Coffee and Family, the Sweet Spot with Donna Rae Crooks
In the sweet spot of this women-friendly cafe talking with a mother and a business owner was the perfect scene for Friday drinks. As she walked into her café from the scorching summer heat, Donna Rae Crooks looked as cool as a cucumber, with freshly painted bright pink nails and a radiating smile. Exchanging introductions and getting settled into our seats at the beautiful Brain Snacks café, from its colour palette to its welcoming plush design, my cup of Lactose-Free Chai Tea Latte never tasted so glorious. With a promise to swap nail colours on our next trip to the nail salon, we settled into our conversations like old friends catching up on past life events.
A boundary-breaking enthusiast, Donna, takes us through her journey of becoming a mom and inside the life of a working mom and rediscovering herself while regaining confidence by supporting other women thriving. She shares tips for juggling family-work balance while building her space for women in the community to thrive. She is constantly evolving and loving every minute of it.
Here are insightful snippets from our conversation
Q; What is your weekly pocket of sunshine?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
Well, I do have some indoor plants and enjoy a refreshing bathtub soak. In the last 18 months, I’ve been working a lot on mindfulness to manage my stress. It’s a good point where I can shut off my head about work-related things. When I’m outside with my flowers, I tune out and into nature, accepting the beauty around me. I grew a bearded Iris this summer, and it was so stunning. And I just thought, “Wow, I grew this.” In my bath, I like to light a big candle for the crackly sound, which closely resembles the ASMR Tune, and that’s pretty much all I do there, relax with a good book or play Sudoku. After a long day, my mind has been so busy. I find doing something like Sudoku, that you have to think and concentrate; you can’t do both things, so you have to focus on what is in front of you.
Q: If you could go back to the time before your kids and business, what’s the one piece of advice you would give to yourself?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
Goodness. I grew up in a single mother’s house. My father wasn’t around, and my mum worked three jobs. I grew up with the thought that I had to work hard. From a flyer route and babysitting, once I was 12, I started working in a restaurant at 15 and have been working since then. In high school, I had a natural business-like mindset. I was like, “Even if I don’t have as much fun as my peers, this is important for the university.” I was taking some courses that I could apply to my first-year credits. My husband and I bought our first house when I was 20, and we worked hard in our careers. When we decided to have kids about eight years ago, I never really took any time to relax or just be myself. I was always trying to have a more significant impact on something. I’m living my life in reverse now. I’m getting more relaxed and trying to have more fun. And so it’s like a bit of a backwards pattern. My advice will be to coach myself around having more space to breathe, enjoy my surroundings, and notice what’s happening around me. As you get older, you start to forget all those things that happen to you, and there are moments in my life that I can’t picture anymore. And I will never know whether it’s just natural or because I wasn’t present enough to capture those memories. It would be good to be more present at the moment and less worried about what’s happened and what’s about to happen.
Q: Do you believe “Balance is achievable,” or is it a Myth, we constantly strive to Pretend is real?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
Oh man, I do think it is unattainable in many ways. It may only be accessible to the privileged to have the financial capacity to support wherever their dream is. Whether it’s having a housekeeper or adequate childcare to pursue everything equally, it’s a challenging time for women. In the pandemic, I’ve seen lots of women pushed out of the workforce because they don’t have enough support for their kids. When I started Brain Snacks, I was hoping to create at least one resource where women could have more choices to integrate the things they’re committed to, whether personal, family, or work. The more I work hard as a mother, the more children I’ve had, I don’t know if I see that as possible. If the change is coming, it’s not coming quickly. When you have a startup business in the middle of a pandemic, you’re in crisis management, and much of your energy goes there. And so I noticed there’s not much bandwidth for me at the house. I don’t think it’s impacted my children’s relationship with me because my most significant contribution to parenting, I guess, is the emotional relationship with my kids. It’s like my husband and I are in that crisis management mode too at home where it’s like, “You take Dominic to hockey, I’ll say Cameron to art class, and we’ll see each other sometime later.” So now that things seem to be returning to more regular, we’re making more of an effort to get back to that pattern of creating family experiences again. And that takes me down the rabbit hole of feminism where I’m like, “Why should I have to compromise what I want to do to have my family, but the boundary is most important. So it’s a conundrum.
Q: Do you think that it’s possible to get to the point for mothers to enjoy the feminist work movement for women compared to women without kids.
