09: The Museum of Motherhood & Herstory (w/ Joy Rose)

All right, here we are. Here we are. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Martha. Joy Rose.

And you go by Joy. So I do. From here on out, I’ll call you Joy.

Thank you so much for, first off, coming to our booth at the Saturday morning market in St. Pete, where you came up to us and introduced yourself. You were the first one to visit our booth that day. Wow.

And I was like, how cool is this person? And how cool is what she’s up to. So thanks for coming to us. Meant to be, clearly.

So you run the Museum of motherhood. You’ve been a rock and roller. You just told me you had your own radio show.

Not sure where to start, but, I mean, I’d like to focus on the Museum of motherhood a bit, but I definitely want to dive into the other aspects of your life. But, you know, maybe you could just start with telling us about the Museum of motherhood for those that don’t know, you know, what does the museum do? Yeah. So Museum of Motherhood, first and only in the world.

Just, I mean, how is that even possible, since we all came from a mother? But, you know, whatever. Here we are. We are the first and only museum of motherhood in the world.

And at mom, we create exhibitions and education devoted to the arts, science and herstory of women, mothers and families inclusive of all reproductive identities. Well said. Thank you.

I like her story instead of his story. Do you have other words like that that you inject into your culture of the museum? I think so. You’re a shero.

You don’t have to be a hero. You can be a shero. I love that.

And herstory, because women’s voices and hersteries have been embedded in history and have been marginalized. They’re somewhat silenced. So we’re talk.

We’re here on a podcast. We’re about making these voices and stories audible, reachable, tangible, so people can be inspired by this connection that we all share. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like your mom or your mom was a rough go or anything like that.

She still made you the heart that beats in your body. And that’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s intense.

Yeah. I got a more full perspective when we had my daughter. She’s 14 months old now, and watching my wife go through pregnancy and being there for the birth and walking through it, it was fascinating and literally unbelievable.

I could not believe what I was seeing throughout the process. And I gained such a respect for her and other women who have gone through that because there is no way I could do that. That’s so cool that you acknowledge that and honor that, because.

Yeah, I mean, I think what’s happened is the opposite of that. It’s so miraculous. This is the creation of the world in essence.

And so that’s such a power that throughout our thousands and thousands of hundreds of thousands of years on earth, we’ve just done this thing where we obliterate that power and make it as invisible as possible because it’s so awesome. God forbid that women. We know that women actually do this thing, so we’ve just, like, you know, kind of swept it under the rug.

Why is that? Why has that all been a thing for through human history? Because, I mean, you can look back. I look back, there are books written. Like Sister Prudence Allen wrote a book called the concept of woman.

And in that book, she argues that the origins, the founders of western thought, the greek forefathers, you know, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, these guys, women were not really movers and shakers in society. In fact, Socrates, the quote from Socrates starts off her book by saying, it is a man’s job to go out and run the world and conquer legions and collect stores. And the woman’s job is to be a good housewife, stay home and obedient to her husband.

So there you have it. In the origins of western thought, laid out for this Sort of second class citizen status. And there are very few cultures that we can even trace where there is a matrilineal or a matrifocal kind of culture involved.

We’ve just always been. It’s always been a male dominated culture. And I say that in the gentlest way.

As someone who loves her sons and loves everyone, you know that I’m just about leveling the playing field a little more. Do you think where we are now, it’s becoming level or more level or. I mean, it’s kind of weird.

Like with a roe v. Wade. Yeah, we like pet.

We ride this pendulum, you know, up in the air back in time. Up, progress forward back in time. I grew up during one of the most progressive times.

I was on. I was a kid on the heels of the second wave feminist movement with Gloria Steinem and all those names that you recognize. And I grew up in the 1970s experiencing the power of my body, my own liberation, thinking that I could do it all and be it all.

And then watched as the pendulum has slowly shrunk backwards. Why? Why is it swinging backwards? It’s just scary to those in power do not want to relinquish power. And I. The more I think about it and read about it and study it.

I’m done with sort of the women and feminists who are like, smash the patriarchy. I don’t think you’re ever going to succeed. These are institutions that were built to look and sound and feel a certain way.

They’re exclusive with some regard. And the only thing we can do is light candles, make light, light our hearts and our voices in new spaces, which is why the museum create a temple, a building, an institution that values women and all and put that on the earth and then let a lot more of those populate. And I think there’s hope.

I don’t think we’re going to do it by tearing anything else down. I think we have to build our own places and spaces and then invite everyone in. That makes sense.

Yeah. It goes, in my opinion, with. Same with maybe the problems with government in general or, you know, money.

And it’s all systems. You can’t at this point. They’re so ingrained in culture, you cannot destroy them completely.

You have to infiltrate from within or create other lights out there so that there are other flames that even this out. Oh, yeah, baby destroying it, because I think there would be some madness in that. What you’re saying is what I’m saying, which is it’s an inside job.

It is an inside job. It’s up to each of us. And so just in the way that you describe your experience with your newborn and your respect for your wife and what her body went through, that is a light right there.

And I so appreciate hearing that story. Interestingly enough, pushback on that is happening in terms of, you know, in the United States, like our maternal morbidity rates, which are, we have the worst of all developed nations. We have the worst record on birth and care for women and their babies.

Our maternal morbidity and mortality rates are at the absolute low of all of developed nations. How is that even possible? Because we just don’t think it’s important here. We say it’s important, but we don’t act like it.

We say we give lip service to it, but our policies don’t reflect it. Our system, even the basic thing of when economists or philosophers like Karl Marx talks about the worker, we’re always focused on the workers, the workers of America, the people who are. Who are running our businesses and how we have to raise good people.

