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,