AUTHOR CHAT: Linda Rhodes' "Breaking The Barnyard Barrier"

She graduates near the top of her veterinary class and still couldn't get hired... because she’s a woman! That’s where our conversation with memoirist Linda Rhodes begins and it only gets more vivid, entertaining, and frustrating from there.

Linda and I talk about her book Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way and the reality of becoming a large animal veterinarian in rural Utah when sexism isn’t subtle, it’s stated out loud in job interviews. Linda takes us through the early spark that pulled her into farm work, to the gatekeeping she faced getting into vet school, to the pressure of being “the test case” for whether women can do the job. Along the way, we sit with the unglamorous truth of dairy cow medicine: freezing nights, no hospital nearby, no backup, and decisions that carry real consequences for animals and farmers.

We also go deep on the memoir writing process. Linda shares why her mother’s death pushed her to write, how she learned to stop writing like a scientist and start writing like a storyteller, and how she chose what grief to put on the page and what to keep private. From there, the story widens into career reinvention, women in leadership, animal health pharmaceuticals, entrepreneurship, and what it looks like to build a family-friendly workplace that actually works.

If you care about women in STEM, gender bias at work, memoir, veterinary medicine, or the kind of resilience that’s earned day after day, this conversation will stay with you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with the moment that hit you hardest.

Purchase Linda Rhode's "Breaking the Barnyard Barrier"

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Xx, Alex

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Transcript

Welcome And Memoir Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Babes in Bookland, your women's memoir podcast. I'm your host, Alex Franca, and today, author Linda Rhodes joins the podcast to discuss her memoir, Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way. She graduated fourth in her class from one of the best veterinary schools in the country and still couldn't get a job. Not because she wasn't good enough, but because she was a woman. I tore through her memoir in one sitting, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it makes me want to start a production company just so I can option it. Linda spent years as a large animal vet in the state of Utah navigating misogyny, a crumbling marriage, and the death of her mother, all while literally elbow deep in dairy cows. Breaking the barnyard barrier, it's a story about grit, grief, love, and what it means to carve a path no one carved before you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I adored your memoir. I told you before we started recording, but I tore through it. It was such a fascinating and well-written story. I admired your grit, your ability to keep pushing forward through misogyny and ignorance. I loved reading about your parents, and I was in awe of the way that you navigated a demanding job, caring for your parents while also trying to keep a marriage afloat. I think your story and your journey will inspire a lot of women. And I think it would make a hell of a movie. Seriously, there are so many great moments of accomplishment, badass moments where you prove yourself. And then there are the heartbreakingly human moments, the struggles that you write about and reflect on so beautifully. So if I ever get my production company off the ground, I'm optioning this.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

That's nice of you to say. Actually, I just got some feedback from one of my friends who just read the book, and he said, Oh my god, that sign where you let loose with all that blue language and and horrified the Mormon dairymans, and you were swearing up a blue streak, and they were like they'd never heard a woman talk like that.

Writing For Family After Loss

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Women, they're men too. No, I'm just kidding. There are so many funny moments. Yeah, I think this is this is just a great story. All right. So before we get into the meat of your memoir, let's talk about the process. Why now, Linda? What inspired you to finally sit down and say, you know what? I'm I'm ready to tell this story. I want to tell this story.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Actually, it had a lot to do with my mother's death. She died when she was 58. I was in my 30s. Yeah, I'm embarrassed to say I kind of thought, well, she was old. I wasn't curious about her life. And years later, you know, when I got into my 50s, and I had my own son and experienced motherhood, there were so many things I wish I'd asked her, and so many stories that I know she had to tell that never got told. And I thought about my son and how, you know, he's not interested in his mother's career and knows nothing about my adventures as a dairy cow vet. So when he was about 10 years old, I said, you know, I want to write these stories down for him. I want him to be able to remember, to know who I was back then. And, you know, you know how kids are. I mean, he might not be curious about it until I'm dead and gone. So I want I want to write it down. Yeah. So that was kind of the the genesis of why I started writing.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Wow. Well, that's such a beautiful gift. You know, when when I turned the age that my mother was when she had me, when I became a mother, basically, we were actually the same age. I realized, oh my gosh, there's this whole part of her life and whole part of my father's life that I don't know who they were. I only know them as I perceive them as my parents and who who they're purposefully showing me, right? Like who you are to your son as mother is a different woman, is a different person because, you know, obviously it's a different type of relationship. So I think that is such a beautiful idea. And I know that there are a lot of companies out there now that can kind of help people. If you don't know the right questions, you actually have a fantastic story to tell. But maybe some people don't feel that way, right? They're like, oh, well, I just, you know, went to school, did like all the normal stuff. I didn't break any barriers. I didn't set out and pave this way for women. But there are a lot of great companies out there that can help people just write down the story of their life because everyone's story is important.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

I mean, even the simple stories, like, how did I get this quilt? Or where did this recipe come from? Or, you know, even the simple stories have such meaning when you get older and you think back on your past that it's it is really wonderful to write them down.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Did your son know that you had been married before? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

He knew that story. He didn't, he really didn't know the full extent of the dairy cow vet stories, though. So that's that's that's been fun seeing him learn about that part of my life.

From Scientist Voice To Story

SPEAKER_00 4:50

I bet. All right, so then how long did it take you to sit down and write the book? And was it just starting as I'm writing these stories down for my son? And when did it morph into, hey, maybe this is something that I actually want to share with the world?

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Well, I started, gosh, almost 20 years ago at a workshop at Cornell, a summer workshop. It was a memoir writing workshop. And I so I kind of had the idea in my head that I wanted to write down some of these stories, didn't know what I was doing. So I thought, I'll take this workshop. I was very surprised when I said the be the morning you were supposed to write a story in the afternoon, you know, you would read it and critique it. When I sat down with my computer, this story just poured out of me. It's like it was been had been waiting to be told. And by that time, I was long past my dairy cow vet days and into my animal pharmaceutical company days. But these old stories were just there. And I really felt passionate about them. And when they started pouring out of me at that workshop, I was like, oh my God, this is really something that I have to do something with. And it was several years later did I kind of think about it as a real book that should be eventually published. But at that moment, I just felt like, you know, you know how your subconscious just suddenly comes up with content that you don't even know you had in you. And it just poured out of me. I was just like writing stories that whole week and people seemed interested in them. And I thought, well, you know, maybe this there's something here. The problem was I was writing like a scientist because I have I have published many scientific manuscripts, which, you know, are very dry and very factual. And so I was writing like a scientist, and I I was lucky enough to connect with a writing teacher who said, you know, you kind of have to start over. You have to ch you have to write like a storyteller. You have to bring the reader into the barn with you. You have to tell them how it smells, you know, how it how the air feels, what what it sounds like, what people are wearing. You know, you have to set a scene. And I had never written like that before, so I I had a lot to learn.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Well, you accomplished that, let me tell you. You really did. You were in the barn. I was I was there with you. I mean, gosh, especially when you're talking about having to feel the the cows to see if they were pregnant. I I don't know why that moment stuck with me. I think because I could feel your guilt at not being certain and like sending potentially sending a pregnant mother to her death. I that moment really stuck with me. I don't know why. I don't know what that says about me. It's always surprising what kind of jumps out from memoirs to people. So as these stories are pouring out of you, there are some struggles. You talk about, you know, losing your mother, you talk about a marriage ending, your father aging. Did you confront moments of grief that you weren't expecting, or was there anything surprising kind of as you allowed this to flow out of you and through you?