But they never talk about where the people came from. They start with the workers, but where did the workers come from? So there’s nothing that supports those foundational beginnings from Social Security for those who stay home to care for their children or others in their family. There’s no Social Security for that.

There’s no federally mandated paid parental leave in the United States. So your company might give you a week off. They might give you nothing off.

They might give you six months off. Um, affordable, all the, you know, I don’t want to get too political. Cause, yeah, I’m concerned with policy, but that’s not my major jam, mom and I want to, like, just give a plug.

Like, we want everybody on Instagram to follow museum of motherhood. We want. We should have a million followers, you know? So sign up, follow what we’re doing.

And the thing is that it’s the art for me, it’s the science, it’s the awe, it’s the inspiration. The policies in Washington are their own thing. I know about them.

I support ones that are family forward, but that’s not mom’s thing. We’re into other things. We’re into more inspiration.

Getting in touch with this incredible legacy. I want to go back to that, but really quickly, I wanted to also relate. I like to see common threads, and for me, I taught for six years at a university level.

And just throughout my journey, I’ve seen the lack of prioritization and accommodation and support in education. So I think it’s interesting. How are these enormous pillars of life and society and our culture not more supported and significant and prioritized? Right.

You’d hear the cliche of, like, teachers are underpaid and undervalued. How is that they should be making more than a sports star. I like sports, but I think, you know, I think if you compare, you know, how popular the NFL is compared to education or, like, knowing who won the Super bowl, do you know who won the Nobel Prize last year? Yeah, you know, things like that.

It’s like. It’s just interesting. I will say, and this is a shout out to my son, who did win the Super bowl with Tom Brady for the Tampa Bay Bucks.

Aly Marpet is an amazing human, and he had a chance before the Super bowl to sort of give shout outs and acknowledge people, and he acknowledged his sister, who is an emergency room nurse in California, for his shout out and the care work that she does. So, yeah, that’s good, because at least he’s using his microphone, you know, to at least plug. Same with musicians who I was in Turkey, and I couldn’t understand.

My wife had to translate, but she’s like, oh, they just were talking about the politics that are going on right. And this band has been around for a while, so, like, using their microphone appropriately for the thousands of people in the audience. Like, at least you’re doing that.

But you know what? More can be done. And I want to go to that point. So first of all, I want to say, like, back to the inside job, because you’re going to raise an amazing kid who has these knowledges, right? And you’re going to enlighten them and empower them.

And I do feel really fortunate that I have four amazing young adult children who are, you know, free thinkers and hard workers and really care about social justice issues. So I’ve got a philosophy professor son. I have a son who loves wildlife and nature, and I have a son who played the NFL and an emergency room nurse.

And not that we’re justifying by our jobs, but each of their professions contribute in positive ways to the planet, which is pretty cool. Sounds like you did a pretty good job. Community.

They were communally raised. You know, I really believe that it takes a village for that. But I want to go back to the microphone, shout out, because the way I got in here today was talking about music, and we had a lively discussion here about being in a rock band.

And that was what I was doing for a long time. And I thought, you know, I thought I could really make a difference in that capacity. And I was sharing with your staff here that, you know, we got a ton of attention.

I mean, we were on Good Morning America, London Times, New York Times, Chicago Times. I mean, my band housewives on Prozac had very high visibility, as did this Mamapalooza festival. And then I went back to graduate school, and I realized that festivals are what in, you know, medieval times, the peasants had an opportunity to go out and be kings for a day.

But after the festival was done, they went back to being peasants. And with the women that we were trying to empower, we were taking our aprons off, getting out of the kitchen, going on stage, having these rock bands. But then we were putting our aprons back on and going back in the kitchen.

And it was only when I realized that we needed a legacy like the museum to harbor these stories, to house in a brick and mortar institutional way. This movement, we were going to just disappear, which is what happens all these, you know, you try to find the women sociologists. You’re right.

You don’t study them in college. They don’t feature the women sociologists. There are a lot of them.

That’s what I taught, you know, but you’re going to find out all the male sociologists. That’s how the canons are created in academia. So I had a similar experience to you when I went back to school.

I was like, where are the women, dudes? It’s 2015. Like, and I’m reading all these, you know, come on. So something like some say 3% and some say 13% of textbooks contain information about women’s history, herstory.

So, I mean, the statistics are crazy. 11% of museum artworks created by women. I mean, come on, we’re half the sky.

So from rock and roll to the hallowed halls of university to the Museum of Motherhood, my march has been consistent, and it’s always been to the tune, banging the drum of the amplification of these voices. That’s fantastic. It’s clear that that’s a very big pull in your life that’s been a guiding light or a guiding passion.

And it’s cool that you’re able to apply that over different realms of the world, from music to academia to now the museum. And, you know, you had also mentioned science realm, and I kind of want to get into the different facets of the museum, but you had mentioned, because I think it’ll help to give us context of, like, what your jam is. You had mentioned that of what the.

What is the museum’s jam? You know, what do you try to focus on to influence change? Obviously, you just mentioned that you’re documenting herstory and giving voice to particular women doing big things. What are some other facets of the museum that you’re trying to accomplish there? Yeah. So.

Well, we have a robust website. We work with student interns all over the world who are interested in their studies and exploring mother studies, which is a field of study devoted to mothers mothering and motherhood. Three different categories.

Mother the noun mothering, the verb as in care work, which anyone can perform free of gender, and motherhood the institution. So those three different perspectives. And in the space we’re currently at the factory, which is in St. Petersburg, in brick and mortar, we have about 1000.

