Transcript
WEBVTT
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being a caregiver is what made me a professional standup cop.
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Yeah, like I.
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Every time I get the opportunity, I have to say that it was.
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It was the pain and the chaos and the calamity and the crisis of losing my father the way I did and then my mom having such a depleted life so quickly it's like becoming a caregiver allowed me to help my mom's life become elongated.
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But comedy allowed me to help my life and I will forever owe the institution and the art form of comedy for that.
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Parenting Up caregiving adventures with comedian Jay Smiles is the intense journey of unexpectedly being fully responsible for my mama.
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For over a decade I've been chipping away at the unknown, advocating for her and pushing Alzheimer's awareness on anyone and anything with a heartbeat Spoiler alert.
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I started comedy because this shit is so heavy, so be ready for the jokes.
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Caregiver newbies, ogs and village members just willing to prop up a caregiver.
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You are in the right place.
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Hi, this is Zeddy.
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I hope you enjoy my daughter's podcast.
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Is that okay?
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Our parenting up community is growing so fast I can't put out an episode as fast as we are growing.
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So text PODCAST to 404-737-1449 for updates, exclusives and suggestions on topics.
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While you're at it.
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Share an episode with a caregiver you love.
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Review on Apple Podcasts and follow us on social media.
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Subscribe to our YouTube page, please.
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It really helps.
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This episode is sponsored by X-Free.
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X-free this comes from our YouTube channel.
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That's right.
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Y'all you got to lean into it.
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So, queenblackness682.
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What up?
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Yo?
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Love that name 100%.
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My grandmother died when she was around.
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No, let me get this right.
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My grandmother's mother died when she was around three years old.
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Her father gave her and her four sisters away at the graveyard to different families.
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Yikes, he didn't even allow them to come back home to mourn together.
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After my grandmother was grown and married with children, her father showed up on her doorstep one day, sick, and wanted her to care for him.
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She did it and took care of him until he died and she buried him.
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He gave no explanation of where he'd been or why he left, et cetera, et cetera.
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Idk if I could have done what she did.
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Idk, I don't know Now.
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Now, that was a comment and a review on the particular episode where we talked about having to care for a parent that did not care.
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So thank you so much, queen blackness 680.
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Queen blackness 682, for sharing something I'm going to tell you right now I don't think I would.
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That's hard.
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I don't know if I got that much love in me.
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I'm happy that's not my story, that I have to figure that out.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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Thank you so much for sharing.
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Yes, thank you.
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Make sure you comment, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts or shoot J Smiles a DM at Parenting Up, all right.
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Please yes, and we're going to have sizzles, gifts, all kinds of stuff coming up as the season progresses.
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Hey, what's up everybody.
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This is Mia Hall, and I am here with J Sm Smiles and we are on the Parenting Up podcast.
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Now, I know that this is not the usual way that you hear the Parenting Up podcast, but guess what?
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Today is going to be a little bit different.
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You know, we're always bringing you something brand new and exclusive, and so that's what we're bringing you today.
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So I know that you might not have met me before.
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My name is Mia Hall and I'm actually the producer of the Parenting Up podcast, and I am also the founder of Parables from the Projects Productions, where I co-host the Parables from the Projects podcast.
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So, yes, so now we are talking about how did Parenting Up get started right and also right.
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Before we do that, I do want to give a shout out to where we are talking about how did Parenting Up get started right and also, right.
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Before we do that, I do want to give a shout out to where we are Right now.
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We are in a cool ice cream shop.
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I actually have some vegan ice cream right here, cherry.
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I'll take a little sip.
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Oh, it is so good, so good.
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But, yes, we're at Ice Screamle, so we shout out to Jason for letting us film today's episode here Parenting Up Family.
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You already know this guest, but do you really know her?
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All right, so now we're going to get into it a little bit.
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So you know, let's just start from the beginning.
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Let's start first of all talking a little bit about Jay, right?
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Because how much do you really know about Jay?
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And you know her childhood and you know things like that.
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So can you just tell us a little bit about you know yourself, like?
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You know growing up as Janae before Jay Smiles.
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You know growing up as Janae before J.
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Smiles Oof.
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A little bit about myself.
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I know what's in this cup.
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It ain't enough in it.
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Was that Remy Martin 1738?
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No, I'm playing, I'm not, but I am.
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Yes, my legal name is Janae.
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I grew up in Montgomery, alabama.
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I'm an only child.
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My mom, yvette, and my dad, jock, very active in the community.
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Dad's like Martin Luther King.
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They marched with him, they knew him.