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Yeah, it was hard writing about my mom's death. That was hard. At the time, I was kind of the caregiver-in-chief and the organizer-in-chief, and I was doing the meals and I was doing the insurance and I was doing the discussion with the doctors. And I don't think I allowed myself to really feel it as much back then. So yeah, writing it was hard. It was it was re-experiencing that level of grief of that of that loss. And as you see in the book, I don't really show a lot about the time from when she was in the hospital to when she came home. I don't really describe that. I just kind of say I'm flying out there and I know she's gonna die, and then the book just goes into she's dead and we're carrying on. And uh yeah, I I debated a lot about that. I got really conflicting advice from different writing teachers about how much of that to include and not include. But I think I reached the right balance. I I think I did. I it you don't want to wallow in that grief. I mean, everybody knows how difficult it is to lose a parent, but you want to show it. I tried to make a balance there and I I I think it worked.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

I do too. I think you're also allowed to keep the some things for yourself. Just because you set out to write a memoir. I mean, I do hope that people are as authentic and truthful in their memoirs as they can be, because that's what we deserve as the readers. But you're right. I mean, I thought it was perfect because sometimes, like, when you watch a horror movie, if you don't see the monster, the monster's scarier. Like I I I knew that your grief was large and that you were holding it. I didn't need you to spell it out for me. Because at that point, I I've already taken part of the journey with you, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

So thank you for saying that. That that means a lot to me. That was that was one of the harder parts to write, as you can imagine.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Were there any parts that you were hesitant to share? I mean, you do you change the names of the men that you a couple of them?

SPEAKER_01 9:07

So my publisher suggested that I change some names. Some names are not changed, but they felt like they didn't want to offend anybody. You know, the people who who I wrote about know it's them. Well, yeah, actually what I think what was hard was to write the the chapter about the cow that I killed when I gave an IV of calcium. That cow died. And I just was horrified. And it was I realized as I was writing the book, I was telling all these interesting stories, and but most of them were success stories, but it wasn't all success. And I I talked with my writing teacher and I said, I I think I have to choose a a difficult failure to make this a more balanced, real vision of what practice was really like. So that that was a hard that was a hard piece to write. And then it was extremely hard to write the piece about my husband's accident. Yeah. Reliving that was uh that was hard. I had to, I had to really think back about the details. I hadn't thought about it in many years. And it took me a long time to kind of piece together and remember what the chronology was, what happened first, what happened second, how how it all worked out. But but yeah, I think that was probably the second hardest piece to write.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

That was wild. And you really did a great job of putting us into your shoes. I I felt the confusion, the hopelessness, and also that weird feeling where your marriage was already in this place that you were feeling like, what are our what what can our next step be? And we'll and we'll get into that. But had you talked to Vincent before publishing the book? Did you send him? I don't is he still alive?

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Yes, yes, he is. And actually, he still lives in the the community in upstate New York playing music with his. Good for him, good for him, which is what he always wanted to do. And he's a very well-known musician. My sister lives in the same town, so she's maintained a relationship with him and his brothers. And the publisher asked me to send him a copy, and I was like, Oh my god, I you know, and I hadn't talked to him since the 80s. So my sister gave me his email and I sent him a copy. I said, you know, this, I'm I'm publishing this, I'm going to change the names. But my publisher really wanted to get your reaction before it goes out into the public. And, you know, they were just worried that he might raise a ruckus about it for some reason. He was so gracious. He was so amazingly gracious. He just said that he loved the memoir, that it was that I was an amazing woman. He corrected a whole bunch of details, like I had gotten the toes that he lost wrong, and you know, some little things like that. I gotten the work that he did down in Utah wrong, and he reminded me what he'd done. But he said, You don't need to change anything. We we might have different memories of this. He was incredibly gracious. And then um, about three months ago, I went to Ithaca and I met with him. And yeah, how was that? It was lovely. Yeah, you know, he's he's remarried, he has a son who's about the same age as my son. We created parenthood stories. He was at a gig playing music, and I got to hear him, and then at the break we had a little chat, and it was you know, it was lovely. So there you go. Who would have ever imagined?

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Look at what the rippling effects of sharing your story has continued to do. His reaction tracks with the character that you set him up to be. You don't dislike Vincent. It's heartbreaking any time that a relationship doesn't work out when two people want it to. And you guys just had battling dreams, is kind of what I took away from your memoirs. You had two very different dreams. Ultimately, it was an act of love to let one another go to pursue those dreams. And here's the rest of your life. It is wild to me, you know. I can't imagine looking back decades from now, but I think about close friendships I had growing up in high school and how I don't talk to these people who had such a profound effect on my life.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Yeah. Well, you should get those relationships back. I I actually do a Zoom every Tuesday night, every Tuesday night with five of my old high school friends. And high school, I graduated in 1966. We've known each other for many, many, many decades, and we're growing old together, and we're still we're we still are very, very close friends. So those are relationships that are really worth reuniting and rekindling.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yeah. Okay, I may take your advice. I've got a couple that I still am close friends with, but there's just the few that got away, you know, because life happens, things happen. It's hard, yeah. I might take this as a sign to reach out.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Yeah, it's it's it's worth the it's worth the effort.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah, yeah. One last question of process. You write that it took you years to get this down, but did you have any moments where you stepped away from it for a long time because you felt blocked or not really?

What Grief To Put On Page

SPEAKER_01 13:53

I I did. I had a full manuscript and I finally found an agent, which, as you know, is a very difficult thing to do. And she had me write a book proposal because for a nonfiction book like a memoir, you have to write a whole proposal, which is another like 90 pages of writing, but it's more like a marketing document. So I wrote that. She shopped it around to a bunch of publishers. I got some good feedback, but nobody bought the book, nobody wanted the book. And she came back and said, Well, based on all this feedback, I think you need to change this and you need to change that, and you need to do something this differently. And I was just like, Oh no, I I just I can't. And I just had to stop. And I just I just told her I need a break. And about six months went by, and I all of her advice was going on in my head, and it just didn't feel right to me. And then she called me and said she decided to get out of publishing. She was leaving her gig as an agent and she was giving me back the book rights. So now I was back to you know, ground zero. And I just realized she had urged me to do things to the book that I didn't think worked. And she had asked me to get rid of a couple of chapters that I thought were good chapters. I put them back in. So I I had a quite a break, like a half a year's break when I just stewed on her advice. And I I really had a breakthrough because I realized that not all advice is good advice. No, that's an important lesson to learn, and that can be really hard to discern for yourself, especially from somebody who's supposedly uh, you know, an expert agent and in the publishing world.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

So yeah, that was my big kind of step back. Once I decided to take the book on and make it what I thought it needed to be and not worry about selling it, it got much better. It got much, much better. And that's when I started contacting university academic presses, and that's when I got my publisher. University of Nevada was delighted with it. They were like, Don't change a thing, we love it. You know, they it went through peer review where they sent it out to two other writers to make comments and they made really minimal comments, and that's when I kind of knew I was on the right track.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

That's amazing. It's a long journey. Yeah, but worth it, definitely worth it. Because now it's out there, now it's out there for everyone to get a hold of. And of course, we always link ways to buy the book from bookshop.org so that people can support their local indie bookstores.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

But run, don't walk, gallop, don't walk to get this book. Okay, let's get into the meat of it. So take me through your choice of choosing large animal medicine. You graduate from college and you're like not quite sure what to do next. And then you go live on a commune, which I would read a memoir just about your time on the commune, probably.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