That’s a move from New York City and from multiple college pop ups. When you walk into the space, you come right upon. We have a lot of body parts.

So you come right upon a vulva entrance with a pin, the sperm on the egg game that you can play, and then you walk by our greeter at the front, and we have quarterly art exhibits. Current exhibit is called Mother the Job by Alexia Nye Jackson. And that is in black and white photographs.

The salaries of professional labor versus care work at home. So the limo driver, who makes $40,000 a year driving a limo. And then the mother or father or care worker, who pays about $10,000 a year in gas and car insurance to drive their kids to school.

The paid laundry person who owns the laundromat who makes $40,000 a year. And then a mother pictured next to her stack of laundry, which is equally high, doing her laundry on her own dime and time. So it’s a salaried comparison of mother labor in the home.

So that’s our current art exhibit. And then you walk around to the back. There’s you can.

A science area. You could try on a pregnancy vest. So the guys love that.

Strap on a pregnancy vest with little boobies in the tummy and walk around, try to tie your shoes, try to roll around, try to move. It’s not easy. I can’t imagine.

And that’s only a 15 pound vest. People usually gain between 30 and 50 pounds in weight with everything else that’s going on in the body. And we have some antique forceps.

We have anatomy models, anatomically correct models of fetal development, and a few other ephemera items in the science area. Talk about women’s body parts, how many holes women have. Many people don’t know that.

It’s fascinating. You can come and find out if you don’t know. And can I say that on area? You can say, yeah, you can say anything.

And then we have a herstory section where we start off my area of expertise, which is the last 250 years of american motherhood. So we start off with sojourner truth, free slave, 1850, giving her speech in Akron, Ohio, ain’t I a woman? In which she calls out not only gender, but racism in America. It’s a very famous speech, and it came on the heels of the Seneca Falls convention days, where the suffragettes went out with their right to vote signs back in the early 18 hundreds.

We feature a laundry exhibit with a library of congress photo blown up on the wall of women doing laundry in Mississippi. And every item pictured in that 1912 photograph we have in our collection. So, the hundred year old bucket, the, um, the.

The laundry mashers, the, um, the, uh, the, uh, washboard, the boiling. The copper kettle that you boil the water in. And what we tell students is, you know, laundry used to take, uh, a week.

It only takes a couple hours now, but it used to be called the weekly curse. And, uh, you know, you would have to chop wood, carry wood, light a fire, carry water, boil water, rinse water, mash the clothes, scrub, scrub scrub, hang it up to dry, hope it doesn’t rain. And these are stiff garments made of wool and cotton and brocades.

And here. Voila. You know, then you iron it with a coal or.

Or fire iron. Fire heated iron, which is no small task. So laundry becomes an epic endeavor.

We also have a. Currently a seesaw in the middle of mom. And the seesaw asks people to engage in civil discourse.

And how do we cooperate in our families and in our society to go somewhere? Because if no one’s working your side of the seesaw, then you’re just going to sit there. And if you really want to ride, you got to work with your partner. So we have the seesaw for people to practice.

That’s great. Yeah, that’s a great tangible visual indicator. Way to measure what’s going on in that back and forth.

That’s very cool. We have 250 years of women’s history on the walls. We have a library of 700 books, not all on site.

And then we have different playstations, so you can play with clay, make body parts. We have a boob chair that you can sit in, all made of boobalicious tufted boobs. And you can sit in that and instagram yourself.

We have a vulva couch where you can. We call it the vagina couch. And you can sit in her soft cushions and you can call your mom.

We have a phone line, a hot lip red phone line where you can dial our 877 mom’s number and leave a message for your mother. How cool. Wow.

I don’t even know where to begin on that. That was long winded, but that’s it. Well, honestly, because I have three areas.

Because, you know, the Museum of motherhood shows you explore the art, science, and history of mothers and families. And as you were talking, okay, she hit art, she hit science, she hit history. Wonderful.

I mean, you covered it all. Thank you. And what you asked about, what do you do there? Well, people come in and we create a safe space for life changing conversations.

So whether you’re someone, and we’ve had many who conceived multiple times and never delivered a live human or people who have lost touch with their adoptive parents due to. Or they’re birth parents and they’re adopted due to circumstances or even fraught relationships, whether you’re, you know, a daughter or a mother or a father or someone who has become child free by choice and made a decision in your life, these are all reproductive identities. And we have space for all these conversations.

So sometimes we get people who are just curious. Sometimes we get people who are suffering and feeling lost. Sometimes we get people who are pondering their future family, and sometimes we just get people who want to have fun.

That’s awesome. It’s fantastic that there’s a space for everyone going through something in that realm, because it is no small thing. No, it’s incredibly life changing and heavy, and it changes your future or the past has set your course.

And so it’s nice that you’ve provided this neat, dynamic space for men and women and everybody to come in and experience it and to gain a new perspective or to get support. I was going to kind of ask you about, do you go out into the community and offer classes or presentations or support? So we do do classes, and we’re launching online classes this year. In the past, we’ve worked with doulas, midwives, even pediatricians and psychologists in a general sense, had had them in the space to answer
questions.

We’re brand new to St. Pete. I mean, we started the nonprofit in 2019, the Mom Art Annex. We were closed for Covid right after we opened for two years.

Of course, I hosted all of the exhibits in my home in 2000, after Covid 2022, I did 179 home tours and had hosted community dinners on site, and we had artists and residencies. And then when the opportunity at the factory came to be, we hopped over there, and that was just two months ago. So we are brand new and just meeting our, making our partnerships in St. Pete.

