Not Your Average Aunties

Perimenopause and menopause are having their moment in public conversations. In this first full episode of season 2 of Not Your Average Aunties (NYAA), Farheen and Mohini talk about their multi-year perimenopausal journey thus far and how it’s been a significant reason why NYAA was itself on pause.

They begin with reflections on the uncertainty, confusion, secrecy and shame associated with menstruation and their bodies that began in puberty, and they dig into this season of cronehood - what it’s been like for them, what they are learning and what is supporting them through the aches, rage, pain, sweats and more. It ain’t easy and it’s not done, but there is alot of hope they’d like to share with others, their own age and younger.

According to Statistics Canada 2021 data, 10 million women, or a quarter of all women, in Canada are perimenopausal or postmenopausal. Women spend up to HALF their lives in the menopausal (peri or post) stage! It is time that women’s health, including the ups, downs and unknowns of the perimenopausal journey, be talked about by all genders and ages, regardless of whether one is going through it. Our individual and collective well being depends on it, and we cannot do it alone.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

The Midlife Feast Podcast by Dr. Jenn Salib-Huber – Episode 1 & 2

https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/podcast

Aging Powerfully with Melissa Grelo Podcast – Episode 8 with Dr. Stacy Sims

https://www.agingpowerfullywithmelissagrelo.com/listen

Dr. Mindy Pelz on the Diary of a CEO podcast – watch from 1h:20m.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mQOGzHtQc

Book: Estrogen Matters

https://estrogenmatters.com/

To get in touch with us, email [email protected].

After almost four years, Farheen and Mohini are back with a second season of Not Your Average Aunties. Informed by their experiences over the past few years and current circumstances, with new insights and ideas in tow, they will gupshup/talk/ponder juicy topics such as perimenopause, marriage, work, health, social justice, dreams and more.

They’ve got lots to share with you over this next season of their lives! Thank you for tuning in again.

To get in touch with us, email [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

In the first of many conversations on creativity, Farheen and Mohini are joined by friends Mercy and Manju to talk about the creative life. Inspired by a group process they went through with the book The Artists Way by Julia Cameron many years ago, they reveal when and how they knew that creation was a central part of their lives, how creativity shows up, the creative process, when it goes dormant and what lights it up.

Creativity is an energy. It’s a precious energy, and it’s something to be protected. A lot of people take for granted that they’re a creative person but I know from experience, feeling it in myself, it is a magic. It is an energy. And it can’t be taken for granted. Ava DuVernay

Deepest gratitude to:

Mercy and Manju, dear friends who shared their creative journeys and stories with us.

Check out Mercy in The Isolationists on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/The-Isolationists-108895730790510

To get in touch with us, email [email protected].

The power of women’s friendships is unearthed through insights from Mohini, Farheen, and their friends Carol, Manju, Mercy and Thuy. The particular magic and potency of these friendships has it’s ups, downs, beginnings, middles and endings.

Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves. – Louise Bernikow

Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses — pretty but designed to SLOW women down.” ― Roxane Gay

Deepest gratitude to:

Our women friends, our soul sisters - who see us, whom we belong to, who form our auntie tribes. Thank you for teaching us, loving us, helping us heal.

To get in touch with us, email [email protected].

The Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe peoples in Tkaronto (Toronto) have been dispossessed of their rights, and continue to be subjected to colonization and genocide. In this context, Farheen and Mohini discover each other’s stories of migration to England and eventually to Canada, from Pakistan and India. They explore their relationship to language, share experiences of racism and reflect on reconnection to self and community. Stay tuned for a future episode about settler colonialism.

Deepest gratitude to:

Our parents, who with great courage, strength and persistence did the best that they could in moving across continents and oceans - more than once. And to our extended families, family friends and larger communities who supported us as new arrivals, and into our auntiehood. We are in them, they are in us.

For a history of Desh Pardesh: https://savac.net/collection/desh-pardesh/

Just some of the brilliant musicians, writers, filmmakers, thinkers in our formative years who helped us reclaim and be proud of our Browness (as complex as that is) - Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, Hanif Kureishi, Kiran Desai, Srinivas Krishna, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Karsh Kale, DJ Zahra’s Funkasia and DJ Amita’s Besharam club nights, DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra jams, Goodness Gracious Me tv show. The 1990s & early 2000s were all that and a bag of Kurkure!

A passage from Harsha Walia, South Asian activist, author of Undoing Border Imperialism.

https://www.akpress.org/undoing-border-imperialism.html

“Racialized communities face interlocking and connected conditions of marginalization within the settler-colonial state. Victims of global political economy built on our dispossession, communities of colour are further disciplined into normative whiteness and hegemonic neoliberalism. The power of state controls and the insidious nature of racism force us to metabolize our own oppression, and many of us become “the good Indian” or “good immigrant” who is silent, complicit, and grateful to the colonial master. Some even become the system’s greatest cheerleaders. The reality, though, is that people of colour face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated against and excluded from equitable access to health care, housing, child care and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; and are overrepresented in head counts on poverty, incarceration, unemployment and high school dropout rates.” pg 124-125, Undoing Border Imperialism

To get in touch with us, email [email protected].

This is the debut episode of Not Your Average Aunties. Welcome! Mohini and Farheen talk about the origin story of this podcast and what auntiehood and getting older means to them. They interrupt and challenge mainstream notions of women’s ageing and their worth.

Deepest gratitude to:

Clarissa Pinkola Estes and the powerful stories and teachings shared in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves

Arundhati Roy, writer, activist and kick-ass auntie to the world

Dr. Angeli Chitale, Naturopathic Doctor for bringing crone consciousness to us.

To get in touch, email [email protected].

Long time friends Mohini and Farheen offer up candid gupshup with garam chai about all the things - taking up space as Brown, South Asian women, working for social change, healing old wounds, cultivating self-love and extending that into the world to make it a more just place for everyone. Feisty, curious, reflective.