I will say I don't think I've ever experienced a time of greater contradiction in my life.
You know, I've never felt more adult, but I've never needed to be looked after by my
It's like you're somehow immediately both the expert and the novice.
Hi, I'm Jess Rowe, and this is the Jess Rowe Big Talk Show, a podcast that skips the small
talk and goes big and deep.
From love to loss and everything in between, I want to show you a different side of people
who seem to have it all together in these raw and honest conversations about the things
I don't know about you, but I really crave connected conversations, so I'm going to
dig deep to give you a new window into the souls of the people we're curious to get
to know and understand.
There might be tears as well as laughter as we celebrate the real life flaws and vulnerabilities
that make us human.
Jan Fran is a Walkley award-winning journalist, TV presenter and social commentator.
At the moment, she's hosting Question Everything with Will Anderson on the ABC and ABC
Many see Jan as the voice of progressive young Australians, and I wanted to find out how
Jan sees herself.
Does she feel a responsibility to always speak up?
And how recently becoming a mum might have changed the way she moves through the world?
Well, Jan, having you in the studio, I mean, you're one of the cool kids.
Oh my god, thank you.
I didn't know that I was one of the cool kids.
You must know you're cool.
That's a good question.
I really don't think I'm very cool.
You know what my sister said to me the other day?
I love my sisters.
They keep me, you know, very much two feet firmly planted on the ground.
She's like, it's so funny that people just don't know how much of a loser you are.
Don't you love that about family though?
They do bring us right back to earth.
But why would she say you're a loser though?
I think I probably just did or said something that was, in fact, deeply uncool, which is
how I tend to operate.
And I think she said, it's like really funny how like people just people just don't know
how much of a loser.
They think you're very cool.
So that's where I think the disconnects come from.
I'm going to tell her and say, Jess Rowe said that I'm very cool.
And it's not just me.
I mean, it's not.
When I was doing research about you, frequently with your name, it would come up that you
are the progressive voice of young Australians.
You must know that.
I've never really even thought about it, to be honest with you.
I've never thought about whether that might be a title for me.
But I guess, I guess in some ways I am.
Yeah, I like to run my mouth quite a bit, hopefully for, you know, better not worse.
It's definitely for better.
Where does that come from, that ability to voice your opinion in a very confident way?
I think my parents, parents is probably the big one.
I think they just really liked me and were very, very vocal about if, you know, if you've
got something to say, you should, you should say it.
You should say whatever it is that you are thinking.
And I think they probably said, I was like this from a very sort of early age as well,
which they then encouraged, which then encourages you to be like that, which they encourage
And so it kind of, it grows.
So you had no one shutting you down, saying, oh, you can't say that.
No, I never had anyone shutting me down.
In fact, you know, my dad in particular, my mum as well, but my dad was always very, oh,
why do you think that?
So he'd tease out even more of, you know, the thought or the idea that you might have
And he never foisted his thought or opinion on whatever it is that you were talking about.
I think he, he just let you think it out.
He sort of just let you be a little bit of a critical thinker.
So it all, you know, started there.
And I remember when I was 13, and I think this is a very sort of important formation
in my adolescence.
And when I turned 13, my dad said, oh, now that you're 13, you're a teenager, you know,
not a kid anymore, you're a teenager.
He said, you don't have to ask my permission for anything anymore.
But if you want, you could ask my opinion.
That's so progressive.
Isn't that extraordinary?
I don't think I quite registered the extraordinary nature of that until much, much later, because
at the time you've just got a parent saying, you don't have to ask my permission anymore.
So you're like, sweet, I'm watching SBS after 10.30, you know, I'm going to Jambaroo.
But did it also mean you had a lot more freedom or was it in terms, though, of what you thought
It absolutely meant that.
And it meant that you were then able to think about your choices because your choices were
yours because you didn't have to ask permission.
But that meant that the consequences were yours as well.
And so you ended up having to think about your choices a little bit more, I suppose
more deeply than what you would have otherwise had to think about them.
And it just gives you that foundation to sort of develop as a person, because that's what
you're ultimately doing.
You're like, oh, if I don't have to seek permission, then I can make this choice, but why am I
making this choice?
And so you start sort of thinking through it and developing a bit of character, I guess.
