Amena Brown Owen:
Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode of HER With Amena Brown. And let me tell you, hey, this is actually a crossover episode. So I'm going to introduce to you a fellow podcaster who is here with me. So those of you that are listening on her feed, you are listening to an episode of Ground Control Parenting as well. So we're going to be here having a wonderful experience. I want to welcome fellow Seneca Women Podcast Network podcaster, host of Ground Control Parenting, a podcast about the joy and the job of raising black children, Carol Sutton Lewis.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Hi, thank you so much. As you know, I've been waiting to do this for a while. I'm really excited to be here and I'm excited about this crossover. This is very cool. So I'm really excited about us doing this.
Amena Brown Owen:
So let me ask you, this was not in my list of questions, but I'm going to ask you so that our listeners can have this setting. I'm always telling my listeners that we are in a living room. When you imagine your listeners, your community around Ground Control Parenting, what's the space in the home where you imagine you are with them?
Carol Sutton Lewis:
That is such a good question. I would say it's probably the space where I am now, which is, we call it our family room or our sitting room. It's where my family gathers and when friends come, they gather. It's not quite the living room, it's the formality of a living room. It's like where we all sprawl and play games and watch TV. So I am so dedicated to the concept of having conversations. For me, it's a lot of parenting conversations, but conversations in areas where you can feel relaxed and be yourself. And so this is a room that I think that happens in. I like that question. I'm going to have to think about that when I'm talking to people.
Amena Brown Owen:
Right. Right. I love that. I love that informal living room. Many of us, especially those of us who are Black and grew up in our Black families, we remember the family members that had the formal living room where you were not allowed to cross that threshold. We're talking about a living room you could take your shoes off and hang out. So I love that. Welcome to all of the Ground Control Parenting listeners and community who are here and welcome to my HER With Amena Brown listeners as well. I'm excited for us to talk a little bit today, Carol.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Same here. And I just have to say to follow up on the living room, true confession. We had that formal living room where literally there was plastic on the couch until the company came. I mean I had a friend that used to joke that they had a velvet rope.
Amena Brown Owen:
Yes, that's it.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Because you could not just go into that living room, you were only special occasions and God forbid anybody see it with a plastic on. When company comes, you rip that plastic off And then...
Amena Brown Owen:
My dad and my stepmother had a living room like that and we were only allowed to go in it for family pictures. That was the place where we took family pictures. That was our one time where we got to sit down actually on the couch itself. Otherwise, I was only in there to clean it up. And I was like, "Why am I in here cleaning up a room, I can't even sit in here?"
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Okay. When this comes out, I'm going to put up on Instagram a picture of my family sitting in the living room with a family picture because that's exactly, exactly what we did.
Amena Brown Owen:
For sure. I got to find mine too, Carol. I'm going to work on mine too. Well, part of how Carol and I met is that we are both podcasters under the Seneca Women Podcast Network and it was just wonderful to get a chance to talk with you and hear a bit more about your podcast journey leading up to being on the network because we both had podcast journeys prior to coming onto the network and now experiencing how we sort of change a little of maybe the format and things of what we're doing, but not who we're talking to and not why we started our podcast in the first place. But before I get to that, you have told us that you would imagine you are in your family room with your listeners. I want to know what is the snack? If the people were there in your home, is there a snack that you would offer? Is there a favorite dish that when people come to just hang out, that's a dish they know they're going to have at your house?
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So I will answer that. I love to have people over. I love to be a hostess. I don't get to do it as much as I like. I love the presentation, not the biggest cook in the world, but I love the presentation. So snack presentation is high on my list, put it out on the plates. And there's usually a hybrid because I tend to eat fairly specifically healthfully, if you will. I mean, I'm not a big potato chip fan, I'm not a big Doritos fan.
However, because a good hostess has to have stuff for everybody, so I will have my almonds and my guac because guac is really healthy. Guacamole and chips. I'll have some cheese and crackers, even if I'm not doing dairy, some days I do, some days I don't. If I'm not, whatever. I'll have the cheese and crackers, I'll have the guacamole. And then I'll have some kind of chip, some kind of interesting chip, sort of some flavorful chip and let people sort of have at whatever they want. I like giving an array of snacks. I like making people feel like there's bounty, there's good opportunity to snack if you want it. So there are a lot of them, whatever they are.
Amena Brown Owen:
I like a bounty of snacks. I'm really glad you brought that word here for us because if I'm going to have a bounty of something, it is snacks that I want to have a bounty of. I appreciate what you said about an interesting, a unique cracker or unique chip. 'Cause when you come across a little rosemary olive oil cracker, you're like, and this is not just a saltine, I'm supposed to layer my Colby cheese on top of this. I appreciate the choices there, Carol. This is good work today. Okay, talk to me about your podcast. I love an origin story, Carol, because I think it's helpful when people are listening. Sometimes we don't know that ideas are germinating with us. We don't realize it. And so I think it's always good for people to know the origin story because they might realize, oh, I have an idea in me. So what was the original moment that made you go, I need to take this to a microphone?
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Okay, so I'll give you just a teeny bit. I tend to tell a long story. I will try to tell a short story.
Amena Brown Owen:
Okay.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I'll give you a teeny bit about the origin of Ground Control Parenting, the concept, and then I will fast forward to Ground Control Parenting, the podcast.
