Living Outside the Box with Danusia Malina-Derben

"We might as well raise a little hell"

I’m so excited to bring you another Living Outside the Box interview! (If you haven’t yet read last month’s interview with Sydney Michalski, about leaving suburbia for life on a homestead, check it out here.)

This month, I am super excited to be joined by the incredible

Danusia Malina-Derben

, leadership consultant, writer, podcaster, mother and author of

Parents Who Think

.

Meet Danusia

Danusia’s day job is advising senior leaders in FTSE 100/250 boardrooms. By night, she creates podcasts and writes books. And, alongside all of that, she is raising her ten children, and home educating three of them.

I am in awe of all that Danusia achieves, and even more so that she maintains her integrity at all times, being unashamedly herself and never afraid to speak her truth. So I’m excited to hear her thoughts on “outside the box living”, which I’m sure can inspire us all!

Photo courtesy of Danusia Malina-Derben. Danusia with six of her children.

Tell us about your “outside the box” life.

I'm a mother of ten children (six sons, four daughters). Straight off the bat I occupy an outside the box life about “appropriate numbers” of children to have borne. Or is it bred? Talking of this, the other day someone called me “a breeder” which they thought was howl-in-my-face funny. Derision is a hazard of being on the outskirts.

In the Western hemisphere, family size norms are built on moderation, in which women become mothers of, say, two, maybe three, or perhaps even four children. As blended families increase, it’s not uncommon to find mothers with five biological children. My sense, although it’s anecdotal, is that, once women become mothers of six or more children, we’ve stepped far outside a normality box. Being a double digit mother catapulted me into an eyebrow raising league.

Some people lean into stereotypes for an explanation to their question, “why ten?” I wrote a piece about this question and my experiences of it. I’m used to having assumptions thrown at me as part of people’s digestion of my life choices. I plan to write more about these assumptions as cultural signposts. Here’s three that show up regularly:

The von Trapp Jig

People assume I joined forces with a grieving widower with an army of children, Sound of Music melodies optional. I disappoint then shock people by admitting that all ten grew in my womb. None are adopted, fostered or inherited from family or any friends.

Earth Mother Glory

Having failed the von Trapp test, people throw themselves into a story that I’m addicted to having a big pregnant belly, and bereft without a buggy in the hall. They assume my raison d’etre hinges on children tugging at my apron strings as I bake then scoff cakes.

Ruthless City Bitch

When people discover my day job is consulting in Fortune 500 companies, they swing on over into another caustic trope. This one is based on the idea that I must be a cold-hearted careerist with a home life that includes an entourage of nannies and domestic staff. I must have the obligatory hen-pecked house-husband who raises our ignored-by-me children.

None of these narratives are right.

It doesn’t take much to live an outside the box life if you’re a mother. Straddling a couple of intersections is enough. In my case, the combination of ambitious career professional with a brood of children becomes an oddity. Or worse, a freak show.

Still, there’s more. I home educate my “last baby”, which turned out to be triplets. Stepping outside the lines of statutory education provision in school is gently becoming less of a radical choice. Even so, home educating three children at the same time as running demanding day and night jobs while living in the countryside brings questions.

“I question what the norm is we hold as some golden standard. … We might as well raise a little hell, push back on cultural narratives, on preconceived notions and status quos of our own lives. What do we have to lose? That’s what feeling alive is about!”

Did you always see yourself as someone outside the “norm”?

I didn’t sit thinking about how to live an “outside the box” life.

Being a woman who lives at growth edges, I’m committed to seeing where my capacity is. I don’t shy from trying out “too much”, because I believe we find ourselves at the edges of our bandwidth. We don’t know what we’re capable of until we reach our threshold. We look around and see how others “do things” and how they live, but we can’t know what’s for us to experience unless we try.

I cause trouble to preserve my integrity. That integrity is about living in ways that might not follow the norm. I question what the norm is we hold as some golden standard. Following from this, I wonder what’s the “inside the box” version, if we say there’s an outside the box life? Perhaps an idealised linear path:

School | university | meet a partner of the opposite gender | start a career | marry | have children | step back from career to raise 2.3 kids | feel guilty | return to work part-time | support husband’s career | look after elderly parents | face the empty nest | (maybe) divorce, (maybe) remarry | find yourself in midlife | give no fucks in menopause | become a creative.