We’ve made some. We’re doing a membership campaign right now with the fairground St. Pete, which is an interactive art space. And so if you join them with the membership, then you get free activity map at mom.

And if you join mom for a membership, you get a free activity at the fairgrounds. Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah.

That’s great to hear. Forming partnerships right now. Yeah.

That’s everything. Yeah. I mean, how do you, how do you become ingrained in the, in the area, especially being new? Yeah.

And being something that is a new idea. Like you said, this is the first. But it’s so not new.

It’s so not new. It’s like, so we have marble museums, mustard museums, car museums. Like, what the Holy Manoli? Why it’s so interesting to me.

Right. It really is. I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is how have women been kind of just on the back burner all of history or put.

You know, it’s. It’s just, it’s. It’s really interesting.

And you’re correct. You’re correcting that in one way you’re doing all you can, it seems like. But if you think about it, like, when I was a hot babe, hot young babe, you know, seriously, 21, 27, like, you couldn’t talk any kind of women stuff to me.

Like, I didn’t need it. I was doing great. Like, I was the shazam and, and so forth until I needed it.

And this is the thing. Like, and this is the hard part, I think. Why do you think we need any kind of sort of social change? Or why do we need any kind of recognition? Or why do women need to find their voices? Because when you’re feeling like you have your voice and you’re rocking it out and you’re doing your life, then you know you don’t need it.

It’s like, not, not again. Not my jam. It’s only when you either realize, like, oh, my God, I just got fired from my job because I’m pregnant, or, oh, my God, I raised four kids with somebody, and then we divorced and they took most of the money.

Now what am I going to do? Or you realize, like, I’ve just had a baby and I’ve had a terrible experience in the hospital. Things have not gone my way. I had an emergency c section.

I had no choice, no voice. That’s when you sort of become interested. And so that’s a bit of the conundrum.

And I have been fortunate. I have, like, some amazing St. Petersburg High School feminist club students who are really into it and stuff. But the majority of people, it’s like, why bother? Status quo.

It’s hard to think differently. Why change? Why do something different? I think that, again, ripples across how we look at maybe government or money or different systems where you go until it affects you. Like, for instance, like, why should I have to pay unemployment? Like, I’m employed or whatever it is, but when you become employed, you go, oh, this helps me.

Right. And that’s why I was paying into that or whatever that is where our taxes go and things like that. It’s like, until you need it, then that’s really the illustration of, okay, that’s why.

But it’s like, should it take that? Shouldn’t we be able to empathize throughout the process? Well, I just think it’s hard, you know? And it’s also hard to imagine, you know, fewer people are having kids, and there’s kind of a. There’s almost a. What’s the.

There’s almost like a turn off. Like, I put everything out front, right? So the word mom, it’s right there mom. A lot of us don’t like our mothers, you know, or we have a complicated relationship with them, or we’ve been taught culturally that if you have a problem, it’s your mother’s fault, or if things didn’t go your way, it’s because you were raised without the right opportunities and it was your mom, that kind of thing.

And that feeds from psychology to social to cultural to all these different facets that go into it. So I’ve got the word right out there. I’m not hiding the word, just like I’m not hiding the boobs on the boob chair or the vagina on the vagina couch.

We want to be upfront with what we’re talking about, but I do think there’s almost a recoiling effect. When you say women’s history or women’s rights or motherhood, it’s like we think hallmark, we think it’s not important. We’re like, what are they talking about? So you have to sort of either have, like we said, gone through it, or you just have to stumble on her space and see how magical it is, and then you become a fan.

So winning people over, one person, one day at a time, to this ubiquitous subject, like, we all came from one. Yeah. Why? I always say, here’s what I say.

If women were, if babies came from rocket ships, Elon Musk would have built a university and several engineering schools around the country to figure out how people are born. The fact that we historically, and now, that’s changing, you know, non binary people are giving birth, et cetera. Men, self declared men are giving birth.

But because historically we have been of woman born, we won’t touch it. We recoil. Young men.

I didn’t want to come from that. Like, I don’t want to see that until you become a father. Ugh, that’s gross.

Yeah. What do we do about that in a culture that perpetuates. Hi, Dan.

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No, this is perfect. Well, I did travel to Malta last summer, and the most amazing things that you’ve never heard about are the seven goddess temples in Malta that are older than the pyramids, that are in the shape of women. They’re free standing structures that are thousands of feet long and tall.

Not thousands of feet tall, but long, huge structures, and you walk in through their vagina. Now, why don’t we know about those? We all read about the pyramids, the great protruding things to the sky. What about the goddess temples of Malta? Yeah.

Amazing. I’m going to do an exhibit in the spring on them. That sounds like a great opportunity.

Yeah, well, it’s great. It’s great that you’re giving the voice to these, you know, these different aspects of the world in. Within this realm of, you know, femininity.

Yeah. Did I say that right? Maybe feminism, I guess. Feminism, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is now, you know, feminism is now not just a term that relates to sort of, some people think, oh, it’s man hating or it’s, you know, it’s got a negative connotation. Feminism now is recognized as equality for all. Is that how you would define feminism? Totally.

Absolutely. Equality for all. Yeah.

So really, as a feminist, you could. There’s no one who’s not a feminist if you’re in your right mind, as far as I’m concerned. Absolutely.

Well, then I’m a feminist. I thought I was before. Anyway, so we need to get you a pink shirt that says it.

All right. I love it. Feminist dad.

There you go. I love that. Yeah.