Amena Brown Owen:
Got it.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So I am a lawyer by training. I have three children who are now grown. And much to my surprise, when I started having children, I was actually more interested in spending more time with them than I thought. That sounds weird, but I really enjoyed, I mean I knew I would like having them around, but I really enjoyed spending time with them and watching how they developed and doing all I could to support that. And just a quick aside, I had a girl first and then two boys. I grew up with two older brothers, one of whom I literally grew up with and the other one was my half-brother, who is much older.
But to make a very long story short, I loved my brother who was closest in age to me dearly. But I could see from an early age that he was definitely dancing to a somewhat different drummer than certainly my parents wanted. And so I watched the dynamic of a very loving family. My parents were great and they loved us both dearly, but they had some trouble understanding my brother. He wanted to be an artist and we were a family of educators and my father was a lawyer. I mean there was a different headset and for Black people, families in that era, 'cause he is older than I, it was tough for my family, my father in particular, to make that make sense for himself.
So watching my parents with my brother and watching there be a little struggle along the way, fast forward to when I had children and I had a boy, I thought, Ooh, I don't really have a great role model for boys and I'm having this Black boy and now in America I need to really focus on how to do this a little differently.
And as I said, I'm a lawyer, I went to school for a long time, what do I do when I don't know? I do research. So I dove into sort of boys and how boys work. And so I started when my first son was born, really amassing information and going to parent groups, not with an anxiety about it, but more like, let me know what I don't know and let me think about how I should think about this. And over the course of the years with my kids, I tended to keep researching and thinking about parenting in ways like, I don't know the answers, but I know how to find some answers. And I was in parent groups that I found really helpful.
Over time as my children grew older, I had all this information that I'd amassed and wanted to help out other parents because, by good fortune, I had the time and the energy to do this. And so many of my friends who were killing themselves at work and were sort of unable to focus, I just wanted to give them shortcuts here, read this book or put your kid in this class, whatever. That's hence Ground Control Parenting, the blog, was born because it was a combination of at that point really wanting to take a step away from active parenting and do something. I mean work, I struggled when my kids were growing with the fervent desire to spend time with them, but at the same time, the knowledge that I was not using all of my skillsets. I mean I was supposed to be doing something more. I don't mean to belittle parenting, but I was supposed to be doing something in addition to parenting. So I said, let me create this blog and let me put out these resources.
I did that for a while, for several years. And I said, okay, now it's time to write a book because I have written a lot. I've interviewed people for the blog and I want to write a book. And so I put together a book proposal with an agent and we sent it out. And the word came back, "Okay, this sounds good, but who is this woman and why would anybody want to listen to her about parenting?" So I decided I had to take a different approach because my blog certainly had an audience, but it wasn't a vast audience and I had not been as public as I could be. So I started teaching, I taught parenting classes at a local college in their continuing education. And that was great.
Two things happened. One, my mom was a teacher and I understood the value of lesson plans. So I was doing extensive lesson planning and it was fun and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. But it took a lot of time and effort to do a lesson plan. And I'd have, I don't know, 25 people in the classroom. And so at the end of one cycle I thought, I'm working really hard to reach a relatively small group of people. And then the pandemic hit. So it was kind of a one, two. I couldn't teach anymore.
And I thought, well, "Okay, I'm sitting around." I was in New York City in my apartment, my husband, just the two of us for the entirety of the pandemic. And it's like, let me just try to, and as importantly, a bunch of my friends were sitting around their places with a laptop, I said, let me try to put this out to more people at one time. So a very long winded short story, but the bottom line was I wanted to take the information that I had been able to disperse sort of locally and just see if it would resonate with a larger audience.
Amena Brown Owen:
I love it. I love it. I love that. And I'm hoping that our listeners will be thinking about the things that they have inside of themselves, these ideas, these desires we have. I mean that's definitely a part of how my podcast was born. It was actually in part born out of anger, which can be very inspiring, but it was born out of anger of feeling like women of color are not getting the platforms they need. They're not getting the opportunity to come into spaces and share their stories. And I was frustrated watching other people not do it. And that's what sent me there. Okay. Well let me set this microphone, figure out how to tell a story. I would love to hear your thought why you believe it's important for Black women and for other women of color to podcast, to exist in the podcast space.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
That is a really good question as well. I will start with my own personal experience with podcasting. The experience has been so much richer and deeper than I thought it would be. I came to this mic with, frankly, not a whole lot of podcast appreciation. I mean, I had sort of listened to some, but I was not deep in the world of podcasts. And I came with a mission to reach people with information I thought would be helpful. But what the ability to sit in front of a mic and exchange ideas and broadcast to the world, the empowerment that can create, it is empowering. It reminds you have a voice. And even if five people listen to you and they're all family members and they say to you, I heard what you said and really, it resonated with me, there's such affirmation in the ability to speak your truth, speak your thoughts, and have people connect to it.
And that goes beyond any particular episode. We joked about the number of episodes that we do for this podcast world that we're in and we're grateful to be able to do it, but it's a lot of talking.
Amena Brown Owen:
Sure, sure.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
But just when I feel that I will hear from someone that they listen to one and one that frankly was a while ago and that wasn't top of my mind and they'll remember something about it or more importantly, they'll feel some way or have some experience with it that wasn't what I intended, and that's actually really glorious it.
I want to turn this to you though because you mentioned your podcast being born out of anger, but your work when you're not podcasting is work that I truly admire. You are doing it and the vocation generally, the work of spoken word and the work of poetry. So you had had the opportunity before you came to this mic to sort of stand before people and speak your feelings. What prompted you to add on taking it to the airwaves?