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He slept at my grandparents' house so everything in my whole world was about activism.
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If you see something wrong, you're supposed to say something, you're supposed to get involved.
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So I was a part of a really tight knit village of mostly African-Americans but also Caucasians.
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We were Catholic in the Bible Belt, so everything about my life was usually a slice of I was a minority in a larger something.
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So even when I was with Caucasians, I was with a larger something.
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So even when I was with Caucasians, I was with Roman Catholic Caucasians in a Bible belt, so it wasn't even a lot of them Right.
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So that was kind of the life that I managed and what I knew to be my own reality.
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Yes, okay, all right.
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So from Montgomery Alabama, from Montgomery Alabama, you actually went on to college.
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Yes, and you went on to school at Howard University.
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What made you choose to go to the other HU?
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I mean Howard University.
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That was so unnecessary Anyway, but because my mother went to Hampton, I'm going to let you get away with that.
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I went to Howard.
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Honestly, my mom went to Hampton.
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You know that, like you did, I was looking at Hampton first, but Hampton didn't have my major OK.
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So I knew I wanted to go to an HBCU because I wanted to have that experience where I knew for a fact race was not playing a part into how I was treated by the administration, by teachers, by the bursar's office, like my entire life in Montgomery Alabama.
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Race played a factor.
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Alabama race played a factor.
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It determined where we lived, where we ate, where we could sleep, where which neighborhoods we didn't go in.
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You know that was real.
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And now they say oh, you know, we got to train the young black boys.
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Listen, when I was growing up, all of us knew what streets not to go down after dark.
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It had nothing to do with how your, what kind of music you were playing or how your car looked.
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You were white or you were black.
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We didn't have Mexicans or any Asians.
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It was Montgomery Alabama, baby.
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It was black folks and white folks.
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That was it.
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If you were Asian, then you were not white, you were black too.
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That's how they were playing it back in the day.
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So I knew I wanted the chance to say how is Jay being sized up?
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How is she being treated?
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Just for her, can I please remove one element from the world?
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And that's made what made me choose hbcu.
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And then I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.
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Howard had a accredited mechanical engineering program and I also knew that Tuskegee existed too, but that was way too close.
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My dad went to Tuskegee and he was practicing law in the city of Tuskegee and I was like that would be like going to the 13th grade and um, uh, I won't grow up.
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I needed to grow up.
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Okay, okay, okay, awesome Okay.
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So you matriculated at Howard mechanical engineering degree and then, um and'm proud of I got to say, is that Howard.
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Was a full academic Scholarship.
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How do you pay for school?
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You don't have a job, yes, but they explained to me about scholarships and test scores and grades and extracurricular activities.
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That's what made me go during drama club and debate club and French club.
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I was like, oh, if I get an A, I'll get into honor society and if I'm in every honor society on the freaking campus, that'll probably make me look better.
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Oh, okay, so I had stuff.
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I was in there.
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It was really because I wanted to pick my own college without my parents getting in it, because they told me real clearly around ninth or 10th grade, if we pay, then we say where you go and I was like, oh, yeah, well, I don't like that, I like that idea.
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So but after Howard, I worked for Ford Motor Company and they had me working out of Dearborn, which is I didn't want to say Dearborn, but Dearborn, michigan basically a bedroom community right outside of Detroit, and it was amazing.
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It was an amazing time to be in Detroit.
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That's when Detroit, when the American automotive we had the big three and they were running the world.
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We had the big three and they were running the world.
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Nobody cared about foreign automotive.
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Middle sized cars.
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Yes, they had luxury vehicles, but Americans didn't really care about those.
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Then, and while I was there, that's when I got my real love for international travel.
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Because Ford, within my first year of working for them, they gave me an international assignment to Spain, gave me a passport.
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I couldn't even speak Spanish.
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That's what I said.
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You know what this thing called Florida America might not be so bad.
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Yes, yes, I remember my grandfather died laughing.
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He said I'm going to never buy another phone in my life.
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I said, granddaddy, why?
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He said, well, they must not have no damn sense.
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He said they're going to send you to Spain and you can't speak Spanish.
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Uh-uh, uh-uh.
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And he was like no, no, no.
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He was like I ain't buying from them, they don't have no sense.
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He like I ain't buying from them, they don't have no sense.
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He said I ain't buying no more costumes.
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Uh-uh, he was like, because they ain't got enough sense to send somebody that speaks Spanish to Spain.
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I said hey, hey hey, hey, easy player.
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He's like we got a translator.
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I can learn I.
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Gracias para vivir en la casa.