There’s so much to say because you were talking about before when, you know, the person process of washing clothes. And we don’t have to go down this route, but it is fascinating to think about how hard, how much work humanity had to do anything. Back in the day when my wife was pregnant and we were having our child, I couldn’t stop thinking about, how did they do this back in the day when we were living in caves? Yeah.

You know, obviously the mortality rate was super high and there wasn’t good rates, and it makes sense, but even just getting through that, being in cold environments or dirty environments, I just. It’s absolutely fascinating how powerful the human spirit is in getting through that and just propagating, you know, obviously that’s evolution for you. They call it the biological imperative.

I remember asking a professor friend of mine when I started this project 20 years ago, and I was like, why do people have babies? And she just said, the biological imperative. It’s programmed. It’s programmed inside us.

Although more people and students when I was teaching, and I was teaching up until 2019, would say, I’m thinking of not having children because I’m intimidated by the economics of it. Or many people were inclined to make environmental choices, and they didn’t perceive children as contributing to environmental consciousness. So we’re in a unique period in history when people are not having babies at the rate they have in the past.

There’s a dip, for sure. Have you seen the movie idiocracy? Oh, my God, that first scene, I friggin promoted that movie like heck in 2016. No one listened.

No one’s still listening. But, yeah, yeah, Mike Judge was telling the future in that, but it nailed so many things. I think that is almost a historical movie and.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would agree with you. I would agree with you totally.

I mean, there have been a lot of. A lot of Orwell’s 1984. I mean, there have been a lot of books that are problematically coming true in some ways, even reproduction.

There’s a whole science area in our space where we do talk about not only the ethics of care, but the fact that we are of human born. In this dystopian video that I created, which is three minutes long, I asked AI this summer to create images of several things, like a womb with a view, the last american housewife. I had a whole list of prompts, and what came out was this very eerie video that dives into the fact that we can now experimentally at least create embryonic cells from birth.

What happens? Cords, cord, you know what I’m saying? Right, sorry. We can create embryos without a man and a woman without myological parents. Okay.

And that is very controversial. There is research that I read about ten years ago that’s now in further development about bio bags. So being able to grow, for example, an embryo sheep in a bio bag outside the body, research into birth pods, think the matrix where babies are hatched.

And if that’s our future, if we take away that one thing that really connects us as humans, that we are of human born, what are we then? If we’re come out of a pod, if we come out of a petri dish, what does that make us? And do we want that, right? Yeah, that would be a next step in evolution. A different tangent, for sure. Humanity would absolutely be different.

But if you look at how we are devolving or evolving from the time that the industrial revolution came and we started driving around a little metal boxes, right, waving at each other through glass, and you think about from that 100 years later, to our separation on social media and the way that we are as fragmented as we are. There’s a theme there. There’s a theme going when you try to call a company and you say, hello, I’m having a problem with my product, and you’re talking to someone that’s at a
call center that has no recourse whatsoever to the actual product.

We are constantly being fragmented out. And, you know, I’m just one person. If you like this, go for it.

I personally stand up and say, I protest. Yeah, it’s going a route that it’s a slippery slope, because all these technologies are very powerful. And it’s funny.

Cars connect us in great ways over great distances. Same with social media. But at the same time, there’s that other side of the blade where it’s slippery slope to complete disconnect.

How are we doing with that slippery slope? Right. Well, not well. Not well.

I mean, we’re just not doing well with it. How can we do better? I would argue that, in general, we have not done well with our protection of other humans, with our care for the planet, and with our ability to perceive what might actually be positive and ethically responsible towards both things. We’ve just made poor choices for greed, for power, for dominance, for all these choices that are not values that are going to ultimately enhance our life here on the planet.

I mean, sure, if you want to go to Mars with Musk, you know, bye bye. Start the same problem all over on a different space. You know, that’s just not the solution for me.

Yeah. What, us on top of the museum of motherhood and all that you’re doing there? How do we take a step back and take a breath and analyze what we’re doing collectively? What’s the solution there? Solutions? Obviously, it’s not one. What do you think there? I do think we need to infiltrate some of these systems of power with new, um, brighter candles with different values.

I don’t know how that’s going. It’s not really going very well, is it? No. Yeah, it’s interesting.

I it’s. It’s still hard to believe. Like, how are certain personalities and people continuing to stay in those institutions and be reelected? It’s almost like what you care about.

If you care about, you know, let’s just say stuff so much, then you’re going to be the best stuff carer that’s on the planet. If you care about money at the expense of all other things, you stand a better chance of being the most moneyed person on the planet. If you care about social enterprise, social justice, equality, offering opportunities and healthcare from a position of spirited concern, then that would be the dominant perspective.

But it’s just not embedded in our world right now. I don’t know why that is. Yeah, it’s hard to believe because these things are so important.

Just like we were talking about education. It’s like, how is that not valued more? Everything stems from education. Yes, exactly.

We were talking about movies before, and this is a stretch cause I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I remember when I saw guardians of the Galaxy. Uh huh. There was a lot about that movie I really dug.

I remember, first of all, it was a very eclectic band of superheroes, right? Groot was one of them, and the raccoon. Right. And the planet that they visited, people had blue hair, and they were just all so different looking.

There was not this sort of black and white portrayal, and I think there was a woman leader of the nations or the planets or something like that. I just remember that being a cool perspective. I kind of liked that movie.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice that we can use movies to illustrate that kind of stuff.

