Zibby Owens: Oh, my gosh, I did not want my interview with Jodie Patterson to end. I had a feeling it was going to be great because I loved her book so much. It’s called The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation. It was so good. It’s really one of my favorite memoirs of the whole year and probably of all time. She’s such a good writer. Anyway, here’s her bio. Jodie Patterson is a social activist, entrepreneur, and writer. She has been lauded for her activist work by Hillary Clinton, The Advocate, Family Circle, Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Yahoo!, among others. She works closely with a number of gender/family/human rights organizations including serving as a chair of the board of the Human Rights Capital Foundation and is a sought-after public speaker addressing a wide range of audiences about identity, gender, beauty, and entrepreneurship. She was appointed by the United Nations as a Champion of Change. Perhaps most impressively, it says — this is in her bio. I’m not making this up. She is a former circus acrobat who performed in the Big Apple Circus. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she coparents her five children with love, education, and family solidarity. Enjoy our conversation. I had the last best time. In some way, I’m going to this continue this in some format. Enjoy.

Welcome, Jodie. Thank you so much for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.”

Jodie Patterson: So classic. I love the name of your podcast. I’m so happy to be here. I’m glad that sometimes we do actually have a moment to read.

Zibby: Me too. I don’t know what I would do without books.

Jodie: I have a stack of books on the side of my bed and my desk, in my living room. Sometimes I just read two pages or something like that. Many years, that felt like a failure if I couldn’t finish the entire book. Now I just really enjoy two pages, five pages. It takes me forever to finish a book, but just the process of reading without the pressure is really good.

Zibby: I totally agree. I used to feel like if I didn’t finish in a certain amount of time, it was on my nightstand too long. I had to shuffle it out because there were new books. I was always feeling disappointed in myself. Really, it doesn’t have to be start to finish. A little glimpse in someone else’s life and mind is such a treat.

Jodie: Yeah. That feeling of not being accomplished, it’s probably habitual for many of us. I’m trying not to feel that way, but I notice myself. I have to fight the temptation to feel unaccomplished even by not finishing a book. Who cares, right? I’m like, oh, you should have finished that. There’s a new Ta-Nehisi Coates book out. You need to get on that.

Zibby: Totally. I’m constantly feeling behind. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to keep up on every single book coming out every day. I even put this pressure on myself once I start a series on Netflix. I’m not even finished with Normal People. It’s been so long. When am I going to finish this series? What if I forget? It doesn’t even matter.

Jodie: Then, I think for me — I’m probably just jumping into this off-topic conversation. When March came and when the world changed pace and when many of us didn’t leave our homes for weeks, I just remembered another way of living. It’s such a strange time. There’s so much pain and so much death, but there’s something really, for me, optimistic about right now, and powerful. Part of that is just the change of pace for me. I needed that. I needed a break, not a break as in a time-out, but a break like a crack. We’ve seen a huge explosion with COVID and with the murder of George Floyd. In a sense, I think it is just a powerful time. We can change a lot of things. I take it actually as a blessing in a sense right now, this time.

Zibby: That’s helpful to look at things that way. I know you have many kids. I have many kids. Everybody’s trying to do so much. It’s almost impossible to keep up at the pace. I know we were talking earlier about living in New York and not living in New York. I also feel there’s some frenetic-ness to just living there. It’s go, go, go, go. Almost everyone I’ve talked to since the pandemic is like, I don’t want to turn that back on. That was a lot. I had a girlfriend who’s like, “Even just getting my eyelashes extended, I can’t even do it anymore.”

Jodie: I know. Done. It’s funny how we all can relate to something like that. I said the same thing. I actually stopped doing my lashes, stopped with toes and fingers and all that stuff. Yet still, life continued. It continued. We find new ways to be beautiful. I don’t take for granted the small things in life that make us feel pretty or glamorous. Those things can be created over and over again. It’s not that we don’t want the act of something pretty, but we don’t have to be stuck in one act. My lashes, I actually really enjoy getting my lashes put in. I like the way it looks. That’s not what’s happening right now, and so I found other ways. I found glasses that are fun.

