Fab, fit and 40

Derval O’Rourke is used to moving at a fast pace but looking after her two small children while growing her eponymous business during a pandemic has meant learning how to speak up for what’s important to her. She tells Jennifer Stevens all about her busiest ever year and her plans for her big birthday!

Derval O’Rourke has been thinking a lot about how women have fared over the course of the pandemic. She is a mum of two, runs her own company, Derval.ie, which employs seven people, is a coach on Ireland’s Fittest Family and is a regular athletics commentator for RTE sports. To say she is busy is an understatement but, even with so much going on, she found that people expected more from her during the last year than from her husband. 

“When the pandemic came, all of a sudden, everyone thought I was capable of fully minding two small children while running my business at the same time, but no one expected that from my husband. I've thought about this a lot. I think a lot of women carve out their own flexible work to enable them to hold on to a career and still be the parent they want to be. That was definitely a motivation for me with the business. But what happens is that when something happens with the kids, I'm always the person that will shift and move and go and do. When the pandemic hit, it was that times 1,000. My mind was blown when I realised that people just didn't consider the fathers.

“At the start of all this, it really felt like people didn't see my work as important. That goes to the heart of the issue of equality. I wanted to be a really good parent, but I also didn't want to tank the business that I had started from scratch. I'm fortunate that I have a business partner, but he happens to be a guy, so his wife was doing all the childcare in their house, the irony of it. Because his wife was doing all the childcare - she's full-time with the kids which in my opinion is much harder - he was able to take a lot of my responsibilities off me. None of the irony and the stress of it passed me by, it was just mind-numbingly annoying."

Derval knew that she had to make some changes in order to make her work life and home life run more smoothly.

“I had a lot of people say ‘you must be really enjoying this quality time with the kids’, which I found intensely frustrating and totally and utterly lacking in comprehension of what the reality was. It wasn't quality time. There's a reason I don't bring them to work. I adore them and they're amazing. They are by far the most important part of my life but they’re also not compatible with work. I've a two-year-old and five-year-old. But I found my voice a little bit more after a few weeks and I started openly saying to people, ‘why would you not expect my husband to do something but you would expect me to?’ It was important to me that my daughter see me do that. We had five full-time employees when the pandemic started, we have seven now, but there was sometimes still a feeling that because I set this up and I work for myself that it's a bit of a lifestyle choice and almost like a hobby.

“In some ways, the last year has been somewhat of a watershed because I found that I had a couple of options. I could have closed down my business and stopped working and become a full-time mum at home. But it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The other option was to actually sit down with my husband and work it out. He was under a lot of pressure, work-wise, as well but I could ask him where his pain points were work-wise and where my pain points were with work and figure out how we could get closer to meeting in the middle?

“The other thing we did was to actually speak to our broader circles. I found that we needed to start verbalising to people that my work was real work. That it was a very genuine business with a lot of ambition, it wasn't a hobby, and that was helpful. 

“The final thing was understanding how I juggle everything work wise. Before the pandemic hit my fingers were in everything and they didn’t need to be. I decided the things that were the most important areas for me as a business owner, where I needed to be, where I wanted to be. It gave me clarity over what I should be doing.

“From a business perspective, it was very, very useful.  But it also made me realise that I’m a better mom when I'm out and I'm working. I have my own career that I'm passionate about and I'm a better parent to them for that. My five-and-a-half-year-old definitely takes it in. I say it to her a lot more now because I know she understands. I say ‘mommy has to go to work because mommy works for herself. Mommy is a boss’. We have a lot of jokes in the house now about who’s the boss at home”

Derval’s business has seen huge growth over this last year, with new elements such as the online shop that sells Irish brands like Two Active Wear and Voya being launched. There are more new launches in the pipeline. But how has she gotten through the last year with so much going on at home and at work? 

“I stopped trying to do everything about nine months ago. I stopped trying to do things that I hated and that were making me anxious, such as being a good homeschool parent. I'm not good at homeschooling. I don't enjoy it. There's a reason I'm not a teacher, and so I stopped. When Dafne started school in September, I said ‘I won't be engaging in homeschool and the homework. It's not for me, and it's fine that it's not for me. There are lots of other things I do amazingly with her, and we're really close.’ My husband's absolutely excellent with her homework, he possibly should have been a teacher, so I leave that to him.

“I think giving myself permission to not do the things that were making me feel really stressed out has been massive in the past year. The other thing I do regularly is to just announce that I need to go. I'm like, ‘I need to leave’, and I’ll put on my headphones and go for a walk. I'll walk to the village where we live which is about 15 minutes away, I might get a coffee and turn around and walk home. I think I'm giving myself that permission to remove myself, because there are two of us in the house.

“I definitely was a martyr for the first two or three months. I was there doing everything, but I think if you don't mind yourself, how are you going to survive? So now I don't feel bad about it at all, and I am all about minding myself.

“Give yourself permission. I just think we beat ourselves up all the time. We overthink how much it always needs to be us. It doesn't always need to be you. Even though our support structures are so much smaller now, they're still there. Whatever you can get in terms of support, take it.”

It's sensible advice from the athlete turned TV star/entrepreneur and some of that wisdom might have come from getting older because Derval is about to celebrate a milestone birthday. 

“I'm going to be 40 at the end of May. I've never, ever celebrated a birthday. Never had an 18th, or a 21st, or a 30th because I was in my running career, and I also I feel slightly uncomfortable with that attention. It's not really my thing. Even at my wedding, I felt really awkward with it all. But I decided in the first lockdown last year that I was going to do something to mark it. I told my husband that I was going to go hard on my 40th because I realise now life is short. I said ‘I am just going to be a bit extravagant and do whatever I want and have a big party in the garden’ because we built a house a few years ago and we've never had a housewarming. I feel like I've made it to 40, I’ve two kids, the business is going grand. I haven't absolutely tanked it. We're not broke so I am going to just celebrate all of that.”

Of course, just like with every other party this year, things are still not as open as we had all hoped and so Derval’s big celebrations will have to be on hold for a little while longer. 

“I’ve wild, wild plans as you can imagine now! My current plan is that if grandparents are allowed to take the kids overnight, I’ll spend the day with them and then in the evening sit in my back garden with some lovely food that we get from a restaurant in Cork, some wine and hopefully a few friends if that’s permitted. And if it’s not, I’ll just sit in the garden with my husband and a nice bottle of wine.” 

As big birthdays go in the current climate, those plans don’t sound too bad at all and it’s not like Derval really has time to take off with everything she has going on. Keep your eyes peeled for lots of newness from our favourite fab, fit, forty-year-old. Happy birthday Derval. 

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