Is this a middle class white woman’s (pallid) life path I’ve jotted? No mention of job losses, infertility, health scares and long-term issues, infidelity, house moves, money worries, mental health challenges, special needs, friendship ups and downs… this list could go on.

My take: We might as well raise a little hell, push back on cultural narratives, on preconceived notions and status quos of our own lives. What do we have to lose? That’s what feeling alive is about!

Photo courtesy of Danusia Malina-Derben.

You’ve mentioned that some people can react negatively towards your way of life - how do you deal with that?

Skewering stereotypes takes conviction. This is rare. It agitates people. It interrupts the status quo.

An early example in my life: My father refused to speak to me for a year when I had my first child at 17. He came around, but his silence taught me to stand for my beliefs even when these threaten to annihilate my support system. When we cave on what we believe in or know to be right, a little part of us shrivels. When juicy white grapes dry out, they become raisins. To become softer and full size-ish again, they need to be soaked. Humans are like this. Until we soak in what’s right for us, we stay shrivelled.

A current-day example in my life: I moved home from a well-connected, culturally rich location to a rural place with fields spreading into the distance, and no neighbours. People questioned how I’d maintain my day job from here. Surely it would be too isolated? My soul knew best. My consulting firm is all the better for having a founder who is replenished, and my children live a gentler, less comparative-based childhood that feeds their strengths.

The magic of this move is that I get less “feedback and input” from human energy here in my wild spacious home life in nature. Living here in ways that don’t involve sharing or showing or validation or even an external gaze is nourishing. I could have chosen to Instagram every nook and cranny of this spectacular home set in a slice of heaven. That would have decentered me being in my life tending my callings.

Weathering people’s discomfort about life choices is a skill.

Remember, anyone’s response to life choices is about them, not us. It’s a projection of their beliefs and values, plus a signal about their capacities (how much/little they think they can handle). The view we hold about a person’s choices is filtered through our own complex lens. If we can depersonalise reactions, we’ve a chance to stay firm in our convictions and to be compassionate to other people’s viewpoints. What a sweet ride it is to find everything can be right.

What lessons have you learned from taking an “unconventional” path?

What if we knew there are very few wrong choices?

Short of fortune-telling powers, there’s no way to know what life lived differently will bring. I’ve never thought the purpose to life is to be happy. The idea of chasing happiness was something that didn’t sit right, whereas living a well-lived life with all the pains, mistakes and fissures that this has to involve has always excited me.

Most recently, I’ve learned loads through parenting twice exceptional (2E) children who require so much scaffolding. It’s led me to consider scaffolding in general for myself too.

My biggest lesson is to find others in a similar leaking boat. We’re all in a leaking boat - find others to feel less alone.

Photo courtesy of Danusia Malina-Derben. Danusia’s triplets at their home.

Have you always had complete confidence in your path?

I thought I could never home educate, because my identity would drown under a sea of children, and that my patience quota made me unsuited to raising kids with special needs. I had no preconception about big families other than fond memories of reunion movies of The Waltons.

Turns out what I thought was impossible has been the making of me. I’m not a one-off in this. I suggest that people write down what they think they can’t do. Write it all down. This list holds the clues to unlocking an extraordinary life - when we surpass our “in the box” limitations, we begin to see ourselves as power-full. Often it’s not the giant acts that build our confidence, it’s tiny incremental actions we fear, but take, that change how we see ourselves.

I used to think I was a fearless person because I took many leaps. It took some years for me to clock it’s the inverse. I’m anxious, terrified, and accept that fear is one of my invisible life partners. I set my fears out into the world to bring home successes. I write lists…

What advice would you give to anyone who feels confined by those “in the box” limitations?

Another “way of being” is always possible. Seek out stories of those who’ve gone before - even if their situations aren’t exact copies of yours, there are themes to learn from. Find ways to tell your story, and to live your story.

“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” ~ Rebecca Solnit

Huge thanks to Danusia for sharing her story, and her powerful words. Do check out

Parents Who Think

- it really will make you think! You can also find Danusia’s books - NOISE: A Manifesto for Modernising Motherhood and SPUNK: A Manifesto for Modernising Fatherhood on Amazon.

If you’d like to share your own story of life outside the box, you can complete the interview questions here.