SPEAKER_06: 0:02

To even question what you've been told is true is incredibly courageous.

SPEAKER_02: 0:07

It doesn't always feel like courage, what looks like courage to other people. For me, it feels like survival. This is our personal mess.

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

If I'm surrounded by thinkers, by lovers, by passion, by integrity, then I really do think that I know who I am.

SPEAKER_01: 0:21

There's a feat that is indescribable when you're being who you are and you're living your purpose. I'm not gonna come to the end of my life and be like I didn't live the life I was meant to live.

SPEAKER_03: 0:30

Can I be so comfortable in the unknown and so comfortable in that uncertainty that every version of it is going to be okay?

SPEAKER_06: 0:38

This is the Inner Rebel Podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 0:50

So today we have one of my besti besties on the show, Meredith Marin, who is an award-winning author of a dozen books. She's a keynote speaker on women and aging and sex. She's a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, O Magazine. I also know she happens to be an expert garden tender, marmalade, and ice cream maker, a master hammock swinger, and she is one of the most fiercely loving and loyal human beings I've ever known. She happens to be one of my very best friends, and I'm very excited to share her with all of you. In 2018, I was in Los Angeles and I was looking for a place to stay. I needed something that was fairly long term. And I had the option between this very stable three-month sublet in a regular apartment, or this woman magically reached out to me and offered me two weeks in her casita artista, which was attached to this it's like a fairy land, this magical garden. And I looked at the photos of this place and I was like, oh, I want to stay there so badly. It made no rational sense. It was not practical in any way, but I could not stop thinking about this magical garden. And this was one of those key moments in my life where I learned to trust my gut over the practicality of my mind. Because guess which one I chose? And sometimes your gut leads you to places or to things you didn't even know you needed in your life. And it was there that I met Mare. It just turned into one of the most profound relationships of my life and has paid off. In I just I can't, I don't know. How would you describe a relationship, Mare? I don't even have words. Um magical is the first word that comes to mind.

SPEAKER_02: 2:59

And for me, sustaining, I can't even imagine how many more mistakes I would have made in the last five days. I have now internalized Jessica Rose to the extent that, you know, other people might say, What would Jesus do? I say, What would Jess do? Or what is Jess gonna say when I tell her what I'm thinking of doing? So, what's the answer to that? Many worse things than I have done. You are the emergency break on my Meredith, I would say.

SPEAKER_03: 3:35

The emergency break on my mare's.

SPEAKER_02: 3:39

I love this. And also the gas pedal for the non-emergency situations, places where I need to get brave and hit the gas in the correct direction. Two in one. Gas pedal and brake. Who could ask for more?

SPEAKER_06: 3:55

You're the whole car. You're the whole focus.

SPEAKER_02: 3:58

And a great car, the best car.

SPEAKER_06: 4:00

Yeah. What kind of car? Well, I was gonna say, what kind of car would she be?

SPEAKER_02: 4:05

A Mercedes sports car. I don't know all the numbers and letters, but definitely one of those cars that when it goes by, I catch my breath.

SPEAKER_03: 4:13

Oh gosh. I think, Mayor, I mean, there's so much I could say about our relationship, but I think you have taught me how to show up in relationship with more honesty than I ever have done before. I think you are my safest person to be honest with. And I don't just mean in terms of I mean, I'm I'm not a liar. I don't mean it in that sense. I don't mean in terms of withholding, but also in how we relate to each other, I feel the safest with you that we can I don't want to say call each other out per se, but I think that we do have this dynamic where we're just so radically honest with one another. We really reflect each other back to each other with that much safety and love that we can really say it how we see it. And I really, really trust you when you see something and I think you feel the same way with me. I do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 5:15

I want to be in that relationship. I'm like, how do I get in on this? How do I get in? I want to get in here. This is my moment. I'm saying the same thing, and I'm going, wait, I'm in that relationship.

SPEAKER_06: 5:27

When I was preparing for meeting you, which I mean, you've definitely been so hyped up, and I can't wait. But I was reading some of the articles you wrote, and one of them you shared back, I don't know when it was written, but on salon.com about this is not how you were with women. Right. Always. Right. So even reading that snippet, I know that's just like a tiny glimpse into your life, but the fact that this is the reflection that you're receiving from Jessica and your friendship, and that you'd started off not really relating well to women. And I think that that's magic.

SPEAKER_02: 6:01

Oh my God, this is turning into the best therapy session of my life. I love 70 years of how I've changed. Yeah, that is Melissa, such a great perspective. And it is true. And I would say part of what makes it really growthful is not like honesty has never been my problem. Blurting out whatever, whenever, to whomever has never been a problem. The bigger challenge is how do you love someone and trust someone and support someone and have faith in someone enough that even when Jessica knows there have been things that I wish she could have stopped doing a minute before she stopped doing them. And there are things, there are things I kept doing many minutes after she wished. And the wishing is all about being protective on my part, and I know on your part, Jess, that you think you can see an obstacle coming right past where we are right now, and you want to protect or I want to protect Jess from it. But what's really the challenge is learning to be honest in the moment and also have faith in the person. So the honesty doesn't have to include, you know, you're doing the wrong thing, you're going the wrong way. It can be, I'm going to support you in what you're doing. And sometimes here's another way I might handle that. You know, or do you remember when you handled that that way and it didn't work out that great for you? You should try this other way, maybe. Knowing underneath that we have enough faith in each other, even when it seems somewhat unwarranted on my part, I have to say, that um, you know, Dr. Phil says the best predictor of the future is the past. And I have repeated many, many, many mistakes in Jessica's presence and that you trusted me to to ultimately come out on the right side of things. And that's been my challenge too. Just keep reminding myself, I'm not the boss of you. Things that might not work for me can very well work for you.