Amena Brown Owen:
Man, and I guess I also want to give a shout-out and a rest in peace to Barbara Walters because as a child I studied Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey as interviewers. I always loved the idea of interviewing people. I just thought that was the most fantastic thing you could do. So really that's sort of how the podcast was born. I was coming into it as a stage person, but I was really not thinking as much about that as I was, oh, this will be me getting to sit down and interview other women of color where women of color get to be the experts we are. We get to be the ones who are sharing the knowledge that we have. We get to be in a role where we are not minimized in any way. That was sort of the space I wanted to make.
And then the rest of the time I was talking and all the things. So it's been interesting, Carol. Now, in this iteration of HER With Amena Brown, I do some solo episodes and probably my listeners who listened to those solos episodes, they are experiencing a bit more of what I'm like on a stage. Because on a stage it is like if spoken word and a one woman show and standup comedy came together in a storm, in a tornado, that's what's happening when I'm on stage. So people now in this iteration of the podcast are getting to hear a little bit of the ignorant things I say on stage.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So how different is it for you to prep to walk on a stage than it is to prepare to sit down at a mic? I mean, in the stances where you're not interviewing someone, obviously if you're talking to someone you know what you're going to ask, but when you're doing solo, is it a different prep? Is it a different experience? There's no clapping, no audience.
Amena Brown Owen:
That's the thing I was going to say. I actually think the prep is the same, Carol. But not having the feedback is very strange. Talking to the camera, I mean, listen to me. Well, yeah, sometimes talking to the camera, but talking to the mic and not having the gasp that you might hear in the audience or hearing someone, they laughed louder than they meant to. They didn't realize it was going to hit them that funny. All those things that happen to you on stage that let you know like, oh, that's working. People identify with that. It is very strange podcasting and not having that and a podcast episode going out and sometimes you hear nothing. People listen to it, they don't really say anything. Sometimes I get a random DM, "Hey, this week's podcast reminded me of something I experienced growing up." And I'm like, "Yay, somebody's out there."
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah. That's funny. I appreciate that because from what I understand, I'm not a stage performer. I mean, I'll stand up and talk to people, but I imagine that the feedback, the energy of the crowd, I mean you instantly know if something is landing correctly or and particularly in comedy, if it hits, if it doesn't hit, yeah, it's a different... But it's probably good exercise for you to be able to do them both.
Amena Brown Owen:
Yeah. I think so. I'm curious to see how it will be now returning to stage. I mean, I've had a few events since things have kind of opened up in the pandemic, but I haven't had that full show feeling where I just went and did a show for an hour. So I'm kind of curious to see, now having spent most of the pandemic talking to a microphone and no one was there except my husband, who's also my producer. So he might be there. That's it though. To now see how is that going to affect what I'm doing when I get on stage. I hope it means some things are sharper that way as a storyteller.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So I have to follow that up with a question I'm dying to ask. So a little bit of background, I went to music and art high school, which is now performing arts, the Fame school. It wasn't when I was there, but filled with people who were very talented. I was a musician but not very talented. So I mean, I would perform when I had to, but clear to me in high school was that there were people that were really good and eager to get on stage and then there were the rest of us. So what I always want to know in terms of someone who performs, are you, because I always think of sort of stage fright and what if you forget stuff, particularly when you're playing an instrument, what happens? Walk me through your walking out. Are you energized? Do you go into some zone where you know what you're going to say next and what happens, God forbid, if you forget a line?
Amena Brown Owen:
I forget all the time.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I forget all the time.
Amena Brown Owen:
I do get in a bit of a focused zone, I would say, before I go on stage. And I'm always nervous every time. It doesn't matter how small or how large the crowd, I am nervous every time. I have a rule where I typically don't eat two hours or less before an event. I have not thrown up on stage in over 20 years of performing professionally. And I intend to keep my stat. So I do not eat. So that way, there's nothing there. If we feel nervous, we don't have to worry about those mistakes. And when I was starting, there wasn't YouTube, there wasn't Instagram where people would be like, "Poet throws up on stage" and now you're viral for that. That wasn't a thing. People might be like, "Somebody threw up at this show I was at in Random Town where a hundred people were." Only those hundred people know you threw up instead of a thousand people or a million people knowing that about you.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
And then they don't have to see it over and over like boomerang, on repeat.
Amena Brown Owen:
That's it.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Like the memes come out. Yeah, no, I get it.
Amena Brown Owen:
That's it. I don't want that for myself. So I typically do get really nervous. I get really quiet. I don't like for there to be a lot of noise and just things that would make me feel anxiety. I always think a lot about my great-grandmother and my grandmother. I think a lot about the women in my bloodline and how I am able to do what I'm doing because of them. In a lot of ways, in a lot of layers of ways, I'm able to do what I do because of them. I think about the circumstances under which they continue to keep their voice and that I owe it to them to be who I am boldly and confidently when I get on stage. And there's something about that kind of thought, if you're watching me on the side of stage and I close my eyes, I'm typically thinking about that.
