https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thank-you-mama/id1502312840 Full Transcript: Risa: [00:00:00] Welcome. Welcome friends. Welcome. Children, mums, parents, magical beings... welcome a wall of fog and returning birds. You'll hear the honk soaring overhead, and the stomps of the three-year old upstairs as we begin to sort of circle in, call in our feelings for a missing Witches first let's talk about mothers. We'll say from the beginning, what a complicated question. And we have the right person to open this up with us. For so many of us, this idea of just purely celebrating mama culture is really hard. There's so much mother trauma in so many of our communities [00:01:00] and so many families where that idea needs to be queered and needs to be multipled. And today I am carrying the heavy weight on my chest of having read the leaked opinion from the United States Supreme court that will force motherhood, forced pregnancy on women's bodies that will remove the protection of Roe vs. Wade. And I'm just really, reeling with the sorrow of what that will mean today. And it all just feels complicated and connected, by the time this episode comes out, we'll know more, but that's where my feeling is. And I have to be honest about it. Thanks for being here, thanks to the coven for being here and for all of you portalling in and out and being in this circle wherever you are in time, by the time the sound hits you. We'll just hold this sorrow together and also this light. [00:02:00] And we'll turn to the complicated question of things we can learn from our mothers, whether they mean to teach it to us or not. You can hear the sweet laugh of Ana she's the award-winning journalist, who is the host of the Thank You Mama podcast. She has interviewed so many people from all over the world about what their mothers taught them. And really you dig into both sides of this question. What did they mean to teach you? What do you wish they could have taught you? What were the tacit lessons? What is this knowledge that's sort of on the edges of all this rationalized knowledge. What are moms passing down hand by hand? You you've gotten so many windows into that. So thank you so much for being here with us today. Ana: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited [00:03:00] to be here with. Today and talk about this and share my learnings and insights and thoughts about this. It's a fascinating topic and I've been dealing with it for two years at this stage, and it's just opening more and more angles. You know, the deeper I go into it, the more dimensions of being open to me and I'm, I feel very blessed that it's a beautiful world to discover and a beautiful topic to be dealing with. Risa: Yeah, it is. Do you wanna tell us how you started and then maybe what are some of the dimensions that are opening now that you're surprised about? Ana: It started very organically. It did not start as a podcast. It started a few weeks after I lost my mom and my mom and I were extremely, extremely close. Her parents had died when she was very young. So she basically lonely had me. She turned me. I mean to her family. And [00:04:00] we had a very beautiful relationship. She was by far not a perfect mother. She was a strange mother, but the one I loved so much. She had two parallel careers. She was an award-winning acclaimed and admire movie actress and parallel to that. She finished the academy of arts and was a visual artist equally, a claimed and awarded. And. What's amazing about my mom being my mom is that she, in a way she's an idol to me, but I meet more and more young women in creation nowadays. So tell me she was there. She is there idle as well. So it's, it's a very. Beautiful situation of having a mom. Who's your idol, both career wise and, you know, towards the outside, towards what she represented in the society, as well [00:05:00] as how she raised me and the relationship she had with me. So when she died of cancer, very surprisingly, oh, it was a big shock for m