With Ana Tajder of the Thank You, Mama podcast, we dig into stories of mother wisdom and mother wounds. And Ana tells us stories of her own magical mother and the small Croatian island both she and her mother spend their summers on, and its tradition of witchcraft and feminine power. “Once the men left, the women dressed in black and took over everything.”

“Ana is an award-winning author, journalist and the host of “Thank You, Mama,” where she interviews women from around the world about the most important lessons they have learned from their mothers.”

Note: for the first time we are able to provide a full, proper transcript for a Witches Found episode! If you know anyone who would like to connect with our podcast and community for whom the transcript makes it possible, please share! And we’ll do our best to keep making these better and provide more and more of these, we’re so excited about it.

Full Transcript

Risa: [00:00:00] Welcome. Welcome friends. Welcome. Children, mums parents, magical beings welcome a wall of fog and returning birds. You’ll hear the honk soaring overhead, and the stomps of the three-year old upstairs as we begin to sort of circle in, call in our feelings for a missing Witches first let’s talk about mothers.

We’ll say from the beginning, what a complicated question. And we have the right person to open this up with us. For so many of us, this idea of just purely celebrating mama culture is really hard. There’s so much mother trauma in so many of our communities [00:01:00] and so many families where that idea needs to be queered and needs to be multipled.

And today I am carrying the heavy weight on my chest of having read the leaked opinion from the United States Supreme court that will force motherhood, forced pregnancy on women’s bodies that will remove the protection of Roe vs. Wade. And I’m just really, reeling with the sorrow of what that will mean today.

And it all just feels complicated and connected, by the time this episode comes out, we’ll know more, but that’s where my feeling is. And I have to be honest about it. Thanks for being here, thanks to the coven for being here and for all of you portaling in and out and being in this circle wherever you are in time, by the time the sound hits you.

We’ll just hold this sorrow together and also this light. [00:02:00] And we’ll turn to the complicated question of things we can learn from our mothers, whether they mean to teach it to us or not. You can hear the sweet laugh of Ana Tajder she’s the award-winning journalist, who is the host of the Thank You Mama podcast.

She has interviewed so many people from all over the world about what their mothers taught them. And really you dig into both sides of this question. What did they mean to teach you? What do you wish they could have taught you? What were the tacit lessons? What is this knowledge that’s sort of on the edges of all this rationalized knowledge. What are moms passing down hand by hand? You you’ve gotten so many windows into that. So thank you so much for being here with us today.

Ana: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited [00:03:00] to be here with you today and talk about this and share my learnings and insights and thoughts about this.

It’s a fascinating topic and I’ve been dealing with it for two years at this stage, and it’s just opening more and more angles. You know, the deeper I go into it, the more dimensions of being open to me and I’m, I feel very blessed that it’s a beautiful world to discover and a beautiful topic to be dealing with.

Risa: Yeah, it is. Do you wanna tell us how you started and then maybe what are some of the dimensions that are opening now that you’re surprised about?

Ana: It started very organically. It did not start as a podcast. It started a few weeks after I lost my mom and my mom and I were extremely, extremely close. Her parents had died when she was very young. So she basically lonely had me. She turned me. I mean to her family. And [00:04:00] we had a very beautiful relationship.

She was by far not a perfect mother. She was a strange mother, but the one I loved so much. She had two parallel careers. She was an award-winning acclaimed and admire movie actress and parallel to that. She finished the academy of arts and was a visual artist equally, a claimed and awarded.

And. What’s amazing about my mom being my mom is that she, in a way she’s an idol to me, but I meet more and more young women in creation nowadays. So tell me she was there. She is their idol as well. So it’s, it’s a very. Beautiful situation of having a mom. Who’s your idol, both career wise and, you know, towards the outside, towards what she represented in the society, as well [00:05:00] as how she raised me and the relationship she had with me.

So when she died of cancer, very surprisingly, oh, it was a big shock for me. And a few weeks afterwards, I had a panic attack. I had this panic fear that I was going to forget everything she told me and that through that I was going to forget everything. She. Who she is that I’m going to lose her if I forget what she told me.