Donna-Rae Crooks:
I think that’s a fascinating question. When you think about it from the perspective of the male by default world, it even props up in the simplest ways. If you walk into a coffee shop, you might not think about the colour palette used to design it. But when we were creating Brain Snacks, it was very controversial to many people that we wanted to make it very pink. Because they thought, “Oh men, aren’t going to come in here, and they’re not going to drink the coffee.” And yeah, when we walk into a coffee shop, we never look around and say, “Wow, they painted these boy colours. I don’t think I want to have a coffee in here.” As simple as that example is, that’s how everything has been created. The workplace paradigm, the hours of work, and the dress code. I think it requires a lot of imagination to think about what a world that’s not male by default looks like and where there’s a genuine openness to people who walk other paths and can create the shape of their life without that blueprint designed by men. If you imagine a world where everyone’s not commuting to work at the same time every day, where daycares are only open at certain times, and where women aren’t paid less for what they do, then more possibilities open up. In one way, although COVID has been really bad for women in the workforce, it’s also created a lot more flexibility in the workforce for where women work and what hours they work. But I don’t think it’s been liberating because women took on so much more when the schools closed and had to run their kids’ classes. So it’ll be interesting to see what further evolution takes place. In the next few years, a hybrid model of people working from home or remotely continues to evolve.
Q Are you ever vulnerable in communicating how juggling motherhood and running a business truly is, or do you strive to maintain a mindset of competing with yourself to be excellent in everything you do?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
One of the things I do is talk to groups, some moms and women, about what it’s to go back to work after you have kids. And I typically share very personal information about that. I’m open about it. To be honest, I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome when I’m doing it because part of me wants to say, nobody wants to hear about your problems and how you have either solved them or been just coping. However, I do get a lot of feedback from women about, “Thanks for being so vulnerable and telling me how it is.” I think that applies in the entrepreneur field as well because a lot of women in business are pressured to make it sound like things are okay, even though their world is financially ending. Sure. The coffee shop’s great and I’m not really like that. I think my experience has been valuable as a learning experience for others because I lost my job two times after my first two maternity leaves. On my third one, there was uncertainty about my role coming back, and I’ve experienced a lot of microaggressions in the workplace based on my gender and age and with the privilege that I have, I know that others are experiencing more difficulty than me. And that was the reason I created Brain Snacks. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur because I came from a financially vulnerable household. And when I got my first government job, I was like, “Holy, I’m in the money. they’re going to pay me what?” And I thought, “I’m going to be a communications consultant for my whole life. This is amazing.” I got a taste of ambition, and I thought, “Oh, I can be more.” My career grew quickly, and I was very proud that it became a part of my identity. When I had my first baby, all my anxieties about leaving work and my worst fear came true when I returned. And so it just crushed me. And I don’t think that anyone expects that. And especially in Canada, where you thought women were protected during maternity leave. Those are the experiences I’d share with women and not just from an empathetic type of standpoint, but I like to give them what to do if you’re called into the office on your first day back from maternity leave, and there’s crazy news, how do you take the news? What do you do next? How do you decide whether you’re going to stand up for yourself or not? One of them is a local group called Mommy Connections with young children going to them. I speak to the group that’s right about to go back to work session of classes that they have. I tell them basically what’s happened to me in the last eight years since I went through motherhood. There’s just so much that women don’t consider part of that process. I think a lot is due to the attention given to less important things like what stroller you will buy. It’s such a journey of personal identity, and there’s growth in there, and there’s pain, and it’s just, so much happens, and you don’t have time to digest it or process it because it’s changing.
Q: What was your journey into entrepreneurship while becoming a mother?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
I had a six-figure career by the time I was 28; I had 12 staff and a couple of million dollar budget. I remember just being terrified to tell my boss I was pregnant and feeling so uncomfortable about being pregnant and didn’t want anyone to talk about it, and now I’m like, “That was silly. Right? You should have just enjoyed it.” it was a mindset I had about how my career could be impacted by having children. I went on maternity leave. I came back, and my job was gone. When I had my first baby, he was colicky, I remember I would get in the morning with him, and I wouldn’t go to the bathroom, have a coffee, or eat anything. I would hold him and make sure he was settled. It would never occur to me that it was okay if he cried while I went to the bathroom, I would be like, “No,” I would stand at the front door and be bouncing him, watching for my husband to come home for lunch, so that’s what I would catch up on myself. It wasn’t until I was so crushed by my return to work that I realized, “Oh, I don’t think I’ve been myself. I don’t have a full range of emotions. I remember I just talked to my doctor about it, and she gave me a prescription. A week later, I was listening to the radio, and I laughed at the joke and was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know the last time I found something funny.”