And I don’t know, I feel like media can be a really powerful tool. Like, this podcast is one of the reasons why here you are, is to talk about these things. And at least we’re going to reach 100, 200 eventually, thousands of people, once this thing really gets cooking and we’re in their ears talking about it, maybe we influence their thinking, just 1%, but that trickles through, and then maybe they start talking about it to someone else.

Same with a movie like idiocracy. Seeing it from a different perspective. Or did you see don’t look up? Yes, I did.

Right. That nailed that. Like, my daughter was like, she just.

I mean, it was. That’s what. That was how she felt during the COVID pandemic as an emergency room worker.

She felt like the don’t look up Jennifer Lawrence character. It was too close. But I want to invite.

I mean, since you posed the question, I just want to invite people. So not just that we’re talking at them, but invite them into the conversation. So we’ve asked a lot of provocative things and don’t want to come off as, like, overly innocent or, you know, lefty or anything like that.

Like, we want to have a real conversation and a real circle of people with everyone perspectives being expressed in a respectful tone. So no othering. No, like, you, you, you.

Or no condemning you, you, you. But just listening. And then once we all listen, like, what do you have to say? What do you think about what we’re saying? How.

How can we shift some directions other than within our, you know, our own minds, our own hearts, our own families, and then our own communities? How can we have real systemic change? Do we want systemic change? What do you think? I would be so curious. Yeah, 100%. I would love to keep conversations going on our social media or directly through email.

They can visit museum of motherhood or interact with you online, but absolutely, that’s where it’s at. I would love this to be a two way dialogue, not just between me and the guest, but our community of listeners, because there’s great minds out there who are literally hearing our voices right now, and that’s powerful. But I love how you said that.

So thank you. Yeah. Because also, that engagement, it only drives positive change or good, healthy discussion or debate.

And that’s what I’m all about. Yeah. We had to have a big brainstorming session this year because I have students that are 16, and then I have second wave feminists that are 70.

Right. And their agendas are different, especially with all of the identity stuff that’s going on, gender identity stuff. The second wave feminists fought really hard to identify their women’s bodies.

They’re not really willing to relinquish it, that identity, so to speak. And then the new generation of 16 year olds, they’re just all about, like, whoever you are, me, we, they, them, doesn’t matter. Like, no judgment.

And so we had to have a brainstorming session about what our ground rules were at mom, and what we came up with was, we only have one ground rule. And I sort of expressed it when we were talking before, and that was, don’t be hating. And hate is defined as the obliteration, objectification, or oppression of another.

So that means as long as you’re in the room talking from your perspective about what your feelings or thoughts are and not pointing a finger, objectifying someone else or obliterating someone else, then you’re cool. So, hate, you know, we’re saying no hate. We’re saying, we want your voices.

Do it in a way that is, you know, inspiring, informative, and we can all learn from love. That. Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Throughout all this, you know, you’ve voiced frustration or, you know, there’s different that I have. I feel frustrated with a lot of stuff. How do you stay motivated through, you know, through this? You know, how do you feel like things are going to get better, even if you might not feel that.

But what keeps you. I’m going to totally shift gears here. I’m going to shock that bejesus out of you.

Let’s do it. Higher power. All right.

I’m doing the work that I was put on the planet to do. I went through a extremely difficult period health wise. It’s a miracle that I’m here on the planet, and I changed my life from one way of living to another.

And I am doing the work now for the past, since it’s been 24 years, I’m doing the work that I was put on the planet to do. So when I’m down, when I’m discouraged, you know, I get on my knees. Right on.

Yeah. That’s powerful. That’s great.

I almost jumped the gun here. But we have reached a moment in the interview. It’s called the rapid fire.

Yep. So points don’t matter. We don’t keep points, but go ahead and try to keep your answers in this segment brief.

It’s okay if you don’t. We had a lawyer on Doug Jackson shout out episode two. He was not brief, and that’s okay.

Even though he was given a brief. Right. And you did not warn me about this.

Pew, pew, pew. Lay it on me. I love it.

Lay it on me. I don’t tell. I don’t tell anything to guess.

Okay. I love the moment of actual. I’m discovering stuff about you I don’t like.

Sure. Any of that. Okay.

Plan stuff. So I hope you’re okay with it. And honestly, again, if you want to expand on the questions, that’s fine, too.

So we just have fun with it. But what is cool about this section is I ask almost all the guests the same questions, so it’s very fascinating to hear the different answers and the similar threads from all of these different individuals. I’m going to try to talk as fast as I can.

Okay, here we go. Okay. What is your biggest source of inspiration? Biggest source of inspiration is my children and my family of origin.

Love it. Oh, she’s gonna be good at this. You tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I can do it.

Usually. I’m a big fan. So do you have a favorite book? Oh, yeah, I’ve got so many favorite books.

Ding dong, ding dong. Let me think, let me think, let me think. I’ll just pick one right now, and I will say our bodies, ourselves.

All right, Boston collective, I think it was, first came out in, like, 1973 74, and they’ve continued reprints since that time. Real quick, two sentence. Our bodies, ourselves, it’s all about your woman’s bodies, how they work, reproductive rights, birth control power.

Women power. How to live in your skin and know what your skin is. Love it.

Okay, cool. So just to let you know, in the notes of the show, we’re going to have a link to museum motherhood, that book, and any other resources that are very relevant. Okay, well, there are a lot of good books.

We have 700 books in our library, so. But that’s a good one. And people can rent from your library.

Yeah. How cool. Yeah, that was.

That was the reason I shouted that book out, was that book was on my bookshelf when I was like 16 or 17 years old. And it’s one of two on my bookshelf that I remember from the time this. Can I say the second book? Yeah.

