Jennifer Tracy: Raising your child is not a service. That's just being a mom. You are of service all the time, but that's different, and I think that's different than the kind of service that I'm talking about that gives you that self-love that I'm talking about. So what I'm talking about is like, for fun and for free, something that is either volunteer work or mentorship. It can be as simple as helping someone who needs help bringing their groceries to their car or holding the door open for someone. I think it's an expression of love through service, through actually physically helping someone else in this world.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the MILF Podcast. This is the show where we talk about motherhood and sexuality with amazing women with fascinating stories to share on the joys of being a MILF. Now here's your host, the MILFiest MILF I know, Jennifer Tracy.
Jennifer Tracy: Hey, guys. Welcome back to the show. This is Jennifer Tracy. I'm your host. MILF Podcast is a show where we talk about motherhood and sexuality. I'm nervous. I'm nervous because I'm doing something different today. I am recording this episode solo. This is just me, coming to you on New Year's Eve 2018 because I wanted to talk to you just me, and I'm really uncomfortable. So fun and frightening, but I'm doing it anyway because I really believe in that, doing the stuff that scares you because there's always so much to be learned from that.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, I'm not talking about stupid shit, like bungee jumping. Not that people ... I enjoy bungee jumping, but like that's not what I'm talking about.
Jennifer Tracy: So this is the show where we talk about motherhood, sexuality ... What was the other thing I always say? Entrepreneurship. There it is. And balancing everything and anything in between.
Jennifer Tracy: So happy new year, you guys, and I'm just so grateful to be doing this podcast. I have gotten so many gifts from it. The biggest gift is learning and hearing from you guys how deeply the show is resonating with you. I've had strangers direct message me, email me, ping me. It means so much because I believe in story, and I believe that the power of story is healing. When we tell our own stories and share our stories with other women, there's just nothing more healing than that. It's as if we're all around a fire and just sharing it all. It's just something that has been very healing for me as well.
Jennifer Tracy: Within that, I've had some requests for more of my voice, just more of me, more of my story, which, as you can tell, is making me very uncomfortable. It shouldn't because I'm clearly a very chatty person, and I'm very open. But it's interesting to have this exercise of it just being me for however long I'm going to talk.
Jennifer Tracy: So here we go. I kind of picked a theme, and I did some writing and some brainstorming for the last five or six days leading up to this recording. And I told myself, because I have to get this into my editor in time to get it launched properly for New Year's Eve, so I told myself, "Just do it now. This will be just a practice one, so you can throw it away." This very Mel ... very Mel, very Mel. Hey, Mel. This very well may be the one that you guys hear. I kind of hope it is because I love all these flubs and me just tripping over myself because it's real. Or this may never be heard by anyone also, which is fine.
Jennifer Tracy: I want to talk about love. That's kind of my topic for the evening. It's evening as I'm recording this, and I'm inside with my inside fireplace going, and the tree's lit, and the dogs are sleeping, and it's really sweet, and I'm alone in the house, which I love. I love being alone in my home. My son is at his dad's house. I went over to visit them today, went to the farmer's market with Jules, and she showed me where all the great stuff is. I never go over there. Now I'm like, "Why don't I come here all the time?"
Jennifer Tracy: And then my ... it's still weird for me to call him my ex-husband. I still call him my husband. My first husband lives right around the corner from there, and my son had said, "Can you come over?" I said, "Actually, yes, I can walk there now." So I walked up, we had fresh raspberries, fresh carrots, and it was just so lovely, and I feel so deeply grateful that I have the relationship that I have with my ex-husband, my first husband, and that we can co-parent the way that we do so harmoniously. I mean, there are moments, very brief, very few and far between now, but our divorce was finalized this year, and I love him. I love him. He's a great person. It's just the marriage part wasn't working for a long time.
Jennifer Tracy: But I just feel so grateful that we can have that because I do know people and I hear stories about they don't even speak to each other. They can't hang out with their child. It's actually ... right now it's the 23rd as I'm recording this, so tomorrow's Christmas Eve. He's coming over here with our son, and he's going to spend the night so we can all wake up and have Christmas morning together, and then we're all going to drive up to my parents' house for Christmas dinner. Yeah, I'm super grateful that we can lean into that love and that we both work a program where we can get past any resentments or ill will and bring love to the table and have that for our kid. I'm super grateful.
Jennifer Tracy: And not to make it sound like "Oh my God, I'm so grateful that we're just so loving" because it's not been easy, and not to suggest that that's everyone's path. It's not. I'm just grateful that it's mine. And I'm also really grateful to be a single woman again and be experiencing that.