SPEAKER_03: 8:10

I think I'll trust you to live out your journey. Like, I don't think that we can bypass the experiences that we need to have for our own learning. Right. And I don't think we can just take advice from someone and skip that. Yeah. As much as I love you and want to just protect you, you're gonna get there when you're ready to get there. And you won't actually get there by me just telling you what to do. It's tempting though.

SPEAKER_06: 8:37

Well, and I think that we're often not able to offer somebody something that we have not been able to give ourselves. Right. So when I'm hearing you, and there's just this unconditional love and trust, and I know it's a journey to give that to ourselves, and it's not always present, but you're able to offer that to yourself.

SPEAKER_02: 8:54

Yeah. That's one of the big things I'd say you've done for me, Jess, is help me have that faith in myself. That's a really good point, Melissa. And Jessica has I've never felt, even when I was horrifying you, that you were which happens all the time.

SPEAKER_03: 9:09

Uh every day. I know.

SPEAKER_02: 9:14

That you ever thought I was getting myself into something I couldn't get out of with something learned.

SPEAKER_06: 9:21

Well, and how beautiful to be able to be your raw, unfiltered, messy self with somebody. Something that's coming through me is the sisterhood wound, which we all have on some level, whether it's come from our moms, our actual sisters, ancestors, or girlfriends, wanted to speak into what's possible in friendship because not everyone has had that experience in their life yet, where they have been able to find somebody, let alone many people, to just love them through their shit, you know, in all forms. And so this just to me feels like possibility for anyone listening that maybe hasn't had that kind of magical friendship yet, but but really desires that.

SPEAKER_03: 10:03

On the surface, this probably makes no sense to anyone. So we come from paper. It's not really, yeah. I'm in my 30s, Meredith is in her early 70s. We come from very different generations, we have a very different disposition and worldview. And yet together, I think what bridges that is we both have this deep curiosity, I think, about each other and about life and about growth. And somehow we just never run out of things to talk about. I know that we talk nonstop, and yet there's still so many things I'm learning about you and excited to learn about you today. I actually want to go back to what Melissa initially brought up around your early relationships with women and how you have grown. And can you just give us a sense of what that was at that time and why do you think it was that way back then?

SPEAKER_02: 11:00

Well, I think the article you're referring to, Melissa, was called Screw the Sisterhood. I'd rather fuck your boyfriend. And that's the one.

SPEAKER_04: 11:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 11:13

And I would say that a lot of it has to do with the times. I am 71 now. I was in my teens, in the 60s. And in those days, the way to get power was off of men, one way or another. Either by standing next to them, by having sex with them, by giving them what they wanted, if perchance it was something other than sex, never found that thing. And so I think it started probably as most things do in my family, where I think I've always been a survivor, a thriver, and I've always looked around me to say, what are the resources here? What are the obstacles here? And in my family, my mother was a typical 50s housewife, full of rage, full of talents that were not being utilized. And the rage came from that as I saw it, that she was not appreciated for anything other than typical housewife skills. But my father, on the other hand, got dressed for work every day. And now I have a gender non-binary partner who smells like my father did when in the 50s. I think it's old spice. I have to check. But anyway, there was a lot of hubbub around my father's comings and goings from the apartment. We had to get my father out of the house every morning, feeling good and ready to go and make the money and be the powerful person. And my mother was the servant who was scurrying around, making sure that he could do what he had to do, which was out in the world, and the door would close behind him. And then we were in this kind of echo chamber of rage. You know, my mother wanted to be the one going out the door. I don't know if she could have even articulated that. And my father was also a slightly nicer person than my mother. So, in terms of where I went for love in the household, it was definitely not toward my mother. And then, you know, as I grew, I won't say up because that definitely didn't happen while I was a teenager, but I just took that dynamic and carried it into the world with me. I ran away from home at 16. It sounds very special when you say it now, but at the time it was like the default mode for an upper middle-class white Jewish kid with yucky parents, like we all had. So when I got into the world, I saw exactly the same thing. I was working for an underground newspaper, an anti-war newspaper, and in my world of hippie dumb and radical dumb, it was exactly the same. The women were making the coffee and turning the crank maybe on the mimeograph machine, which is how we produced our first newspaper, and the men were thinking great thoughts and going off to cover great demonstrations. And I quickly decided that in this new family of mine, which was the Change the World movement, I didn't want to be the woman. I wanted to be the man.

SPEAKER_03: 14:11

And how did that affect how you treated the women around you?

SPEAKER_02: 14:15

Not great. I mean, I would say that maybe three or four years after I ran away from home, or maybe less. The women's movement, very, very early days, second wave women's movement started. And in the kind of straight world, it was the women who were working in offices making the coffee and being the wife to the boss, basically, who started rebelling against that same role that my mother had. And in the alternative movement, the counterculture that I was in, it started pretty much the same way. It was women starting to question why are we making the coffee? Why aren't our names on the masthead? Why aren't we covering the demonstration? And so I at first was totally against that. I was theoretically against this is what I do. I make a brilliant justification for any bullshit that I'm spouting. So it's kind of like when they say someone knows too much just enough to be dangerous. I knew just enough to be dangerous about pretty much everything. So I was like, hey, chick, if you want power, earn it. Like the men did. The men get their power from writing articles and organizing demonstrations and starting organizations and all that stuff and from fucking women. So if you want to get power, you do what they do, just like I am. It's not my fault, and it's not my problem if you're too weak to grab power from the men. Wouldn't you want to be besties with someone like that? No, not particularly.