Zibby: I love those glasses. Those are awesome.

Jodie: Actually, what I also noticed is if I do a run in the morning and sweat, then my eyes look less puffy. It’s like natural makeup.

Zibby: There you go. Two in one, two benefits. I just completely relate to all of that. I feel like if run in the morning, I end up hobbling around. Aside from that, it’s usually good. I actually started your book on audio and then switched to paper when I was reading yours. Audio is a new thing for me. Anyway, I loved it. It was you reading it. It’s amazing. I feel like inadvertently, you and I took this nice long run together and you just didn’t know.

Jodie: I loved writing the book. That was over many months, maybe two years actually, if I think about it. I also loved recording the book in audio format. It was several days, I think four days, of studio work, which I had never done before. No one likes the sound of their voice. It’s creepy to hear your own self speak. The book is intensely personal. I went to places, I had to recall things that were really deep down and buried. I recalled them by looking at my journals and looking at letters and pulling out notes that I had scribbled down and tucked away in drawers. I was unearthing a lot of stuff, memories. When I was recording it, I was really in my emotions and really in my feelings. Sometimes I wasn’t able to hold back the tears just recording it. It took it off of the vanity level. On the vanity level, I don’t like to hear my voice. It was such a powerful moment for me to record my own words because those words had been dying to get out since I was a kid in many situations. I take it as a blessing to be able to write the book, but also then to record the book. Actually, here’s a secret. Sometimes I go back and listen to my own audio.

Zibby: I love that. Why not?

Jodie: Oh, man. I do sometimes if I just need a good cry or a good laugh.

Zibby: Aw, see, this is an unanticipated benefit of writing a book and recording it. It’s like your own therapy. It’s self-fulfilling. Maybe we should back up a sec about the book and how it even came to be a book. First of all, I have to just say that since I started this book, I have been recommending it right and left. I love memoir. I read lots of memoirs. This just stood apart. It’s so good. I’ve been trying to tell people, I’m like, it’s marketed a little bit about her having a transgender child, but I think it’s mis-marketed a bit because that’s one piece. It could’ve been a child with anything, it’s how she handled it, like, I had a child with, let’s say, eczema. Not to minimize, but it’s really about you. It’s about you and your life and the things that you had to deal with across the board from start to finish. It’s more than a coming of age. It’s just amazing from the parenting to being parented. Anyway, go. Now you talk.

Jodie: I’m bursting because I’m so glad you saw that and said it so poignantly because the book is not a story of my son. I have five children. One is trans. My third child identifies as a trans boy. That means when he was born, I assumed girl. I looked at the body. The doctors looked at the body. They said, “You have a girl.” We named that child Penelope after grandma. Within the first year, there was all of this unrest in Penelope, and anger. By two and then two and a half, Penelope had become a bully. Penelope was pissed off, crying all the time, temper tantrums. I really couldn’t figure it out. I was trying to do everything like change the diet, take out dairy, make everything vegan, read more stories, tell Penelope how much I loved Penelope, snuggle. Nothing worked until one day Penelope just said, “Mama, everyone thinks I’m a girl, and I’m not. I’m a boy.” That is the impetus for my growth. So much weighs on this one kid, but as you know, a mom of multiples, your life is not one kid. It took me a minute to get out of the darkness of realizing that your kid is so different from anything you’ve ever imagined. That was pretty scary.