That's a whole nother story, right? Yeah. When I got there, I had grown up in a suburban neighborhood with cats. I mean, I'd never taken care of farm animals. I'd always kind of had a dream about horses. Oh, someday I could ride a horse, but you know, we didn't have money to have horses or go to horseback riding. So when I got out there, I I had everything to learn. And they had about 30 goats and maybe 20 sheep and a horse and a pig and a bunch of dogs and 200 chickens, and it was a crazy place. And so I was working for a room and board. And the first thing that they asked me to do is milk the goat. So I had to learn how to milk a goat. And from then on, I just really enjoyed being in the barn. I got a kick out of learning everything I could learn about how to take care of these animals and what they needed, and you know, how to clean up their barn and what to feed them and what to how to trim their hooves and how to milk them and how to shear the sheep. And I just fell in love with it. I liked all the physicality of it. You know, I'd been in college for four years where it was like you sit at a desk basically, and it was just great to be out in nature and moving around and learning all kinds of new things.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

And what is your favorite thing about farm animals, the large animals? You taught I love where you're like, it all started with goats, and then you talked about having to milk the goats.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Well, you know, I'll talk about cows. I mean, goats are the same, but the cows are much more intelligent and sensitive than you would think. They're very observant, they're very curious. I mean, the same is true of goats. Goats kind of even more so, because I think goats are a little more intelligent than cows. But have you seen the videos of people like out in the pasture playing music and the cows come over the pasture and they all like look at the guy that's playing music? And they they're just wonderfully curious and intelligent animals, which I think we generally appreciate. And they're just silly. I mean, you know that term when you say, Oh, she hightailed it down the road. Well, that comes from cows because when a cow runs, she puts her tail straight up in the air and kind of waves it around and just dashes across the pasture and she said that's the hightailing it thing. So they're just endlessly curious and and and to develop a relationship so you could like kind of read them and they could kind of read you. That took me years. I mean, the dairymen kind of have it in their bones, but I I I had to work at it. Um, but after a while, they and they all have personalities. I mean, most of the cows that I worked with had names Pinky and Daisy and Lemon and Marcy, and they all had names, and and they were personalities. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

So my grandmother had cows. My grandmother had a farm growing up. Um, she got rid of the cows when I was still fairly young, but I remember she had like two or three, and me and my cousins would go out there, and they have puppy dog eyes, you know, like oh yeah, they're soulful creatures, and I do think that there's a disconnect that has to happen if you're a beef eater, you know, like there's only so much maybe that you can stop and think about how incredible these large animals are.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Well, that's one of the reasons I like doing dairy.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Because um, because you your your aim was to keep the animals healthy and alive.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

And uh so they could make the most milk they could make. So that was a nice way. And then it was also the calves are beautiful, and it was really fun to see the calves growing up. But I always had the science brain. I was a science nerd in college, and I I kind of miss the science stuff. So I bought a Merck veterinary manual and I would look, I would read that, and that was and one day I just thought, well, you know, what would be the career that would blend my enjoyment of these animals and being in the barn with the science part of my brain and being a large animal of vet seemed like the perfect, the perfect fit.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

At what point was there a point where a little voice said, Yeah, but you're a woman?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

You know, it wasn't until I didn't even I didn't even know it was hard to get into vet school. Okay. I mean, it turns out it's much harder to get into veterinary school than into medical school. I I had no idea. Wow, okay. But I came back east and I had not taken any biology courses undergrad. So I had to take the minimum four biology courses plus organic chemistry in order just to apply to vet school.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Sounds like my nightmare, Linda, but good for you.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

So yeah, I took genetics and microbiology and anatomy and embryology and organic chemistry. But I knew that I had to get straight A's in order to get into vet school. And there was a pre-vet advisor at that college, it was SUNY Binghamton, and he I everybody said, Oh, you should go talk to the pre-vet advisor. And I went in and he just said, Forget it, you'll never get in. Women just don't get accepted. So just you just should like figure out something else to do with your life because you'll never get into vet school. And I was just like stunned. And I I was I said, that can't be right. That just can't be right. But I it turned out that it was really hard to for women to get into vet school. I was right at the cusp of when in 1973, when Title IX was passed, which the federal government said you can't discriminate, vet schools had only been admitting two or three women per class. And so I was right on the cusp of when that changed. My class was 40% at Penn. The same year, there were only like 12% at Cornell and maybe 10% at Wisconsin. And so it was very hard for women to get in. But Penn was much better, and I was lucky enough to get into Penn. But at that moment when he said, Forget it, I just already had this can do attitude. Like, no, I'm gonna prove you, I'm gonna prove you wrong. I'm I'm gonna get in.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

And I did. So I was felt very blessed because Penn was one of the best vet schools in the country, and they were more willing to accept my. Women than anywhere else. So I was I was very lucky.

Vet School Gatekeeping And Title IX

SPEAKER_00 22:02

And then you mailed a copy of your acceptance letter to that guy. No, just kidding. That's what I would have done. I would have shown up and been like, see, told you I could do it. But unfortunately, that was just the first hurdle for you to have to overcome. You want to show your advisor that he's wrong. You do show him that he's wrong. You get into pen. There's other women, you're looking around, you're saying, okay, I'm not the sole apple on the tree here. But you didn't really have a female figure who was a farm vet veterinarian that you were looking at. You knew that it would need to be you paving the this path. And that never deterred you. You felt confident in doing that.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky. I I did have a woman mentor at Penn, Dr. Elaine Hamill, and I talk about her in the book that she's the one who told me you never stop being afraid, you just stop showing it.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

Um, she was terrific. She was, I whenever I'd get into a difficult situation, I would think, it how would Elaine handle this? So she she's still alive, by the way. And I am going down to University of Pennsylvania to do a book reading, and I'm gonna I'm gonna see her.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Oh my gosh, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

90 years old. It's like it's really sweet. That so she's she's she has a copy of the book. I gave her a copy of the book. So she was a really good role model. And there was one other woman who was at Cornell, and I I spent a summer writing with the Cornell vets when I was in school, and she also she was smaller, she was a very small woman, but she was of terror and she could do anything. So I used her as an inspiration too, because when I would I I would I saw her in in action in the dairy. She was a goat specialist, but she did some dairy work as well, and that's kind of how I got connected with her. So I I had two women who I when I was in the depths of thinking, oh my God, I just women just really can't do this. I would think, but Mary did it and Elaine did it. But I didn't know any women practitioners that were not in academic settings. And in academic settings, you always have backup. You know, you can always bring the animal into the hospital. You can if you have a real problem. Or you can you're at the farm, you can call for backup, and there's dozens of students and other faculty who can come and help you. I didn't have that. So I didn't know any any women that were out in the real world, not academic world, practicing. So I really did have to pave the way. I I think I was the only woman veterinarian, large animal vet in the entire state of Utah at the time.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

I would be curious in America as well. Like I would really be curious about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

You know, there were there were dozens, not hundreds, spread over the whole country.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Wow, that's incredible. Have you ever reached out or been in touch with any of those women?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

I have. I actually started a Substack I'm calling Gutsy Women. Yes, we love Substacks. I'm trying to find those stories to do little video interviews with. And I have connected with a couple of women who said they would they would be willing to come on with me. I haven't actually done it yet. I'm kind of busy with launching the book, but my goal is to actually exactly that, find those women and get their stories.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

I love that because you're right. We all need those names in our head as we're trucking through whatever it is we're trucking through, even if it doesn't quite match up, you know, in this exactly the same world, just knowing there are other women out there who are doing the damn thing, fighting the fight. It encourages us all. It gives us all that strength and that confidence. I think you also should explore a children's book because I would love your story uh to read to my child a version of it. So I'm just throwing that. Linda, I love you, is all I'm saying. Okay. Come on, what else can you give us?

