MeaningMaker Podcast

We prepare to return to the small town we left in 2020 to speak at a church exploring same sex marriage and what it means to be an affirming congregation - openly welcoming and supportive of 2SLGBTQ+ people. If feels complicated. But why we agreed to do it isn't. It's an act of faith.

If it's true that creative ideas come to us because they're begging to be brought into the world, then maybe it's also true that our lives - and the ideas and dreams we have about them and the next version of ourselves - are also begging to be brought into the world. In this episode, we talk about our own creativity and what it's teaching us - that similar to life, it's about surrendering to the process.

In a continuation of the failure discussion from S2/E2, we talk about shame - which touches all of our lives at some point. It's about what happens when shame is deeply internalized and allowed to become the narrator of a life story. It's about the inability to set boundaries, the acceptance of a story told by others as your own, and the belief that who you are at your core - and who you are becoming - is your biggest failure.

In an unexpected episode - recorded just after Episode 1 of Season 2 - we turned the mics back on to capture a conversation about what we weren't planning to talk about. Two divorce stories playing out with much different outcomes - one much more common than the other. Not every story has a happy ending. Some endings feel like failures. Sometimes you learn that the real work is just accept the ending that you have so that something new can begin.

More and more, we're each learning that the podcast has been a journey to owning for ourselves both the hard and beautiful aspects of our story. One year after taking a one-year break from podcasting, we're “beginning again” after experiencing a profound moment of closure. In this first episode of the new season, we talk about that moment, why we're back, what has changed over the last year, our regrets from the first season, and what it is that we don't want to talk about anymore.

As mothers and wives with young families, we knew there would be no right time and no right way to open the closet door.  Listen as we talk about some of the things that inspired courage in us, that guided us to the eventual decision and that we had to consider - including the losses we would likely face. 

Over these 23 episodes, we've chronicled our coming out story — and our life in the decade after that. We've honoured and loved and struggled to make meaning of all that came before — and so much of what has followed. These real and raw conversations every other week have healed and changed us both. And recently, they've left us with another unexpected gift. The realization that as much as the podcast has been about telling the story — it has also been about letting go of it.

The past is gone but, so often, it defines the present. After reliving this many-faceted coming out story over more than 20 episodes, we talk about why it's been important to make meaning of what happened in those initial coming out years. How we needed to find a truth about those events which is true for each of us, individually. How we discovered that our understanding of the truth continues to evolve and change over time. And, how all of this has pushed us to re-examine faith, flaws and even how we imagine the future.

We've all felt like outsiders at one time or another. In those times, we don't feel seen or witnessed in some way. Because of who we believe we are, what we dream about, what we do or do not believe in, who or how we love, what we do for a living – and a whole string of other reasons. In this episode, we talk about how so many of us stay closeted and unseen about the things we feel might cause disconnection or rejection in our social circles – and the price attached to those choices.

We're back at it after a month-long break to talk about the future of the podcast, vulnerability hangovers, making mistakes on the air, what reliving this story for you through these episodes has revealed for us, and the unexpected grief that healing brings. It's almost like we're not the same people who started doing this podcast nine months ago.

The stories we create in order to justify our actions and choices become, in so many ways, who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. But what if some of those stories were nothing more than comfortable lies? Things we've told ourselves to maintain a level of peace about our lives that, if we were honest, eat at us because they don't reflect our reality. In this episode, we talk about the comfortable lies we've told ourselves over the last decade and what happened as we gradually allowed them to become uncomfortable truths.

We love to hear from listeners and, in this episode, we answer some of your most frequently asked questions. How do we know this isn't a phase? Initially, what did you say to yourselves in order to begin to absorb your changing sexuality? What has been the hardest thing about this journey? What about the best thing? And…the most commonly-asked sex question we get from straight women. (You'll have to listen to find out.)

On a cool fall night in October, 2020, we surprised our kids and got married in the backyard of our home. The eight-year journey to that night was curved like a road through the mountains, with stops for each of us along the way. In this episode, we talk about some of them – the notion of “living in sin”, internalized homophobia, letting go of the past, and the lack of rituals for the ending of a first marriage. And how, for a time, just the thought of having a wedding was enough to stop us from having a marriage.

