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CNA
13-06-2025
- Health
- CNA
Growing up, my father was always quiet – but his love for us was always loud
In March 2024, I became a father. Now, one year and three months on, I'm still figuring things out day by day. Curiously, I now find myself looking back more often than ever before – back to my own childhood with my own father. In my secondary school years, I had a close friend who was both my classmate and teammate in our co-curricular activity, basketball. My friend's father would come to watch all our basketball games and, afterwards, would talk extensively and openly about how he felt our team and my friend had performed. Whenever father and son had differing opinions, they would have a healthy debate about it, and were comfortable doing so even in front of others. They shared a rapport that seemed so vibrant and dynamic. My own father, on the other hand, was never the loud or demonstrative type. My teenage self might have described him as reserved, perhaps even stern. He never criticised me in front of others, but neither did he praise me. Most of the time, he just quietly listened to me talking about what had happened in school and rarely voiced his thoughts or opinions (unless they were about his personal passion, aircraft). But today, with a son of my own in my arms, I see the deeper truth: My father's love wasn't lesser for being quieter. It wasn't loud because it didn't need to be. It was reliable, patient, and quietly powerful. SHOWING UP AGAIN AND AGAIN Growing up, I had scoliosis, which meant frequent hospital visits and brace fittings. My younger brother suffered from asthma and often needed urgent care or hospitalisation. My dad worked rotating shifts and took on as much overtime as he could to earn more money for our care. He'd take me to all my doctor's appointments, wait patiently with his foldable chair in cold hospital corridors when my brother was warded, and after each visit for either of us, he would make a call from the public payphone to update my mother on how things went. No loud fuss. No big drama. Just my father, showing up – again and again. As a child, I didn't always understand or appreciate the sacrifices Dad made. It took me becoming a dad to really, fully understand how deeply love was embedded in those simple acts of him being present. It couldn't have been easy for him to adjust his schedule and work long hours, but somehow he was always there for us when it mattered most. Medical needs aside, he would also often scrimp on himself, bringing yesterday's leftovers to work for lunch so that my brothers and I could have fresh food. He worked long hours and rarely spent money on himself, saving it all for us. Like many fathers of his generation, he didn't always articulate his love in words – but now, as a father myself, I see how he lived it every single day. PARENTING IS NOT ABOUT PERFECTION Today, my wife and I are fortunate to have more flexibility in our work schedules than my father ever did. We take turns during those tough newborn nights of changing diapers, soothing cries, and rising early to prep and play before the workday begins. I take a day off each week just to be present with my son – not doing anything special or extraordinary, but just being there and spending time with him. Over the last year or so, I've come to realise what my dad always knew: Parenting isn't about perfection, it is about presence. It's about being there for your child, consistently and compassionately. I used to see my father's selflessness as old-fashioned – perhaps even boring, compared to some other dads I knew. But now I see that it was profoundly brave. Now, whenever I'm doing something 'boring' for my son Noah – packing his bag for a family day out, or making another adjustment to our home so he can safely explore it on his unsteady feet – I think of my dad and how he worked so hard behind the scenes so I could have a loving childhood. LET GO OF EGO Fatherhood is a daily exercise in humility, where we need to let go of ego and embrace patience. Noah's favourite person in the world is my wife, his mother. As it goes with all young children, there are moments when I feel rejected by him – when he clings only to his mother, refusing to be comforted by me. As much as I would like my son to like me just a little more even at this young, irrational age, I have to remind myself that love isn't always returned in the way we expect it to be. My own dad never complained, never demanded thanks or gratitude from us, and never once asked to be repaid for all he gave us. He taught me that, as parents, our love doesn't have to be loud or immediate – what matters most is that it runs deep and strong. No matter our frustrations, we must show up anyway because that is the true essence of fatherhood. REAL STRENGTH IN LOVE AND CARE There's one specific quality my dad modelled that I try to carry forward each day: To make the people we love feel seen. My practical, pragmatic father always supported my choices – even the big, uncertain ones like leaving a corporate career to start my own business. When we began Anglo Caregivers, he even opened up his own home to temporarily house caregivers engaged by us, before they started officially working with their employers. In a period where I was wrestling with doubt and uncertainty, his quiet trust and belief in me gave me the courage to keep going. Today, I try to offer that same grounding presence to my son. He's still too young to speak, but I make sure to look him in the eye. I slow down when I hold him. I offer soft words and steady hands. Even before they understand language, children understand love. They feel it in our tone, our gaze, our touch and our attention. The love and care my father showed me has become such a core part of who I am today. It's what I want my son to feel from me as his father; it's what I want to show my wife as her partner in this life. It's even what I want the families I work with through Anglo Caregivers to experience for their elderly loved ones. To my dad – thank you for teaching me that strength isn't about being seen, but about seeing others.
