honesty is during motherhood.
“I think one of the other great benefits of playgroup and mothers group and all that kind of thing is talking to people who may come from very different backgrounds, may have very different perspectives of the world, but they’re all going through the same thing you are going through, in terms of where they are at in their lives- that is being the live support system for another human being which is really what motherhood is, particularly in the early years. It is enormously comforting and reaffirming to talk to other people who are doing what you are doing- but it’s only comforting and reaffirming if they tell the truth about it.”
Jane completely understands why humans do it, why we are partial to glossing over the more challenging aspects of life, but over time she has come to the realisation that it can be incredibly isolating.
Jane said that if you are brave enough to tell the unvarnished truth about your sleepless nights, your terror about whether your child is eating properly, your fears about whether you can cope with the change or that you feel depressed or sometimes, at 3am after patting your baby for the 349th time, you wonder why on earth you have done this in the first place- that’s okay. “That is allowed. You are allowed to have that thought.”
Jane has found that people will comfort you, they will listen, they will be kind to you, they won’t condemn you or judge you.
“Something even more profound will happen,” said Jane, “they will start to tell you, and you have given them permission to tell the truth about their terrifying, difficult, neglected, far too heavily judged, far too heavily criticised period of life which is early motherhood and if we could all be more honest about it, we’d all be able to cope better and we’d all be able to comfort one another and recognise that it is an incredibly tough job, incredibly demanding and you are allowed to feel overwhelmed by it, exhausted by it.”
Once at a function when Jane’s children were teenagers, a mother with a newborn asked Jane for some wisdom- what had she learnt being a mother, what could she pass on. It was a good question and Jane thought about for a while, catching the woman at the end of the evening before she departed.
Jane said, “I’ve got your answer, but you’re not going to like it. This is the truth of it I think, from what I’ve learnt. Your children will disappoint you and you will disappoint your children, so relax, enjoy it, don’t worry about it, they are ordinary human beings and so are you- and that’s fine.”
“We’re all working things out as we go.”
Many years earlier, Jane’s daughter was born prematurely. She was turning blue in Jane’s arms and incubated. How could she have prevented it. How could she fix it. How could she change it. The terrifying experience rustled up many of Jane’s worries and predispositions for reasoning with complex situations.
A neonatologist and grief counsellor practicing that day had a big impact on her life, providing a reality check that altered her mindset and caught a hold of her runaway thoughts: ‘There’s nothing special about you, there’s nothing special about Polly [Jane’s daughter]. Terrible things can happen and they can happen to anyone. Safety is an illusion, danger is a reality’.
“It sounds like a brutal thing to say to a mother who thinks that she is just about to lose her child, but it took bricks off my shoulders because I suddenly thought, yeah it’s not why me, it’s why not me,” said Jane. “It could to happen to anyone, it’s happened to us and now the thing to do is deal with it as best you can but you don’t blame yourself. I’d been doing all this bargaining stuff, you know.”
Jane said it had an utterly positive effect on her because it halted her worry.
“The only thing you can control is your reaction to things and so I started to learn the difference between what I could control and what I couldn’t and it’s funny, it was those three sentences that really got me started in understanding that and giving up wasting my time trying to control the uncontrollable- and the funny thing is when you do that and you give up trying to control the uncontrollable, you stop being anxious.”
Throughout her career, Jane has written, studied and spoken about a wide array of subjects, many of which charter social studies, creative copywriting, advertising, relationships, feminism (“Feminism is a giant female support group”) and politics. Jane pioneered part-time work in the 90s in the advertising world (“Nobody I knew was doing it”). She leans into difficult discussions and feels the importance of being part of social commentary and political discussions. Although they are challenging, she said, “I do want to improve the world.” She is taking action.
A big part her of work, and making things work, is play.
“For creativity, play is everything. All creative people play. We play with ideas. We play with our imaginations. We play with different possible solutions, different possible scenarios, different possible ways of approaching things. We play with new ideas, with different ways of looking at something and it is a form of play.”