So I sat down and started writing down everything I could remember. She told me, and then that turned into everything she taught me and everything she showed me and that turned, started turning into a book about her life, through her lessons. And then the magic started happening in that I was telling my friends what I’m working on.

And you could see their reactions, how obvious and deep and important [00:06:00] this topic is to all of us. What have we learned from our mothers, but we never really articulated or put it in a form or give it a deeper thought. And that inspired me to start a podcast. because for me, the important thing was to interview women from all over the world.

I really, and this is why a podcast was such a great medium to do this because I can just use Skype and interview women. I had women from 50 different countries. I had women from Nepal and Tanzania and Kenya and Trinidad and Iran, and you know, all over the world. And it was important to me to not only go geographically globally, but also to interview women from very different backgrounds and different religions and different socio economic status and not only successful professionally [00:07:00] successful women, but stay at home moms, women who are farmers to really get a feeling for what is it that our mothers around the world teach us. And then little by little, and this is one of the dimensions that opened up.

A question popped up to me. I still quite early on in my interviews was what, what was something important that your mom did not teach you? What, what did you miss in, in what she showed you taught to you? And this turned out to be one of the equally important question as what your mom taught you.

But then another dimension that was really important to me because I had such a close relationship to my mom and I grew up in this beautiful mother-daughter bubble. Was that. Not all women have relationships like that. They’re mothers. And somehow the universe shoved my head into a [00:08:00] series of interviews just recently with women who had very let’s call them complex relationships with their mothers.

And I started reading literature on mothers who don’t love, or, you know, complicated mother daughter relationships to prepare myself for these interviews because it was a completely foreign world to me. And I’ve learned that this is just as important as those women who come on my show, who just, you know, bursts with love with their mothers is women who had very tough relationship and still have lessons to share that they learn from, from that, that, that that’s beautiful.

Risa: It gives me a sense of ease in a way around the subject to know that those stories are included to, you know, those stories are, as you say, they’re, they’re pushing their way in the universe is pushing their way into you [00:09:00] being. Like, this is complicated shit, you know?

Ana: Well, I started reading the books about mother wounds and, you know, the, the inherited trauma and they just opened, it opened again, it opened the whole world to me, a new world that I didn’t know, but also it opened my eyes towards some of the trauma that goes around in my family that we never dealt with it actually, or, you know, it gets mentioned, but never really dealt with.

Risa: Can you tell us more about this childhood on an island in Croatia, you told me that children told you you were a witch when you were growing up

and your mother sounds like she had. A real magic, like a real, she made a magic bubble for you and it wasn’t always perfect, but..

Ana: So I, I did not grow up on the island. I grew up basically in [00:10:00] Zagreb in the capital of Croatia, but my mom’s family comes from a very tiny island. South of Croatia. It’s so tiny there during the winter, there are 120 people living in it.

It doesn’t have any hotels. It doesn’t have any cars. So it’s really, when you watch a Disney movie, Luca, I think was the last Disney movie with this beautiful Mediterranean island. That’s our island. You know where everybody’s family, no cars, no tourists, just this wild. Beautiful. Mediterranean island. And so just as my mother did, I would spend my whole summers there.

So come end of school, you know, immediately the next day we went to the, to the island and I would spend two and a half, three months on the island every year. We. All of us in our family feel extremely, extremely, deeply connected to the island. We really feel like it’s in our blood, in our veins and the [00:11:00] island.

I know I’m boasting and I sound like a person in love, but people who arrive to the island do say that it has very, very deep energies and it’s very special. we Have an old house, which my great grandmother bought. And that’s another beautiful story about my island.

Please tell me to shut up if I’m too long with my story.

Oh no, no, no. A theme of our podcast is please expand. So please take us on this

journey. So in early. 20th century. So just, I would say just around first world war. The, that was back then, Austro-Hungarian monarchy that the island belong to went through its crisis.

As did the whole world. There was no food. There was, there were, there was a depression and the men on the island decided to go and look for [00:12:00] other places to work and go look for money so they can send money back home to the island to support their wives and children. So they left. Once the men left the women decided to dress themselves in black and they took over everything, everything they took over the farming, they went fishing, they raised their children, they took, took over whatever work there was. These women. Dressed in black on this Mediterranean island took over and I have a beautiful postcard, always on my desk of these women.

