Two Moms Day Drinking

A bobcat sparks a little slither into a personal philosophical wormhole. 

Come. Join us. 

(Please re-read the above in Rod Serling's voice. Thank you. Carry on.)

I run my house, and parent my kids, like we're at summer camp and I'm only slightly more capable of adulting than them. 

It's about that time. Baby chickens will be hatching in my bedroom any day now, and I simply cannot wait. 

I want an entire commune full of Sister Wives around me, tucked into the forest like a happy little Nature Woman multi-family homestead utopia. 

Sometimes you have to make a choice that sucks for one group of people, because it is exactly the choice another group of people need you to make. Sometimes you have to engage in some woowoo ritualistic lunacy to make that choice one you can stomach. 

Bigfoot is kind of like a super hippie life coach guru. 

Bears are cool. I'm basically a bear if bears were humans. Horses are insane. The two don't tend to go well together. One time, I thought I was going to die when I encountered bears on a psycho horse. 

C'mere. Let me tell you this story. 

The jungle and its book have a lot in common: there's more inside than meets the eye.

Grief and Covid-19 share one symptom, and it's a major bummer either way.

My uncle wants to know if I can dig an artifact out of the family archives. So I have to talk about it.

Obviously. 

I've recently revised my policy of not paying my kids to do chores, and I need to talk about it. 

Three of Gina Merritt's four children have moved out of her house, and it hit her hard at first. Then, with the help of some good advice and a talking to by her husband, Gina came down off the ledge and is starting to embrace the reward of watching all her hard mommin' work come to fruition. And she has some advice for other moms struggling to let their babies fly the coop. 

My blog debut for The Watershed Journal. All about me and my ridiculous writing life. Check out The Watershed at thewatershedjournal.com/blog

Some girls want a romantic Valentine's Day getaway to Paris or New York. I'm over here like Gobbler's Knob, y'all. 

I have Mr. Crowley suck in my head. So of course you're all going to hear all about it. You're welcome. 

Joe Biden is the Grandpap we all need in our lives right now. On our mom's side. Bernie Sanders and his glorious mittens are the Grandpap on our dad's less formal but still benevolent and loving side. 

I've been on hold for 16 minutes and 33 seconds, and I simply must tell you all about it. 

I ran out of propane this weekend because I suck at being a grownup.

And it got me thinking...

Andy Close wants kids someday.

Brian Hagberg already has some. 

All three of us were reporters at the same newspaper once.

Now Andy and Brian are co-owners of Your Daily Local, a news outlet of their own. 

Read columns and news stories written by Brian, Andy, and me at yourdailylocal.com

I put my own ring on it. Here's why. 

I had a wonderful column completed in a reasonable amount of time.

Then, the toilet got clogged. 

A collaboration with Your Daily Local, check out my first audio column all about how we came to be the family who adopted an elf on the shelf. 

Gina and I talk Christmas, and do some armchair analysis of traditions like Elf on the Shelf and the concept of Santa Claus. Is Christmas just a celebration of Big Brother and toxic guilt tripping? We think not. Find out why. 

Also, our mutual Twitter friend Ashley's dad is the most legit Santa Claus I've ever seen in my life. One of my favorite things is to include listeners in our lunacy, and Ashley was so generous to share this shot of her dad that I've used as episode artwork this week. 

Have a beautiful, peaceful Christmas filled with love, sanity, gratitude, and reflection. 

We've a new year on our doorstep and, honestly, it can not be that hard to improve upon the year we've already trudged through if we just keep our chins as up as we can. And trust me, it is not like me to offer that advice, but for about the past month I have been undergoing a somewhat jarring change of personality. Could be me maturing. Could be the onset of a stroke, for all I know. But all I do know is that I have felt this amniotic weighted blanket of general peace settling over me and I can't explain why or how, but I also don't want it to go away. 

Maybe I'm actually freezing to death. They say freezing to death comes with the same subjective experience, more or less. 

Either way, let's kick this holiday's ass and then square up to 2021 like the badass muthas we are.  

K? 

K. 

Bill and Mary McFarland were married 20 years before they had their son, Ian. Does a 20 year marriage under a couple's belt make the experience of parenting a child easier or harder? Bill and Mary have strong opinions. 

Destiny and I talk being kind to one another after her formal episode, Episode 4, on Working Moms. 

Gina and I discuss the movies Peter Pan and The Sword and the Stone. 

Fair warning, I was tired, overworked, and all over the place. Which makes this funny but ultimately light on substantive conversation from my end. 

It's fine.

It's all gonna be fine. 

Shanell was episode 12 and it feels like yesterday. I interviewed her in February. Just before the world fell in on us. Shanell is a school Psych in Ithaca, N.Y. and she's also my best friend ever. She's the Pinkie Pie to my Big Red. The Peppa to my Salt. 

Mary Hetrick is passion. 

In the flesh. 