But as a teenager, were there times when that choice went a bit pear shaped?
I was an overall pretty good kid, I think.
There was a bit of sort of tension.
I suppose everyone has tension with their parents when they're teenagers.
But you know, my parents, I think it's a migrant experience as well, because we came from Lebanon
And my parents, very sort of progressive people, comparative.
But you know, things like getting a boyfriend, very fraught, because it was just not something
that you really did culturally.
You know, it's funny.
Did you have a boyfriend as a teenager?
I did have a boyfriend.
But it was very like, well, who is he?
And who are his parents?
And you know, just 1000 questions.
And you know, this idea of where are you going?
And what time are you going to...
I'm not going to say I felt policed, because I didn't go had a lot of freedom.
But I think that there was, you know, even sometimes freedom to like sleep over people's
Like, well, we don't sleep over people's houses.
That's just something that's not done.
And it was, you know, all girls sleep over, we're having fun, and everyone was allowed
to sleep and I was not allowed to sleep.
So I guess like sometimes tension came from there.
But I don't really feel like I made particularly terrible decisions.
Like I don't think I really fell in with a bad crowd, for example.
I think I wised up pretty quickly when someone was a bit, hmm, how you going?
A bit dodgy, yeah.
But again, where did that come from?
Because it's pretty normal as a teenager.
I mean, I use the word normal, because I don't think anyone is normal.
But you know, you want to experiment, you want to push the boundaries.
But it sounds like from what you're describing, you were pretty sensible.
I was pretty sensible in some terms.
Like most people would be like, oh, she just wants a boyfriend to sleep over someone's
That's all right.
That's not pushing the boundaries.
But in the cultural sense of how I grew up, that is considered pushing the boundaries.
You know, I went overseas and lived in France for a year, and that's considered pushing
And then I moved overseas and lived in Bangladesh for a year, which is considered pushing the
And then I moved out, which is, I don't know if you've ever met Lebanese people, they
stay home till they're 45.
It's cultural law.
And so leaving home before you're married, you know, is really sort of pushing the boundaries.
I had 26 people at my wedding, which is...
There wasn't a massive thousands and thousands of people.
No, my parents were going to call the police.
It was almost illegal.
Well, how can we invite the plumber?
Because they did invite the plumber to my sister's wedding, just FYI.
But you know, so that's considered sort of a pushing of the boundaries.
So yeah, like I said, in some senses, it was, but then people might look at that from the
outside and go, so what?
You had 26 people at your wedding.
It's like, that's just not the done thing, though.
And there's a lot of negotiation that comes with wanting to do that.
And it gets, it got to a point where it's like, you know what?
She's just going to do what she wants to do.
I've told her that she doesn't have to ask for permission.
You know, my parents raised me to do that sort of thing.
They knew it was coming.
They knew it was coming.
They tut-tut about it, but they knew it was coming.
But they gave you permission.
And I think as a parent, that's one of the best things you can do for your kids, that
you give them permission to be themselves and make their way in the world, even if
it's very different to what you would expect or how you did it.
That's what they did very early on for me.
And that's what I think really kind of helped with my confidence, my sense of self, my character.
And just knowing that the consequences are yours as well, makes you think through things
So let's talk about growing up in Bankstown.
So you moved from Lebanon to Bankstown when you were, was it four?
Do you have memories of being a little girl in Lebanon?
I have very sort of hazy memories of that time.
I have memories of things like the window sills in our house, which were green.
I have memories of the landscape, which I sometimes, you know, memories are a funny
You think, did I remember this?
Or did I see this in a photo?
Or did someone tell me?
They're capricious, aren't they?
They're very capricious.
It was confirmed when I did go back to Lebanon in 2004 for the first time.
It's like, no, they're green.
Shutters are green.
I didn't make it up.
I didn't make it up.
I have memories of school buses, of yellow school buses.
Memories of preschool.
I was sort of at school very, very young, at two, of being outside and picking little
bits of greenery from the ground.
Somehow that's a memory that stuck.
I can remember the taste, but they're all sort of little snippets and vignettes, you
know, not really too much before the age of four.
And so then your family moved to Bankstown.
What was that like growing up?