And you can see how burned by the sun and hard work they are. They, they, they look like men actually. This life toughened them up a lot. And it was famous for being this island of these women dressed in black and they would go rowing the boat. They would go fishing. And this picture stays very clearly in my head from hearing about it and seeing [00:13:00] the old photographs of these women in these big black dresses, rowing their boats, you know, and fishing.

So it’s, it’s a very magical, and female, like this place, that’s just bursting with this women, females and female energy. Quite recently, I heard stories I read that the inhabitants of the island original inhabitants were considered witches.

They were in, I think there were shamans. Uh, they brought the. Whatever religion or shamanism, I think from Bosnia Herzegovina when they came towards the island centuries earlier and they never forgot it. So there are stories of raising dead back to life. Apparently in front of each house door, we have bones of our ancestors buried.

I dunno, I haven’t yet looked into it. Who is buried and what’s buried in front [00:14:00] of our house, but. There are all these stories of this. And there are also stories of people being able to fly on the island. So there is a old fishermen who is now, now, already dead, but he, I think he was also like 1940s, 1950s, where he self taught himself to paint and he started painting all these amazing paintings off the magic on the island. So his paintings are full of this people flying around the island and, doing some strange rituals. And. I didn’t know this. When somebody told me once one older gentlemen on the island once looked at me I was saying something and he said, oh, you’re a witch just like your great grandmother. And I said, I got a little offended because I thought he meant I was, you know, we in west of this idea [00:15:00] of witches as being old evil women. And I was like, why, why is he telling me that, you know, and only once I heard this background story about what, they meant what he meant you know, I, I realized I received a compliment.

Risa: Yes, you did.

Ana: So that’s the story. That’s the story of the island.

Risa: That’s so powerful. I had to stop to write down. They dressed themselves in black and took over everything.

Ana: How amazing is that? So pure and I’m so glad there are photographs of this women, you know, it’s not just a legend. It’s it’s it’sreal.

Risa: Yes. And now that you know, it’s a compliment, do you feel connected?

Do you feel like your, your writing your interviews are sort of drawing, weaving that web of power [00:16:00] between women’s knowledge powerful femme knowledge?

Ana: I do. And you know, it’s interesting that my mom, my mom was a feminist and very outspoken and she was always an activist. She was always fighting for the weaker ones in a society back then in 1970s, way before Hollywood stars, she created a charity organization for hungry children in Africa.

And she donated. Well, every award she would win she would donate and collect money and buy food and medication and fly to get over these things to Sudan and to different countries, to make sure that they reach the, the, the ones who need, they reached children and don’t end up in the wrong hands.

And equally, she was always very loud and raised me to be very aware of this… female energy and how special we are. Dare I say, you know, and how powerful we are. But, [00:17:00] but I’m very embarrassed to say that only through this hundred something interviews I made in last two years, this really entered my body.

I don’t know how to say it in different way. I really feel with every cell of my body. How. Interconnected we are. And, and what I’ve learned through these interviews is how there is a common narrative in women’s lives, no matter where they are and what, what circumstances they live in and grew up in, you know, a woman who grows up on a farm in Turkey and a woman who grows up in a, Middle-class family in Switzerland there are always these common narratives in women’s lives, and that feels extremely connecting. And that made me aware of what a sisterhood we have and how interconnected we are. And it [00:18:00] kind of was beautiful for me to learn through my podcast that I lost my mom, but I gained… billions of mothers around the world. You know, this podcast because it was really such a beautiful gift to me and listening to all this lessons and women’s lives and how, how universal the lessons are, what women are teaching their children , really, really, really brought home how, how powerful and how connected we are. And it made me very, very sad that we are not aware of it. You know, even me when my mom who tried to teach me this and show it to me, it took a while for me to learn it. And I wish we, all of us would be more aware of it.

Risa: Yeah, it feels pretty intentional sometimes eh? Layers and layers and layers of intention that separated us from each other, separated us from that sense of power.

Ana: I just wanted to say that from the sense of power I interviewed a [00:19:00] lady a few weeks ago, who wrote a book called “We are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn” and reading her book was just so eyeopening to me. It really hit me very strongly, how unaware we are, how buried this, this feeling of our power. It was just as you say, systematically, buried through century, not century millennium, you know, and I’m glad that we are slowly waking up to it. It’s going to be magical, we’ll save the planet.