Jennifer Tracy: Love is my topic, which I know is a really broad topic. 2018's been a hell of a year for me, so at the beginning of the year, I had been separated for one year, so that was kind of the ... and then we were in mediation at that time in January, so that was all happening. The divorce was in full swing. I met someone, and I fell in love with someone, and I got my heart broken, and I was devastated. I was just devastated. That part's been a real, real learning for me. After having been married for 12 years and together with my husband for 14, this was like, "Oh, wait, what? Oh."
Jennifer Tracy: The way that I interact with people that I fall in love with, whether it's platonic friendships or lovers, is that I just go all in, so I have addiction issues clearly, even though I'm 20 years away from my last drink, thank you, God. But I definitely have some codependent stuff and some Al-Anon stuff, which I'm not really supposed to mention that program by name. But it's definitely there, but I also have worked through many things to where I do think I have pretty healthy boundaries in a lot of areas. I'm sure there's still work to be done. I tend to really love big or go home. I don't just kind of half-ass my relationships with people that I'm really close with, and I like it that way.
Jennifer Tracy: When this happened, it was just really wonderful, and I don't regret a moment of it. Without going into too much detail, it's just one of those things where it just didn't work out. What was amazing was I learned that I have that capacity still within me to fall in love with a man. I say it that way because I identify as heterosexual. That could change. I don't know. I'm open. But it was wonderful to feel that again, even though I had the devastation, and I had it many times because we got back together and broke up like I don't even ... I lost count. And my close girlfriends lost count. I mean, they just ... I could hear them rolling their eyes and slapping their foreheads on the other end of the phone, lovingly, lovingly, very lovingly, very supportive.
Jennifer Tracy: So that happened. I started this podcast in 2018, which was an amazing journey, has been an amazing journey, is still an amazing journey. And I've learned a lot since I started it in June.
Jennifer Tracy: Then this fall, my best friend of 20 years, who's my person ... I mean, I have a couple of people, so I'm very fortunate in that way because, like I said, the people that I get really close with, I just love them with all of my being. I have more than one best friend. But she killed herself and had been struggling with mental illness for many, many years, but had treatment. She was brilliant, just a brilliant, brilliant woman, very loved by so many people, and was getting help at this juncture. We, her support group, her partner and me and her family and other friends, we were all on deck and thought that she was getting enough help, and she wasn't. So she took her own life, and that was just at the end of October, so that journey is still very new and very fresh for me and excruciatingly painful.
Jennifer Tracy: I've never lost someone this close to me in this way. I don't think I've ever lost someone this close to me. You know what I mean? Like my grandma died a couple years ago. It's a different deal. She was 94. This is a 44-year-old woman in good health who chose to end her life. I don't know if any of you have experienced that, being a survivor of suicide, a survivor of someone who died by suicide, but it is extremely complex, the levels of grief and the different layers of grief and anxiety and bargaining, all the stages and denial, just tremendous guilt. It's a bitch. It's really a bitch.
Jennifer Tracy: And within that, I have found tremendous strength and comfort in the friends that were in her life, her other girlfriends who were very close to her as well. We have reconnected and shared in this, and that's been incredibly healing and just profoundly beautiful because each of us are a reflection of her, so we kind of get to ... We all say, "God, I want to call her, but I'll call you instead. And I know you're not her, and I know I'm not her, but I'm here for you." There's so much love in that, and it's like carrying her love onward in that.
Jennifer Tracy: The other day, I got this direct message from a woman that had seen me in the manicure place and recognized me from Instagram and from the podcast. She listens to the podcast. And she was just this beautiful woman. I had noticed her in the salon, and she was there with her girlfriend, and she was pregnant and just absolutely radiant and very stylish. She had this cool hat on. And then I went about my day and didn't think about her, and then I got this message from her saying, "This sounds crazy, but I saw you at the nail place, and I wanted to come over, but I didn't want to bother you. I love your podcast. I love what you're doing." And it was so amazing and so meaningful.
Jennifer Tracy: And I was reading this as I was alone in my backyard that night, burning a fire because that's my new ritual, and I just burst into tears because all I wanted to do was call Kim. All I wanted to do was call her and say, "Oh my God, look, this is happening" because when I started doing this podcast, she said, "This is so amazing, what you're doing. This is so big. I just know this is going to lead to other things for you, and this feels just right." And then when I started producing the episodes, she was listening, and she was like, "I just love this. I want to be a mom just so I can be on your show."
Jennifer Tracy: So, in front of the fire, I just wept and wept and wept, and that's obviously not the first time that's happened, but it's now been over a month. Actually it's been coming up on two months, and so it's really settling in that this is real and that she's not just on vacation or hasn't called me back in a while. This is someone I spoke to every day. Yeah, yeah, so there's this deep pain, and then it washed over me. Okay, I'm having this deep pain because I had this deep love with this person. Sometimes you can't have one without the other.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, I think that's just really ... that's why my theme sort of evolved this week as I thought about, "What am I going to talk about on New Year's Eve?" It's just love and how do you love and how do you put that out there in every part of your life. What do you hold back and why? There's no wrong answer. There's no best way to love, I guess, but you know what I've also learned in my 43 years that not everybody's going to love the way that I love, and that's okay. There's this freedom in knowing that and loving the way I love and not expecting, trying not to expect.