SPEAKER_06: 15:53

I'm glad I'm really happy to see things have turned around over the years. Yeah. But I mean, that's brave. It's one thing to just be like, why not go do that? That's not an easy thing to do, to challenge an entire societal system to say, okay, well, this is how you get power. I'm gonna do that. You know, that's really, really brave at any stage in life. So, where did that come from?

SPEAKER_02: 16:18

You know, that is really a good question. I right away think about what Jessica was saying about our friendship, which I think you understated a bit how different we are, and that we have almost opposite approaches left around devices, life in general. Let's just say that on my tombstone will be written, Let me speak to a supervisor, and on Jessica's will be written, I know you did the best you can.

SPEAKER_06: 16:50

Let me speak to a supervisor. I feel like you and I are gonna get along, Meredith. I'm a I'm a let me speak to a supervisor. I'm like, oh, you want to tell me no? That means ask again to a different person later. Okay, cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 17:03

So I don't really know. I mean, Jessica and I can look at our families, for example, and see some, you know, you can always make a story about why something is the way it is, but I know this is a genuine 100% truth. When I meditate in the mornings on the odd mornings, I have a little photo of myself when I was, I think, two years old. I keep it there because I'm me. Like I don't look at that picture and think, who was that little girl? Or I have to reach out to the no, that little girl is me. I feel so at one with the person, as long as I can remember being, which is long because I've been tested. I was seriously ill as a little teeny child, like one to two. I was in the hospital regularly for long stretches of time. And I drew a picture for my mother of the ward I was on, they called it wards, and I told her what color coat she was wearing and all that when I was like one or two. So I know that I have memories from those times. I had croup was what was wrong with me. And I remember struggling to breathe. I remember trying to manipulate my circumstances around me. Like I don't remember a time that I wasn't looking around going, how do I get this better for me? And then for some reason, seeing how is the way in which this sucks for me also sucking for other people. Like I got very early, I don't know why, it's not from my parents, that my individual suffering was going to be tied to human suffering on a bigger scale. And I remember, I swear from birth, looking around to see who are the other people I could get together with to make them stop this. Like in the case of hospitalizations, my mother says they wouldn't let her come see me because when she left, I would cry. And their slogan was, if you cry, you'll die because of my illness was congestion in the chest. And I remember looking around, other little babies in their cribs with these plastic covers, they would be giving us treatments and we couldn't breathe air. We had to breathe this special stuff. And seeing the other babies lying in their cribs, I remember, I swear, I remember thinking, if my mother can't come, probably their mother can't come. And how could I get a megaphone and start talking to the other baby? So we rise up on our hands and knees and make them let our mothers come. It's always been those two things. And that's where the courage has come from. What looks like courage. It doesn't always feel like courage, what looks like courage to other people. For me, it feels like survival. I feel a lot more grace as a human being when I realize the ways in which my struggles exist in other people. My mother says that when I was 11 or 12 and hippies became a thing, that she said to my father, We're screwed. It's like sex, loud music, insane clothes, you know, patchouli, hating grown-ups, all the things. Yes. And she always says to me, You were a hippie waiting to happen. You were never gonna stick with us. You were always gonna go there. And I think that's true. And I think what Jessica and I have in common that is the most important bond is we both care most about the same thing, which is humans. It sounds very broad, but the way in which we choose to care about humans, ourselves, and others, and the fact that when we met, we had both gone through, or in Jessica's case, we've going through such a similar and in some ways unique, it seemed, experience. The particularities of each of our breakups, if I'm allowed to talk about yours, were so insanely similar. And I know I had never met anyone else who had had the same experience that I had had. So I think looking for bonds is just an integral part of who I am.

SPEAKER_03: 21:11

I know you to be someone who looks for those bonds, who has this deep, deep need for connection and community and belonging. And I feel like you've been searching for that belonging throughout your life. So I do think it takes courage when you how do I word this? I know that you had a resistance to the beliefs or narratives that you grew up around in your home life. I think it takes a lot of courage as someone who does have that deep need to belong to defy the expectations of your parents. And how do you see why I keep her around? You see?

SPEAKER_06: 21:51

Well, because it can either go one way or the other. You could like really conform, which is the path that I went down for a long time. Is I'll be the good girl. Who do you need me to be? Right. Who do you need me to be to earn your love? And you were like, Nope, I'm out. I'm gonna go be me. I'm gonna go figure out what that is. So yeah, I think it can often it's like one way or the other. Wow.