As humans we're hard-wired to see patterns. Like on a grilled cheese, in the stars, in events, or in nature. But we often miss them in ourselves. In this episode, we let you in on a self-proclaimed “messy patch” that has revealed some of the unhealthy patterns we've each written over our lifetimes. Patterns that have followed us through first marriages — and now a second. There's truth in patterns that can be hard to accept. The truth we don't always see because we aren't looking. Or, because we don't want to look.

Family is a tough subject for many people. Us, too. We've had a hard time talking about the concept of family – even to each other sometimes – over the last decade since we came out. With four kids who didn't ask for this new journey and two moms with admittedly naïve and different ideas about how and when to move on from the families we had before all of this – it's been messy. And good. And ragged. And new. And a work in progress. We're not an idyllic blended family. But you can be real at our house.

We switched on the mics mid-conversation to catch a discussion about an argument we'd had a few nights before. The episode isn't about the argument. It's about two people who often struggle at the same time and the patterns that has created in our relationship over the last decade. It's a 'two-people-trying-to-find-their-way-through-their-own-sh*t' episode.

We'd always planned to do an episode about our decision to stay living in a small town after we came out. This is not it. We scrapped two full-length episodes in favour of this one – a third attempt that ended up being a conversation about why it is we just couldn't seem to have that small town conversation. We stayed for good reasons. And we left, after 8 years, for us. Sometimes you don't need to relive a laundry list of reasons to go. Sometimes wanting to leave is enough.

What do our first pride parade, standing shoulder to shoulder with half a million women in Washington the day after Trump's 2016 inauguration, a gay bar in Kentucky, making a wish on the moon in the middle of Sausalito Bay, and a Tibetan store in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco have in common? We've kept a piece of each of these moments, and so many more, in the happiness jar that we let you peek inside of in this episode.

Is it possible to love the hardest things you've done when they've caused such hurt to yourself and others? What does it mean to forgive yourself? And, how do you do it? In this episode, we explore the concept of self-forgiveness through some emotionally-charged memories about the pain our decision to come out caused others.

We let ourselves out of the closet in 2012 and then, for a while, we stuffed our joy in there instead. In the beginning, the joy we shared together saved us on the hardest days, and it also remained something we played small about. In this episode we talk about closeted joy, keeping ourselves small for others, and how sitting with the mess can be the jumping off point to joy.

From Charlene's most recent digital album, "Imperfect". Available for download on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you stream your music. If you wish to support Charlene's music directly, visit charlenegingerich.bandcamp.com where 100% of every music purchase goes directly to the artist. Enjoy!

We'll never have a more complicated, intricate relationship with any other human being as long as we live, than we do with our mothers. In this episode, you'll hear how and why one of us lost our mother to her own grief and anger, for a time, after coming out – before we finally lost her forever to cancer, in 2019.

In this episode, we explore the individual faith journeys and difficult spiritual awakenings we each experienced - before we knew one another - and how they were a door to what became our journey together. We mention God and sin a little. But not in the way you might expect.

We're both walking around the house these days feeling a little bruised from everything the podcast is surfacing in us and for us. In this episode, we stop to share some unexpected realizations brought to each of us through co-hosting the first several episodes.

In this unexpected episode, we acknowledge the truth of how our relationship started. We talk about crossing moral boundaries, affairs, and whether the search was for another person - or for another self.

In this episode, we talk about the unanticipated depth of the grief of ending a first marriage - and how different the journeys to the end were for each of us.  The ending of a relationship taught us so much - not only about ourselves - but about love and the way it transforms.  

When we arrived at the decision to tell the truth, there was no right or gentle way to do it.  This episode honours the journey through the telling as much as it does the initial grace extended to us by our former husbands.  Love is a masterclass in acceptance.  

Join us for a far-reaching discussion about closets, courage as a muscle, and how the Universe conspires to give you exactly what you've asked for - though often, it doesn't look like what you've asked for.

In this opening episode, we talk about the origins of our story.  From moms in separate marriages to men - with children - to friends, to married to each other.  Listen in as we try to make some meaning of how we got from there to here.