And then they say your name and it's like once I get up there and get to the mic, I use living room all the time because I feel like I'm in a living room with those people. That's how it feels to me. It's like I immediately feel like, what have y'all been doing? Why are purses like this? Who invented a bra? It's like all the random thoughts. It's just us having a conversation instead of it being two people, it's however many people are there. And I feel totally comfortable as soon as I get there.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Oh man, that's great. I can relate a little bit. Long ago I was a litigator and the only good thing, I didn't stay a litigator for long, but the only thing that stayed with me that I still use is that before I walked into the courtroom, if I had to make any appearance before a judge, the morning right before I would get a gurgling in my stomach, I would really feel... I would feel it. I would feel the physical nerves. And although that was not particularly comfortable, it reminded me that something was going to happen and all my senses need to be sharp. And now when I'm interviewing, when I'm about to sit down for the podcast, if I don't feel a little bit of that, I'm thinking, okay, something's not right. I need to be sharper because you want a little bit of physiological reminder that you're about to do something, you need to be ready for it. So I get it that a little bit of nerves.
I regularly have a psychiatrist who visits the podcast, an expert in child stress, and he talks about how stress is good. It motivates you, it helps you stay clear focused. The bad part about stress is when you get an overload. So you're not trying to remain stress free, you're just trying to manage your stress. So I think we're both talking about an instance where stress management is helpful.
Amena Brown Owen:
For sure, for sure.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So I want to actually circle back with a quick parenting kind of question because I mentioned that my brother was an artist and it was tough for my parents who were educators and lawyers, just who had had a different track in life to sort of grasp. I mean, they were supportive. He went to art school, but they were kind of waiting for him to do something else. So you grew up and at some point, you'll tell me when, but at some point you knew you wanted to be an artist. So when did that happen and how did your family react?
Amena Brown Owen:
That's interesting. That's interesting to think about. It's almost like if I really think about it, Carol, I don't know if I knew artist at first. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. And I do believe writers are artists. I just don't know if as a child I had made that connection. I would've thought Artists are people who do visual arts or people who perform, they play music, they sing, they dance, those things. And honestly, I grew up in my mother's house. It was just a house full of books. She had and still does to this day, she just had a wonderful library. I just remember as a child, peering at her books, once I could read and trying to figure out who is this, who is Toni Morrison? Who is James Baldwin. And so I think in a way, because my mom was such an avid reader and she had such a wonderful library, she really encouraged in me this sense of reading and enjoying a story well told.
And then I read all these books as a child and just thought, what is the job you do where you put your words in this? Because I would like to be that. I would like to find a way to do that. So I knew very early on it was writer for me. But I truthfully think that I wanted to be a novelist. When I thought about writer, that's what I thought. Then I got into Nikki Giovanni and my mom was one of those people who wants to go to a bookstore, whatever city you're visiting or whatever area of town, must go in the bookstore. This is a old school thing to say now, but must go in a card shop when it was popular for there to be these greeting card shops. And of course inevitably the greeting card shop also had little gift books and different things related to words.
I mean, my mom just eats this up, takes her two daughters in all of these places, which all of that I think just gave me this sense of the importance of words and wanting to write. So by the time I started reading poetry, that was the first thing I probably started writing on my own in my little notebooks and things. And my mom also was a big proponent of journaling. She encouraged us as her daughters to journal because she would say, that's your one place in this world where you're unedited. It's not for anyone. No one's grading it. It's not for class. It's a place for you to put your thoughts, put your feelings. So I journaled a lot. But then by the time I got a notebook where I was like, here's my poetry notebook.
Now I know that this is not a thing that parents do today what I'm about to say, my mom did. But my mom told us that there was no such thing as privacy in her house. And I know that is not how the people parent today, but that's what she said to us back then. "There's no privacy in my house. If I find a notebook, I'm reading it. If I find a little note you wrote in class, I'm reading it because I need to know what you're doing, what you're up to."
So she was true to her word. She read one of my notebooks and she said, "This is actually really beautiful poetry." She was like, "Why don't you share this other places?" I mean, as your mother would say, she's obviously this is a brilliant person I have birthed. Why would you not take this to the New York Times at 12 years old or whatever. And because she was my mom, I was like, you're not a respectable critic of my work. You're not the voice for me to know, is this actually going well? So I just didn't believe in it. And she's truly the reason that I am even performing to this day because I don't think without her pushing me that I would've made the connection that that's a thing I could do.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Wow, that is such a great story. Lots of great parenting stuff in there, that I just have to step back and point out, first of all, the library, I mean parents everywhere need to understand that the more books you have around, the more positively you can influence your children to read.
Amena Brown Owen:
For sure, for sure.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I mean, definitely, I grew up with a lot of books and God knows my husband is the world's most avid reader. So our shelves, I mean, see behind me, our shelves are lined with books. So it's lovely to hear your vantage point of being around all those books and having that experience, how it encourages you to read. And then secondly, this is such a great story because more often than not, you hear the story, it's like mine and my brothers where the parents didn't understand and they were like, "That's interesting, but now what are you going to do?" I mean, your mom was like, hey, this is something that you should be doing. That that is amazing.
And just finally about the no privacy. It's so funny, I remember that vividly that, and I tried to institute that with my children early days when Facebook was a thing, when my kids were growing up, that was the thing. The first thing was Facebook. And my rule was, you can only have a Facebook page if I am your friend, if you friend me, you have to friend me. So because like your mom, I just didn't want there to be this whole other world that, and I guess for me the difference was maybe they could have their own little worlds in their books that they kept in their room, but on Facebook they were creating this over the world that a bunch of other people were looking at. So I can appreciate that feeling. I'm impressed that she found stuff and read it. God, I mean, I definitely had that desire. And yes, I know it's not what you're supposed to do with your children. However...