Yeah, that's an interesting question because at the time, so I grew up sort of, you know,
we're talking the 90s, 2000s.
It was a very fraught time and place, I'll say, for people who were of Arab descent
and specifically Lebanese descent.
The Cronella Riots happened in 2005.
For anyone who doesn't know what the Cronella Riots are, they were a race riot where people,
you know, showed up on Cronella Beach and were sort of chanting things like, fuck off
lebs and holding placards and all that sort of stuff.
I mean, I remember seeing that on the television and was just appalled, disgusted, couldn't
believe it was happening.
But for you as a young Australian Lebanese woman, how on earth did that make you feel
Yeah, it's funny because I was working in retail at the time selling very cool jeans
in 2005, December 2005, and my dad called and he said, oh, you should turn on the TV.
And I said, well, why?
He said, oh, something's happened.
And I said, what's happened?
And he said, they hate us.
You know, I'm at Macquarie Centre playing like Ministry of Sound, Volume 5, like I can't
have an existential crisis right now, Dad, what's going on?
And he said, just turn on the TV when you can.
And you know, I would talk about race with my dad for many, many years because there
was sort of a buildup, I suppose, to the Cronella Riots.
Sometimes, you know, he might be prone to exaggeration, perhaps, or feeling a certain
way that I might not have necessarily felt.
So I thought, oh, it's dad.
He's just calling.
It's not that bad.
You know, it's probably just some story in the paper about Libs again.
And remember flicking on the TV.
Good evening. It started out as a show of numbers by locals wanting to protect Cronella.
But by mid-afternoon, it had turned into scenes not seen before in Sydney.
Angry mobs fuelled by alcohol turning on individuals because of their ethnic background.
Here, officers are pelted with beer bottles as they help one would be victim into a police car.
And it's like, it's like you just fold in on yourself.
Don't know if that makes sense.
It's not really a disgust or an appalled.
It's like you just collapse internally.
It's not even really fear.
There's a hint of dread.
It was almost like, what have I done?
That was the immediate question that came to mind, you know, to see somebody holding
a sign that says, fuck off, Libs.
There was thousands of people.
What have I done?
What have, you know, what has my dad done?
Because when people say Libs, like, that's who I immediately associate with, of course,
because I am that and, you know, my family is that.
What have we done to warrant this?
And then once that feeling sort of subsides, it's like, it's then the anger and, you know,
the being appalled and those feelings kick in.
But before all of that, like I said, it's this sort of like inward shrinking feeling
that you get where you're like, oh, I don't, I don't belong here.
I think it's important that we don't rush to judgement about these events.
I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country.
I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people.
Because that's what, you know, migrant kids, I think, deal with quite a bit.
It's this feeling of outsider.
It's an outsider status.
And you're constantly grappling with that.
Always, always, always, you know, not feeling like you belong anywhere.
And I think, you know, in your formative years, you just want to belong, don't you?
Well, you want to fit in.
You want to fit in. You want to fit in.
You want to feel like you belong.
And, you know, there's all these things sort of telling you, you don't, you don't, you don't.
You're not from here. You should go back to where you came from.
You came from somewhere else.
You know, you flew here.
We grew here. You're not of here.
You're not from here or of here.
You're sort of this foreign entity that's here at the behest of all of us gracious people
who've let you in.
That's sort of how you walk through the world.
And that was the riots were sort of the biggest confirmation of that.
They were a very, very, you know, awful confirmation of your worst fears, actually,
that you don't belong where it is that you're supposed to belong.
And I mean, the absurdity, too, of all of that is we're all from elsewhere,
apart from our Indigenous brothers and sisters.
All of us have come from somewhere else.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, the great absurdity, I think,
is that there was an Indigenous person who was getting beat up,
you know, when all of this was happening.
You know, the only people who probably have a real claim to Australia
are, I suppose, suddenly also being conferred upon that outsider status.
And then you sort of realise, as I grew up, that that outsider status
or that feeling like an outsider actually is a very quintessential Australian feeling.
You know, I once worked with a guy who always used to say,
the obstacle is the way, which I thought was very annoying.
That's a very... Stop saying that!
You know, that's the obstacle. That's not the way.
You know, and I sort of came full circle on that.
