She Said We Shed

Crystal Tennille Irby, a birth worker among many other crown jewels, joins Aja and shares her birth story, the importance of knowing and understanding your birth story and using it as a catalyst to healing. As Crystal shares her very personal birth story she helps us to understand how, both, her physical and circumstantial birth stories impacted her life but most importantly, how she began to use it self-reflect and begin a road of transformation so that we can do the same.

Aja will speak on learning how, what and why we need to begin shifting our awareness in order to heal ourselves and treat our selves and children with respect and love. She has been focused on this work and we believe it would be useful for us to hear about the direction–the pivot. Also In this episode, we share a clip of She Said We Shed’s unfiltered recordings. In this clip, Aja takes us into her personal story and the impact her mother has had on her life. She shares where she is today in regards to her relationship with her mother and highlight’s steps she’s taken throughout the years to heal and improve their relationship. This shedding helps us to understand why she feels she needs to begin this podcast. Aja shares her previous struggle with yelling on her son years ago and how she brought him into the process of shifting in order to reduce and eventually stop yelling and screaming on him, despite being raised by a yeller herself. She shares how she became aware, checked-in and listened to herself in order to stop inflicting trauma on her son.

A replay from Aja's second public discussion on Black Mama Trauma.Aja’s healing work is specifically related to her relationship with her mother and that’s what’s being discussed today. She’s going to go from just having a conversation about it to really having this massive movement around legacy shifting related to Black mama trauma. Has it been dominant in her life? She says it has. She grew up without a father and with a single mom who was her primary caretaker and thus formed her view of the world from that upbringing. She felt she was more oppressed than cared for so recognizing and trying to heal from that was work. Work that many of us are familiar with in different ways that shows up in various relationships in our adult lives. Motherhood is one of those ways it shows up. Can adults and children deschool together? Aja and her son are in transition mode from homeschooling to deschooling because in addition to deschooling herself, she has decided that her son is going to as well. It felt contradictory not to do so, she felt like she couldn’t do both. She needed her son to think differently, to think for himself and shared examples of this here in this podcast.

Replay from Aja's first public discussion on Black Mama Trauma.

When Aja and her son moved back to the U.S. after their natural learning travels took them to Mexico, they ended up staying with her mother longer than anticipated. Aja has been realizing how much her mother’s baggage affected her own sense of worth and value. Who am I? What do I like? What am I healing from? How is my relationship with my parent playing out in my relationship with my child? Those are the questions that have been on the rise for Aja, and she is not willing to leave them unanswered. Listen and connect as Aja talks about what she’s feeling, observing, and moving toward as she deschools herself and makes room for her son and her to continue cultivating a holistic, authentic, trust and respect-based relationship.

We ain’t dragging no mamas, some of us are mamas; we’re just prepared to finally heal.” Created by Aja, and produced by Raising Free People Network, She Said We Shed is a reclamation project for defining a motherhood that acknowledges and helps us heal from the unresolved trauma-informed parenting practices among Black mothers. Aja is raising her Black son while healing from the trauma of being raised by a woman who didn’t heal from whatever harmed her. Black mama trauma is the topic, and honest, love-centered, reclamation and healing are the intentions. Join Aja twice monthly as she and invited guests get vulnerable and deliberate about legacy shifting with support, back-up, and truth-tellers.  http://bit.ly/shesaidweshed