Life on the B Side

It’s really easy to let encouraging and supporting your child to reach their potential turn into living through them and their achievements. In doing so you can end up claiming victory for yourself while your child is left pursuing a dream that is no longer theirs. But don’t panic! It’s never too late to let that inner child out to play…

You don’t get to this age without the odd look around to see how successful you are in comparison to others. But wait! Should we really be measuring our life’s success in monetary value and volume of possessions? Even if you think you should have been more ‘successful’ in life by now (whatever that means), there is still plenty of time for some personal bests…

PART ONE: Getting Your Timing Right From talking to teenagers, sliding doors moments and bank robberies. Adulting is all about timing. And that’s not sexy. Or fun.  

While this episode started off under the guise of being about GCSEs and real-life work experience, it ended up using the phrase ‘faecal chatter’ more than once. All I can do is apologise for this one.

We all chase a dream – the dream life, the dream bod, the dream relationship, the dream bank balance! And in pursuit of these goals, we invest HEAVILY. We invest our money, our energy and our time. But sometimes the goal shifts or it just gets trickier to attain, and the amount we have already invested becomes a dead weight, anchoring us to the spot, to the dream. “If you stop now you’ll have lost...

There’s a saying - "What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while". But sometimes, what you do once in a while can have a profound effect on what you do every day. It can be hard to reset yourself but if you’re lucky enough, you might have a Factory Reset Friend who comes along and pushes the right buttons to get you back to what was normal before normal was this. Make sense?...

Moments of disconnect happen to everyone, right? Join Maria as she takes on a little exercise to identify why she can’t create a vision for her life and what the biggest barrier to discovering her purpose is. The 5 why’s exercise: https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/Pawley/Lean-Enrichment-Activities/LEA---5-Whys.pdf Good ol’ Bob Proctor for a bit of woo woo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?ap...

Once the journey into midlife gets underway, one town you might visit is Crisis-ville. It’s situated somewhere near Parent Village and Invisibility Central. Navigating your way through Crisis-ville isn’t as tricky as you might think though. Just remember, that YOU are your map. And if you change yourself entirely en route, you are 100% bound to get lost.

Show name change! Why? Because I refuse to talk to myself, or a wall. Because actually, this is just Life on B Side. And some B sides have been known to be better than the A sides. Not sure if you’re on the B Side? Well, if you know what a B Side is then tag, you’re it. But just in case, here’s 5 subtle clues to help you recognise your B Side status. You’re welcome :) 

There’s not much I don’t feeling guilty about. Being a sh*tty daughter is near the top of the list though. I’m not always sh*tty. Only when it matters. And just when I learned to live with the weird warmth of accepting that I could have done better, my Dads diligent note-taking came back to haunt me...

ME: Valentine’s Day is utter horseshit, yes? Can we agree on that? THEM: OK, so what’s really important in a long-term relationship? ME: Earplugs, distance, a good solicitor? THEM: *unimpressed* ME: OK, so after 20 years of marriage, here’s what I think…

When Maria finds herself apologising to food, it sparks a few questions… Why do we say sorry so much? How do our past experiences of apologising shape why we say sorry? And why, oh why, did she apologise for her boobs and a work colleague’s punctured testicle?

Lists, lists and more lists. Apple watch notifications. And the world’s most annoying app. The constant stream of tiny things to do, questions to answer and general background noise can be a f*cking nightmare… Send help! (Here’s a link to a bunch of suggestions on how to handle ‘overwhelm’: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/01/make-a-much-shorter-to-do-list-15-quick-simple-ways-to-...

It might be a New Year thing or an age thing, but quitting things is definitely a topic of discussion at the moment. Maria looks at how you know when it’s time to quit something and how it’s better to reframe the decision for the positive.

Maria has unlocked a new level of parenting – guiding your children through their first broken hearts. Listen as Maria examines her own break up CV (she has plenty of experience) and provides her guide as to how she sees the new rules for today’s dating game. Good luck kids! This game is getting more complicated every day...

Not every Christmas is a merry one, but happy endings are sometimes achievable. The trouble with bad memories is they keep floating out of the woodwork like festive ghouls intent on ruining your happy vibes. Maria shares how her first 14 Christmases were pretty cruddy and how their lingering presence needs to be put to rest once and for all. Contains a theme of domestic abuse, just so you know. No...

If you listened to Episode 3 then you’ll want to hear this one :) Listen in to find out the names of all the 90s bands included in Episode 3! Maria will guide you through each one. How many did you get?

When a man ‘of a certain age’ dismisses the concerns and accusations of women ‘of a certain age’, it shows he doesn’t have a clue about the lived experience of women. This episode contains some details of Maria’s own potted history of sexual violence and harassment and why women of a certain age are just fed up now…

How, after almost 30 years of consigning university to a bin labelled failure, reliving shared experiences with old friends helped Maria salvage a part of herself she had forgotten. There was physics, biology and a bit of chemistry. You can’t rewrite the past, but you can reframe it.

27 years after graduating it’s finally time to attend a reunion of sorts. But after almost 3 decades, Maria can finally admit that university didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped at 18 and that she probably shouldn’t have gone in the first place… And also, what does she wear?

Everyone’s got one. Some folks are so desperate to share their opinion (not their, well, you know what) that they won’t wait to be asked. But not all opinions are created equal and the trick to getting value from someone else’s thoughts is to work out what you need and who you need it from… https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/10/the-best-advice-ive-ever-been-given-celebrities-share-their-...

Aah the 90s. Who doesn’t look back on that decade with fond memories? Memories is all we really have as there’s very little photographic evidence of what we got up to. We still have the music though! Maria’s obsession with Absolute Radio 90s inspires this very short episode but don’t be fooled, you’ve got a job to do… Can you find the 60+ band names hidden in this episode?

Thought teenage friendships were difficult to navigate? Well not much has changed. Except maybe the new ways we can kill our friendships these days. Maria didn’t expect to use social media to assassinate a friendship in her 40s, but that didn’t stop it happening. And just when she thought it was resurrected, well what goes around comes around doesn’t it?

What makes a 48 year old woman with a crippling fear of failure suddenly decide to launch a podcast? Maria explains why now is the time for Gen X women to ditch any obsession with perfection, forget shame or embarrassment and look beyond the constraints of being the sandwich generation. There are stories to be shared, lessons to be learned and even more ridiculous adventures to be had. And this is...