This feeling of never really belonging always felt so like it was this foreign concept.
It was this very un-Australian concept. I don't feel Australian.
And then I kind of, over the years, I guess, found a little bit more confidence
and started thinking, actually, that feeling, that's the feeling.
That's the Australian feeling.
And I think a lot of people feel that way, especially a lot of kids of diaspora,
various diasporas, various migrant children.
And the more you hear from them, the more you're like, oh, so many people have this sort of story.
That's a quintessential Australian story. Yeah.
So you say that's what you've come to now.
But what about when you described that folding in on yourself?
How then were you able to come through that?
Because it could be quite easy to imagine.
A lot of people might just go, I'm so angry about this.
I'm going to act out this particular way or head down this path.
How was it that you came through that and not be so angry or resentful about what had happened?
You know, I think I still am a bit resentful.
I think I've been hanging on to it for 15 years.
It's funny because it's like when I'm in the car, sometimes I see a sign that says Cronulla.
And I have this reflex reaction to it.
I don't think about it really.
It's not like I've processed what's happened.
It's just like, oh, I get a sort of a shiver.
And I was speaking to a cousin of mine the other day who's 21.
And, you know, I was saying, oh, the Cronulla riots.
And she's like, yeah, I mean, I was five.
So I don't really remember.
Like, it wasn't really a thing for her.
You know, whereas for me, I'm like, what?
You don't remember the Cronulla riots?
I can't forget the Cronulla riots.
You know, it was this very sort of like different experience.
So how old were you then?
But, you know, talking about growing up in Bankstown, there was all these sort of things
in the lead up to the Cronulla riots that had happened in the area.
You know, in 2000, there were horrible gang rapes that were perpetrated by men of Lebanese descent.
There was, you know, September 11, which was in 2001, perpetrated by not necessarily
people of Lebanese descent, but Arabs and Muslims.
And, of course, Arabs is this homogenous term.
If you're an Arab, then you're a terrorist.
And so, you know, terrorist jokes ensued for however long.
You know, there was a lot of sort of what was termed kind of gang warfare or gang crime.
And these sort of calls that, oh, lebs can't integrate.
Oh, no, we should reconsider our immigration processes and, you know, should they really
be coming here and yada yada yada.
So that's sort of what we were kind of dealing with in the 10 years prior to the riots actually
happening, which sort of, again, just kept confirming this outsider status.
Maybe we shouldn't be here.
Maybe we shouldn't, you know, maybe we can't integrate.
Maybe you start to sort of believe that about yourself, that you're not quite good enough
And how do you feel now?
Do you feel good enough?
I mean, you know, this is this is all sort of part of growing up as well, I think, is
you just you kind of get a little bit more confidence in yourself.
Solidarity is a big one.
So you start to connect with people around you who've had similar experiences and sort
of end up being, you know, empowered and successful.
The community is a lot older.
You know, we're talking about stuff now that happened like 20 years ago, you know, even
longer if you're going to go back to the 90s.
And it's an older community.
It's a slightly more established community.
I think people have, you know, money and power and platform and voice and agency.
And you see, you have a voice and you use your voice.
And I was interested to read recently how you were mentoring a younger woman about her
experiences and how she can make her way in the media.
What you have done has paved the way for other women exactly like you.
Oh, thank you for saying that.
A lot of it is if you can see it, you can be it.
That's a lovely saying.
And I know that there's, you know, complexities to people arriving in certain jobs and certain
positions and whatnot.
But like when I was growing up, there's not a single person who was of Arab descent that
said openly, I am of Arab descent.
I just I couldn't think of a single person.
And now there is, you know, I mean, 10.
I know 10 sort of sounds like a bit of a ridiculous number, like really, just 10.
It's like, yeah, but it was zero before, you know, and now it's 10.
And I hope that that continues.
I mean, I hope the diversity conversation, people are like, everyone's always talking
It's like, mate, I would love to not talk about diversity ever again, truly.
Like it's there's a lot of much more interesting things to talk about in the world, believe
And I'd love to get to a point where having, you know, a Lebanese person wherever on TV
in the upper echelons of the parliament and the corporate world and whatever is just so
run of the mill and so boring that we don't have to talk about it.
We're not there yet.
What will it take to get there?