Daily Mail
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Justin Bieber's former manager Scooter Braun thought about suicide amid public clash with Taylor Swift
Scooter Braun says he had thoughts of self-harm amid a time of uncertainty in his life and business. The 43-year-old entertainment executive, best known as the o ne-time manager of pop superstars such as Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato, chat about his darkest of days on the Diary of a CEO podcast. The New York-born music mogul - who made headlines after purchasing Taylor Swift 's earlier material amid controversial circumstances in 2019 - explained how he came to be suicidal despite experiencing success most could only dream of. Braun said that the reason why he entered a personal growth retreat in October of 2020 was because his marriage to wife Yael Cohen, 38, - who he shares kids Jagger, nine, Levi, seven, and Hart, five, with - 'was falling apart. ' Braun said that he felt inclined to self-harm - 'It went to a very dark place,' he admitted - after going down a rabbit hole of 'What if's' as he felt his life slipping away amid the nascent marital split. 'I had a suicidal thought for 20 minutes where I was like, " If my marriage is going to fall apart, I'm not gonna be with my kids all the time,' Braun said. 'I can't control this. I'm not gonna be this perfect image that I've presented to the world. Braun is best known as the one-time manager of pop superstars such as Justin Bieber. Pictured in LA in January of 2020, the year he entered a week-long residential and personal growth retreat called The Hoffman Process Braun added: 'And if I can't be this perfect image, I don't want to be here.' Braun said that the public generally had the misconception he was 'crushing it' in life amid his successful stewardship of the careers of Bieber and Grande. Braun said after the period of suicidal ideation had thankfully passed, he gained a sense of clarity, focus and direction. 'That's not me - I would never leave my kids,' Braun said of his earlier intrusive thoughts. 'I don't wanna leave anybody. Like, what was that?' Braun said that after speaking with a confidante, he was advised to go to a week-long residential and personal growth retreat called The Hoffman Process in an effort to better adapt to the changes coming with his divorce. 'They told me that they could get me in two weeks because there was a cancellation,' he said of facility officials. 'That was the release of Ariana Grande's Dangerous Woman album.' He said Grande had been fine with delaying her release of the record so he could focus on his health. Braun attended Hoffman more than four years ago amid challenges in his personal and professional life. Braun described how the life improvement retreat works: 'It is one week of no phone, no email and intense work on your early childhood to understand why you are the way you are and to give you tools to go out in the world and understand yourself.' Braun said that the intense incident caused him to look within himself and suss out what what truly important in his life as he moved forward. 'I've spent my whole life pursuing these things, doing this, choosing this, choosing that life and choosing the clients,' said Braun. 'I'm the top of my game yet I wanted to kill myself last night. Something has got to change. He continued: 'I chose to go to that place instead. The hard stuff actually came after I got out.' Braun said with the tools in place to maintain a sense of balance, he was able to endure stormy times without feeling too blue. 'I ended up going through a divorce,' Braun said. 'I ended up going through all this different stuff — but I never was depressed again.'