Phyllis Chesler. It was a book about women who had been institutionalized by their families because they were out of the box. Women in madness, it was called.

And those two books, our bodies, ourselves, women in madness were on my bookshelf at 16. And when I unpacked, whatever, 50 years later, when I moved to Florida, 45 years later, they were still in my box of moving stuff. So that was pretty cool.

They’re on my bookshelves at the moment. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Awesome. I love how you guys have a library that’s really neat. Yeah, this might be a hard one, too.

Do you have a favorite musical artist or an album that really sticks out to you? I’m gonna say favorite musical artist, Frank Zappa. And I’m gonna say favorite musical, as in movie is Priscilla, queen of the desert. And they have Abba as a soundtrack.

Oh, okay. But not cause I love ABBA, but because Priscilla, queen of the desert is just such a great film, everyone should see it. Noted.

Yeah, it’s about a bunch of trannies who dress up and drive across Australia miming to ABBA music the whole way. Cool. Yeah.

Sounds interesting. Yeah. All right, cool.

You’re doing great, by the way. She’s winning. I’m winning, I’m winning.

We’re all winners. You know how it is these days. Yeah.

There’s a participation medal waiting for you at the door. I can’t wait. Okay.

Do you have a favorite business resource? Favorite business resource? It used to be the women’s media center. They’re not as active anymore. And I would say now I look a lot to the Woodson Museum.

So the Woodson Museum is a museum here in St. Petersburg. African American Museum. Got its start in a little bungalow just like we did.

They’ve now gotten a big endowment from the city, and they’re building out and building up. They’re having a lot of success, and I hope that we’re just not too far behind them. And I really admire what they’ve done.

So as a resource, they’re kind of an inspirational resource. Yes, they’re an inspirational resource. That’s fantastic.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. One of the niches that I’m trying to hone in on with our business here is working with educational entities, science based organizations, museums, and nonprofits.

And so, you know, it’s great to hear the cool things that are going on just in St. Pete. The more I get integrated into this city, it’s really cool to see the energy, and I think there’s really something to it. Yeah, I mean, there are so many resources, honestly, that I could list, so I just trying to pick something that’s very tangible and local.

Love it. Yeah, love it. So, yeah, that’s fantastic.

One more. Yeah. How do you define success? I define success as meaningful labor, time spent with people that I love, and having a consciousness about the well being of our planet and others.

Love it. Love it. That one’s one of my favorite questions to ask.

Those three points. Besides the last one, I love the last one. Very specific.

The first two have been said. Yeah. Meaningful labor is something I talk about with the kids all the time.

Love it. You know, find something that, you know, it’s hard sometimes, but something somewhere in your life where you really feel passionate and involved and included and you’re doing good work and you feel good about yourself at the end of the day. Absolutely.

If more people did that, we’d have less of these corporate structures. I know we have to survive, but, like, some of these corporate structures are just so messed up. Yeah.

I have conversations quite often. Just last night, I had a meeting at like 10:00 p.m.

with a great friend of mine, shout out Dave. And, you know, he’s just talking about his, the corporate life. He’s.

He’s got so many passions. He’s unbelievably bright. We, we were in startups together and building, and he just gets to him daily, and he’s got a passion for art and creating with his hands, and he’s, he’s climbing out of that, by the way.

He’s doing fantastic in the corporate world, but he’s trying to dig a path out of that and do what he really loves. It’s so important to do that. And it’s crazy that it is so difficult because people get caught up in this wave in this momentum of life, and they’re like, I need to pay rent, and so I need money now instead of taking.

Yeah. And I’m not talking about, like, the high level executives who are doing great. Things are awesome.

I’m talking about the, you know, the average Joe and Jane who do have to put diapers on their kid. And, you know, they. The job they get, you know, the privileged perspective of, you know, you’re gonna have a fabulous job and make fabulous money and have a fabulous life is extremely privileged.

The bulk of our american culture are scrounging to get by, and that’s rough. And part of the reason it’s that rough is because the people at the top are not sharing. And I’m not a.

I’m not a, like, you know, socialist at all. Right? I’m just like a share nice person. You know what I mean? Just share nice.

Yeah. It really doesn’t have to be that hard. Like, how much do you need? How much is too much? Yeah.

Yeah, agreed. So, I mean, that definitely gets in my craw. And I’ve definitely lived both sides of the.

I’ve lived as the very wealthy person, and I’ve lived as the very poor person. And so I really understand deeply that perspective of what it is to have both. And they’re hard in different ways, but there’s nothing in America like being poor.

It’s hard. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting.

If someone with hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s like, you’re good. And with that amount of money, there is such power to do good. You know, the allocation of our resources, just in general, not at the individual level, but our prioritization, going back to what we were talking about earlier, it’s like, how are we prioritizing this money? Like, half of our tax dollars going to a military complex, and it’s like education and NASA gets, like, 2% or something like that, or very low percent in
comparison.

It’s like, where are our priorities? Should we take a step back? Maybe there should be a holiday where we go, this is a breath day, a reflection day, or. You’re familiar. I’m sure there was a big conversation several years ago.

Jeffrey Satz wrote the price. No, that was Ann Critten, the price of motherhood. But some books written on economics and wellbeing across multiple levels of living here in America and the unsustainability of our current systems.

And I’m sorry I got off on a tangent, and I shouldn’t have done that. This is a big conversation, and it’s extremely important. And I know the country of Bhutan is a small country, but they changed their GDP and I’m sure you’ve heard of this to gross national happiness index.