Look, firstly, time.
That's I think the big one.
And like I said, I've noticed a difference in, you know, my community now versus my community
30 years ago, just in terms of like, you know, the kind of empowerment that comes with second
and third generations, the wealth to some extent, because you left your country with
You've started with something.
It's not, you know, a huge amount, but it's something.
And the generation after you will improve on that, hopefully, that's the plan.
But I think, you know, I'd like for each person who, you know, pushes a door open to leave
that door open so that other people can walk through, so to speak.
I think that's what's going to change that.
You know, I think visibility is really important just so because you need to be able to plant
that seed that, oh, no, this can be done before somebody heads down the road of doing it.
Look, the emphasis on diversity and inclusion, I think, is good.
It has perhaps pitfalls, maybe, in some ways that I don't know where it's going to go.
And what do you mean?
I think sometimes the diversity and inclusion conversation lets people off the hook easy.
Because if you're a corporation and you want to be seen to be doing something, and when
you go, OK, well, we've got a diversity and inclusion officer, you know, this is all good.
We have diversity and inclusion day, but we don't pay our workers properly.
But the top echelons are actually not diverse at all.
You know, we've got the diversity and inclusion officer in a particular place and they get
to do this sort of slightly limited thing that's very front facing.
So we can tick that box.
We can tick that box, yeah.
I think it can sometimes, it can be a bit of a box ticking exercise.
It can be prone to tokenism.
And I think that, you know, sometimes you do see that happening with corporations that
sort of go, oh, we need to act and we need to act now.
And we need to put a brown person here.
And so that brown person then comes to represent all of the brown people.
And actually, all that is is just white people telling you who is brown enough to be in this
role and who's not.
You know, there's just a lot of complexities, but real change takes time, time, time, time.
And with those complexities, you talk about, OK, we put a particular person in this role.
It's a lot on someone's shoulders.
Do you ever feel sometimes, I don't want to be a spokesperson for women from Lebanon?
I definitely am not a spokesperson for women, but no, that's a yes.
But in terms of people saying, well, OK, Jan Fran was born in Lebanon, she's Australian.
Let's tick that box here.
What she says is now representative of what young women, young Arabic women think.
I'm very, I guess, deliberate with how I talk about race.
I'm deliberate with how I talk about a lot of things because you can get pigeonholed
into these sort of boxes whereby you're like, oh, you're an ethnic person.
Well, you don't tell us all the ethnic opinions that we need to know.
And it's just like, yeah, no, I'm not interested in being a spokesperson for my community.
I speak on behalf of myself as a member of that community and how that has kind of formed
me and formed my opinions and really been a driving force in my life, I guess.
But yeah, I'm very conscious about being pigeonholed.
And a lot of times I just, you know, people say, oh, you know, we want someone to talk
about this stuff.
And I've said, you know, I don't I don't think that that's me.
I don't want to be like, and now the ethnic person.
Because that's the outsider sort of status that you constantly keep getting relegated
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You know, we've moved on from this.
You know, how do you make that a quintessential Australian voice, actually, rather than something
that you pluck from the outside and bring in when needed?
Let's talk about where you're at now.
You've recently become a mum.
Oh, you know, there's a lot of chores.
I'm constantly doing dishes and constantly sterilising bottles.
I will say, I don't think I've ever experienced a time of greater contradiction in my life.
You know, I was just saying to a friend the other day, I've never felt more adult.
But I've never needed to be looked after by my mother more.
You know, it's like you're somehow immediately both the expert and the novice.
You know, you're the mum.
Well, you're his mum.
You should know everything.
But you've got no idea because you've never done this before.
You're a complete novice.
You know, it's like the smallest person in the house takes up the most space.
In every way, in your mind, physically, in every way, you know, and you feel like the
days and the nights are somehow both long and short.
You know, the nights feel long, but somehow the months are short.
You look back, you go, how did this month pass?
But you feel like you're staying up at night forever.
So your little one, your little boy, how old is he?
He's four and a half months.
Four and a half months.
So it's still very much that sleeping.
And I remember I used to just long for sleep and it would never happen because they're
just doing their own thing.
They don't know it's night.
They don't know it's time now to be quiet and off you go to sleep.