Jennifer Tracy: I was talking to Elaine about this the other day, trying not to expect a certain response. You know what I mean? I mean, there's a difference. I'm not talking about unrequited love. I'm not talking about unrequited romantic love. I'm talking about just how do you give of yourself, and is that ... you just give of yourself freely because it brings you joy. But also, you can't expect someone to be nice, I guess, is what I'm getting at.
Jennifer Tracy: So Elaine and I got into this sort of heated conversation, it was really great, about what is ... Define an expectation. Define what that means. We didn't get very far because I think she had her kids, and I had to pick up mine or whatever. But to be continued. I may have her back on the show, and we can talk about that because she has a lot of wonderful insight about it.
Jennifer Tracy: I don't even know if this is interesting, you guys. I really don't. Oh, here's something I wrote. So I had wrote all these notes. I mean, it looked like a crazy person. And as I was writing these notes over the last couple days, I thought, "God, if someone came in and found this notebook with all these scribbles for this particular episode that I'm trying to manifest and curate, would they just think, 'Oh my God, it's like this girl is like Beautiful Mind crazy'?" Because it kind of looks like that, but it's not math. It's like all these words, like layers, trust, jealousy, pain.
Jennifer Tracy: What does this say? I can't read my own handwriting. I have the worst handwriting. I never ... I mean, I could've been a doctor. Not really, but I write like that. Oh, divorce, boyfriend, broken heart, wouldn't change how I did things, except trying to be more present. Oh, that's interesting.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, I do find myself ... I don't know if that's part of being an addict, of avoiding feelings, or if that's just human, but I found myself, right after Kim died, I just would go and spend money. I mean, it was Christmastime, coming up on Christmastime, so that was kind of part of it but not really. And one of her other friends and I would be on the phone, and I'd be like, "I just spent so much money." She'd be like, "Me too, me too. I just went and bought this, and I bought this, and my sister talked me out of buying this." And I'm like, "Yes." And it's definitely that like, what can I do that's going to keep me away from these feelings? But the truth is ultimately nothing will, and I have to be careful with my money obviously. I'm a single mom.
Jennifer Tracy: The way that I love isn't the way everyone else loves. That's not a judgment. It's a fact. Learning this in lessons of humility and acceptance and huge, forced surrenders ... That was my dog shaking ... is how I came to realize myself. Wow, yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: The biggest key to unlock self-love is through service to others. That I definitely feel is true, and yet I think it's really important to have a balance with that. I think a lot of my early to mid-twenties, I spent time ... It was almost like being of service to others because I found that in my early twenties when I stopped drinking, I discovered that tool, so it was like, "Oh, I'll just be of service. Service, service, service, service, service." And it was like, well, yeah, but you got to stop and actually feel your feelings, and you need to slow the fuck down.
Jennifer Tracy: So I think there's a balance in that, and I know in therapy that's really helped me over the last, gosh, six years I've been in therapy. That's crazy. Back in therapy. I mean, I've kind of always been in therapy. But having a balance of, yes, you can be of service. And I guess I should define service, so raising your child is not a service. That's just being a mom. You are of service all the time, but that's different, and I think that's different than the kind of service that I'm talking about that gives you that self-love that I'm talking about.
Jennifer Tracy: What I'm talking about is like, for fun and for free, something that is either volunteer work or mentorship. It can be as simple as helping someone who needs help bringing their groceries to their car or holding the door open for someone. I think it's just an expression of love through service, through actually physically helping someone else in this world, and there are so many ways to do that. I think it's easy to lose sight of that in this time, in this culture of "I need to earn more so that I can have more so that I can be better so that I can look better so that I can blah," you know. And those things aren't all bad, but I think all by themselves they can become toxic because it's empty at the end of the day.
Jennifer Tracy: Someone said to me recently, we were talking about ... but she said, "You know, you can't take a U-haul behind the hearse." And it's so true. You can't take all this with you and all the material things that we want to accumulate or the money that we want to accumulate, the cash and prizes. At the end of the day, it's really ...
Jennifer Tracy: And that's too what my friend's death pointed up to me is, when she died, the love that she had created in her relationships is what poured forth. The phone calls, the emails, people wanting to do something, people wanting to talk about her, people wanting to know what happened, people in devastating shock because they loved her. They loved who she was. They loved what she gave them in their hearts. That was essentially what we really celebrated at her memorial earlier this month was just how deeply she loved and how deeply she felt joy and how absolutely alive she was, which sounds insane because I'm talking about someone who took her own life, but she suffered from something called bipolar II disorder.