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Okay, yeah, so you had many experiences before you decided to go to Stanford, correct, correct.
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So Stanford came.
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Actually, I knew I wanted Stanford before I left Howard, but Stanford's graduate program required that you have real life experience.
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I love that I love that.
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I was mad at the time.
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I also love it too.
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When I left, when I was finishing Howard, I knew I wanted to design products and toys.
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What I found out in my last year at Howard was mechanical engineers usually design the machines that make the product, but product designers get to design the product.
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So I was like, hey, I want to design the cup.
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And they said, well, no, mechanical engineers design the machine that makes the cup.
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I said, well, who gets to design the cup and decide who makes this cute little thing, all this little image?
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And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's for product designers.
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I said, well, who gets to do that?
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They said, oh, you gotta go to school for that, and most people would did that as an undergraduate.
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Well, I wasn't about to go back and get another undergraduate degree.
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That sounds silly.
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So Stanford was the only school in the United States that would allow me to go into the graduate program for product design with an engineering undergraduate degree.
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They say, oh, yeah, you can do it, but you got to go get real life experience first.
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They said we don't care if you work or go feed koala bears, but you got to go find yourself and know something about the real world.
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And I get it.
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How can you design products for people if you haven't been out buying products and using them?
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Yeah, and so I left Howard saying, okay, I got to work somewhere and praise God, ford hired me and I got a full graduate fellowship.
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So then I also went to Stanford free.
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Nice, yes, so student loans where Okay?
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Zero student loans.
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No student loans.
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They paid me to go to school.
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I had a stipend Room and board too.
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Yes, that's goals right there for all you up and coming college students.
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You know goals All right, all right, awesome, so, yeah so you had I mean everything going for you.
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You know you planned it out, you know very intentional about it, got your career, but not only, not only did you pursue that.
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Then you became a lawyer, yeah, yeah.
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So can you tell us about that too, and the planning, the intention of all of this?
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Yeah, so to back it up a bit.
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Actually, going to Howard, my plan from high school was to be a lawyer.
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All of the engineering and product design was a really roundabout way to civil rights activism.
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Before I finished 12th grade, I started three student protests.
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One of them got me invited to not to return to Catholic school.
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They said you know what troublemaker you?
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Okay, you and John, take your good trouble behind.
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Right on to another school Because my father was a lawyer.
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That's actually not the reason I wanted to be a lawyer Now.
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Him being a lawyer did expose me more to the profession.
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What got me excited about the law was what I knew about the civil rights movement and the fact that for the last, the whole 19th century, everybody that was a part of making change seemed to be a lawyer.
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There was always a lawyer in the mix.
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I should say there was a lawyer in the mix that was designing the strategy around.
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How are we going to break this rule, break these ugly rules for women, for men, for kids, for foreigners coming into America?
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And I was like I want to do that because I want to help for foreigners coming into America.
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And I was like I want to do that because I want to help.
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When I was preparing to go to Howard, my dad said baby, don't major in pre-law.
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That is the dumbest program ever, he said, because if, for any reason, you don't choose law school, you're stuck with a degree that is absolutely useless.
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Law school, you're stuck with a degree that is absolutely useless.
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And spoiler alert I hate reading and writing.
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I hate it.
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I can do it, I just don't like it.
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And my father knew that I loved math and science.
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Like I would do a math problem, like other people will play jacks or hopscotch or jump rope when I was a kid.
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Okay, so that's what an interesting came in, okay.
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And so my dad said you know what, baby?
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What you need to do when you go to Howard is you need to major in something where you will take your butt to class.
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The most important thing for law school is to actually graduate from undergraduate school.
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Okay, okay With the best GPA you can.
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They don't care if you graduate in basket weaving Graduate with the highest GPA.
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So what will make you go to class?
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And I said math and science.
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He said well, go major in that.
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My mama was mad as hell.
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She said don't let her major in something that's not law, because then she's going to get distracted and get over here.
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He said I don't care.
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What I don't want her to do is not graduate, or graduate with grades so poor that it's hard to get in law school.
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I'm at Howard.
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My father ended up being so right I'm at Howard, I'm finishing my junior studies.
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I fall so in love with engineering that I want to go design stuff.
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And I kind of tested by my mama one day.
00:19:57.871 --> 00:19:59.988
She's like I don't know what you're talking about.
00:19:59.988 --> 00:20:00.790
You're going to law school.
00:20:00.790 --> 00:20:09.830
You've been talking about law schools and you in the eighth grade and I was like yeah, I know, but you know this, this, I just want to go do this and then see, and then she kind of walked out the room on me.