SPEAKER_02: 22:14

Um, there's a saying I'm an AA and Al-Anon. And there's this saying in Al Anon, the older I get, the better my childhood gets. And that's definitely been true for me. I wouldn't say better childhood, but I would say that I recognize my mother's 94. My father died almost 10 years ago. And I think that in these past 10 years or so, I've come to see things I've inherited or learned from both of my parents that did encourage that. My father, on the negative side, the only reason he could see to have kids was to create mini hymns and to have my brother and me do the things that he wished he could do that he didn't. Maybe that's part of it actually. Now, this this free therapy session is really working for me. Um, my father's story was I was going to be a writer, I was going to be a professional baseball player, I was going to be a professional trumpet player. Those were his three things. But then, and he would look at me because I was the first kid, you know, we had you, and I had to grow up and be a grown-up and make money and da-da-da-da. So I guess in a way I saw the consequence of not following your dreams. He had all his rejected scripts. He used to write plays, and the bottom drawer of his dresser, I swear I remember crawling to it, but maybe just because it was an easier way to go, not because I was nine months old. But I remember crawling to that drawer and opening that bottom drawer and just looking at all these clipped together manuscripts with rejection letters on top of them and the fact that my father would keep them in such an accessible location. I think that helped me. I wish I could tell him that now. It helped me see both why he quit and went the straight route to became an ad man, basically. He was an ad exec on Madison Avenue, and also where his passion was that he still kept it. I think if that was me, I would want to not have it in my view. So I think that very early on, I think my father, because he wanted to be a writer, and my brother was not going to be a writer. So like he put on me the trumpet and the writing, and he put on my brother the baseball playing. And my brother became a star baseball player. I actually played the trumpet in my school orchestra, which was completely not allowed. Girls got to play the flute or the violin, preferably the violin. And my father had given me this beautiful trumpet, and I was really good at it. And he helped me fight the school. So there I was playing the trumpet with all the other girls were screeching their dying cats on the violin. Um, so I think some of it was nurture, and some of it, it is again when I go back to looking at that two-year-old picture of myself, who was I? I feel all of one piece with that little girl. I remember every feeling she felt, every idea she had, every scheme she came up with, and it's the same as now.

SPEAKER_06: 25:16

I'm curious, was there like a conscious transition of this is my father's dream for me, and now this is my dream for me? Because you are a writer, and so I'm assuming it feels like it's your dream at this point.

SPEAKER_02: 25:28

Well, it was very satisfying because of the fact that he did leave it, he did drop it in order to quote unquote be a responsible parent. And I think it was a relief for him, actually. And as I sit here waiting for my 15th book to sell, I'm very aware, like there was an article in the New York Times recently that said, you see writers when they're successful. That's the only time you, population, see writers. And 98% of the time they're in despair. And I thought, how did they get that? Nobody asks me. It's probably 99 and a half, but anyway. It feels low. It's low. Little low. Yes. And I think in a way, I got a twofer with my father because I saw how important it was to him at one time, and I saw him give it up. And I felt his giving it up. I felt his loathing of the work he did and the people he did it with. So I kind of got both the idea that I could do it and the impetus to not give it up for money. I could have followed his other path. I have worked as a marketing person in several companies, and I've actually had great success in large part thanks to my father, who trained me to be a marketer at the dinner table every night. And so when I needed money, I would dip into the socially responsible business pool and I'd go work for Ben and Jerry's, or I'd go work for Odwala Juice, or I'd go work for The Body Shop. And I was really good at it and made buckets of money for these companies that had good intentions, and I hated every minute of it. So it was really clear to me. I probably could have spent 50 years being just totally frustrated, very rich ad woman. Glad I'm not.

SPEAKER_03: 27:22

You left home at 16, along with many other teenagers in America, and you found yourself right in the middle of one of the most revolutionary cultural moments in American history. You were in the counterculture, the late 60s. And this is one of those eras that has always fascinated me in my life. We've bonded over that too. Another reason we're practicing. She loves 60s music. Yeah. So you didn't just live through it. You were part of it. Right. Like she's leafing home by the Beatles, and are you going to San Francisco? These are experiences that you directly lived inside. So you've spoken to this a little bit, but I am curious about what your lived experience of the world was like at that time. Did it feel historical as you were living it? And I think there's some contextual pieces about that period that we in today's day and age don't actually understand things that we take for granted, like the pill coming out and what that meant culturally and what that meant for your life, right?

SPEAKER_02: 28:25

Yeah, that's a really great, great question about do we know, did we know it was historic? I think that I'm I'm comparing it to now. Like I'm very moved and surprised, I have to say, by the changes in the world since George Floyd's death. I think when George Floyd first died, I can only speak for myself, but looking in the middle of COVID, looking out at what was happening in the world as a result of his death made me think this is a historic moment. And I had been super paranoid about COVID. I guess you don't call it paranoia, if it's real. But because of that childhood illness and my age, I felt very vulnerable. And the first thing I did to leave the house, I decided I would rather literally die than not be part of it. And that was the first thing I did. You mean the marks was to go to a demonstration. I saw the demonstration. Yeah, and then I just started going to all of them. I would say, depending on your definition of the word historic, like we had a sense of it's important. We definitely were living to change the world. So it's not like we were going, oh, I feel like raising goats. What did you think you were fighting for at the time? Well, I remember an article that my boyfriend and I wrote for an anthology that was called Dear Mr. President. And it was activists from all over the country. I can't remember who the damn president was at the time. I think it was Nixon. Each chapter was a letter to Nixon saying how we want the world to change. And Paul and I wrote this thing that was a glossary. It was just a list. It was like, You guys use Valium. We use pot. You do nuclear family. We do commune. Paul and I wrote books together. We were on TV quite a few times for our books when they came out. We were like 17, 18, and they always asked the same question. We were on Jack Barr. I don't know if you even know who that is. Kind of like the original night show, whatever you call that. Everybody who interviewed us said, who's going to pick up the garbage in your society? Who's going to pick up the garbage? And we always said everyone picks up their own garbage, which is a teeny bit unrealistic now that I see what kind of garbage I'm producing. But anyway, you know, what we wanted, we were very clear about, which is that there would be freedom, that people would be free, that every convention that existed, marriage, family, how we dressed, if we dressed with clothing at all. Usually the earrings you're wearing, Melissa, would be pretty much the only outfit, that the only garment.

SPEAKER_06: 31:04

Just these solo. Maybe I'll try that soon.