Amena Brown Owen:
There was a time parents did and sometimes it worked out. There were a lot of times didn't. This is one case with my mom that her reading those things totally worked out.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Either that or you became a really good hider of things.
Amena Brown Owen:
Right. And she knows me. It's like I have a lot of brain capacity for other things. Hiding is not one of them. I have been telling on myself since I was five or six years old. Inadvertently just tell on myself. So she knew the vibes. She knew what I was going on there.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
That's so funny. Just one other thing occurs to me. Your mom encouraged you to journal, which I think is really great. I had the opposite experience, but it didn't dim my interest. I was an English major and I loved to write.
Amena Brown Owen:
Me too, me too.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Oh yeah. I didn't have writing aspirations per se, but it was a pipe dream to write a book. I mean, as I said, I tried once already and my mother, she too was an English major, she was a reading teacher. She was just all about the books. But she was a very, very private person, very introverted, had an extroverted daughter, but she was a very introverted person. And she used to say to me, "Don't ever write anything down that you wouldn't want to read on the front page of the New York Times."
Amena Brown Owen:
Wow.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah. And I remember that like it was yesterday. I mean, she was a very private person and that was evidence of it. She didn't want me to write something down and have somebody read it that I didn't want to read it. So I guess you could take that to one way would be just to obey. But for me, it gave me some insight that there would be an issue if I wrote something down that was problematic, but it didn't stop me from wanting to write or write things down. And as I grew older and I kind of understood the... It's funny when you get to a point and you realize your parents are actually people, and that their guidance comes from a place, comes from their very specific place and you can respect it, but you just realize it's not sort of all knowing, all being, it's sort of knowing some, but from a very different, very specific perspective.
As I got older and I started to, I don't journal, but I definitely have lots of notebooks where I started to write my thoughts, I have to say, as freeing as that is, in the back of my mind, I can still, I mean, my mom is as long gone now unfortunately, but I'm either writing thinking, "Oof, ma, you wouldn't like this."
Amena Brown Owen:
Right.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
And I'm also thinking, okay, I need to put this away somewhere safely so the New York Times doesn't get it.
Amena Brown Owen:
Right. That part. I mean, I'm not going to lie about it. My younger sister, we are almost 11 years apart, and I have definitely given her some very specific instructions because I imagine that she may be here after I'm gone. So I've told her, "When I go, you get in that house for those people and I'm going to put my journals in a place and you get that stuff out of my house. I don't want anybody posthumously putting out some stuff that I didn't mean to be put out." So that's our little directive we have as sisters. It's a certain box. Whenever I move to a different house, I always take her in a closet and say, "This box right here, when I'm gone, you come in here first and get it. I don't want those people in here." No. Nope.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Okay. But what she's supposed to do with it? She has to keep it. She has to hand it down. I mean, it's got to live you. Does it get buried with you? I mean, what happens to the box?
Amena Brown Owen:
There've been different instructions for different times. There was a time that I was like, "You going to burn everything that's in here." Now, I'm like, I don't know. Maybe if I had children, maybe I'd want them to have it. But then I always think about one of my favorite films, Bridges of Madison County with Meryl Streep and after she passed, the kids were going through all her stuff and realized she had an affair with this National Geographic photographer. And I'm like, and now they're freaked out because they're like, oh my gosh, my mom had a sex life. And I'm like, what if this lady didn't want you in that? She didn't want you to be in it? She did that for herself.
So I feel like there's still, Carol, maybe there's two boxes. I feel like there's some boxes of things that I'm like herein, if I had a child or a niece or a nephew or a mentee, here's a box that I would want you to have access to. But there are some things, Carol, that are not for the people. They're not. And I think the burn instructions will still be true for that box.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
So I think that all of our listeners, everyone across our two podcasts need to think seriously about having two boxes. Because there is definitely a world where the things that you muse about, the things that you think are important, the things that you think could be helpful need to be kept. I mean, both my parents are gone and when my mom passed away, I had all her stuff and my father's stuff, which she had kept. And I was randomly throwing things out until I realized this was my father's writing. And it was really important to me suddenly to keep it because I wanted to see his words on a page. And there's something about just understanding what people were thinking. So that's really important. There's stuff that needs to be preserved.
And then there's the stuff where it felt really good to write it down. It was really important for you to have it to go back to. But yeah, it needs to be... And I mean there should definitely be two boxes because you should definitely have that second box. It should exist. It just needs to self-destruct.
Amena Brown Owen:
Yeah, that's what I want, Carol. A self destruct. There's certain people I don't want reading that. I don't want anybody to be like, "Wow, this is salacious. Let's put a book out." No, no. I don't know how it works in the afterlife, but don't make me come back and tell you, don't do that. Don't make me do that is what I'm saying. No.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah. And I mean, I'm sounding old when I say this, but all this cancel culture now, sort of like, God forbid.
Amena Brown Owen:
I'm like, I don't know what I said.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
And you go out in this sort of blaze of story. Oh, she was so great. She did this and that. And then they find some stuff you wrote when you were 12. Well, I wrote when I was 12 and they're like, X.
Amena Brown Owen:
Find that one journal and that's it. Now your descendants can't get no royalties off of anything. Goodnight. Nope. No. Absolutely not.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Okay. There's a business here, the self-destructing journal keeping box.