Risa: Oh I love your optimism Ana! I need this today. I mean, I feel that in our work too, and it’s so powerful to connect with your web and your circle and the sense of mounting knowledge. Cause I do believe this is how we cast a circle of protection for trans women for non-binary people for gender expansive people that it is in [00:20:00] owning our own power our own divinity, our own, power as women, as something deeply connected to the earth and to the reproductive power in the, Earth, fertility, whatever that fertility is for you.

Ana: I just wanted to say this female energy that’s nurturing How should I say, it’s, it’s nurturing and cherishing and taking care of things. We’ve been too long in this male energy of using rational brains and building things and constructing. My mom was always telling Ana don’t construct life. It’s a very male thing to do. This conscious constructing. And, I really think. We really need more of this intuition and this nurturing, caring energy, which I want to call female, you know,

Risa: can you talk about [00:21:00] when the nurturing breaks down in the interviews that you’ve had, where for whatever reason, a mother wasn’t capable of that? Can you talk about what lessons you’ve been hearing from that side of the experience?

Ana: The most important lesson I heard from all of that is that to two things. One is there is a magical moment that happens. My guests tell me when the Mom admits to her daughter that she made mistakes and that she didn’t do certain things right. And when she tells her daughter, but this has to be honest, of course, that, you know, I’m, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry if I made mistakes, I’m sorry. I did make mistakes. I’m sorry that sometimes I hurt you. I come from this place. I couldn’t do better at the moment. You know, just to knowledge I did my best and I’m sorry [00:22:00] that it wasn’t enough or it was wrong. I loved you. And did what I could and I heard in a few interviews, how that creates a very magical moment when a door open. A door to forgiveness opens and new energies released in that relationship. And, and you know, some of my interviews were in tears telling me about this, how, how much that matters. The other thing I learned is that it’s connected, you know, it’s connected, I’ve learned that we have to look back and see where the person comes from. You know, what her trauma was or why she wasn’t able to give the love that we deserve or the support for it. and this is where forgiveness come comes in again. I learned that growth comes from this [00:23:00] forgiveness, that caring I had, you know, I had a few guests who didn’t speak to their mothers for decades.

One of my guests told me she hugged for mum for the first time in her life when she was 69, but it’s never too late. You know this moment of connecting and forgiving at the end. Right. Open open some beautiful energies, no matter what happened.

Risa: Yeah. I mean, I will say, I think if you’ve been, um, you don’t have to forgive everybody.

Ana: You don’t. No, no, no, no, no, you don’t need to forgive, but you have to come where I think you have to see where they come from.

Risa: Yeah.

That can be a great gift yourself.

Ana: Yeah, exactly. Because as one of my guests said, being angry is like drinking, poison and waiting for the other person to die.

And then in a way, is that, is it because what we [00:24:00] need to do is learn how to. Release what, whatever the negative thing was from our moms, was it their trauma or the way they treated us as you say, it doesn’t have to be forgiving, but it has to be recognizing and maybe through seeing where it comes from, just releasing it, you know, I’ve, I’ve, it’s funny.

I went through this with my dad and partially with my mom, but when my mom passed away, my dad, I don’t know what happened to him. He suddenly turned in. It felt like he turned into my enemy. He, he just, instead of being there for me, then I was an only child and don’t have any other family. And he was the only person that was out there that still, I feel like he should have been supporting me through this.

He suddenly turned into this person like a stranger who was against me. And I didn’t speak to him for, I mean, after all the courts and [00:25:00] lawyers and most awful experiences, I didn’t speak to him for a year. But then, then I decided for myself that. That’s not what I want. You know I know what he did to me. I recognize it. It’s there. The pain won’t disappear. The, the feeling of betrayal won’t disappear, but I do not want to be a person who doesn’t speak to her father I want my son to have his grandfather and I’ve learned for myself and I’m very proud for that to compartmentalize, or what is the word in English, you know, to just put this feeling into its own place and say, this is give it a ribbon and say, this is what it is, but I still want to have a father in my life and a grandfather in my son’s life. And, and it was a huge learning experience to create boundaries and self-defense and know how close to let certain people to you, you know, [00:26:00] where to just raise the wall and be like, this is how far you are in my life. You’re my dad, but this is how far you can come.