SPEAKER_02: 31:10

Like money, as opposed to trading or plastic wrap around meat in the grocery store, as opposed to we shot deer and ate them. We fished for fish and we ate them. Everything had to be natural. It was just every single aspect of life would be based on a lot of what is now considered environmentalism. But anything that could be done naturally, we wanted to do it that way. And anything that involved using resources that we didn't create or participate in was out. Except for my hair dryer, because I had to pretend to have straight hair to be a good hippie. I had a bonnet hairdryer they had in those days, like in the beauty parlor, and I would sneak off. I didn't have electricity, so I had to sneak off to a friend's house and lock myself in a room and dry my hair with big giant rollers in it so that I could emerge looking like Mary of Peter Paul and Mary, except for dark.

SPEAKER_05: 32:12

I was like straightened taming.

SPEAKER_06: 32:16

Yeah. So ironic in the midst of like the revolution that you were at your core. You're like, but I have to have my hair fitted.

SPEAKER_02: 32:24

And it took a long time. I had a lot of hair. It took like two hours to be under that thing. The main thing I had to worry about was somebody catching me. So there you go.

SPEAKER_03: 32:33

To me, fighting to be exactly who you are seems to be to me what you've really been an activist for. And you've already spoken to this a little bit about that feeling you had when you were like one year old, where you just felt that tie between the personal and the collective. And so much of what makes you you are things that have culturally, politically, socially been labeled at different times as being wrong, or even were dangerous to be. Your personal journey and your personal liberation has been so deeply interwoven with the journey of the country. And as you've liberated yourself, you have liberated others. What's it like for you to see in today's world, to look around you? Do you see progress? Do you feel like we've moved backwards in some ways? Or what do you think is the most significant lasting impact of that era?

SPEAKER_02: 33:28

I mean, I used to go by jamba juice when they first made jamba juice, the chain of juice bars. I used to go in there and just be like, we invented this because we used to make smoothies before, you know, they were called smoothies. And just the whole idea that you would take fruits and combine them to make a meal or something was like, how come we're not getting credit for this? I mean, that's a silly example of what I see, like the whole health food movement and all that stuff. We used to do that in the 60s.

SPEAKER_03: 33:56

It's funny you tease me about it. You're like, I was a vegetarian for 15 years as you stuff your face with steak.

SPEAKER_02: 34:02

I know. And then make fun of me. Totally. You're looking at someone who used to sneak off to blow dry her hair. I mean, come on, you don't expect non-hypocrisy just because I'm a revolutionary, do you? I feel very proud of the war in Vietnam ending because that's a specific thing that I think would have taken years and hundreds of thousands of more lives if not for us. There are a lot of things that when I think of things that we fought for that have been co-opted. And I'm sure that's why I get so mad about Whole Foods, all the ways that, you know, eating naturally has been monetized and corporatized and like groovified by people who are elite and can only afford, you know, how expensive it is and all that. When our whole point was nature's everywhere and everybody can grow their own food. But I feel really proud of feminism. I feel really proud every day when I just am in the world and I see a dad with a little girl, or I see a mom teaching her little girl gymnastics, or it's just anything, it makes me cry. Like I feel so affected by what the limitations were on girls and what made me feel both so special and also so wrong. The main thing was the ways in which I identified with boys and the way I didn't want to be around girls because I didn't want those limitations. And to see women now, or even little girls, having girl pride and knowing that they can love their girl sisters and also be really strong. I think the battle for power between men and women is still very much raging in every sector of society. And I also feel like it's advanced so much. And that's probably the thing I feel the most proud to have participated in. But I think there's so much in the culture that I see every day that I think is positive that I won't take personal credit for it, but I will take collective credit for it. That I think we were so opposed to the nuclear family. I used to wear a button that said one nuclear family can ruin your whole life. And now, like poly when people just exploring what is marriage or what is it that people are looking for when they look for a partner and all those things.

SPEAKER_03: 36:29

I'd like to talk about the nuclear family. Because you just said that that was something that you resisted. It was like, God forbid. And yet there was a certain point in your life where you chose that. And I'm curious, because it's so counter to everything you stood for up to that point in your life. What led that wild communist hippie Meredith to choose that kind of life to settle down?

SPEAKER_02: 36:53

That's a great question. Jessica's referring to a time during which I was legally married to a man and had 2.2 children and two cars and lived at 1, 2, 3, 4, Champagne Lane. But it's interesting that you say what led wild commie Meredith to do that. I did it to be a communist. I did it because at that point in my life, what I felt the most important thing was to reach out to the working class and not have these beliefs that we had be limited to this small group of, at the time, students and student dropouts. It was a youth movement and it was very much an upper middle class white movement. And I came to believe that the revolution couldn't succeed unless workers were in it. So I joined a communist organization and we all went to work in factories. I wish there was a cartoon of it. It would be hilarious. All these kids dropping out of Radcliffe and Yale and Harvard and putting on a hard hat and going to work in a factory to try to reach the working class. I worked on the assembly line in a Ford truck factory near San Jose. They were mostly Latino workers, and the white workers were workers, not upper middle class hippies. And I saw that they were married and that the main thing they had to look forward to in life was their family life. They hated their jobs and they lived for the weekend. We were mimicking the people we were trying to organize. You could really ask yourself, where did you first realize there was something wrong with this plan? And that was the fact that the people with the plan were nothing like the people they were planning for. And so we were trying to look like we were like them. My husband and I were both in that organization. He worked at General Motors, I worked at Ford. And so we got legally married in a total hippie. Like the person who married us was a universal life priest. And we were actually hippies. I always told him I don't believe in monogamy, and I was having love affairs with other people, but we were legally married and we had gold wedding bands, and then we had kids. So we looked more like the people we were trying to brainwash.