SPEAKER_01 25:35

I love that idea. That's a sweet idea. That's a very sweet idea. Yeah, and you can just uh name one of the cows Alex.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

I don't know, whatever, however you want to wing. Okay, so let's talk about some of the pushback that you do start receiving. You graduate from Penn and you can't find a job. You can't find a job. And so what happens next?

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Well, I had devoted my four years to getting good at doing cow work. I had milked in a dairy and I spent a summer up at Cornell riding around all the dairies and all the courses that I had taken. And I had made sure that I took everything that I could that had to do with cows. And I graduated fourth of my class, which was not a small feat at Penn because there were a lot of very smart people there. I just hit a brick wall. I I had more than a dozen interviews, and I portray one in the book, but I have another dozen stories that I've written of other interviews where men would just tell me no, I'd never hire a woman. I mean, they'd flat out tell me. It wasn't subtle. Right. And women can't do the work, my wife wouldn't like it if I was riding around with a wife.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

I thought that was bananas. I a part of me sort of understood the physical aspect of it, right? Okay, fine. Like I don't like it, but I guess I could sort of buy that. But when you brought up, I mean, it wasn't just one person who told you my wife wouldn't like it. I was like, oh, I'm sorry. The fact that your wife can't trust you, why is that reflecting negatively on me, sir? I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to milk some cows here.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

You know, you're you're all covered with manure and and stinky coveralls. And it's like, it's not, it's not really a sexy look, believe me.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Right, right. But you do ultimately end up at Utah State University. You graduate from Penn, and then did you have to get sort of this internship?

SPEAKER_01 27:24

No, you're not, you're not required as a veterinarian to do an internship to practice. You can go right into a private practice.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

But you were exploring all avenues because you just kept hitting brick wall after brick wall after brickwall.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Yeah, I wanted to uh and they they had a clinical internship and they had a big dairy and they had a big beef herd and they had a sheep and goat institute. And I thought if I did an internship there, even though it's not private practice, I'll get a lot of experience and then I can go into private practice. But I applied for it and they turned me down. And and then I applied for a number of other jobs, and I went out to California, got a California license, I couldn't get a job there. I had to go into small animal practice for a few months because I was my student loans were due and I had no money. But then a friend called from Utah and said that that internship was open, and I it like in September. And I said, How could it be open? It was started in May, it's and it's for a new grad. And she said, Well, the guy who took it was a big blonde Mormon guy, and he got kicked by a cow and broke both his legs. And so he's out. And I was like, Maybe this is my spot. So I ended up, you know, interviewing for it, and they were very, very, very reluctantly said they were so desperate they would just have to give me.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

I can't believe that they really told you that too. That must have been you're like, Thank you. That's exactly what I needed to do.

Rejected For Being A Woman

SPEAKER_01 28:36

I said, when do I start? I mean, I was like, I was delighted to have any job that that was in large animals. So I knew it was going to be a heavy lift, but I was delighted to have it.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

And you get there, and I love the part where you write about how uh you're like, where's the women's locker room so that I can wash up? And they're like, Oh yeah, we don't have that. And you're like, the sink in the women's bathroom would not be sufficient for friends.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Yeah, you do get pretty dirty when you're doing dairy cow work.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

So throughout all of this, where do you think that this ability to stay the course, this tenacity grit, where do you think you got that from?

SPEAKER_01 29:12

You know, that's a that's a hard question. I don't know. I I think I was always like that when I was little. My mother used to say when Linda does something, she does it 150%. It's just something that I've always had, and I I really don't know. I mean, both my parents had to have a lot of grit to do what they did. So I, you know, I'm sure some of it was inherited. My parent my parents both grew up in small rural towns in Colorado in poverty, both of them in in pretty severe poverty. My dad decided to come east. He wanted to study photography, and when he got out of the army on the he he got us the GI Bill would pay for it. So he and my mom drove across the country with two young kids. My sister was four, I was six months old, and they moved into graduate student housing, and he had to find a way to both feed his family and go to school. So, you know, my dad had incredible grid. And I'm I'm sure I learned a lot from just watching him. He had to have he worked nights and he went to school days. He worked some pretty awful jobs to support the family. Actually, when he arrived, he would tell the story that he went to the dean and he said, I've got to find a job because I've got to support my family. And the dean said, Well, you should just turn around and go back to Colorado because there's no jobs here. And my dad said, I can't because we don't have any more gas money left.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

I've got to, I've got to find some. So he did. He did eventually find a night job, and it was uh it was a nasty job, but he did it. You know, I guess that's your answer. I I I watched him and my mom just survive in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids, you know, cockroaches in the oven, just really difficult. And they kind of clawed their way into the middle class. Wow. Always really valuing education and learning.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Passions, it feels like passion as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

Yeah. So yeah, so so it was I was very fortunate. I mean, they were just phenomenal parents, and I'm sure that a lot of my ability to keep going in such a difficult situation was subconsciously referencing what my folks did.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

You talked about, you know, what would Elaine do, what would Mary do? Did you have anything of faith or anything like that that you could also turn to in those moments of not even weakness, but doubt, I guess?

SPEAKER_01 31:20

No, it's a good question. I I grew up an atheist. Okay. I did I just did not have any feeling of that that there was some higher power I could lean on. But I do tell the story that when my mother died, we had some remarkable spiritual moments around that. And uh it made me it made me believe in life after death. And Vincent's mother said this beautiful thing. I said, you know, she said, Oh, you know, I'm I'm sure that your mother is in heaven looking down. And I I said, well, you know, we don't believe in that. We're eight, she's an atheist. And and Vincent's mother, she her face lit up and she said, Well, won't she be pleasantly surprised?

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Yes, I oh, I love that part. I highlighted that part because Vincent's family, Italian Catholic, right? Very Catholic, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

And it was just so oh gosh, you know, so I think I developed some spirituality, but it wasn't something that I leaned on to get me through tough times in the barn.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Did working amongst such uh like a Mormon community, did they try to push that on you at all? Oh yeah, big time.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

I had so many copies of the Book of Mormon, you can't imagine. Yeah, yeah. But eventually they figured out that it wasn't, you know, I was not interested in in their religion. And but what I do hope that you could you take from the book is that they were a fantastic community. And when I needed help, they helped me, even though I wasn't a Mormon. And the and the bishop basically said, You help us, we help you. They were just terrific. And it made me really appreciate the Mormon faith and community because they take care of each other in a in a way that I think is really extraordinary. So um I learned to have a great respect for the Mormon community.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Yeah, when you write about how they just showed up for you when Vincent had his accident and you opened your fridge and there was food there, and the women would just come and sit, just sit with you, Vincent. You know, I like that's a really powerful thing, community. I think that is one of the more beautiful aspects of religion.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Yeah, building community. It's so important, especially now. We all need community. And whether it's a faith community or a neighborhood community, um, it's it's really critical. And yeah, they really came through for me in the time that I really needed it. And it was, I'll never forget it. I mean, I talk about it in my acknowledgments in the book. These are these were really good people.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

Okay, so let's get back to this big break you had. Talk to me about the about the pressure of having to prove yourself.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

Oh gosh, that was it was very hard. I I felt like I had the burden of pretty much all womanhood on my shoulders. Yeah. You know, it was really uh it was really important that I succeed because if I didn't, they would say, Well, you see, women just can't do the job.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Although, Linda, it was heartbreaking. You were a badass during this internship. You were amazing. And then at the end, he was like, Yeah, I don't think we'll hire a woman again. I want to just throw the book across the room. I was like, sir, she literally just proved you wrong. How dare you?

