The Other Side

Clarissa Arthur spent her early teenage years angry. The skipping school, running away, in and out of trouble with the police kind of angry. Then 3 weeks after she turned 17, standing in the bathroom at her high school, she found out she was pregnant. This is when she made the decision to change.

This instinct - to keep moving forward even in a situation that could easily have derailed her - is what propelled Clarissa in ea...

Dr. Sam Hetz cold-emailed three Ottawa clinics that were offering Botox, asking for ten minutes of their time. One doctor graciously said yes, changing the direction of Sam's life. A decade later he's a partner of a 70-clinic, L'Oréal backed medical group, as well as the co-founder of Ottawa's first personalized, private, longevity-focused clinic, LifespanMD. 

What makes this conversation worth the hour isn't his resume, though...

Michelle Weger fell asleep at a microscope in her first year of university and woke up with two black eyes. It took five years before anyone figured out why.

As Michelle talks about living with narcolepsy we speak about the tendency to hide the parts of us that aren't so polished, and what can happen when we let our guard down.

What you'll hear about: the 5 years of dead-end doctor visits and the friend, Rebecca, who changed her life...

My mom is 77. Her closest friends are four women she met when she was 16 and for almost a decade of their lives, she barely spoke to them.

I went into this conversation expecting a nice story about a friend group that's lasted 60+ years. What I didn't expect was how the silence actually ended - not with a big reconciliation talk, but with two of them showing up at her door with a pie. She still calls it an olive branch.

This week I c...

Erin McHarge was a 27 year old PhD student going about her life when she was told she has stage 4B endometrial cancer - and it's incurable. 

But this isn't a "cancer episode". It's a conversation with someone more curious about her own life than afraid of it - and it changed how I think about mine.

This is one of the most highly downloaded podcasts of the year and within minutes you'll see why. I originally released it as a two-...

One of the most downloaded episodes in the history of this show - and it's the very first one I ever recorded <3

My friend Mandie lost her mom to cancer, and then her stepdad, 11 months later. Two parents, back to back, in under a year. We get into what actually gets you out of bed the day someone dies, running the Chicago Marathon four hours after finding out her mom had two months left, and the dead-parent jokes that only make ...

He spent 25 years inside some of the highest-stakes rooms in the Canadian government and he still describes himself as "not really a social guy."

This past January Nadine sat down with Fraser Valentine to talk about what happens when the thing you built your whole identity around is about to end. It was just months before his retirement date and the conversation was so well received it remains as one of the most downloaded - so here...

This month Mom & Sis joined me to talk about the moment a parent-child relationship quietly turns into a friendship - and the phone call Nadine got from a hotel in Quebec that made her realize her mom had already made that shift, years before she even noticed.

This isn't a how-to-raise-your-kids episode. It's the other side of it: what it actually takes for a parent to step all the way back, and what happens once they do...

Nagad is a therapist, and the jeweller behind Of Soleil, where she hand-shapes polymer clay into blueberries you'd swear were real, earrings inspired by basket weaving, and collections named for the instruments and scents of home.

What got me wasn't the craft itself, gorgeous as it is - it's that every piece she makes is doing quiet, deliberate work: carrying her culture and memory into rooms they wouldn't otherwise reach.

We talk ab...

Dr. Jared Gerston has been treating Nadine's body for years using a technique called PDTR. When she went to see him for what she assumed was pickleball-related neck pain and walked out pain free, learning it had nothing to do with her favourite past-time and, instead, was her nervous system still reacting to an old injury, she knew it was time to mic him up! 

This isn't really an episode about chiropractic care. It's about what...

Rebecca Rowe trained at Pratt Institute and ESMOD Paris, ran her own clothing brand for eight years, and lost her entire collection - patterns included - the week a flood destroyed her apartment.  

What struck me wasn't so much the flood as what came after: an insurance adjuster telling her that her patterns (which took hundreds of hours of work) were worth $9 each. That's the moment I understood why she does what she does now....

Ro Nwosu spent years as one of the only Black movement instructors most Ottawa-area fitness studios called on when they needed to "do the diversity work" - often unpaid, feeling under-appreciated, and expected to make hard truths comfortable to hear.

This is something we cannot gloss over when we talk about her burnout - in fact, it's a direct cause. Listen in as Ro tells us how she turned "I'm the problem" from an accusatio...

This month's Mom & Sis episode started as advice for my nephew Connor, who's about to graduate high school, and ended with all three of us realizing we're still graduating into something new every few years, whether we call it that or not. Our own advice, mirrored back to ourselves, even at 48, 55 and 77. 

We talk about: the year Danielle and Nadine both moved out, and what Lorraine now calls the "freeing" side of w...

Megan Lendrum and Meagan Kribeiro are the makers behind the jewelry company, Daughters of the River. Introduced by a mutual friend, they ended up side by side at a creative market and, within weeks, became roommates, dear friends, and then business partners. 

Their story is a beautiful one - instead of treating each other as competition, they merged their client lists and skills, and built something even bigger and more beautif...

Hillory Tenute got divorced. No one cheated. No one lied. No one did anything wrong - they just grew into two different people, and chose to let each other go with love instead of a fight.

What struck me wasn't the divorce, it's that she let a marriage go while keeping the friend who happened to also be her ex-husband. 

We talk about: the surgery in 2020 that changed how she felt in her own body, and how that quietly reshaped he...

Sure, Amanda Ruddy knows how to throw a party, but this conversation is about so much more. It's about losing her mother to breast cancer and running an event three weeks later. It's about starting her event planning business and having to close it weeks later because of a global pandemic. It's about the grief-fueled resilience she didn't ask for, but used to keep going, smirking as she remembers thinking, "What's the worst that ca...

Mom watched me unnecessarily rack up student debt in my twenties and made a choice most parents wouldn't: she let me handle it myself.

And I'm not the only one - she's done this for all three of her kids, in different ways at different times in our lives. Watching, quietly running a sort of threat assessment even to this day. 

We talk about: my student loan and how I moved to Calgary after my master's degree with...

Content warning: infant loss

When we left off, Emma Mitchell's daughter, Evie, had just been born at 23 weeks and 6 days. In part two, Emma picks up 118 days later - when the numbers finally stopped adding up, and she and Devin had to decide, together, how Evie's story would end.

Evie passed on December 10th; her due date had been December 5th; and by pure coincidence, the 10th was also Emma's mom's birthday - the birthday her mom al...

Content warning: infant loss

Emma Mitchell spent years assuming motherhood wasn't in the cards for her - until a chest X-ray for a bad case of pneumonia led her to check, almost as an afterthought, and the test came back with the darkest line she'd ever seen.

What got me is how much had to go right just for Emma and her partner, Devin, to meet their daughter, Evie, at all - a scare at eight weeks that looked like a miscarriage, a cer...