Amena Brown Owen:
That's it. That's what we need. I thank you for bringing that up, Carol. Listeners, we know you're out there. Please let us know that you have this because, it's like we need a safe that you could tell it or somebody could press a button or you give somebody the code. They take that thing out there somewhere and everything just incinerates inside. That's what we need.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Exactly, exactly. Okay, good. Well, imagine in this short space of time together, we have created a business model, a business opportunity.
Amena Brown Owen:
That's it. Look at us, Carol. We are solving the world's problems. Okay.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
We are. We absolutely are. Great minds thinking together. It's a beautiful thing. Okay. I have one more series of questions for you because my head is always in the parenting mode, but I want to talk about, I mean, you mentioned not having kids. There's a world out there in parenting that I haven't yet addressed on my podcast. And this is a great opportunity to start. And that is my fervent belief in the world that people who help raise up kids but didn't give birth to them play in the role of kids.
Amena Brown Owen:
Sure, sure.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Certainly, grandmothers of course, but aunties, especially play aunties, I mean, your chosen family that helps you and godmothers and friends and people that are just around you, there can be such a special relationship. And so I want to ask you first, when you were growing up, did you have any kind of relationship with say your mom's friends or with play aunties? And then, do you provide that for anybody?
Amena Brown Owen:
One of the things I really love about now as a grown woman, looking back at how my mom raised me, is my mom had such rich relationships with other women, most of them being other Black women. So there was this moment where her friends would come over and I was one of those little kids that loved to eat all the little veggies, all the little broccoli florets and the little baby carrots and all the little cauliflower thing. And so they would sit there and eat little veggies with me, but at a certain time at night I knew I had to go to bed so that they could stay up and talk. And as a little girl, I just remember fervently feeling in my bed, I am one day going to be grown so that I can stay up with my girlfriends and do whatever they're doing. I don't know what they're doing, but I want to do that. I want to be a part of it, but I'm too young.
So there's just so much reverence I have for that because in general, she was modeling for me how to be in community with other women and how important it would be in so many phases of life to have these women that you could stay up late talking to them or come by the house at whatever time and chat with them. So I think that's a big model there that I look back on now and feel really grateful. And I mean, I remember one of my mom's friends as the one who taught me how to do my makeup for the first time because when you get to that 12, 13, for me that was like a girl is very fascinated. A girl wants to know about lipstick, a girl wants to know what should she do, what should she not do?
And her friend Lisa, she sold BeautiControl, which I guess, maybe BeautiControl still exists, but it was kind of like an Avon, Mary Kay kind of model. And so she did the whole thing, taught me how to wash my face, how to moisturize, the toner. She came over and did what you would go to the makeup counter in the department store, she came to our house and did that for me and got to show me how to do an appropriate look for my age at that point. And that was so helpful to me because the women in my family, we were coming from a church background, like a Pentecostal Holiness background where women weren't supposed to wear makeup. So my mom was actually rebellious to that by wearing the bright lipstick that she wore. But I didn't grow up seeing my grandma use mascara and things like that. So that was wonderful to have another woman around that could say, "Oh, I see this is a thing that you're interested in. Let me show you how to do this the right way before you get some red lipstick and just do things-"
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Mark up your face.
Amena Brown Owen:
On your face. Let's try to figure out what we're doing. So that's one strong memory I can think of. But my mom had a lot of wonderful women friends in her life. We had a wonderful church community too. My mom was a single mom raising my sister and I. So we had a lot of people around us that were father figures at points, were mentors at points, were showing us how to do various things. My youth pastor taught me how to drive. There were just all these... My mom tried. There was just a lot of, "Mena." A lot of yelling like that. And she was like, "Somebody else got to do this. This is somebody else's job. It's not me. I can't be the person."
So that was really wonderful to think of too, to see this wonderful church community that I grew up in to surround my mom as a single mom that she never felt like alone in parenting us. That she knew she had some other people. I mean I remember dating boys and people in the church being like, "Why are you dating and so?" And I'd be like, "Well, you been talking to my mama? Why are you asking me? I'm in love. Obviously we're 15, we're going to get married." "You're not going to marry him. No. No, thank you."
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah. See those friends, those play aunties, they can say stuff that you can't hear from your mother.
Amena Brown Owen:
No, no. I distinctly remember my youth pastor, this is telling my age, y'all, because we didn't have cell phones obviously, but it was very popular when I was in high school for some parents to get their teenagers their own phone line where you had your own number and then there was the house number. Because otherwise, if it was just the house number, my mom was definitely one of those moms that would pick up the phone and be like, "Hello, I need to use the phone."
Carol Sutton Lewis:
This is the mom that would read the things. Yeah, that's tracks.
Amena Brown Owen:
Period. No. And I'd be like, wait. I'd be like, "Mom, okay." And then we would wait and she'd be like, "Say goodbye." She wouldn't even give you the opportunity. She wouldn't even hang up and let you say goodbye. She'd be like, "Y'all say goodbye so I can use my phone." So I felt very excited when she gave me my own phone line, Carol. It was the '90s. So every part of the phone was a different color. The receiver, the base, the core, they were all bright. It was very great. And was I talking on that phone past bedtime when my mom told me that I should be off the phone? Of course, I was, Carol. Of course, I did. And my mom went in there and grabbed that phone. I just remember her arm winding the cord around that phone and putting it somewhere that I just didn't know where.
