S1E106 - Zena on Parenting

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Zena and Brooke talk about parenting.

Guest Info

Zena Sharman (she/her), PhD is a writer and consultant whose body of work pivots around the questions “How do we create change?” and “How do we care for each other?” She’s the author of three books, including The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021) and the Lambda Literary award-winning anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016). Her next book, a memoir, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2025. She’s an engaging speaker who regularly gives virtual and in-person talks and workshops to audiences across North America. You can learn more about Zena and her work at https://zenasharman.com/

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Zena on Parenting

**Brooke ** 00:14 Hello and welcome to Live like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Brooke Jackson, and today I have with me Zena Sharman, and we're going to talk about collective parenting. But before we get that, we want to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by giving a little shout out to one of the other wonderful podcasts on our network. Insert jingle here!

**Brooke ** 01:31 And we're back. Zena, thanks for being on the podcast with me today to talk about collective parenting. I'm really excited to discuss this topic more with you. But first, let's, I want—I want to get to know you a little more. Let the listeners get to know you a little bit more. So, would you introduce yourself? Tell me name, preferred pronouns, other things you want to share?

**Zena ** 01:54 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for the invitation to be here. I'm a really big fan of the podcast and hopefully will have some useful things to share with the community of listeners. So I'm Zena Sharman, I use she/her pronouns, and you can find me on unseeded Cowichan territories—so colonially known as Vancouver Island up in Canada. And I come into our conversation as a queer femme. I'm in my mid 40s, which feels salient to how I'm moving through the world as a parent, and I am a parent to three kids. And I'm raising them collectively with three other queer people. And outside of the work that I do—the care work that I do as a parent, I am also our writer, I have done a lot of queer and trans health advocacy and systems change work over the years, and then have a growing practice in my communities as a death doula and a hospice volunteer. So thinking about many facets of how do we care for one another?

**Brooke ** 02:51 That's really great. We recently did an episode with a death doula and talked about a little bit of that subject. But—

**Zena ** 03:00 You know I listened to that one.

**Brooke ** 03:03 I'm glad. But we're gonna talk about the other end of the life spectrum, and the the little ones, and how we care for them. So you mentioned that you collectively parent, and of course I've mentioned that that's our subject for today. So I'm curious what that phrase means to you, how you define it, and what it looks like in practice.

**Zena ** 03:29 I think practice is the operative word, in the sense that I'm definitely not coming into this conversation as someone who claims any kind of expertise or definitive take on how to do this. And what I can say is I'm coming into the conversation sharing some of the things I've learned, and I'm still in a process of learning now, having been in this experience for more than five years, almost six years. So I wouldn't say that I use collective parenting necessarily, kind of, consciously in my day to day life. And I do think it's actually a really nice way to describe what it is that I do. And I mean, I think if I had to give the most distilled down definition, collective parenting would be parenting together, including with more than two parents are multiple kinds of caregivers and whatever that family or caregiving formation looks like. And I think it's useful to think about how there are many ways in which different kinds of ways of taking care of children are collective. Though there's definitely variation in maybe the shape or intensity of the collectivity kind of inherent in that. And I mentioned that because I think about the ways that family structures continue to change, right, like if we think about the dominant norm of the nuclear family, which is such a structuring shape in the context of settler colonialism, in the context of the ways in which the state seeks to legislate family. Yet many kinds of communities are creating family in different kinds of ways, you know, even down to kids with multiple parents because of having blended families, you know, maybe with divorce, for example.

**Brooke ** 05:01 Right.

**Zena ** 05:01 So I think it's useful to think about that bigger picture piece, but also think about like, what does it mean to make an intentional choice to parent together outside of the nuclear family form? And that's the particular kind of collective parenting that I'm practicing.

**Brooke ** 05:18 Very interesting. Did you—I'm really curious, did you start doing that when your your first child joined the family? Or is that something you discovered, sort of after they, you know, after you became a parent?

**Zena ** 05:34 Yeah, it started even before that, actually.

**Brooke ** 05:36 Okay, cool.

**Zena ** 05:38 I'll give you that the micro genesis of our family. So many years ago—so our—I should maybe you kind of bring us into the present for a moment and say that there's four adults in our family, there's three kids. So we have a five year old and we have 20 month old twins. We're busy. And among the adults, we have two romantic couples who are coparenting together, we all live together in one big house, and at the core of that, as well is a platonic coparenting dyad. So two of my coparents many years ago, as friends, said you know, we keep dating people who don't want to have kids, but we really want to have kids. What if we committed to co parenting together as friends? You know, we're queers. We do what we want. And so that I think was really cool origin story was them basically saying, look, we know we want to become parents, we don't want to have to wait to find, you know, quote, unquote, like the one, you know, the romantic partner who is going to be your like perfect coparent. And then eventually, you know, my other coparent, like, dated her way into this family system. And then I kind of laugh because my agenesis was actually initially, like, what was very much supposed to be a casual hookup with my now-partner. So I hooked up my way into this family. And the process of becoming a parent, you know, it took longer than that. But actually, by the time my partner and I really very