The crux of the book is about how I was able to shift my way of thinking. You’re right, that kid, that unexpected twist could be anything. As we see now, COVID, life delivers a sinkhole, a fissure, something you’re not expecting. You have to deal with it. Penelope was my disruption in life in a sense, a beautiful disruption. I thought it was going to be the end of the family. I look back at now and I’m laughing because I thought, oh, gosh, what’s it going to mean for Penelope? What’s it going to mean for our family? We’re doomed. It was one of the most profound breaks in reality that forced us to create a new reality. We’re better off for it. The reality is, yes, any mom could listen to this or read this book because it’s really, how do we shift? How do we shift for our kids? How do we keep a flexible mind? How do we stay with the ones we love even when we don’t understand or even if we don’t agree? Not everyone in my house agrees on this big concept of gender. We just don’t. One kid says, “I love my brother. I’ll always use the right pronouns, but scientifically, you’re a girl. We have to stick to science.” I know that the science shows gender fluidity and gender diversity, but this is my kid also who’s saying, I love my brother, but I don’t believe that gender is anything more than two options: male or female. They’ve been talking this out for ten years. They still don’t agree, but they eat dinner together. They play basketball together. They live in the same house together. This is what the book really taught me. We just don’t have to agree. We have to just use decorum. We have to discuss and debate with decorum and then shoot some basketball together at the end of the day.

Zibby: Which, PS, is the best advice for the world at large, I feel like everybody right now. That is not just about within families. I feel like every parent can relate or every person who’s grown up in a family with many kids can relate to the incessant fighting of the stupidest things or the biggest things and not being able to agree. After all, yes, you have shared DNA, but every kid that comes out is completely different, I mean completely. Some of my kids have nothing in common. Then others are very similar. I’m like, where did all these people come from? It’s insane. The ability to tolerate that and make sense and navigate, I think many grown-ups would be wise to heed that type of advice.

Jodie: It takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of time. It’s not the efficient way to run a house. You’re right. It’s about little things and big things. Who gets the front seat in the car could be a big argument. Then how do we look at gender? A massive disagreement. We have this process. It’s called The Lab. We sit down on the floor. Each person can speak as long as they want. If you have the microphone, you speak. You can take however long you want. In my house, that can be hours. You can’t interrupt. You have to just speak your truth. We’ll talk about gender and the identity of being trans. We’ll talk about faith. The same kid who doesn’t see transgender as a reality also doesn’t see God as a reality, as a scientific reality. I’m thinking to myself, who raised you? How can you be my child? I’m a member of my church. I have a strong faith. Then here’s my kid who I raised who says that God cannot exist scientifically. At a certain point, I just am not willing to throw the kid out.

Zibby: Well, that’s good.

Jodie: How many kids do you have?

Zibby: I have four kids.

Jodie: Four, it’s a lot, man.

Zibby: It’s not five.

Jodie: I birthed four. No, I birthed three. No, I birthed four.

Zibby: You should know that. You should have this part down.

Jodie: I had three on earth. I had my fourth in my belly. I adopted a young man while I was pregnant, I believe, with my fourth. He came technically at the end of all of the children, so he’s our baby in that sense, but he’s the oldest because we met when he was eighteen. I’ve got three children from my second marriage, one child from my first marriage, and then one adopted. It’s really a blended family. When you talk about being right or being with the ones you love, that’s the story of blended families. There’s no one right. There’s just a million rights every freaking day.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, it’s true. I loved in the book, your whole story of how you ended up adopting him and coming into the — it was a record store, wasn’t it? Your store was a beauty store. I thought there was something to do with records or he was bringing records or something with music.

Jodie: Yeah, he’s really into music. We talked for hours about music.

Zibby: In my head, I turned your beauty salon into a music — I know exactly what you were doing, but in that scene I had you somewhere else in my head. This is what happens when I don’t read and I listen. Things are not perfect. That whole thing, just to take on another person like that and the way you did it, that’s really amazing with all the stuff you had going on.

Jodie: It definitely wasn’t planned.

Zibby: I know, but still.

Jodie: It’s still, on paper — well, I’ll say this. When I came home that month and told my husband at the time, “We have a new child. The child is eighteen. He’s moving in,” my husband thought I was really being irrational and quite dangerous to the family. It sounds like in hindsight it’s a really beautiful story, but in the moment we had a real clash between my husband and I. I kept saying, “I know it’s irrational, but it makes sense in a heart way, not in a logistical way. In a heart way, it makes sense.” He said, “No, absolutely not. We cannot take a grown man into the house that we don’t know.” There was maybe a month where the two of them would play basketball together on the courts and take walks together on the pier on the Hudson River. They got to know each other. My husband who was forty-something and this child, young man who was eighteen, they had their own way of developing their own relationship. At the end of that month, my husband said, “Okay, you’re right. He’s special. He’s ours. We’re his.” We joined as a family. It deserves its own book.