Loves it. So instead of a gross national product index, they have a gross national happiness index. Oh, I love that.

So I mean, some reflection on their part. You know, they’re not a wealthy country. How do we establish ourselves within our pattern and framework that we can.

And I think that’s a pretty cool model. I love that. Yeah, absolutely.

There’s a really cool. It’s like a docuseries that rain Wilson. Yeah.

I don’t know if you know him. I do. Of course I do.

Dwight K. Schrute, he’s wonderful. Yeah.

And he’s going around to different countries learning about their level of happiness, what they’re doing and trying to expose like, you know, just like under the COVID or whatever, what that country is up to, why they’re happy, why they’re not. So many great people. There are so many great people out there doing.

Making music, doing good things. Yeah, music is the highest form. I have to say that music is the highest form.

But you know, as we were talking before, it takes great resources and energy to keep music going. So. Absolutely highest form.

Can you define ah, highest form of. I mean, of expression. You make those audios.

I have made audio waves in my life on stages in small clubs in New York City that no longer exist, that have gone into the universe and are still reverberating. I have made noises on large stages where the noise is still going out, make a joyful noise, it’s still going out and reverberating. So in terms of vibrational coolness, music is where it’s at.

And again, the only reason I sort of turned away from that was I felt we needed a place on earth, a brick and mortar where people could come and study this incredible thing called motherhood. Well, two things. One, also the universality of music.

It doesn’t matter. Like what I was saying when I was in Turkey, I didn’t understand. I understood a little bit of what they’re singing about or whatever.

Didn’t matter. It was great music. And I felt it just as hard as everybody around me.

And second, I wanted to ask, are you ever gonna pick that mic back up? Well, I am right here singing wise on stage. You know, I’ve done a little bit of spoken word, okay. And it’s easier to do spoken word than a band because bands have to practice, they got to lug equipment, they got to book the gigs, they got to do the whole rigmarole.

Whereas spoken word, I can have some cool poems or short stories or slam kind of words and I can go into any environment and share those. So I done some slam stuff. That’s been fun.

Very cool. Yeah, awesome. Well, I don’t want to wind down, but I’m going to feel like we could talk literally all day.

I wanted to know a few things just to leave the listeners with and to kind of pick your brain. One is I’m interested. What does the Museum of motherhood look like in 510 years? Yeah, it’s a big pregnant glass building.

If you’ve ever seen the Dali museum or you’ve ever seen the hard rock cafe shaped like a guitar, only this is a pregnant torso with a pink door at the bottom. And it is a freestanding structure with four floors and a globe on top. So on the bottom floor, you walk into the store and some meeting areas.

On the second floor, you explore art course of motherhood. On the second floor there is some science. I want a whole hospital wing.

I want to show people what they’re going to walk into when they give birth. They have no idea. So a place where you can actually see what’s going to happen, you can see an incubator, you can see a birthing table, you can see alternative birth things.

You can see a water birth room. You can see all these things. Then go up to the top floor for some herstory.

American herstory. 250 years of american motherhood. And on the top floor, global issues.

So there’s a globe, a half dome globe by the dome guys on top. That’s our building. It’s here in St. Pete.

And you can come visit us from all around the world. Wow. What a very specific and well thought out vision.

I mean, it’s clear you’re going to get there, I hope in my lifetime. Absolutely. Well, what I wanted to ask is how can people listening and the community help with making that a reality? What can people do? Yeah, we are fundraising.

We are creating our executive fundraising board. We’re collecting philanthropists. We’re collecting people who get this and see this vision or just a mother lover out there that wants some naming rights.

So we are building our collective and we’ve had some great people come on board and. But we’re like just poised now. So we’ve got our all our back end stuff.

We’ve got our salesforce, we’ve got our quickbooks, we’ve got our systems in place. We have 23,000 combined social media followers and about 5000 people on the newsletter. So join us, sign up for the newsletter, come in, donate, get involved, help us build this really legacy production.

And someday, you know, we may need to know how mothers did it because we may be coming out of pods. I. Who knows? Oh, boy. Yeah.

That’s an interesting thought. I’m like, yeah, it’s actually a museum for the future. Exactly.

I’m always way ahead of my time is all I can say. I love that. But I hope people do get on board, so.

Yes, and we’re easy to find. You just, it’s mommuseum.org and our social media museum of motherhood on Instagram or Facebook.

How fantastic is it that the initials of museum of motherhood makes mom? It’s too perfect. It’s just meant to be. Meant to be.

I love that. Thank you. Last thing.

Yes. Someone listening. What is advice? A piece of advice that you can give any listener that you would have loved to hear you think is the most powerful thing that you could say at this moment.

Just that in terms of mom specifically, you think you don’t need us, but you do. And I can guarantee that every human in their life, one thing’s guaranteed, you’re going to hit some kind of hard time. Everybody does.

It can be a health incident. It can be trying to find a partner. It can be a family.

It can be a divorce. It can be a child. It can be a job.

And when you’re down, when you think there’s nowhere to go, mom’s got your back. We love you. And we hope you’ll know that we’re a resource for you and that your own relationship to your own heart, your own history, your own herstory, your family of origin and your family of here on the planet of friends are what makes us human.

So you can just follow the beacon home. I don’t know if there’s much more to say. I can’t thank you enough for coming on here and sharing everything that you’re doing and doing what you’re doing and connecting with us and being willing to come on the show after just meeting with us, you know, one day, one nice morning.

You’re doing great stuff. Thank you. You as well.

And I look forward to keeping in touch and supporting each other along the way. Sounds great. Thank you.