And I remember going to my youth pastor and complaining to him. I remember going to him and saying, "This lady", and he wasn't married at the time that I can remember. Maybe he was just about to get married at this time. He was engaged. He's like, "Really? She took your phone?" I said, "She took my phone away, wrapped the cord around it and took it out of my room." And he was like, "Wow." He was like, "Man, so who paid for the phone? Who bought the phone?" And I was like, "I mean, she bought it but it was a gift and you can't buy a gift for someone and then just take it back. You can't do that." He was like, "Oh man. So who paid the bill? When the phone bill came, who paid it?" And I was like, "I mean she did. But she's a mom. She should pay it. So I don't have a job. I'm a child. How could I do that?"
He was like, "Oh man. And who pays for the roof over your head and everything? Who pays for the house where you live?" And I was like, "Well she does because..." So it was the more he was asking me, the more I'm like, oh God. And he was like, "I think you might owe your mom an apology for how you reacted and how you weren't following the rules because it's really her phone if you think about it. It's her phone in her house, in her bedroom. You're sleeping on a bed she bought."
And I was like, why did he use the logic against me this? I went to him, Carol, expecting him to be like, "How dare she take your phone? That's your one way of communication to the outside world. How dare she? What a terrible parent. Let us tell the elders of the church, we have a terrible mother in the church." And I'm walking away going to apologize to this lady for taking my phone? That conversation was not supposed to go this way. But that's an example of having someone who's not your parent that can ask you some questions, get you to thinking about your choices.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah, that is a great example. Let me ask you this. What kind of a play auntie do you think you would be? Would the kind that would say, like you wanted your youth pastor to say, "Girl, she did that? Okay, wait, I'll talk to her because that is not right." Or would you be the kind that would say, "Okay, and can we just revisit?" I mean, would you be team kid or would you be team mom?
Amena Brown Owen:
This is fascinating 'cause my sister and I both have actually talked about this as we've gotten older and we're sort of at that point where we're like, wait, we are the age that our aunts and uncles were when we were children. So that still feels weird. 'Cause when we're with our aunts and uncles, we still feel like the kids and they're the adults. But when we actually get by ourselves, we're like, we are actually the age they were when we remember them as children.
And so we have talked about who is the cussing auntie? We've talked about that because you need to have at least one of those. You need to have at least one auntie that's the person that cusses and is the person who's going to have a good drink at the family gathering. And I've always wanted to be the auntie that if children have questions regarding relationships and sex, that they know they can come and speak to me and that I'm going to speak the truth to them and give them some rounded wisdom that I wish had been spoken to me when I was their age. Give them some things to think about.
But especially for those of us who grew up in church settings, when it comes to dating and sex, you really aren't getting the information because people in the community feel like the less they tell you, the less amount of trouble that you may get in. When the opposite is honestly really true. So I feel that that probably to some people has been my role a little bit. That if you have a question, I'm the person that you can come and speak to. And I'm going to tell you the truth about that.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
That is a really valuable role to play because when it comes to talking to our kids about relationships and especially about sex, we all kind of first dive back into how we were brought up and if we appreciated it, if it was a good way we do that. But if it wasn't, we try to go in another direction. And I will tell you that even with your partner, I mean my husband and I had different approaches. I was all about the, "Okay, we're going to talk about this because this needs to be talked about." But with three kids, they each react to me differently in terms of how much they want to share. And my mom laid down for me and I fully agree that I'm not trying to be my kids' friends. I'm not trying to create a relationship where we tell each other every single thing because you talked about the trauma of people finding out after their mom is gone in the books that she had an affair with some guy, a photographer.
I think kids, no matter how old they are, there's this image you have of your parent that you kind of don't want completely shattered. I mean as you get older you acknowledge, your mom, your dad, they're people, they have perspectives. You don't agree with them necessarily. They are the way they are. They're not you. But you don't want... So it's hard. So I have to say that I respect that my kids, they're all grown now, but they're not like, call me up every five minutes to tell me some new event. But it's really important that they have somebody else that they can go and ask questions to because I want them to talk to somebody. Our parents are whoever they are, and I think it's really important to have another person that's not them. So you just get a different perspective and a valuable one.
Now if you're that real or play auntie that likes a good drink and is the wild one, cussing all the time and all that, you want to make sure that, you got some balance there.
Amena Brown Owen:
Sure, sure, sure.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
You don't want to send your child off with somebody who's telling her about ways that you don't necessarily agree with. But it's such an interesting and kind of a dicey relationship. I mean, I am friendly with some of my children's really good friends, but I know the line that I can't cross in terms of asking about my child.
Amena Brown Owen:
Right.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I can't. It's like, I'm not going to put them in that spot. I cant. I mean, I'd love to know and I'm really close to this person, but I'm not... Can't do that. It's so weird. I mean you spend so much time with these children and then suddenly there have to be boundaries and distance and you have to respect. So those play aunties come in handy because girl, you know I have called up my girlfriend, I'm like, "Listen, she's not going to talk to me about this. But if there's some way that you could talk to her, I would be very grateful."
Amena Brown Owen:
Okay? Put it out there. And the last thing I'll say too, Carol, is, and I especially experienced this in my friendships with women, I think there are all these different phases of life that we experience as women. And some of that is related to maybe where our career goals are or where that ends up. And some of us thought we were going to work for somebody else and then we end up becoming entrepreneurs. And some of that's related to our relationships. If we decide to marry someone or be in a long-term partnership, if we thought it was long-term and that relationship ends or we end up experiencing divorce. However, our journey is towards parenting, whether we actually become parents or not. And then those of us who do, the phases of that and the developmental stages. And one of the things that I would say has been a real joy and I feel an important thing in my life is I think it is important for us to have friends who are in our phase of life because we need that sense of feeling understood in the particular phase we're in.