Risa: Yes. Raise that wall. And you point to such, a poignant and painful thing. And I’m so sorry that happened to you, that those layers of complex trauma around your mother’s death that’s fucking sucks.

Ana: Oh, man. It really, it was, it was it really sucked that, that part, it was hard enough dealing with losing her and losing her so quickly. But then dealing with that, I felt like I really felt like somebody tore the skin of my body and I was lying wounded without skin on the floor. And he came and started punching me with his feet.

This is how I felt like I was really like, you’re supposed to give me a hand and protect me and not in this worst month. But anyway, Yeah.

Risa: And you point to you, point to something [00:27:00] that I think is so core to this is that the, the mother trauma, is twisted and tied up in the father wound too. Right? It’s all this shit that patriarchy did to women it did to men too did it to them, to. It’s a violence that it took from them too, that it made them. You know, suffer also and put that suffering on their, on their children.

Ana: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah,

Risa: yeah. Yeah. I didn’t mean to diminish what you said, because I’ve had very powerful experiences in the same way of like choosing a forgiveness that was for me and wasn’t for that.

Exactly. Yeah. Um, but I also, yeah, I wanted to say it out loud because I do know there’s people in our coven, people who listen to people in the world, close friends of mine for whom the mother trauma you know, it’s at the level of abuse. [00:28:00] It’s at the level of such pain that it’s like

Ana: but I think what I’m trying to say, spit that poison out. You might find that poison in your body, in your being and the pain and spit it out in whatever shape or form you find it useful, like you decide or works for you, but maybe more than forgiveness. It’s. Spit it out, throw it like, whoa, get rid of it. Yes.

Risa: Yes. And like you said, put that, put that wall that maybe it’s a container, you know, for me there was some container magic involved or there was, you know, there was some freezer magic involved. There was some burying of things with seeds that, you know, there was also some like drawing out of like, what do I choose to keep from that experience

Ana: Burning for me, burning burning helps a lot. Fire helps a lot for that kind of cleansing. Yes.

Risa: Yes you are [00:29:00] a Witch.

Ana: Discovering little by little day by day.

Risa: Yeah. All of us, all of us are discovering. Can you tell us, take us down like memory lane, maybe, uh, take us on a memory journey of some of the moments in your interviews that were the most profound for you.

Ana: Well, I already mentioned that lady who just, she said, I couldn’t be in the same root word. My mom, since I was born, you know? Wow. There was some bad energy there. They never, they just never got along. And then she told me how. COVID happen. And her mom was in her eighties and she was 69 and suddenly they were kind of in a similar situation of being the high risk group and very [00:30:00] nervous about, you know, what is going to happen if they’re going to die from this.

And they started zooming everyday. Just to check on each other and see how the other one is doing. And they shared this fear. And little by little day by day, they started talking more and more and they found a way to each other. It was amazing listening to this story.

And then when everything was over and they had a group reunion, this is where that hug happened, where for the first time in their lives, they hugged. And listening to that, I, I cried. I also had, just my last interview is a book author who in her twenties remembered that she was sexually abused by her mother’s father and her mother would not have any of it. Instead of supporting her her mother got very angry that, [00:31:00] you know, she’s doing this to the family and to her father and… this is one of these interviews where I listened to this, both having my mom as my mom and being a mother, just my, my brain, this information can’t land anywhere in my brain that a mother wouldn’t support her daughter in that.

The good thing is Laura started writing about, she went through therapy and started writing about it and wrote a book about it. And this book reached millions. She sold millions of copies and reached millions and millions of women who were in the similar situation and help them, you know, she started doing workshops and obviously she helped other people with same experiences.

But her modern, never, no matter what happened from mother, never accepted that this was the truth. And in spite of that, Laura took care of her when she was old and dying and she was there and [00:32:00] they somehow, they somehow found each other, you know, that was deeply touching. And then on the inspiration, very positive side, I, this might be my favorite interview and I keep talking about it all the time.