After losing my job, I was lucky to reach out to my network and find something I felt I could contribute to within a couple of weeks. I was on my way to a new role, but I felt compromised because it didn’t include a project that was mine. I wouldn’t have a team I could work with. It was more, I was knowledge-sharing with executives in government, and it was really exciting to work, a lot of people would’ve been thrilled to be there, but it just wasn’t what drove me to get excited. I deliberately accepted it because I would have balance. I’d be able to leave every day on time. I wouldn’t have to work those 16-hour days I’d been doing before I had the baby. And so I did that, and my husband teased me about having another. I remember saying, what the heck my career already blew up. Let’s do it. Then we had Cameron, and I got a call to go in a month before I was due back and was told my job was gone. My next role took the most out of me in terms of being vulnerable as a young person, an innovative person, and a millennial; in the workforce, there was bullying and microaggressions. At that point, I was working on something that I felt was socially significant and thought, “I need to put up with everything I’m feeling right now because the mission is more important than me.” I just drove myself into a nervous breakdown. That was when I decided to open Brain Snacks and have our third baby. I would open it on maternity leave because there was no way I was jeopardizing my financial responsibility to my family by opening a business without some safety net.
Suddenly everything went crazy for the next 18 months of my life. My sister had a chronic illness, and she passed away in the September of 2018, and I was pregnant with Baden at this time. I was preparing to open Brain Snacks. In January 2019, I had my third son; in March 2019, my middle son had a hernia repair. The doctors inadvertently introduced a superbug MRSA to his spinal column. They couldn’t figure out what it was because his surgery was fine. I couldn’t be around him because I had a newborn. I had to trust my husband to be the hospital dad. Thankfully, my husband can be a hospital dad not all dads can do it. In June, Brain Snacks opened, and my dog died. In September 2019, I found out that the doctors had missed a congenital heart defect for my newborn. And so, he had pulmonary stenosis that was getting quite dangerous, we had to go right away for emergency heart surgery. And then January, I went back to work in government, and the pandemic hit.
Q: Why do you think women need to achieve soul care at least weekly?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
I had to work longer, full-time at the government while I tried to open the business than I intended because of the pandemic. Iin August that year, my middle son, who had back surgery the previous year, had an emergency bowel surgery. It felt like one emergency after another, I had always had the mindset that if you’re mentally tough enough, you can weather it. Right. My body was like, “No, this is enough.” So I just found I was having panic attacks. I’d be putting peanut butter on toast and suddenly feel a fire chasing me. This was a new experience, I didn’t even know what it was. One day, I was describing it to somebody, and they were like, “Oh, this is a panic attack or an anxiety attack.” My body taught me a lesson if you’re not going to take care of yourself, I’m just throwing this wrench in your path. That’s when I took a leave of absence from the government and tried to rebuild my sanity. It is what I talk about with a lot of women. The idea is that I can have a self-care plan and start it tomorrow. It isn’t good enough. You must live it every day because you must build up the reserve you will need if something goes wrong. It shouldn’t take 20 days to take you down; it’s okay if one does. Otherwise, I feel okay when I wake up, and I start doing some laundry and start to feel warm, and suddenly I feel I can’t manage my day. There is no warning.
Q: How has creating Brain Snacks and watching it grow helped you in your journey as a mother?
Donna-Rae Crooks:
Even though it hasn’t been spectacular, I feel I made it profitable during the pandemic. It’s very empowering being in charge of the impact that I think I can have on the community and how I want to spend my time. And I believe there are a lot of ways that I give back to others, whether through things we’re doing or just visiting with moms who have their kids in the play space. I was chatting with one of them about her plans to return to work and some of the considerations of whether she returns to her prior employer, folks, or something else. There are lots of things to consider, especially financial considerations. I always feel energized after talking to these women. That was part of the business model of Brain Snacks. We had our first event. We called it The Guide to The Mommy Galaxy. It was September of 2018, attended by basically many pregnant women and I, all newly mothered women. We just talked through all the things I was talking about except the things that hadn’t happened yet and gave them my best advice about after you go back to work and how to speak to your spouse about what you might need and how to talk to your boss about what you need and how you should know what you need even. So that’s how I wanted Brain Snacks to be and to have that component. I desire to have it as more than just that space, maybe thinking of doing a book club to have mothers come together and see them chat. And although I haven’t done it yet, I think we all need that space, that safe space, to be able to talk about what’s going on and relax.
I hope this inspires you to beginning your journey as an entrepreneur and don’t forget to add fun rituals or activities that help you recharge during the week- whatever that looks like for you and curious on how to get started? don’t hesitate to reach out! If you would like to listen to or catch up with her, check out when she is speaking via Mommy Connection or grab one of her fantastic drink creations by stopping by Brain Snacks Co at 376 University Park Dr, Regina, SK S4V 1J4 or order online at www.brainsnacks.co.