Jennifer Tracy: That's the thing with that particular disorder and others like it is that there's just this deep capacity for all, right? So you can have this deep capacity for ... expansive capacity for joy and just ultimate pleasure and ultimate connection, and then the converse of that is just this emptiness, just complete emptiness and depression and/or anxiety or mania, loss of self. It's just ... yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Mental illness is so real, and if you or anyone you know is experiencing any symptoms like that or any other symptoms that are depression, anxiety, loss of interest in life, in pleasurable things, things that you normally take pleasure in, please call and get help. There are so many resources for help. I will put some in the show notes for this episode as well. There's obviously suicide hotlines. There are all these amazing therapy apps that you can talk to a therapist for relatively inexpensive fees, and that stuff does work, you know. It takes consistency, but it does work.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, I think just really ... that's really just what I wanted to talk about was this idea of, for me, 2019, when I look forward, I just want to keep loving more and bigger and deeper. I want to keep opening myself, in a healthy boundaried way, but I do want to keep opening myself to more connection and more intimacy. There's nothing that I regret about having loved my husband so much and having created a child with him that we just adore, who is just this magnificent human being, having had this man come into my life and loved him fully, having loved Kim and had her as my best friend for 20 years. It's so much laughter and joy and all the experiences that we had.
Jennifer Tracy: We used to belly dance together and go to this ridiculous Mexican bar. My God, I think she was 25 ... I was 25, and she was 26. Anyway, it doesn't matter, around that age. I think, for a couple of years, we danced with a company. She was in the company much longer than I was, but it was called the Flowers of the Desert, and we would work on the weekends. That was like our side gig, side hustle.
Jennifer Tracy: Every Friday and Saturday night, we would dance at this place at 10 p.m. I think it was a Lebanese restaurant off of [Coanga 00:24:49]. We would do a show there, and then we'd get in our cars, and we'd drive down to Long Beach and go to this Mexican bar called El Pedal and dance on the tabletops. Everyone there was completely drunk because it was a midnight show, so they were just completely drunk, and the mariachi band would get off the stage so that we would come on. It was so random. It was like why do you want a bunch of belly dancers? But it was great, and they paid really well, and we did a 30-minute show and then we left, and that was our every Friday/Saturday night. Just crazy. And it was fun. It was fun.
Jennifer Tracy: That reminds me of something else that I think I'm going to close with, which is, about two years before that, so I was, gosh, I think I was 23, and Kim was 24. We were in her backyard. She and this other beautiful, magical being named Marcy lived at this place in Hollywood that we all called the Royal Palace because it was literally like the den of magic. You'd walk in there, and you were pretty sure you might see a unicorn at any moment. I still joke with Marcy. I'm like, "So you fart unicorns and rainbows, right?" Because she's just ... I think she has fairy wings.
Jennifer Tracy: We were in the backyard at one of the parties, and it was actually like midday. I don't even think it was late because all kinds of craziness used to happen in performances and burlesque shows. It was really fun. And I was down about something. I think I hadn't booked a job that I was up for, an acting job, and I was like, "Ugh, I'm a failure" and this and that. I really waded through so much insecurity in my twenties, just rivers of insecurity.
Jennifer Tracy: I can't even remember what I said to her, but I remember what she said to me, which is "You know, Jen, I would love you even if you only ever worked at Burger King because you're you. You're my Jen, so it doesn't matter whether you booked this job or not." I will never forget that. I've never forgotten it. I've referenced it. I would tell her, "Remember that time you said that thing to me? That resonated with me." That was the first time in my life I'd ever had someone reflect back to me my value, just as me. Not my accomplishments, not my bank account, not my looks, not my ... it wasn't a summation of my resume or my talents or anything like that. It was just like, "It doesn't matter. I love you because you're you. You're great." And I just really heard it, and I will always be grateful for that.
Jennifer Tracy: It really started me on this path of like, "Okay, right, let's drill down to that." I had to then go and find that for myself, and it took me almost another 20 years, but the fact that she could do that and see that was everything, and that was one of hundreds of gifts that Kim gave me in her lifetime.
Jennifer Tracy: So, with that, I'm just going to invite you all to open yourself to something for 2019 that maybe scares you a little bit, as I've just done this. How long have I been talking? Oh, 32 minutes. Okay. I was hoping it'd be like around 30 minutes because longer than that felt like ugh. Me talking for longer than that is too much.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, maybe try something that scares you in 2019. Try something different and maybe open yourself to loving bigger, loving more deeply, whatever that means. And maybe it's loving yourself more. We could all use more of that, that's for sure. I love you guys. Thank you so much for listening and happy new year.