I read "Yesteryear" thinking it would just be a fun book to read on vacation, and instead it pissed me off enough that I apparently need two episodes to talk about it.

So here's Part 1 of my thoughts. I’m getting into one of the things the book captures so well: the weird tribalism happening between women right now—working moms, stay-at-home moms, trad wives, feminists, influencers, and everyone in between.

Why do we get so angry at women whose lives look different from ours? How much of that anger is actually jealousy, guilt, resentment, or just feeling like we’re failing at something everyone else seems to have figured out?

I talk about my own experience as a working mom, why the perfectly curated trad wife life can be so irritating, what social media leaves out of the picture, and why I think motherhood has become another place where women feel like they have to prove they’re doing it right.

And somehow we also get into $30,000 stoves, nannies nobody admits to having, dead chickens, raccoons, and why there is absolutely no such thing as effortlessly doing it all.

This book gave me a lot to think about, and unfortunately, I’m nowhere near done. Part 2 coming soon...

Purchase "Yesteryear" by Caro Claire Burke

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Being Different with Liz Durham is a Palm Tree Pod Co. production

A friend recently told me she wanted to hear about my “cooking journey,” which made me laugh because honestly, it has been a pretty pathetic one.

I went from barely cooking at all, to living on Uber Eats, to becoming slightly obsessed with Martha Stewart and convincing myself that everything needed to be homemade, organic, beautiful, and somehow effortless.

Obviously, that didn’t last.

In this solo episode, I’m talking about how feeding my family has changed as I’ve changed—what I care about now, what I’ve completely let go of, and why I think moms make food way more complicated and stressful than it needs to be.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized the point isn’t to cook perfectly. For me, it’s about slowing down, teaching my kids something useful, eating better when we can, and actually sitting around the table together at the end of the day.

I’m still figuring it out, but I’ve definitely chilled out a lot.

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Liz Durham Instagram | Website
Subscribe Apple Podcast | Spotify

Being Different with Liz Durham is a Palm Tree Pod Co. production

Mark Taylor is one of my husband Luke’s best friends and one of those people I can never have a surface-level conversation with. Every time I talk to him, I leave thinking about something differently, so I finally decided to sit him down and ask him about all the parts of his life I somehow didn’t know after knowing him for years.

We start with how Mark was raised and why he credits his parents with giving him the freedom to screw up, make his own decisions, and fail while he was still at home. That turns into a conversation about how he and his wife, Lynn, have approached raising their own four kids, why he cares more about who his kids are becoming than perfectly controlling what they do, and why he thinks there comes a point—especially with teenage boys—where a dad’s role needs to change.

Then we get into Mark’s career and the influence his own dad had on the way he thinks about work and risk. We talk about starting a real estate business with two very young kids at home, taking risks without knowing exactly how they were going to work out, and the part of entrepreneurship people don’t talk about enough: sometimes it takes a really long time before any of it starts paying off. In Mark’s case, he says it was probably close to ten years before they saw real financial traction.

From there, we get into real estate, housing, hospitality, homeownership, why the American Dream looks different to younger generations, and how the cost of housing may be affecting everything from wealth building to whether people feel like they can even start families.

And because this is Being Different, we obviously end up talking about family, stay-at-home motherhood, feminism, social media, materialism, faith, and whether our culture is starting to realize that some of what we’ve been chasing isn’t actually making us happier.

This conversation goes a lot of different places, but I think the thread running through all of it is pretty simple: build a life around what actually matters, be willing to take some risks, and don’t be so afraid of failure that you never try anything in the first place.

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Liz Durham Instagram | Website
Subscribe Apple Podcast | Spotify

Being Different with Liz Durham is a Palm Tree Pod Co. production