I interviewed a doctor in molecular biology whose mom grew up in Turkey, on a farm in Turkey. And she as a girl was not allowed to go to school or get any kind of education and so she was completely illiterate and she had three daughters, which in Turkey, on a farm is not considered a big achievement, maybe even a burden.

This Mom. Somehow managed to gently and lovingly support these three daughters and gently push them. And this is the beautiful thing. Listening to my guest, explain how gentle, these pushes and supports were from this [00:33:00] mom, to the extent where she would ask neighbors to help the girls with a homework, because she wasn’t able to, she was illiterate.

Two of the girls now have PhDs. One is a lawyer in the UK. My guest, as I mentioned, has a PhD in molecular biology and that was just an amazing story. That was the, the, the beautiful, positive. This is exactly that nurturing, loving, supporting energy that I think the world’s needs right now.

Risa: Oh! Yes. What a world changing power.

Ana: You know, it was so funny when I was, I have a corporate history. I did an MBA and spend many, many, many, too many years in corporate life. I was an international marketing, . Uh, professional. Strategies for different markets. And [00:34:00] anyway, my company invited two Scandinavian futurists is talking about future of business and management. And it was a very big symposium taking place in a, in a beautiful, Theater here in Vienna and this tool dude’s dressed in black and shaved heads with their glasses. And they were telling us about the future of business and you know, this whole blah.

And then they throw a question in the audience and they said that they asked us, what do we think the managers of the future would be like? And I got up and said, mothers. And I think that was the moment where it was clear to me by the silence from the audience and the dudes on the stage. It was clear to me that I need to resign.

This is not a world for me. You know, bed moment was so clear to me that. This is [00:35:00] completely wrong and it needs to change it just as a, as I said, mothers, you know, it was clear to me that. That’s what needs to happen.

Risa: Yep. And you’re, I mean, I think all the research backs you up, right? I was just reading research about, the most effective new hires in police departments the ones that have the best success rate at solving cases at resolving situations without violence. Uh, building community connections. They are mothers. They are women who are later in their career. They have like raised some kids, and now they’re doing this out of a commitment to their community. Policing is pretty fucked as an institution, but when, when people are trying to get it right, they are trying to hire, you know, generally like black women, who’ve already raised kids. And that’s the thing that’s making the biggest impact in communities. Is it enough to save the institution of policing? I, you know, I don’t [00:36:00] know, but I think you’re right that we need. Mother energy and intelligence.

Ana: Nurturing and nurturing and connecting. Somebody who unifies and connects.

Risa: Yeah. I will, um, open it up. If anybody who is here wants to say hi, ask a question, just share a response. It’s so nice to have you here in person. So feel free to just go ahead and unmute.

Coven 1: Is it okay if I just sort of respond a little bit?

Risa: Of course.

Coven 1: I’m Zoe and I am a Witch from Western Australia, currently working on a mine site driving dump trucks.

I’ve had to delve deep into a lot of psychological and spiritual healing that went back many generations on both sides of my family.

Like Anna [00:37:00] was saying coming to a place of understanding and forgiveness. Is

something that’s

definitely come in time. Like for me you know, I’m 31 and it’s been a journey to get to there. I think as witches, we are self appointed to break, those traumatic cycles we are often the black sheep of the family. It’s a solitude, lone Wolf kind of practice. And we do a lot of healing for a lot of other people. And that comes from that divine, feminine energy that we’re talking about. And it’s yeah, just to do with healing, all of the trauma that has come before. All of the other women and the men.

And, I think I’m in a good place with my mum now, but we can’t live under the same roof. [00:38:00]

Risa: Same..

Coven 1: Thanks for letting me chime in.

Risa: that’s what’s special about, being in the coven and, and for us being able to have you here is there’s, it’s a prism you know, as you say, this practice or this identity can be so solitary. So. It’s a relief to get, to hear each other’s voices and hear my own thinking drawn out and reflected. And yeah, it’s a, it’s a support. So

thank you for being here.

Coven 1: Thank you so much for having me

Risa: CAS.

How are you doing with all this?

There’s a lot. There’s a lot of stuff in here, especially as a mom.

