Show notes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thank-you-mama/id1502312840Full 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 me. And a few weeks afterwards, I had a panic attack. I had this panic fear that I was going to forget everything she told me and that through that I was going to forget everything. She. Who she is that I'm going to lose her if I forget what she told me.So I sat down and started writing down everything I could remember. She told me, and then that turned into everything she taught me and everything she showed me and that turned, started turning into a book about her life, through her lessons. And then the magic started happening in that I was telling my friends what I'm working on.And you could see their reactions, how obvious and deep and important [00:06:00] this topic is to all of us. What have we learned from our mothers, but we never really articulated or put it in a form or give it a deeper thought. And that inspired me to start a podcast. because for me, the important thing was to interview women from all over the world.I really, and this is why a podcast was such a great medium to do this because I can just use Skype and interview women. I had women from 50 different countries. I had women from Nepal and Tanzania and Kenya and Trinidad and Iran, and you know, all over the world. And it was important to me to not only go geographically globally, but also to interview women from very different backgrounds and different religions and different socio economic status and not only successful professionally [00:07:00] successful women, but stay at home moms, women who are farmers to really get a feeling for what is it that our mothers around the world teach us. And then little by little, and this is one of the dimensions that opened up.A question popped up to me. I still quite early on in my interviews was what, what was something important that your mom did not teach you? What, what did you miss in, in what she showed you taught to you? And this turned out to be one of the equally important question as what your mom taught you.But then another dimension that was really important to me because I had such a close relationship to my mom and I grew up in this beautiful mother-daughter bubble. Was that. Not all women have relationships like that. They're mothers. And somehow the universe shoved my head into a [00:08:00] series of interviews just recently with women who had very let's call them complex relationships with their mothers.And I started reading literature on mothers who don't love, or, you know, complicated mother daughter relationships to prepare myself for these interviews because it was a completely foreign world to me. And I've learned that this is just as important as those women who come on my show, who just, you know, bursts with love with their mothers is women who had very tough relationship and still have lessons to share that they learn from, from that, that, that that's beautiful.Risa: It gives me a sense of ease in a way around the subject to know that those stories are included to, you know, those stories are, as you say, they're, they're pushing their way in the universe is pushing their way into you [00:09:00] being. Like, this is complicated shit, you know?Ana: Well, I started reading the books about mother wounds and, you know, the, the inherited trauma and they just opened, it opened again, it opened the whole world to me, a new world that I didn't know, but also it opened my eyes towards some of the trauma that goes around in my family that we never dealt with it actually, or, you know, it gets mentioned, but never really dealt with.Risa: Can you tell us more about this childhood on an island in Croatia, you told me that children told you you were a witch when you were growing upand your mother sounds like she had. A real magic, like a real, she made a magic bubble for you and it wasn't always perfect, but..Ana: So I, I did not grow up on the island. I grew up basically in [00:10:00] Zagreb in the capital of Croatia, but my mom's family comes from a very tiny island. South of Croatia. It's so tiny there during the winter, there are 120 people living in it.It doesn't have any hotels. It doesn't have any cars. So it's really, when you watch a Disney movie, Luca, I think was the last Disney movie with this beautiful Mediterranean island. That's our island. You know where everybody's family, no cars, no tourists, just this wild. Beautiful. Mediterranean island. And so just as my mother did, I would spend my whole summers there.So come end of school, you know, immediately the next day we went to the, to the island and I would spend two and a half, three months on the island every year. We. All of us in our family feel extremely, extremely, deeply connected to the island. We really feel like it's in our blood, in our veins and the [00:11:00] island.I know I'm boasting and I sound like a person in love, but people who arrive to the island do say that it has very, very deep energies and it's very special. we Have an old house, which my great grandmother bought. And that's another beautiful story about my island.Please tell me to shut up if I'm too long with my story.Oh no, no, no. A theme of our podcast is please expand. So please take us on thisjourney. So in early. 