If you didn't catch her original episode you can hear her talk about herself and how she got into, of all things, being the only local provider of badass vintage furniture reupholsering in Episode 6. 

The other thing I wanted to talk to Mary about this past January was an upcoming production of the The Vagina Monologues. The first her hometown of Jamestown, N.Y., had ever hosted.

Mary's passion is infections. She's positively bursting at the seams with passion for so many things. She reminds me of myself in that respect. But Mary is far less timid or mild mannered than I am, and she's got big ideas that her little body can't seam to contain. She's inspirational and just an all around badass woman.

She talked a lot about herself and her adventures in Episode 6, but hear Mary gets down to The Vagina Monologues and what that show means to her as a woman, as a feminist, and as a mother. 

I tried to get seats at The Vagina Monologues when her show came around and I waited to long. Mary sold that show out both days it ran and raised a little money for a local domestic violence shelter in the process.

Mary is an 80's and 90's kid like me, and grew up internalizing the feminist message of that era. She's a trip to listen to, and I wish you could all meet her because she is just an amazing mom, an amazing lady, and one badass bitch that I'm proud to know!

My dad made a fresh opening, just for this most holy of days. Check out "Spooky Uke," his newest creation. 

Mwahahahah....

I had to ask Gina to take the wheel for a bit while I dealt with having an alien consciousness implanted into my brain and being groomed as the ET queen before being reinserted into my Earthly life as a sleeper cell for the Alien Takeover. 

In this episode, Gina talks Trick-Or-Treating in labor, her cheeky Irish Grandpa ghost, and her favorite Halloween memories, movies, and costumes. 

And she's cute as hell. 

Happy Halloween. 

Now quake with fear, you tiny fools. 

Bonus points if you get my random movie reference. 

Loves yas,
Stacey

I interviewed Emily Wachter, a local Early Interventionist I've had the pleasure of working with for various stories and things over the years. This bonus content is a long one, but it's a good one. I sometimes go back and relisten to old content and this episode is one that I've loved for a long time.

Also, keep your eyes open for another Halloween themed Gina & Stacey Sidecast later tonight. It's a bonus weekend. I'm feeling generous. Because Halloween and all. 

Love, 
Stacey

An extra hour of tape from my interview with Frank Williams, who talks about how deployment may have helped his marriage, and helped him to see what he had at home that he possibly hadn't appreciated before. You can hear the first part of Frank's interview in Episode 11. 

So I've been going through old content as well as pre-2020 and early-2020 content, when everything was still relatively normal and I thought I might actually take a shot at monetizing this project. Part of that included bonus content from each episode, which was only available for Patrons at the time. 

Each interview typically lasted 2 hours or a little more. I always aired the first half of the episode and kept the second half for Patreon.

But now we're all wizened October 2020-ers and I simply am not able to commit the time or consistency to asking for patronization (you're always more than welcome to pledge, but by no means can I request pledges for content with the schedule I currently keep). So I've decided to dig up these bonus episodes and release them, as I'm also going through the last of the pre-lockdown interviews I did. 

I think there's a lot of value in these interviews. All of them. Whether the guest and I have much in common or not, the conversations are worth sharing in their entirety. 

This is the second half of my interview with Aaron Stearns. You can hear the first half of our conversation in Episode 10. 

Aaron has prioritized his wife Carissa's career and takes on a more or less full-time stay-at-home dad role at home. 

He's a pretty cool dude, and passionate about politics, his family, and being aware of his own motivations and inner workings. He's for sure worth kicking off this Deep Cuts series of episodes with. 

Sunny Kirby grew up in the same part of northwestern Pennsylvania as I did, around the same time as I did. We probably knew a lot of the same people. Yet Sunny and I hadn't met in person a day in our lives before sitting down this past Monday to talk about homeschooling. 

Our conversation naturally branched and stretched, always coming back to that home base of a topic, but naturally and organically occurring as we discovered more and more we had in common with one another. 

Gina and I disucss our favie princesses ever in the Disney Canon, which happen to be the same princess actually, as well as our favie non-princess female leads. We also discuss Gina's first Hocus Pocus viewing and lay out some plans for upcoming Halloween Episodes

Gina and I break down Toxic Masculinity through a brief deconstruction of Gaston, Frollo, and Hans from Frozen, while establishing that (a) Tarzan, who was raised by apes, is the most perfect man in history and (b) Gina's love storhy or "How Gina Met Mr. Gina" is the most romantic story of all time and I'm both intensely jealous and in breathless awe. Gina is a real Disney Princess with a real Disney love story. 

In part two of her episode, Michelle discusses how rising up - using her voice to speak openly and unabashedly about her past and her struggles - has helped her to sail on. To move forward from those struggles by picking up any useful pieces left behind in the wake of her past and going forward in a constant state of development and growth. 

