Not Your Average Aunties

Faiza and Manju join Farheen and Mohini in this candid conversation about what it means to be mothers. How we were mothered and how we mother ourselves informs how we care for the children in our lives. What is the impact of sexist mother-blaming, mother-shaming ideologies and pressures to be perfect mothers? These friends discuss what intentional and conscious parenting/auntie-ing looks like, centering the joys of witnessing children grow, while providing them with space to be their unique selves who challenge and inspire us. So much gratitude to our mothers who birthed us and love(d) us, and to the ever-evolving children in our lives for being the joys that they are. Mohini is eternally grateful to her friend Lisa, now in the spirit world, who was the first (older) woman with whom she experienced unconditional maternal-type love and friendship. Check out Faiza's beautiful children's books at https://bornonafriday.com/ Excerpt from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you they belong not to you. To get in touch with us, email notyouraverageaunties@gmail.com.

What to do when our first notions of romantic love have been distorted from the get go? Farheen, Mohini and new friend Amardeep dig into their complex relationship to romantic love. Traversing their parents' marriages, Bollywood songs, love addiction and fantasy addiction, they individually and collectively come upon self-love as the truest, deepest love. Self-love is not a cliché - it's a response to heal from intergenerational histories of misogyny, dislocation from community, childhood trauma, sexual violence, abandonment and more. We heal in the present, for the future and into the past for our loved ones. We commit to examining, meditating on, unlearning and re-learning about love in action - love that is not predicated on hyper-individualism or capitalism. Quote from bell hooks' book All About Love, page 188: “Richard Bach's autobiographical love story Illusions describes both his flight from love and his return. To return to love he had to be willing to sacrifice and surrender, to let go of the fantasy of being someone with no sustained emotional needs to acknowledge his need to love and be loved. We sacrifice our old selves in order to be changed by love and we surrender to the power of the new self.” Readings recited in the episode from: bell hooks - All About Love Pauline Harmange - I Hate Men To get in touch with us, email notyouraverageaunties@gmail.com.

There can be much shame, secrecy, harmful and toxic thinking concerning money and wealth. Farheen and Mohini speak frankly about their families' relationships to money and how that has impacted them as well as attempting to de-centre white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist values around deservingness, wealth and generosity to create a more economically just world. Shoutout to Resource Movement and all the friends/folks there who are working to self-reflect and do the hard work to build relationships in efforts to re-distribute land, wealth, and power. https://www.resourcemovement.org. Read the blog post about how much deeper economic injustices have gotten during the pandemic: https://www.resourcemovement.org/post/as-millions-suffer-from-the-pandemic-who-s-getting-rich Gratitude to Edgar Villenueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, and his words in a piece called “Money as Medicine” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/money_as_medicine# In her April 2020 piece entitled “The Pandemic is a Portal” auntie extraordinaire Arundhati Roy offers us this: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” To get in touch with us, email notyouraverageaunties@gmail.com.