SPEAKER_03: 39:00

Brainwash. And then something shifted. What shifted for you?

SPEAKER_02: 39:04

Yeah. I did that for 10 years and it wasn't working, I gotta say. There were no signs of imminent proletarian revolution. I really didn't like my husband, and he really didn't like me. And I had known all my life that I liked girls. I mean, I liked them sexually, even when I didn't like them for a friendship. And when the factory work went away, it literally went away to Mexico. I started just getting odd jobs. I cleaned houses, I did different things like that. And then somehow I I don't remember how, I got a job at a sex toy store in San Francisco. I didn't even know this one. I noticed the whole face. I was living with my husband and Sam was saying, I was taking the train to San Francisco where the lesbians were. I was basically on the hunt at this point. I was like, is there really such a thing as a lesbian? You know, like I had seen the movie The Story of O, which is kind of an artsy porn movie that featured a lot of girl-on-girl action. And when I saw that on the screen in front of me for the first time, I was like crossing my legs so hard next to my husband in the theater. I was like running to the bathroom to get off every two seconds. And then I was like, wow, I'm not turned on by the men screwing women. I'm turned on by the women together. And then I was like, I think that's called lesbian. I gotta find them. So I had to get a job in San Francisco, which I did at a sex toy store. And I took the train, my suburban tract house in my little like shirt waist dress, and I went to work at this sex toy store, and that's where I met lesbians for the first time. And once that happened, it was on. I'd take the train home, and the boss would give me like a cardboard box full of toys because she wanted me to be able to sell them. Oh my gosh. And I didn't know anything about anything, so I would go home. I remember I had this double dildo that was like, in my mind, it was like eight feet long, and it was in this cardboard box with the top of it sticking out, like flapping in the wind.

SPEAKER_05: 41:02

Yeah. With all these men commuters in suits and ties. It's like hitting them in the side of the head. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 41:11

Yeah. And then I'd go home, and my kids were babies, they would take the toys out of the box out anyway. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_03: 41:17

Your life is for sure a movie. It's amazing. There's been so many moments where I'm like, that one can't be true. Like, she has to be embellished in each one. And then I like randomly stumble upon a picture or some kind of like actual proof.

SPEAKER_02: 41:32

Yeah. When you live on the upper east side of New York, you do run into a lot of celebrities, or you live in the lower east side as a hippie. Like I know a lot when you and I watch TV together, something I'll be like, oh, I fucked him, or all the time. I know you always look at me like what? And then yeah, it's just because I believe you. I'm just like, wow.

SPEAKER_03: 41:52

Can you tell us about going into a gay bar for the first time? Oh my God.

SPEAKER_06: 41:57

I really liked reading that article you wrote about that and what happened. Oh, did I write about that? You talked about how you shed your pants. I did.

SPEAKER_02: 42:07

Yes, it was with my friend. We called her Trippy. She was my fellow communard in Taos, New Mexico. And we both left our boyfriends and moved to San Francisco. And we both decided years later that we might be gay. We agreed to meet outside of a women's bar called Amelia's in San Francisco in the mission district. We both dressed up the best we could to look like a lesbian. So we're both had bought like red flannel shirts and really bad jeans. We both had long hair. We put our hair up. What did you think a lesbian looked like? Well, that. Why did you think that? Well, because that's what lesbians looked like in those days. In those days, it was so hard to find each other, like in the world. Denise, my partner now, now they identify as gender non-binary, but at the time they were very butched when they were first trying to come out. And like they would be in an office full of people and looking around, going, Who can I date? You know, who can I kiss? And there was the only way to know was certain signifiers. And one was apparently a Bobby Kennedy haircut, really bad jeans.

SPEAKER_03: 43:13

In terms of like the context of the time, it was not safe, right? Everyone was sort of hidden.

SPEAKER_06: 43:19

You said, like us hippies, these lesbians were uniformed to be recognizable to each other, finding safety in numbers, seeking shelter in a hostile world. Absolutely. And that's what gay bars were for.

SPEAKER_02: 43:31

Yeah. You had to walk into a door and walk into a room. And in theory, you were safe. And that's why I got kicked out of every gay bar in San Francisco at the door. Like I would go to the door, and the bouncer sitting at the door would be like, You don't belong here. Just straight up. You're not going to be comfortable in here. You girls are not going to like what you see in here. Just move on down the road. There's a straight bar right there. If you're looking for men, go over there. But Trippy and I parked our Volkswagen Square back across the street from Amelia's, and we sat there for the longest time trying to get up the courage to go inside. And meanwhile, we're watching these people go in there that were like so nothing like us. And I wanted the women from the story of O, who were profoundly Femi wearing lace push-up bras with their boobs spilling out and wearing tons of makeup and having their hair done. And then I'm looking at these humans going into this bar, and I was like, No, I'm not that. But finally we decide, okay, we did all this, we got the outfits, we're we're going in. And we were about to go in, and I literally pooped in my pants. And luckily it was diarrhea. It ran down my leg, which is lucky because luckily I could just clean myself up. And Trippie was sitting next to me, and she's looking at me, just horrified. It was very obvious in a small car when it just happened. So, anyway, first we cleaned myself up and like still, I'm sure, faintly stinking of poop. And we talked our way in. And the first thing we did, we were gonna walk up to the bar, and I sat down, and I was trying to make myself like when you see a bobcat on a hike, you're supposed to make yourself look really big. I made myself look really big and scary. And the next thing I knew, I hear this voice behind me, hey, like that. I was like, And I had sat myself down at somebody's place. Like there was half a beer and there was a cigarette burning in the ashtray, and she was like, The hell are you doing in my place? And I was like, And we just kind of ran out screaming, and we just fell all over each other, giggling.