It's this sort of blurring of everything.
I mean, you know, he's a baby and sometimes I'm like, why is he doing that?
And then I'm like, cause he's a baby.
That's just what babies do.
They're sort of insane.
There's just these insane little things, but I love sleeping so much.
And one thing that I've been pleasantly surprised by myself about is when this baby
came along, cause sleep thing of the past, just how quickly I was able to adapt to
Because I just, I'm like, there's no point fighting this.
There's no point.
I'm going to have a terrible time if I fight this.
I now am a morning person.
That's what you got to say.
Or I'm just an awake person.
I'm awake all the time and it doesn't matter what time of the day or night it is.
Yeah, you sort of do have to say that.
You have to let go.
And are you finding that easy to let go?
I know for me, I struggled before I had kids.
I'd have goals in mind and I'd think if I do this, this and this, I'll get this result.
And I had to let go of all of that expectation and that was hard.
Do you find that difficult to do?
Not as difficult as what I thought I would find it.
Yeah, it's funny.
I've got like the parenthood, three L's.
The other one is to lean, to lean in to it or lean on to people.
And I've forgotten what the third is.
So I'm really not pitching this very well.
No, that was three.
It was, it's let go, to lean in and lower, lower.
Or lower your expectations.
Let go, lean, lower.
Lose, lean, lower, that sort of thing.
Lowering expectation.
Lower them to zero.
My sister taught me that because I used to think everything had to be up here and lower
the expectations because then you can be pleasantly surprised.
And rather than putting that external pressure about what people think you should be doing,
I just go, you know what?
What is going to work for me and for my family?
And I think that I have done that faster and better than what I thought I would do
that because there's no point in doing anything otherwise.
There's no point because it's just going to make your life harder.
It's not going to have good outcomes for you and your kid.
It's something that you have imposed on yourself.
No one cares about you or your family as much as what you care about you and your family.
That's the best news you'll hear all day.
No one gives a shit about you.
That's honestly, that's great news for me.
I care about you and I care about your story, but I do understand.
In terms of the judgements that we think people are putting on us, they're not because
they've got their own stuff going on.
You see, you're very sensible.
See, I told you, I'm not cool.
Do you believe me now?
Well, but maybe we could say sensible is the new cool.
If we do it your way, you see.
We're really trying to push a square peg into a round hole here, Jess.
Sensible is the new cool.
Actually, can that be the tagline for the podcast?
Dan Fran, sensible is the new cool.
I reckon, I reckon, I think so.
Because that is very sort of almost zen to go, I'm just going to go with this.
I'm not going to fight against it.
Because for a lot of women and men too, it's harder to let go of that, to let go of
that previous life, those previous expectations, this idea of how you want
your life or your family to be.
I think it comes from a place of deep pragmatism, really.
I'm sort of, I'm a very pragmatic person and I just think to myself, well, what's
going to get me to the place that I want to go the quickest?
And it's letting go of expectations.
You know, if the place that you want to go to is a comfortable place for you and
your baby where you're feeling good, well, okay, how am I going to get there?
What is the fastest, easiest way to get there?
I don't want any dramas.
I just want to get there as quickly as possible.
And it is letting go.
You mentioned that you had never needed your mum more.
In what way, how has she helped you now that you're a mum?
My mother, she is glorious.
This has really helped me look at my mother in a new light.
And she was always a very loving mother.
We did butt heads quite a bit.
I think it was that independence streak that I had.
We butted heads over a few things.
Our temperaments were perhaps not aligned, but as good as she was a mother, she is an
extraordinary grandma, just extraordinary.
And seeing her with my son, you know, I think to myself, if I do one thing, I'm
happy with this, I'm good.
I can kind of walk away and say, I am responsible for this, you know,
I mean, she's watching him right now.
I couldn't do what I do without my mother on the most tangible level.
You know, actually having her there looking after my kid is what allows me to work.
And, you know, she's so good with him and he loves her.
He loves her and he loves my dad who changed a nappy for the first time in 68 years.
Oh my goodness, how did he go?
It was garbage, but you know, it was the first time, so we commend him, but I really
want to foster the relationship between my son and his grandparents, my in-laws as well.
But, you know, it's just like, I stayed at my mom's house for six days the other week.