But I think it's also helpful when we have friends who may not be in the same phase of life that we are. Like I've been an entrepreneur now over 10 years of my life. It's wonderful for me having friends who aren't and talking to them about their jobs and how they navigate their workspaces and them hearing from me about this. I don't have children and I've walked through the various journeys of my friends, some whose journey towards parenthood was easy and when they actually got to parenthood was really hard. And some whose journey towards parenting was very difficult.
And so for some of my friends, I may be one of a small number of friends have that don't have children and I'm like, you know what? You're going to get a lot of mom talk, so I don't need to provide that to you. I'm here to remind you that you are a woman also outside of the fact that you are a mother to these children that I know you love very much. And also you'd like to leave and go to Tuesday morning or go grab a cup of coffee by yourself or use the bathroom without having anyone's little fingers coming under the door. It's my job to remind you that you're gorgeous and beautiful. You're a sexual being. You are not just that. And I think when we have friendships that give us that sort of cross-section, it gives us some ability to see each other in our different phases of life and not assume things about what may be going super easy or what may be going really hard.
We get a chance to walk through that with each other. And I've really enjoyed that about the women that are in community with me.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I just have to quickly add that one of my dearest friends who we've been friends for over 30 years now, geez. And she is a wonderful woman, a very successful film and television producer, has had an amazing life and a great career and continues to have one. And when we met, she was abandoning a legal career to sort of try her hand at Hollywood. She was just like pivoting completely. As was I, because I was leaving a job I really loved, I was getting married and my husband's work required him to move to Chicago. I didn't know anybody in Chicago, so we were both pivoting in directions that we were excited by, but kind of wary of.
Long story short, we've joked about this for the past 30 years, that if you could mush our lives together, I did the kid thing and the sort of, I'm still married to 30 some odd year. I mean, definitely I have the domestic thing, and I agonized for decades on not having that career that I thought I was going to have. And she has the hellfire career and is divorced and didn't have kids. And so we serve that, what you just talked about, that role for each other, it is both the friend that is not going to burden you with all the... Whatever it is that they're talking about, you want to hear it's not your life.
Amena Brown Owen:
Right, right, right.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Whatever, work stress or whatever, it's like you want to eat that up. But we're also the ones to tell each other that as good as this looks from the outside, it's great on one level, here's how it's not great, and here's the reality of the situation versus the sort of how it looks, the lives. Both of us our lives. I mean, it's really been amazing to have this journey with her where she's at the Oscars, she's at the... I mean she's... And I'm like, "Oh, my..." And I'm thrilled for her and I'm excited to hear what's going on, but I know the 360 of it, so that's really, really valuable. So I so applaud your interest in your work and making community of women because I don't know where we would be without them.
Amena Brown Owen:
Okay. That's it for real, Carol. That is it.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yeah. So we are wrapping up here. First of all, I want to thank you so much. I've had so much fun. This has been really great. Yeah, it's been really, really great. I've loved talking with you as I knew I would, but it's really been amazing. And can I just slide in for the very end, what I do on my podcast, which is the GCP for Ground Control Parenting lightning round.
Amena Brown Owen:
Okay.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
I will give you an abbreviated version of the lightning round. Just ask you two questions. First one should be easy, and that is, what is your favorite poem or saying? I'll give you the both and then you can answer.
Amena Brown Owen:
Okay.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
The second one is, give me your favorite two children's books. Books that you remember from growing up, or books you've given to friends. So poem, favorite poem, favorite children's books.
Amena Brown Owen:
My favorite poem is Theme for English B by Langston Hughes. And it has a line that says, "Go home and write a page tonight and let that page come out of you. Then it will be true." That's my favorite one.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Love that.
Amena Brown Owen:
My two favorite children's books, my top one is Goodnight Moon.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Ah.
Amena Brown Owen:
Still my favorite.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Love that.
Amena Brown Owen:
And my second one is Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters. My mom read that to both my sister and I, and it's a wonderful story, but it's also gorgeous. The illustration in it is just beautiful. So I actually still have a copy in my library. That's one that I needed to have a copy of for sure. Yeah.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Those are great, great answers. You probably should get a copy of Goodnight Moon. That is a very peace, meditative-
Amena Brown Owen:
I also have a copy of that one.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Oh yes. It's a meditative book.
Amena Brown Owen:
I'm a collector of books around here. I am now like, it doesn't matter if I read them. I need to see them in my home. That's where we're at, Carol.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yes, I agree. Definitely on the, it doesn't matter if I read them. But anyway, thank you so much.
Amena Brown Owen:
Thank you, Carol.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Great answers.
Amena Brown Owen:
This was so great. Thank you for joining me. I am happy to be invited into the family room with you, and I was glad to bring you here into the living room where we could eat gorgeous snacks. We could have rosemary crackers. I'm just, yes, I'm here for all of it. I will make sure we're sharing all the information. But from my listeners, please make sure that you go and take a Listen to Ground Control Parenting podcast hosted by Carol Sutton Lewis.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
Yes, and for all of my listeners, please, right after you listen to this, go listen to HER With Amena Brown and you'll be glad you did.
Amena Brown Owen:
Thanks, Carol. I'll see you soon.
Carol Sutton Lewis:
See you soon.
Amena Brown Owen:
HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.