Michelle speaks with unvarnished honesty about her experience of growing up with an abusive father, within a context of chronic stress and fear. And about how that experience played out throughout her family, what that looks like today, and what she's learned from it. 

The most important thing, Michelle says, is to find your voice and to move past the past. 

This is part one of Michelle's episode. The second half will be out at the end of the week, and I feel like if you give Michelle five minutes of your time today, there's no way you're not going to come back on Friday to hear the rest. She's an excellent storyteller, with incredible insight, and a resilience that looks and seems nearly bulletproof to me. 

Michelle is an excellent example of how controlling the narrative of your life, and how it's used, and for what purpose, can be what sets you in motion toward moving past it. And, while she and I had very different experiences of childhood, we both know what it is to have grieved a man with whom we've had to develop visitation arrangements for our children. A man we loved, deeply, and lost, in the end, but one we grieve a little bit each time we see them, and we see them often. 

We both also know how awkward it can be to speak openly about the biggest challenges in our lives while also staying within - if we must - or, better yet, restructuring our environments to reflect social expectations that we endorse. 

Part one is about finding your voice, what Michelle calls "risin' up." 

Part two will be Michelle explaining what "sailin' on" means to her. 

Holy Crow, Y'all. 

I've been looking for someone to talk about making a conscious choice not to have children since December of 2019 and, man, did Bridget deliver. This is a woman who grew up in a chaotic home with a mother who struggled with significant mental health issues, but who loved her very much, and told her so. 

Bridget displays an insane amount of insight and introspective wisdom, and I am so, so excited to share this episode with you. 

Gina and I wound up discussing the differences between the classic Greek myth of Heracles and Disney's 1997 adaptation of the myth for its movie canon. 

It's different comparing Greek myth to modern life because in no way was it attempting to account for modern life. Plus we couldn't really find a lot to bitch about in terms of Disney's adaptation. 

So we just talked about it for an hour. Because that's what we do. 

Was gonna hold this for Friday, but I've decided to throw it on now, bring the newest episode to ya this Friday, and start working my way through episodes I never got to edit and release from this past April, when the pandemic shut me down for a while. 

Just some girls giggling about muscles and bees today, kids. Good craic. Come have a listen. 

Jenny has a number of autoimmune and hormone disorders that prevent her from safely getting pregnant. "There's no good way for this to end," Jenny said in regards to the notion of having kids. 

In this episode, Jenny talks about the process of deciding, for the sake of not only her own health, but for the health of any potential children she might conceive, not to try having children at all. 

And, said Jenny, while it's not the end of the world for her and her husband to hang that idea on a permanent hook, it's not without occasional thoughts in the "what if" vein. 

This podcast is all about exploring our notions, schemas, and philosophies around raising kids, and it would be woefully incomplete without highlighting the voices of women who either can't or won't be moms. 

Gina and I asked the Twitter Lovelies which villainesses they wanted to hear discussed from both Disney movies and the Fairy Tale canon in general. Altogether we came up with: Mother Gothel, Evil Queen, Ursula, Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Prince Charming's mother from Shrek, and Lady Tremaine. 

Rather than discuss each character (or archetype, rather) individually we approached the subject more in terms of tropes or common themes that emerge when one examines the various villainess archetypes within folklore and Disney movies alike. We touched on vanity, vindictiveness, beauty (or the lack thereof), social slights, witches and wise women, and the danger of female power as expressed in both classic and contemporary storytelling, as well as how those tropes translate to today's actual lived experience for women in terms of work and parenting domains within their lives. 

It's a great conversation, built on the interests and requests of the women who listen, and we hope it will both destroy your Disney nostalgia in the healthiest of ways, while giving you more insight into the complexities and nuances of actual women whose lives are infused with the messages and values inherent in the stories we grow up on. 

Also, giggling. So. Much. Giggling. 

Gina Merritt discusses navigating the IEP process in both private and public Pennsylvania schools, teaching her son to advocate for himself, and how she wound up with adult kids who actually like her, and enjoy being around her - something I desperately hope to accomplish as well, as a mom. 

I'm going to have to go to bed soon. I have to get up at 3 a.m. to drive 70 miles into the blood drive in the morning - gotta be there by 6. So it's bedtime soon and because I don't feel good about being a little later on Friday than I'd like to be, then I wanted you to have this little teaser to tide you over. Scout's honor, the full episode will be up by the end of the day on Friday. Gina kicks ass. Stay tuned. The episode was nearly two hours long, so I had to make cuts, but I didn't want to cut anything so I decided to turn at least this part into a little clip for you. 

A teaser of the episode featuring Gina Merritt, who talks about helping her son learn to self-advocate through the process of navigating his IEP in both public and private Pennsylvania schools. Also, a teaser for another potential sidecast in which Gina basically allows me to destroy all of her favorite Disney movies in the name of feminism. I'm going straight to hell. I'm sorry. Mostly to Gina.