SPEAKER_01 34:17

They couldn't get away from their own bias. Yeah. They just couldn't get away, even if even with the truth right in front of their face. Like they could not get away from their own bias. I I had a conversation with a small animal dead in Utah, and he said, Yeah, I hired a girl once. She she just didn't work out. You know, she didn't she was slow in the surgery and the clients didn't like her, and I had to get rid of her. And so I wouldn't hire another woman. And I said, Well, have you ever had a guy that didn't work out? He said, Oh, yeah, I've gone through a lot of guys, you know, this guy and that guy and the other guy didn't work out. And, you know, I'm not very good at interviewing, and I guess I chose some rotten apples. And I said, But you keep hiring guys.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

And he stopped and he looked at me, and he he was like, it was like a light bulb went off in his head. And he said, Yeah, you're you know, you're right. It's just like they didn't see their own disconnect. You know, it was so interesting. They they couldn't see their own bias.

SPEAKER_00 35:04

Yeah, it's crazy. So you felt a lot of pressure to be perfect, but you had some moments where you weren't perfect. Talk to me about some of your your failures, as you said, you know, as you said, you you wanted to include these moments where you were like, oh, I did not do that right. And then tell me some of your big successes, because those are funny.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Yeah, but I mean the the killing a cow with calcium is always a horrific thing that happens to dairy vets. I had a professor in school who said, if you haven't killed a cow with calcium, you haven't been in dairy practice very long. Okay. You have to give these animals calcium because when they deliver their calves, they pour all their calcium into their udder to go into the milk for the calf, and it depletes their calcium so much that their muscles can't work and they just fall down. And it's called milk fever. And the only cure is you have to give them IV calcium. But IV calcium, if you give it too much or too fast, stops the heart.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

And there's no way to start it again. So you have to be very careful about giving it. And I just wasn't careful enough. Yeah. And I was by myself, I didn't have somebody to help me to monitor her heart rate, and I wasn't paying attention, and I killed the cow. And it was heartbreaking. That was a really tough one. And then the other thing you mentioned when I was down in Penguinch doing pregnancy checks on beef cows, and I didn't feel like I was very good at it, and I was worried that I would misdiagnose a pregnant cow as non-pregnant, and the cowboy would said, Well, yeah, there she goes to McDonald's. And I was like, Oh my god. So I never knew, you know, afterwards. I went home not knowing how good I'd been. But um, that was a really hard night. I thought a lot about that. Yeah. As I as you mentioned how it affected you, it definitely affected me in that way. Those, those were, those were tough. There was there were always times when I thought, I just can't do this. This is too hard. But you know, what you what you come to terms with is I'm all there is. There's no other vet within a hundred miles. I have my truck, I have the stuff in my truck, that's all I have. I don't have a backup, I don't have a hospital, I don't have a light, I don't have a sterile field. I do the best I can. And it's better than nothing. Yeah. And and the more experience I got, the better I got. And but it was hard coming from vet a vet school that had all the equipment and all the people and all the procedures and all the support. You know, when you're out there all by yourself in the middle of the night, it's 20 degrees out, you've got a dying cow, you just have to make the best of it.

Solo Calls And Costly Mistakes

SPEAKER_00 37:33

You have to trust your instincts and your judgment and just just go with it and do the best you can. At this point, you were working at a private practice. This was after you were done with Utah State University, right? And you were working with Ron. And Ron was an interesting character. I liked that he seemed to accept you into his practice pretty easily. I thought, oh, yeah, that was a win. But then he kind of just like stops answering his phone when he it's his on-call night. You pick up a lot of the slack, and it turns out that he's like potentially having affairs and you like know about it. It gets very muddy, messy. Yeah, yeah. How was that? I mean, do you feel like you were taken advantage of because you were a woman?

SPEAKER_01 38:17

I kind of yes and no. I mean, I thanked Ron for giving me a job because he was the only large animal vet who ever offered me a job. Um, and he taught me a lot. I mean, he was very good vet. I mean, he was really good. And I learned a lot from him. Just the simple things about how to carry my equipment and how how to do things more smoothly and and just uh just the way with the farmers. He was he was really a good vet. But after he saw that I was pretty good too, after a year or so, he began to slack off and let me carry much more of the load. And that was really hard because I was already carrying a pretty heavy load. Yeah. Um, so yeah, he did in the in the kind of second half of actually even in the first half, he he took advantage of me. When he went off on vacation, right after he hired me and left me with the whole practice with the dairyman who didn't know me and didn't trust me. And he did what he could to get what he needed out of me for sure. Didn't pay me very well, gave, but gave me a washing machine, and which I knew I needed, I didn't realize I needed, but boy, did I need that washing machine. Okay, I came home with you know, full of filthy clothes and towels and stuff, coveralls.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

But yeah, it was we had a kind of an interesting relationship. I I I I both admired and resented him. Uh I uh hopefully some of that comes across in in the book because it was not a simple friendship.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

No, I think that you admired and resented him comes across in the book for sure. Do you know if he is still alive, if there's any chance that he could I tried to track him down.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

I really tried hard, and I finally tracked down one of my dairymen who had worked with Ron. Okay. And actually the dairyman had passed away and I talked to his son. Okay. And his son said that after I left, Ron fired all of his clients in Utah, moved up to Idaho to graze Idaho, to work with the best dairies that we had been working with. And he worked with them for a while, and then he kind of went off the deep end on alternative medicine and started like prescribing herbs instead of antibiotics and doing crazy stuff and and being more interested in the horses than the cows. And he said we all had to fire him because he he turned into a kind of a kook.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

Wow. But then who was left? Who was left to be your big animal vet?

SPEAKER_01 40:35

Other other vets moved into the area. I mean, that was that was in the 80s. There were now, you know, a few more vets that could take over his practice.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

Because your area was large, it seemed like in your book. I mean, you know, right. And could because it felt like it was just you and Ron.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

It was, it was, yeah. But I think you know, things got better in the mid-80s. I think more vets showed up. And I mean, Blair, the son that I talked to, he said that they had to hire another vet. I don't know exactly who they hired, but he also told me that when I would come to the farm, he was in eighth grade, and he said, I had such a crush on you. I used to go and sit on the fence and I would skip school on the days I knew you were coming to the farm, and I would like to sit on the fence you were. I had such a crush on you. And I was you're a fox. You're look at that. You look like such a badass in in your picture. And that cow on the at the bottom picture, the black cow, Blair, who I was talking to, told me that he remembered her name, and her name was Pinky. Pinky the black cow. That was one of their cows, and he remembered that. He remembered that whole story. Yeah, I sent him a book. He got a big bit kick out. But unfortunately, his father and the two brothers, all of whom were my best dairymen, have all passed away. Okay. But I did get in touch with the guy whose triplets I delivered.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Okay, and I wanted to ask you about that. Was that the rarest thing? That was the rarest thing that you said you had seen at that time. And then you moved into pharmaceuticals, so you're probably not, but that and that's an extremely rare thing to happen, triplets.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

Yeah, it was so rare that they had to make a newspaper article out of it.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

That is so wild. I mean, how large did that cow look?

