MeaningMaker Podcast

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.