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
A cookbook taught me everything I know about home - and sobriety
If there was a single feeling that defined my 20s, it was a generalised allergy to the very concept of home: I learned it's a myth that you only run away from it once. If you have the skills, you can spend a lot of your life dodging comfort, security and a place to return to. Which I did because I was an alcoholic, and alcoholics are always suspicious of safety. The only true way to be safe is to not drink, after all, and you do not want to stop drinking above all else. This in turn informed my relationship to food. It goes that way for all of us: food is home. You're not really staying in a place unless you've cooked in it. Otherwise you're just a visitor. And because I had always wanted to be a visitor, I'd long been almost deliberately malnourished. I often boasted about my profoundly undistinguished palate, because everybody wants to ensure the worst decisions they make sound like some sort of quirky character trait. But then an odd thing happened: I quit drinking. I tried a few times, sometimes making it stick for a few months, once for over a year. And then finally, definitively, I just … stopped. I don't want to make it sound easy. I mean more that after years of trying to find sobriety, it seemed like suddenly sobriety found me. After that, on the odd day when I caught a glance of myself in the mirror, it seemed like the person there might be someone I might quite like, someday. It was around this time that I purchased an unusual gift for myself: a cookbook. The author was Nigel Slater, whose name rang a bell. Picking it up satisfied one of those odd urges that I had in the early days of a true commitment to sobriety. I later came to understand these urges were newfound pangs of self-preservation. I was immediately taken by the way Slater wrote about food. These were not just recipes. They were short poems, filled with astonishingly beautiful, compact phrases: at one point in Notes from the Larder, he describes garlic being as 'fresh and sweet as a baby's breath'. This poetry was what kept me going through a number of culinary disasters – I learned that before one makes something as wholly nourishing as Slater's macaroni and tomato pasta, they have to actually learn to cook pasta. But I got better – better in regards to cooking, and to all the other stuff too. I started to cook almost every meal, a profound change to a lifetime of takeaway. I made sweet teas and fish cakes; ricotta pancakes and pink lemonades. All of a sudden, I found I had a new sentence to describe myself. I'd had a few in my back pocket for a long time, all of them either tied to my profession or my addictions: I am an alcoholic, I am a writer, I am a painter, I am a chain smoker. But now I had one which was tied to neither self-destruction nor my career: I like to cook. And then something else miraculous happened: I met my partner, Rosie. I sometimes say that she taught me everything I know to be good in this world, and I mean it. The world makes sense to me now, because she is in it. Rosie likes to cook too. For many of our early days together, I was her sous-chef, chopping beside her in the kitchen, with a record on, astonished by this feeling that had come over me, which was the feeling of happiness. These days, I do as much of the cooking in our home as I can without denying Rosie her own culinary joy. I cook for Rosie; I cook for our housemate; I cook for my friends. Because I'm a writer, I often work from home, and one of my favourite things is making something that will be ready shortly after Rosie returns from work. It feels like a little gateway into the rest of the evening; a little marker that says, we are here together again and I have something for us to eat. Destruction is sudden. Healing is slow. You don't actually need to make that many decisions to ruin your life, but you have to make a great deal of decisions to improve it. If you're an addict, you need to stay sober every single day. It is work that never ends. What also never ends, but is only ever briefly satisfied: the desire to eat. When I return, almost daily, to Slater's cookbook, I am re-pledging the desire to not die; to simply, uncomplicatedly sustain myself. The other day I cooked a pasta bake. It was mostly done by the time I heard Rosie's key in the door, the smells of cheese, salt and herbs wafting through the kitchen. And when I heard it, I thought, with a thrill: oh, she's home. And I remembered again, properly, that I was too. Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His latest book is Painting Portraits of Everyone I've Ever Dated (A$34.99, Hardie Grant)
Daily Mail
02-06-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Last year, at 73, I was so fat I couldn't walk round my kitchen island. But now I've lost three stone and cycle five hours a day - here's how. By TV chef ROSEMARY SHRAGER
As you read this, I am somewhere between Land's End and the White Cliffs of Dover, pedalling my heart out on the second day of an 18-day, 450-mile charity bike challenge. I can hardly believe this myself. After a lifetime of despising exercise and struggling with my weight, I've reached a place where I'm reaping the physical and emotional benefits of prioritising my body and health.
Daily Mail
02-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
Have the baby. Travel alone. Never waste love - and don't forget this one life lesson... the 50 things I've learnt at 50: CLOVER STROUD
I've just turned 50 – a fact that feels completely insignificant and also, somehow, incredibly important. And I guess to me alone, it's both of those things. I keep walking around saying '50' to myself to see how it feels; it feels good, and normal, and huge, and nothing – all at the same time. I want to be able to hold the number in my hand somehow; to feel its weight and its shape.