Another thing Jane has learnt over time is the need to be yourself. In all situations in life. To be true to who you are, not flinching at the ways that some people may dislike aspects of who it is that you are and what it is that you believe.
“Happiness is the management of expectations and so in a way you lower your expectations of people liking you and you realise that’s not actually the point, the point in life is not to make other people like you, the point of life is to be as much of yourself as you can possibly be.”
For Jane, being yourself and walking your own path is the only way to go. To live your own truth and get the best out of yourself, which in turn, is a gift to others.
During the pandemic, Jane wrote many articles that resonated with families, living amid the bizarre and unique experience of prolonged uncertainty. Working from home en masse gave an insight into how families are juggling home and work life- regardless of any lockdowns. That too Jane believes was a moment of reckoning.
The pretence that everything is under control and that there is no problems and other obligations while trying to navigate family life can put up a facade. Many families all over are working overtime to keep things level. Like a duck gliding along the waters surface, but with feet paddling full throttle beneath.
So, what for the future, now that we return to offices and workplaces and airports and traffic jams and kids activities and the busy nature of modern life. What is it that we have learnt:
“You go back to that illusion of the professional- because none of us are really professionals. We may have a profession, we may even be good at it, we may be very experienced at it but we’re not a professional, we’re a human being living a life and lives are complicated.”
“We have very much isolated the people who are bringing up our children, particularly when those children are very little and that’s actually not doing anyone any favours, including the children because they’ve got exhausted, overwhelmed, overworked, often exasperated parents- they are exhausted. The parents also get bored, people need adult stimulation and just because you love your child it doesn’t mean sometimes you think, ‘If I have to play another game of Spot It, I’m going to go completely insane’ and I just want to speak to another adult about an adult conversation.”
One of the great changes Jane has noticed since she was raising children of her own is the increased financial pressure families are enduring today. The stress of having a mortgage and wondering if they have enough to pay it. The stress of renting and carrying the worry of instability that comes with that.
“The fundamental for bringing up children is to have a secure place to live and it strikes me that this generation in particular have lost that.”
Jane was let go from her job when she was four months pregnant. They had a mortgage but were secure in the comfort of knowing that they could pay that off on one income. They could live quite comfortably on one income. Yet, she did feel that onrush of stress, home with the children while her husband was away travelling. She has great empathy for the parents and carers today who are juggling it all- and more.
“Stress is a bad thing. That kind of financial stress can destroy relationships and families and mental health and all sorts of things. That is something that I have really noticed has changed a lot.”
Back to the family home, Jane speaks of her 10-month-old grandson, of the excitement of her growing family, of the referendum, the planet, the perils parts of the world are in. She is good at light and shade. She speaks of her parents, both in their 90s seeing every film, every play, reading as many books as they can. Jane remembers robust dinner table conversations growing up, her parents, intellectually curious and engaged with the world. Jane, forever absorbing that in their orbit.
Jane said her parents modelled a good marriage.
“I often say to people, if you are looking for a partner there is only one thing you need to worry about: do they make you feel better about yourself. When you are with them, do they build you up, make you feel a better person. Do they take your self-criticism and turn it around and actually make you think, ‘Oh, I am being a bit hard on myself’. That is who you want to be with because that’s who is going to make your life just that much better and is really going to lift you up and help you go further, help you be a bigger person but people who join in the criticism, belittle you, want you , they are trying to make you a smaller person so they can be bigger.”
“My partner has always tried to make me bigger. I hope I have done the same for him. He helped me be everything I could be- not be the best version of me, that’s judgmental, that means they’re trying to make you into something you’re not that might better suit them, not that, but help you to be even more who you are and in the end I think that is the only thing that matters, that’s what they do and that then becomes a life enhancing partnership for both of you.”
As Jane returns to her family, her next book, her next adventure, her next day, she knows there is only one way:
“I just do the best I can.”
While so many of us toil away, working things out as we go, Jane reminds us that it is those along the way who support you and encourage you and enjoy the ride with you that make it all worthwhile.
“Human beings need those social strokes and they cost you little and give you a lot.”
The friendships and family, enriching all it is that you have already got.
Article by Sinead Halliday