SPEAKER_01 42:11

You know, I the the calves were not as big as normal calves. Each calf was only about 60 pounds. Um, normally a Holstein calf can be like 100, 110 pounds. Wow. She didn't look abnormally large. And one of my friends just asked me, Well, how the hell did you not know that there was another calf in there when you were in mucking around in the uterus? And I said, I never thought that there could be triplets. It never occurred to me. So when I pulled number two out, I just started showing up. And nobody would have looked for a third calf because they almost never have triplets. But so that was, yeah, it was pretty rare. That was that was a fun, that was a fun day. And I did find and talk to Greg uh uh about six months ago, and he left Daring. He's doing he's doing he's raising beef cows down in Provo, Utah, which is south of where Logan was. But he's still in the cow business and we had a good laugh over the triplet story.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Wow, that's so incredible. You brought up the pictures on the front of your book. So because you went with the university press, were you able to have more control over the design of your book? Was it always titled Breaking the Barnyard Barrier? We didn't get to that at the top.

The Practice Partner Who Slacked Off

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Its first title was Lady Cowvet. Okay, okay. Because once the farmers got to know me and I got to be more experienced, I was a really good vet and they appreciated it. And and because I was the rarity in in Utah, when they'd go to like the state fair, they would brag, oh, I've got that lady cow vet taking care of my cows. Like she's a real, you know, it's a really exclusive thing. Because I couldn't take care of everybody's cows. And so I was like the Lady Cow vet was their nickname for me. So that was that that was the original name of the book. I think the publisher thought that it could be misconstrued, that people could think it was like a veteran a veteran, or or that Lady Cow could be pejorative in some way. Or I actually they came up with the title and I I liked it. I thought it was a I thought it was a good title. But they were very generous. We we really did everything together. They were just wonderful. Um I provided all the pictures. They came up with the cover design, which I think is terrific. I love the little cow on the spine, the little cow picture on the spine.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Yeah, very sweet. So yeah, they did it, they did an excellent job of layout. They did a very light edit. You know, I was worried that they would ask me to change a lot of things, and they really didn't. They did an extremely light edit. So it's been a it's been a real pleasure to work with them.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

That's awesome. It sounds like a very supportive, collaborative process. Yeah, which is what anyone can ask for when they're sharing their life story. Yeah. Okay, so before we get into talking a little bit about your family and your relationships with them and with Vincent, just briefly talk to me about the rest of your career. You pivot to the pharmaceutical industry where you feel like you can make uh maybe an even larger impact.

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Yeah, I went back east and was trying to decide what to do. Should I open my own bovine practice? Because by now I was very experienced and I felt pretty confident. But I was lonely and you know, I was still single, and my mom had died, and my father had remarried, and he was off to a different life. And so I moved back east to where my sister was to be close to the only family that I really felt close to at that point. And I was thinking maybe I could do this and maybe I could do that. And I I like I wrote letters to the UN to see if I could take care of cows in Africa. And you know, I was just thinking about all kinds of different possibilities. And I was doing relief work. So I would go into a large animal practice and take care of the practice while the veterinarian went on vacation. And somehow people at Cornell heard about me and they had a an opening for someone to teach the laboratory in in cattle reproduction, and that was my specialty. And so it was a very part-time job. It was like, I don't know, six months for the year of the year and maybe two days a week. But it got me on campus in the vet school, and I met some interesting faculty, and they were apparently impressed with me and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a PhD in reproductive physiology. And I was like, Well, I've never thought about doing a PhD, but gee, you know, maybe that would allow me to travel and maybe I could be in the library more, and I wouldn't have to be out in the farm so much, and it would put me in a different world. And I just kind of wandered into this PhD program without much planning or thinking. And it ended up being fabulous. I really enjoyed being back at school. And when I got out, I was recruited into a big job at a big pharmaceutical company doing drug development for animals. And I I liked that connection. So I was working on cattle drugs and drugs for poultry and dogs and cats. And yeah, I went into I went into the industry and I've been in the industry ever since.

SPEAKER_00 46:45

I think it's incredible that you had this goal that you set out, and then you did it. And then you were also able to acknowledge that you did it, have your success, and pivot into something else. I think sometimes it can be really hard if you're trying to prove something. Sometimes we forget that really ultimately all we're trying to do is prove something to ourselves, but it feels like we have to prove something to the world and you you don't always know where that line is. And so I love that, you know, you your memoir is the story of you breaking the barnyard barrier, which you did, but it's also you saying, Yeah, I did it, and then I was ready for something else, and that's okay too.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

Yeah, and it took me a while to acknowledge that because it was hard to walk away from something that I felt like I was really good at and that I I people admired in me, and that you know, younger women were now looking up to me for inspiration. Yeah. So it was hard to walk. I used to say I if I could do the pharmaceutical job four days a week and be in the barn the fifth day, that would be ideal. But you just can't do that. That's not that's not a real job. So so yeah, I I went into the corporate world and I survived for about 10 years and then I broke out and started my own business. And I I was a serial entrepreneur. I started two different animal health companies and they were both really successful, and I'm really proud of that. So that was a whole nother, I mean, that's a whole nother breaking into an industry that's you know also difficult, but it was really enjoyable, and I'm very proud of that work because now I meet people whose dogs are on my drugs and are doing well, and I'm like, Oh, that's my drug. You're taking new dog is taking for arthritis.

SPEAKER_00 48:17

That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

It's been fun.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

Have you ever had any women come up to you and say, You are the reason why I thought I could do this?

SPEAKER_01 48:26

All the time. Yeah. All the time. In fact, I was just at a veterinary conference in Florida a couple weeks ago, and a young woman who I mentored came up to me and said, Yeah, and she's a very successful career. And she said, I wouldn't have ever been able to do this without you. It's just, you know, it's just wonderful. Yeah, I've I've mentored a lot of young women in my companies. I hired a lot of young women and made a very family-friendly company. My very first hire and my very first company was a young woman who wanted to have a baby and she didn't know how she was going to balance it with her career. And I said, I can't pay you what the big companies are paying you, but if you're willing to take 30% less, anytime your baby has an ear infection, you'll be staying home and I'll be covering for you. You know, anytime you want to go on vacation, you're gonna go on vacation with your kids. You know, you can make your own schedule. I know how hard it is to have a kid and work full-time in a demanding job. We will, if you want to bring a crib in and put it in the office, you can do that. Whatever you want to do to make this work, I'll I'll help you. And I actually just saw her a couple weeks ago. She's got three kids. Her youngest is in college now.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Wow. So you're saying it can be done. We can create companies that support women and encourage them to work and be mothers. Yes, we can.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

We can. And and not only we can, but we should. And actually, those companies thrive because these women who I hired, you know, I let them have a lot of flexibility. But when I needed something, you know, when there was an emergency and oh my God, we had to get everybody in to do this thing over the weekend because this deadline and that deadline, when I would call them, they would be there. Yeah. A hundred percent for me because I had been there for them. Productivity was good, people were enthusiastic about the work. You can create those cultures. It's just that we don't have enough women leaders who are willing to do that.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

I agree. Um, that's something that I talk about a little bit on the podcast from time to time. The women who they think that they had to play by a certain set of rules, and so they want other women to play by those rules instead of turning around to uplift other women. And so I think it's so great that you demonstrated that throughout the rest of your career.