20th century. So just, I would say just around first world war. The, that was back then, Austro-Hungarian monarchy that the island belong to went through its crisis.As did the whole world. There was no food. There was, there were, there was a depression and the men on the island decided to go and look for [00:12:00] other places to work and go look for money so they can send money back home to the island to support their wives and children. So they left. Once the men left the women decided to dress themselves in black and they took over everything, everything they took over the farming, they went fishing, they raised their children, they took, took over whatever work there was. These women. Dressed in black on this Mediterranean island took over and I have a beautiful postcard, always on my desk of these women.And you can see how burned by the sun and hard work they are. They, they, they look like men actually. This life toughened them up a lot. And it was famous for being this island of these women dressed in black and they would go rowing the boat. They would go fishing. And this picture stays very clearly in my head from hearing about it and seeing [00:13:00] the old photographs of these women in these big black dresses, rowing their boats, you know, and fishing.So it's, it's a very magical, and female, like this place, that's just bursting with this women, females and female energy. Quite recently, I heard stories I read that the inhabitants of the island original inhabitants were considered witches.They were in, I think there were shamans. Uh, they brought the. Whatever religion or shamanism, I think from Bosnia Herzegovina when they came towards the island centuries earlier and they never forgot it. So there are stories of raising dead back to life. Apparently in front of each house door, we have bones of our ancestors buried.I dunno, I haven't yet looked into it. Who is buried and what's buried in front [00:14:00] of our house, but. There are all these stories of this. And there are also stories of people being able to fly on the island. So there is a old fishermen who is now, now, already dead, but he, I think he was also like 1940s, 1950s, where he self taught himself to paint and he started painting all these amazing paintings off the magic on the island. So his paintings are full of this people flying around the island and, doing some strange rituals. And. I didn't know this. When somebody told me once one older gentlemen on the island once looked at me I was saying something and he said, oh, you're a witch just like your great grandmother. And I said, I got a little offended because I thought he meant I was, you know, we in west of this idea [00:15:00] of witches as being old evil women. And I was like, why, why is he telling me that, you know, and only once I heard this background story about what, they meant what he meant you know, I, I realized I received a compliment.Risa: Yes, you did.Ana: So that's the story. That's the story of the island.Risa: That's so powerful. I had to stop to write down. They dressed themselves in black and took over everything.Ana: How amazing is that? So pure and I'm so glad there are photographs of this women, you know, it's not just a legend. It's it's it'sreal.Risa: Yes. And now that you know, it's a compliment, do you feel connected?Do you feel like your, your writing your interviews are sort of drawing, weaving that web of power [00:16:00] between women's knowledge powerful femme knowledge?Ana: I do. And you know, it's interesting that my mom, my mom was a feminist and very outspoken and she was always an activist. She was always fighting for the weaker ones in a society back then in 1970s, way before Hollywood stars, she created a charity organization for hungry children in Africa.And she donated. Well, every award she would win she would donate and collect money and buy food and medication and fly to get over these things to Sudan and to different countries, to make sure that they reach the, the, the ones who need, they reached children and don't end up in the wrong hands.And equally, she was always very loud and raised me to be very aware of this... female energy and how special we are. Dare I say, you know, and how powerful we are. But, [00:17:00] but I'm very embarrassed to say that only through this hundred something interviews I made in last two years, this really entered my body.I don't know how to say it in different way. I really feel with every cell of my body. How. Interconnected we are. And, and what I've learned through these interviews is how there is a common narrative in women's lives, no matter where they are and what, what circumstances they live in and grew up in, you know, a woman who grows up on a farm in Turkey and a woman who grows up in a, Middle-class family in Switzerland there are always these common narratives in women's lives, and that feels extremely connecting. And that made me aware of what a sisterhood we have and how interconnected we are. And it [00:18:00] kind of was beautiful for me to learn through my podcast that I lost my mom, but I gained... billions of mothers around the world. You know, this podcast because it was really such a beautiful gift to me and listening to all this lessons and women's lives and how, how universal the lessons are, what women are teaching their children , really, really, really brought home how, how powerful and how connected we are. And it made me very, very sad that we are not aware of it. You know, even me when my mom who tried to teach me this and show it to me, it took a while for me to learn it. And I wish we, all of us would be more aware of it.Risa: Yeah, it feels pretty intentional sometimes eh? Layers and layers and layers of intention that separated us from each other, separated us from that sense of power.Ana: I just wanted to say that from the sense of power I interviewed a [00:19:00] lady a few weeks ago, who wrote a book called "We are the daughters of the witches you didn't burn" and reading her book was just so eyeopening to me. It really hit me very strongly, how unaware we are, how buried this, this feeling of our power. It was just as you say, systematically, buried through century, not century millennium, you know, and I'm glad that we are slowly waking up to it. It's going to be magical, we'll save the planet.Risa: Oh I love your optimism Ana! I need this today. I mean, I feel tha…
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