SPEAKER_03: 45:37

And that was your foray into lesbianism.

SPEAKER_02: 45:41

That was it.

SPEAKER_03: 45:51

You also had to fight for gay marriage. You also had to fight for your children. Again, it comes back to you having to be an activist to just be who you are. And so many of the things that we take for granted now at the time that you were living them, it was life or death for you.

SPEAKER_02: 46:10

Yes. And I guess when I say things I'm proud of, it's really interesting that so much of what I fought for in the early days had nothing whatsoever to do with me directly. Whether the war in Vietnam was going on or not going on, I felt it very personally. Like I remember watching it on TV and watching some of the things that was the first war, I think, that was ever on TV. And I remember seeing what was happening, and I felt it as if it was happening to me, but it wasn't. And the civil rights movement for black people was the next thing. And then all of a sudden, it seemed like when the youth movement came along, I think that's why it was so big, because that was for me. Like I wanted to live in a different world than my parents' world. And I wanted to be able to smoke pot and have sex with whoever I wanted and all those things. But ever since the youth movement, the things I have fought for have all been well, I still fight for civil rights for other groups besides my several groups that I fit into. But it's really been a change, you know, when I had to start fighting for things that I actually needed for my own life, like gay rights, women's rights. And yes, because I had decided to be a factory worker and I'd married this guy when I left him for a woman. He threatened to take custody of my kids who were two and three at the time. And that was terrifying. It's hard to remember the terror of it now, but I remember looking through the yellow pages under gay, and there was nothing under gay, and then I had to look under lesbian or homosexual for a lawyer to save the custody of my kids. I found a lesbian rights organization in San Francisco, and she said the first thing you have to do is get the case moved to San Francisco because if you have it where you live in San Jose, you'll never see your kids again. Just because I was dating a woman. Yeah. So things got pretty real. And also the first girlfriend I had was, um, I haven't checked in with her lately. I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if she identified as non-binary now, but was mistaken often for a boy and kicked out of women's bathrooms a lot. So I got my first education about it was kind of more okay for me to be like a cute, femme-looking lesbian than it was for her. She suffered horribly, and we were chased down the street many times by teenagers chasing us with baseball bats and stuff, if we held hands. So once I went gay, which happened in the early 80s, from then forward, I think a lot of my activism has been around me too kind of stuff. Experiences that I had. I was raped as a teenager, and it really resonated when that movement started growing. And yeah, it's been much more me-oriented and serving me more directly since the youth movement. Which also serves everyone. Yes. Which also serves everyone. And similarly, also, like I said, when George Floyd died, I definitely was part of that movement. It was really important to me.

SPEAKER_03: 49:23

We bonded through sharing some similar grief coming out of our marriages. And I've watched you go through some incredible learning and growth the last few years and in the time that I've known you. So I'm Your patience is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_02: 49:38

So grateful for that.

SPEAKER_03: 49:40

I'd love to ask you about dating apps in your in your 70s, but in your own time of reflection. What do you think some of the biggest learnings of your single years before you met your new love, Denise? What were some of those learnings that you think have contributed to calling in this very deeply significant relationship that you're now in? I'm curious how this relationship is different.

SPEAKER_02: 50:03

Well, it's funny. This this morning I was saying to Denise that I think without the struggles that I went through in the years between the end of my marriage and meeting Denise, Denise finished the sentence for me and said I wouldn't have made it past the first date. And that's really true because I had a list and everybody had to check all the boxes on that list. And Denise checked virtual, I would say no boxes on that list. Interesting. I disagree completely, actually, but well, I will counter this. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking Denise really values relationship, and that's what makes sense. No, that's not what I'm making.

SPEAKER_03: 50:46

I had you write a different list because I called you out on your list. Well, you did. That is so true. I found your original list the other day.

SPEAKER_02: 50:54

Yeah. Checks all those boxes. So that's true. That's really a good point.

SPEAKER_06: 50:58

What was the difference between the list?

SPEAKER_02: 51:01

My list was like FEMI, an artist as a career, alternative, and like a past like mine, rich, preferably rich, not so rich that they'd be obnoxious, but just rich enough to buy me things. I can't even remember all every single thing on the list. Pretty much like there was not on my list what I now know makes something work for me.

SPEAKER_03: 51:25

My impression of the two different lists is that the first list was superficial things, and it was ideas that you had in your head about how things should be and should look and what should make you happy versus actually coming from this authentic place of if I really get quiet with myself and what I'm actually longing for in relationship, how do I want to be met? And when you wrote your new list, it was about that. It was about how you wanted to be seen and held and loved and the kind of connection you wanted. And then Denise came in and I think blew your mind in that way.

SPEAKER_06: 52:01

Yeah. And I want to jump in because I think this is what we do, right? In life. This is what it should look like. These are the superficial things that I've been told will make me happy, or even based on experience, right? Well, this other thing didn't make me happy. So this probably will. And even the way in which you spoke about it, if I just get still, get quiet, turn in, like really get real about it. What is my list? And maybe there's some crossover, and maybe those things do provide joy, but I think this is so often what we see is like these things should bring me joy, but yet they don't.