Pivot To Pharma And Entrepreneurship

SPEAKER_01 50:33

And I started um an award called Feather in Her Cap about almost nine years ago now that gives awards to the women uh outstanding women in the pharmaceutical industry to highlight how many great women there are who are still underrepresented. We just had our ninth annual dinner and we gave awards to a number of women. And yeah, if you Google it, Feather in her cap, you'll you'll see it. It's um it's it's turned out to be a a really, really influential award that most of the pharmaceutical industry were not aware of how many talented women there were until we started having those dinners. And we have a fancy cocktail party, everybody dresses up, and we put feathers in our hair, and we have this great, great event, and we celebrate women in the pharmaceutical industry.

SPEAKER_00 51:13

That's fantastic. Why do you think it's so important? Like what compelled you to create that award?

SPEAKER_01 51:18

There were not enough women in leadership roles. And I would talk to men in leadership roles and they'd say, Oh, I just don't really know anybody for that role. And I would say, You have a lot of talented women. If you just give them a little bit of mentoring, you know, you you can grow a whole crop of really talented women. And that just was not an awareness of what needed to happen and and what talent they actually had. I mean, I had people say to me, I didn't know she was in my company. What? I mean, these are big companies with lots of people, but you have a senior woman who's like running manufacturing for a big pharmaceutical company. You know, the vice president of commercial would say, I didn't know we had a woman running that. Right. So doing the awards really brought, I mean, all the women that get nominated get celebrated. And and then, of course, everybody sees them. And somebody who's in the business of hiring somebody will say, Oh, I I should talk to her. Maybe maybe I could hire her. So there's a lot of networking that happens. Yeah, it's very it's been very productive. Good for you. I'm very proud of it. It was it was fun to put together. Plus, it's fun to just dress up and have a fancy party. So true.

Parents, Independence, And Self Worth

SPEAKER_00 52:22

That's so true. Oh, okay. Well, before I let you go, let's talk a little bit more about your family. You write about your mother and your father. And I asked this question at the beginning: where do you think that you learned, you know, your grit from? But what do you think that your parents taught you about valuing yourself? Because I feel like throughout the memoir, it's just very obvious that you were a woman who knew your worth from the go. And so you weren't as easily deterred. And I think that can go hand in hand with grit and resilience. But yeah, do you think that that was modeled to you as well?

SPEAKER_01 52:56

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. My parents were very unusual people, as you get a sense from the book. Like they they didn't want us to call them mom and dad, they wanted us to call them by their names, Josie and Dusty. For us, it was normal, but our friends were like calling your mom by her first name. Later, when I grew up, I asked them why did you do that? And they said, We wanted you to think of us as people, not just as parents. Wow. We wanted you to to realize that we we had identities other than just mom and dad. And how thoughtful is that? You know, it's just really, really thoughtful.

SPEAKER_00 53:28

Does your son call you Linda?

SPEAKER_01 53:30

No, no, and I I didn't try to teach him one way or the other, but his dad was pretty traditional. So his dad would say, Well, your mom this and your mom that, and yeah, so yeah, he calls me mom. So that didn't go into the next generation. I don't know, they were just really interesting people. They were voracious readers. My dad was a scientist. Um, but from when I was really little, and my sister too, they gave us a tremendous amount of independence. I would go out in the playground when I was five years old by myself and play with a whole bunch of kids, or we went to a public school that was quite a ways from our neighborhood, and we took the public bus. And when I was like six years old, I would get on the public bus and pay with my little quarter and ride to school and get off where I was supposed to get off and go to school. And I was a six-year-old. They gave us a lot of freedom. We took it. We we were all over the place. I think that built a lot of confidence. I mean, just just learning to ride your two-wheel bike. My dad didn't help me. I he gave me the bike and he's like, go figure it out. Wow. And I got on the bike and I fell down a hundred times and then I figured it out. You know, so I think the the independence built a lot of confidence in both myself and my and my sister. Well, we would just try stuff.

SPEAKER_00 54:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:45

We had a lot of adventures. But I think it was, you know, now kids are so much more overprotected. And, you know, you would never let your five-year-old or six-year-old get on the public bus by themselves and ride, you know, half an hour away. But back then, we just had that kind of freedom and it built a lot of um self-confidence.

SPEAKER_00 55:05

You do write, you say thank you in your acknowledgments. You write for bringing me up to believe that a girl could do anything she set her mind to, and for creating a home where logical thinking, taking risks, and challenging the status quo were considered virtues, which I think are beautiful things to consider virtues. How so how did you turn around that around what you took from your parents and apply it to motherhood?

SPEAKER_01 55:29

I tried to be as good a parent as my parents were to me. I think it's harder these days. I think in the world that we live in, it's it's it's much more difficult. Kids are more constrained, I think, now than than they were then.

SPEAKER_00 55:43

Which is interesting to me because we're also technically, technically in a way safer culture and community and society. I mean, I was allowed to ride my bike to my friend's house. She lived kind of far away. But it is weird to me because I I just I don't understand how that flipped when technically like we're in a safer, more surveilled world, you know?

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Yeah, yeah, I d I don't understand it either. I think there was just a lot of cultural fear around, you know, missing children and you know, that was the era of missing children on the milk cartons, and and we see it in our society now. People are fearful, and and it's it's a shame. But I did try to create a home, particularly the logical thinking and challenging the status quo. We would have a lot of conversations around the around the table about why are you doing that exactly? And are you are you doing that just because everybody else is doing that, or are you doing that because you really want to do it? And we would have a lot of conversations about that. My second husband was Israeli, he was kind of a status quo guy, so it made him a little uncomfortable. Okay. Um, part of the reason we're not together anymore. But I think my son took away a lot of those same lessons. He's doing very he's doing really well.

SPEAKER_00 56:58

That's awesome. How old is your son?

SPEAKER_01 57:00

He just got married. He's 34. He just got married a couple years ago, and he had a hyphenated name, my name and his dad's name. So his name was Rhodes Rogan. He married a girl that had a hyphenated name. So I was like, well, how is this gonna work out? And I was very proud of the fact that instead of her changing her name to his name, they shuffled the hyphenated names and they chose one of each name and they created a new hyphenated name, one from her and one from him. And I thought, okay, that's challenging the status quo.

Marriage Endings And New Beginnings

SPEAKER_00 57:28

That's that's yes, that's incredible. I think my biggest thing that I try to foster in my children is curiosity and exactly thinking for yourself. You can still come to the same conclusion, but let's let's really dig in why are you making the decision that you're making? I think that's really important. I think that's something that is a little lost right now. I feel bad, like we didn't really get to Vincent. So the the entire time that you are navigating breaking the barnyard barrier, you have a husband, and he's kind of put his dream on the back burner to come be with you in California, and then ultimately you walk us through. He got electrocuted, and that was a really difficult moment for your relationship. At the very end of your book, you write about experiencing this moment of relief. You've said goodbye to your mother. She's died. You've said goodbye to this relationship with your husband. You're kind of looking to the next chapter of your life. What was that moment like for you?