And it's funny, it's just like, she just walks into a room and it's like this weight
just lifts off your shoulders.
Mom's cooking something and it's like everything she makes is delicious.
You know, and she says, oh, it's because I make it with love.
And she does, she does.
She's got this garden, it's this beautiful garden, and she just spends so much time
in the garden and she talks to her plants and she says, look at this.
Oh, look at this plant, it's my beautiful little plant.
Come and see this plant.
And the other day the sun was setting and she had the hose out in the garden and I
had Jo with me and she was saying, and there's onions and, you know, watering the onions.
And she's like, and look, Tata, Tata's a grandma in Arabic, and look Tata, there's
the radish and, you know, oh, this is strawberries.
And I just thought, this is it.
You know, this is the place.
Yeah, getting a bit emotional over here, but, you know, very, very, very fortunate
because not everybody has that.
And, you know, the kid's born into two families that are obsessed with him.
He's the first grandchild in both families and they're the moments.
So all of that stuff about, oh, I expect to be here and I expect to be there.
And I expect you miss, you miss that.
You miss that the actual thing, you know, like the sooner you let go,
God, the happier, the more joyful you'll be, I think.
And you realise as well, it's those moments that matter.
Seeing those that you love most, connecting and being a part of that.
It's not fun having a baby, but I will say it's one of the most joyful experiences.
I don't know how else to describe it.
It's hard because it takes the fun element out of it because it is hard.
You're planning and you're thinking and you're not sleeping and you're working
and you're tired and you're working out how to do this.
But there's a joy that just permeates throughout the whole experience.
And it is, it's those moments.
You know, I wouldn't try, I'd trade, you name it to have more moments like that
for, you know, the rest of my, my natural life, my son's natural life,
my parents' natural life, you know, trade, I trade it all in an instant.
But you are going to have so many more of those incredible joyful moments altogether.
If I have anything to do with it.
Of course you will.
You know, like everything's just, there's just a different hue, you know.
Christmas is coming up.
And I was like, oh, and my sister got him a Christmas outfit.
You know, there's just this joy that is there now that just wasn't there in the same way.
I'm not going to say we weren't joyful before, you know, I love my family,
great family, a lot of good times.
There's a particular joy.
And also it brings a perspective, I think, that you realise
actually it isn't just about me anymore.
It's, you know, people say, yeah, children bring meaning into your life.
I don't think that they inherently bring meaning into your life.
I think what they do is they force you to live for something other than yourself.
And I think that's what brings meaning into your life.
And I think you can have that in many ways.
Children is one of them, because that's what they force you to do,
to put, you know, a sense of service over self.
I think that's where the meaning comes from,
where you realise, you know, it's, you're not, things don't circulate around you.
Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
And I love, though, that image of your mum's garden.
That's, I'd love to go and sit in that garden.
And have her show me all the plants.
All the radishes.
Yeah, yeah, it really is special.
Well, you're special and thank you.
Oh, thanks, Jess.
I reckon Jan Fran is cool.
I want to be cool like Jan Fran, and I'm sure you do too.
And if you can't get enough of Jan, make sure you check out her show, Question Everything,
where Jan and co-host Will Anderson separate the real news from the fake,
along with a panel of comedians.
It's on Wednesdays on the ABC and ABC iview.
And for more big conversations like this, follow the Jess Rowe Big Talk Show podcast.
It means you'll never miss an episode.
And if there's someone in your life that you think might enjoy this conversation,
share it with them.
And if you enjoyed this episode with Jan,
I reckon you're going to enjoy my chat with Faraz Durrani.
You know, being a little bit culturally different,
you have to be more on your feet and have your wits about you
in case there's people around you who's trying to take advantage of that,
you know, and really be self-effacing.
And, you know, some of the things that I would do is be the clown to get out of things,
you know, just in case they were to strike me down or to minimise me or marginalise me,
you know, I'd be the clown and maybe they would like me more then.
The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show was presented by me, Jess Rowe.
Executive producer, Nick McClure.
Audio producer, Nicky Sitch.
Supervising producer, Sam Kavanagh.
Until next time, remember to live big.
Life is just too crazy and glorious to waste time on the stuff that doesn't matter.