SPEAKER_02: 52:39

They don't. Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this. I think there's even a space beyond the going quiet and thinking, what do I really want? which is relinquishing control over what is coming to me and actually wanting that. Like wanting what I have is a very different mindset from how can I manipulate the world so it gives me what I want? I am every single day in awe and stunned. I'll be with Denise and I'll suddenly realize how I feel being with them in the moment. And I'll just look at Denise and know what I thought I was looking for and what I thought would make me happy. And I'm just like, how is this what we have making me happy? And it's a hundred percent about the quality of the relationship. And I could only have that kind of relationship with a person like Denise, who is purely authentic. And by definition, I was looking for people based on qualities that had nothing to do with authenticity. Yeah. And just who I'm able to be because I'm not fooling or tricking or trying to imitate a different kind of person in my relationship. I'm actually being me and I'm valued for me. It sounds really corny, not a bad thing. But it's also really true.

SPEAKER_06: 53:57

But also that it took you, how old were you when you met 70? I mean, you were revolutionizing everything you touched for your entire life, fighting to be you, fighting to be free, and yet fighting for authenticity. Yeah fighting for authenticity. But it's so just the journey of it, right? That it's not like you arrive at this place, well, I'm authentic now in my life. The journey of authenticity, which is why we're doing this podcast, that even at 70, the partner that you wanted to call in, still there were these parts that were keeping you in a box or keeping you from being loved for who you are. And now you found somebody that can meet you there and is a reflection of probably 70 years of work that you did to fight for this for you. Good point. I love that. Jess is about to fly out of her seat through the ceiling of her apartment.

SPEAKER_05: 54:48

It's like, she's like, I love that. I love when I see you. Like, I gotta talk.

SPEAKER_06: 54:54

Like, you're just like her arms are all up. I was like, oh, she's got something brewing over there. Well, my brain to connection.

SPEAKER_03: 55:02

And I'm like, don't forget my thoughts. Uh I'm sure we've talked about this mirror, but you healed a very important relationship before Denise showed up. You healed a relationship with your mother. And you talked at the beginning of this about how difficult that relationship was when you were young. And over the pandemic, I watched you and your mom do a lot of healing and communicate love for each other for the first time. And I think a lot of what you were projecting onto your ideal partner were judgments that you inherited, like particular ideas of how things should look that were not yours to begin with. And in healing that relationship, you were actually able to let those things go and feel safer to show up as you. My gosh. Yeah. And safer to love who you're really meant to love.

SPEAKER_06: 55:55

I'm so glad you jumped through the screen for that one. That is really that's really worthy of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 56:01

Yes, it is. Oh my gosh. Yes. And just to be real, it's not gone. My mother's voice is still inside me, and I'm still fighting to love myself without the judgment that I imagine always coming in from my mother, my brother. So just to say, it's a lifelong struggle. And I'm really glad you brought it up.

SPEAKER_06: 56:20

Well, and it's a beautiful thing to always be looking at whose thought is this, whose belief is this, whose judgment is this? Does it really belong to me? And we're always kind of running that audit behind the scenes, right? Is this belong to me or does it not? Or did it belong to a previous version of me and it no longer belongs to me? And I think it's such a beautiful thing to be fluid in that and let yourself grow and change and evolve and question those things. And I'm so happy that you got to repair that relationship. Imagine who we all could be if we could repair those relationships with our nuclear families.

SPEAKER_03: 56:56

Yeah. Mayor, I just want to reflect that I know that you might call it hypocrisy, but I actually see it more like duality. We've talked on this podcast about holding two truths at the same time. And there's been one aspect of you going out and fighting to break convention and fighting for freedom and fighting so that we can all live in authenticity. And then another part of you that I know has lived alongside a lot of judgment and a lot of ideas of how the world should look and should be, which is its own kind of cage, right? And that's just the human condition is that we have these belief systems that we're born into that we're raised with. It takes a long time to unravel those things. But as you've been unraveling them, I think you've been doing so much work for the world. And I'm really grateful for the freedoms that we have that you paved the way for us to have. So thank you for being such a hero. I love you so much. Can we please do this again and have a part two? Because I have so many more questions. We've only scratched the surface.

SPEAKER_06: 58:03

So I'd love to have you back. I'm down. Yeah, thank you so much. I have these conversations with women that are so frustrated about where we are today and why we're not further along. And I'm like, no, the women that did this for us are alive. They're still here. You know, it's not that far. It's not like it's been hundreds of years. You're here, you're only 70. And to think like how, oh, I have goosebumps that we've come so far in your lifetime to be able to have the privileges that we have. And so I always like to remember that perspective of we're so lucky in the time we live in and to have the privileges that we have, even though the work isn't done, we're so lucky.

SPEAKER_02: 58:44

Also, I do think it's important to talk to women my age, especially people who are involved in that fight, because then it gives you a blueprint too for what you're doing now, which is the same work. I think that the whole movement toward people being free that certainly Jessica is doing with her work and also with this podcast, is the form that it's taking now, that therapy is becoming something for the masses, not just the elite and self-awareness and not blaming, but looking inside instead of outside. All those things, 12-step programs are all things that are carrying on that movement for how do you not participate in a war? Is first love yourself, and that's what's happening. So I thank you both for carrying the torch.

SPEAKER_06: 59:36

It's a perfect ending, it's a perfect ending.

SPEAKER_03: 59:38

I love you so much.

SPEAKER_02: 59:41

I love you so much, Melissa. I'm so happy to get to know you, and I totally see what Jessica sees and why that's her great team. Really wonderful.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:01

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