SPEAKER_01 58:22

Well, and I also quit my job. Right. I had a new job, but I but yeah, it was it I I just felt like all of the weight that I'd been bearing for years of the relationship, of taking care of my parents, of the job, it was just relieved. I was just free of all that. And I could I felt this great sense of peace over over that. Right now there was gonna be nobody who was asking me to do something for them. My dairymen weren't gonna be calling me. Vincent wasn't gonna be bugging me about anything. My parents were, my dad was off with, you know, his new life. So I just didn't have to do it anymore. And it was it was a real feeling of peace and relief and eagerness of what's gonna be next, where am I going? You know, there was some regret, there was some sadness about leaving my community that I'd grown up in in in Logan and leaving my relationship, but it felt right. It felt like the right I'd made the right decision. And so there was a real feeling of kind of relief and peace over that. It was um it's always hard when you leave a long relationship. I mean, we'd been together more than 10 years. I mean, he was a a sweetheart in college, and it was hard to walk away from that. But as you say, we both knew it was the right decision because we both had different different paths that we needed to follow, and they just weren't compatible. I think we left in a good place.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

I love that your memoir ends at a new beginning. That's life, right? It's a bunch of new beginnings, it's a bunch of endings.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

You write this at the very end. I had grown the confidence that comes from hard work, failures and successes, and showing up day after day, month after month, when almost everyone expected me to give up. Do you think that's the secret to success, Linda?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:02

Oh, being afraid but not showing it. Just just show up and uh, you know, I I kind of say don't be afraid to get dirty. Yeah. Don't be afraid to dig in, whatever it is, whether it's physical dirt or emotional dirt, just just jump in and don't be afraid of it. And I I think, you know, yeah, it's um it applies to many, many different situations.

Hope Through Community And Friendship

SPEAKER_00 1:00:22

I agree. All right. I ask all my authors this question. How do you stay hopeful today?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:27

Oh, I saw that question on your list, and I thought this is a very challenging question, particularly in the last few weeks when we've seen innocent American citizens gunned down in our streets. Uh no matter what political persuasion you are, that should just horrify you. Um, I guess my hope is in building community, as we talked about earlier. Um, seeing so many people come together to help each other from, you know, organizing rides, buying groceries, guarding schools, just watching out for our neighbors. Um, it's really a beautiful thing. It's kind of what I saw in the Mormon community, that that they've really made a community. And I think we've been so, you know, we're so ambitious, we're so in our own little worlds, our own little nuclear families, and then we're all busy all the time that we forget that building community is is really, really important. So I guess that's what gives me hope is I see people realizing that we have to build more communities. And and we are, and it's it's lovely to see.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:23

Yeah, I think it it's been a lost art. You know, when my mom and I moved into a new house when I was in junior high, we had all the neighbors come by within a week with a little baked good to welcome us to the street. My husband and I have moved, and we live in California now, that was Texas. I don't know, maybe a little different, but my husband and I have moved multiple times, and I just met some of our neighbors last week. My daughter's selling Girl Scout cookies, and they came through and supported her, which is very sweet. But I was like, wow, and that's on me too. I can go when I move in, I can go to a neighbor's house, introduce myself, and I should. I should.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:54

So and also, as we talked about earlier, keeping touch with old friends and keeping those connections and nurturing those connections, making time to make that phone call and say, Do you want to go out for a cup of coffee? Or it doesn't have to be anything fancy. I mean, I think often we think, Oh, we have to entertain. So we have to have people for dinner, which means cooking and it means cleaning the house and doing getting everything put away and make I have events with my neighbors where I just say, I'm buying a couple of pizzas, you bring a bottle of wine, come over and spend the evening with me.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

It doesn't, I didn't I don't clean the house. I don't, I just want some company.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:29

It kind of loosened things up a bit in the neighborhood that people didn't feel like they had to, you know, be a fancy cook to have a dinner party, yeah. That we could just get together. So I think we put these high expectations on each other of what we have to do in order to have people over or go out with people.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:46

The more we take those expectations down and make it less formal and more spontaneous. One of the things I love about living in New Hampshire is that I have I have neighbors who will call me and say, You want to come over tonight for a glass of wine and some appetizers? And it's like tonight. Yeah. It's not like next week, put it on the calendar. It's like, and I I always say yes, yes, because that spontaneity of I'm, you know, I'm lonely or we're thinking of you, we just like to see you. It that's like gold. You know, we really have to do more of that because it it's what builds our communities.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:16

Yeah, I love that. And and if then your neighbor says no, try again. Don't take it personally, just be like, oh, because we're all busy. But you're right, fostering those connections, I really think that is such an important thing that we need to do in our world today. We need to see each other, meet each other, talk to each other again.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:33

Because underneath all this political rhetoric and and animosity, we all want the same thing. We all want to be healthy, we want our kids to thrive, we want to have enough food on the table, we want to have shelter. You know, we all want the same basic things.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:48

And so all that other stuff that social media and and the political world piles on top of that. If we just get down to basics, you want a good meal, I want a good meal. You want your kids to be safe, I want my kids to be safe. Those are commonalities that we all have.

Books That Helped And Hurt

SPEAKER_00 1:04:03

Yeah, I completely agree. I have my Babes in Bookland question jar, and who knows what what's in here. Yeah, fun. All right, Linda. What's a book that made you feel seen and a book that made you feel judged?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:20

Ooh, that's an interesting question. A book that made me feel seen. I would go with Jane Austen. Okay. I would go with Pride and Prejudice. It's one of the first novels that has a really strong woman in it. You know, it's from a different era, but a strong woman who knows her mind. I think it it was the beginning of women being given some agency about their lives. And yeah. And I just love Jane Austen. So the book that made me feel judged, uh, it's easy. It's it's um the book Lean In. Okay. That book by Cheryl Sandenberg, right? Yeah. Lean In is basically saying, oh, women, you know, the reason that you don't get ahead in the world is because you don't seize the difficult challenges in the corporate world and and put yourself forward and say, yes, you'll take on that assignment, or you'll be the one to c travel to that conference in Japan, or you'll step out of your comfort zone and and try to get these two teams to work together. And if you women, if you just leaned in more and took all those opportunities, you would be more successful. Well, I consider myself a failure in the corporate world because I just could could not get ahead. I used to say to people, it's not a glass ceiling, it's a dense layer of white men. Cheryl Sandberg was saying, no, no, there's it's not prejudice, it's because you're not taking the initiative, you're not leaning in, you're not. Well, of course she could do that because she was a gazillionaire and she could hire a full-time nanny and a cook and a house cleaner and uh, you know, she had plenty of money. And so if she was going to take that two week conference in Japan, her nanny would take care of her kids.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:56

I couldn't do that. Yeah. And I, you know, I kind of felt judged. By that, and like, yeah, I maybe I should have done this or I should have done that. And and then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, no, this is a bad message for women. We we cannot have it all. And and that's part of what I show in my book is that you have to make some hard choices. Um, and so that whole lean-in message didn't work for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:18

I love that. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I love we'll link all of the incredible things that you do. We'll keep everyone posted on your Substack when that gets going, and we'll link the way to buy your book.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

It's it's so it's been such a pleasure talking with you. I've really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

Thank you, Linda. Thank you for sharing your story with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:34

Yeah, thank you so much. Really a pleasure.

Support The Show And Next Week

SPEAKER_00 1:06:37

Take care. Bye. Bye. Thanks for being here. And if you'd like to further support the show, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or find us on Patreon for exclusive content and extended episodes. Next week, we're doing something completely different from a Utah dairy barn to the stages, sitcom sets, and recording studios that made a legend. At 14, Brandy landed her first record deal. At 15, her album went platinum. At 16, she was starring in Moesha and became the first black actress to play Cinderella on screen, alongside Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother. To the world, she had it all. But in her debut memoir phases, she finally reveals the real story, the stratospheric highs, the unimaginable lows, and the journey she had to take to discover her authentic self. My friend Kate joins us. You're not gonna want to miss this one. Until then, take care of the video.