Coven 2: This was such an emotional topic for me. Been sitting here like. Tears in my eyes because, well, first of all, Ana, thank you so much for this conversation I’m a stay at [00:39:00] home mom and I hold a lot of privilege with that under capitalism. I also questioned my worth.

However as I’m sitting here and we’re talking about what didn’t we learn from our mothers and honoring that generational trauma and with everything that’s happened this morning,

I’m just holding space for the work that I do. For my family, with my own family, I’ve ended up becoming my mother’s mother and my grandmother’s mother. And as my husband is learning how to hold emotions. I’m holding space to mother him and I mother,

my children. I feel really powerful in my tears right now. Would it be alright if I speak my [00:40:00] great great-grandmother and my grandmother and their names

Risa: right now. Yes.

Thank you.

Coven 2: Elizabeth. Rose..

Linda Tammy. Cassandra..

Risa: I hope in this litany of names, you also hear reflected listener the names of the women, the DNA lines, the deep timelines that connect us to each other, these complicated, painful memories. Especially on today when we’re reminded again, of all the people who don’t get to make this choice and all the people who’ve brought us here and made infinite choices along the way, and all the people hoping desperately to get us safely to tomorrow.

Ana: thank you to Zoe and thank you to [00:41:00] Cassandra. I am, I am in tears and I’m very deeply touched because they were so touched with our conversation. Um, I have something I would like to share with Cassandra.

It just lights went off in my head when I heard her talk, one of the most important things I’ve learned from this hundred something interviews again from mothers everywhere and every shape and form and every situation and every circumstance. When I ask women, what do you wish your mom had taught you?

One of the three things that always comes up is self care. And I know it became more of a very cliche word, but hearing Cassandra mothering, her children and her husband and herself, I just want to throw it out there. Cassandra, please mother yourself as well, [00:42:00] because you, you, you have to, you have to mother yourself so that you can mother all of these other people around you.

And I know where you come from. I feel like I have two children, although officially I have only one I’m I’m mothering them both and, and it’s beautiful. and awarding, but it can be depleting as well. And yes, healthy boundaries as well.

Just be there for yourself as well. Not only for everybody else.

Risa: So in that spirit, can I ask you Ana. Would you draw on all of these voices that you’ve heard and maybe as a, as a closing moment for us here today. Can you speak in a collective mother voice, or maybe it’s your own mother voice and offer us listeners a little piece of [00:43:00] motherly wisdom, a little piece of that nurturing that we can carry with us in our hearts this week and this year, and going forward, that’s a big question, but I feel like you can do it. you’re a witch from an island of women who dressed in black and took care of things,

Ana: I can definitely, I can improvise and I want to connect to what I just said to Cassandra, which is.

Just love yourself, you know, love yourself and love this life. It’s one life that we have and it’s short and it’s beautiful. And it’s so magical. The fact that we. Can be here on this planet and look at this beautiful full blue sky or your beautiful foggy forests and put our feet in the grass and feel the ground and breathing and hear the birds, twitter in our ears.

It’s magical. And we should just appreciate it. And. Feel how amazing we are. This is, this is I think the most important thing I’ve learned from the mothers around the world is [00:44:00] how powerful, how unique, how amazing in our uniqueness, how strong we are and how connected we are. And. We should just celebrate it.

We should share this love and kindness with everybody around us and stay strong because tough times come and challenges come, but we can do that. We’re strong enough and just pass on all this joy and love. And I think that’s, that’s what I feel I want to share.

Risa: Thank you for that. I will replay that when I need to hear it.

And thank you for being here. Ana, it’s so nice to get, to spend time with you. I love the way you think it was such a pleasure to get to talk to you on your podcasts about Amy’s and my moms. And so nice to get a little glimpse of your [00:45:00] magical mom. I feel really lucky to have this conversation with you.

So thank you.

Ana: Thank you so much for having me and thank you to Zoe and Cassandra for joining us.

Risa: Thank you to the coven who’s here and the coven we make in the dark between our ears. We love you so much. You know, you have Canadian aunties up here whenever you need us. And I think a Croatian aunty, I’m going to include Ana in this great circle of protection we make for you.

If you need to get the fuck out of America or whatever,

we love you guys blessed fucking be.