Zibby: Yeah, I was going to say, you could flesh that one out pretty easily. If you write that book — I know you’re already working on other books. A minute ago, you said that finding out about Penelope and when he said that he wasn’t a girl, he was a boy, you called that a beautiful disruption. I think that would be a good title. You should store that one away for something.

Jodie: I have been thinking about that a lot because COVID — I don’t know if you know this, but I was patient three positive with COVID in the state of Nevada.

Zibby: I didn’t know you were patient three, but I’ve been following your Instagram where you talked all about it. I can’t believe that that happened to you and that you were separated from your family for so long. Tell me a little about that. This podcast could be like five hours. I have to be careful here. I could talk to you forever, oh, my gosh. Tell me about being patient three.

Jodie: I was traveling, as I do a lot for work. I was speaking. I was on a plane, then a train, then a bus, then a plane. It was Black History Month, which was February, which is a big month for my speaking gigs, going into Women’s History Month, March, another big month for being in conversation. I had just been flying. My immune system was really shitty. I was tired, changing on the plane, changing in the airport. I get to Vegas. On Friday, I speak, on Saturday. By Sunday, I have this excruciating migraine and spinal pain and joint pain. I put on some pajamas at the hotel. I had to make my way downstairs and ask the taxicab driver to take me to the nearest hospital simply because the pain was so intense. I knew of COVID, of course. We were aware of it then. No one was wearing masks. I was wiping down my doorknobs at the hotel, but I wasn’t thinking that this was COVID. I had no symptoms that were typical, no congestion, no bronchial, no fever. I had just excruciating body pain and head pain.

Get to hospital, never left. I was there for two weeks positive with COVID, third patient in the state. I guess the lucky part was that I had an entire hospital with the attention of — it wasn’t overcrowded. The doctors were attentive. At the end of the two weeks, I was able to come home, but those two weeks felt like forever. I had no one there with me. My family wasn’t there. I was a bit anonymous in terms of — being in the hospital’s a weird thing. One, you’re a patient, so you’re anonymous in that sense. They have to treat you in a way that just doesn’t feel very personal. I don’t know how to describe that. Then also, I’ve noticed this thing as a black woman, if you don’t know my title — one of my titles is Chairman of the Board of the Human Right Campaign Foundation. If you haven’t read my book or if I don’t have my clothing on right, I roll out of bed, if I don’t have any jewelry or if I don’t have lipstick or something that registers for non-black people, I was treated like a random person. People were talking over me and around me. I didn’t have pain medication for the first twelve hours. I didn’t have a toilet. I kept asking for things. It sounds like a one-off. People will say that’s just what hospitals do. But it’s more than what hospitals do because I’ve been in the hospital a lot with my pregnancies. I’ve seen it over and over and over again where they don’t believe what I’m telling them. I kept telling them, “I’m in a lot of pain. Please test me for COVID.” It took a while for people to communicate with me in the way that I’m used to being communicated outside in the world. That was a really difficult experience to be alone experiencing without an advocate. I’m used to be the advocate. I didn’t have what I needed for the first few days.

Zibby: I am so sorry you had to go through that. An hour in a hospital is like a year in human time. I feel like hospitals are this awful time warp. Our whole lives, we’re treated based on who we are emotionally and everything. Once you’re in the medical setting, it’s your body, which half the time we pay no attention to. I don’t even pay attention. My vitals? Who cares? I’m too busy for that. In the hospital, forget it. Also, there’s that feeling of being trapped. I remember going to the emergency room for various things. They’re like, “You can’t leave yet.” I’m like, “I’m the one who came here. What do you mean? My head’s fine now,” or whatever it was.

Jodie: Total .

Zibby: Right? Yes.

Jodie: You’re right about that.

Zibby: Anyway, but having to go through that and the uncertainty, that’s an interesting point of view that you had. It’s terrible. It’s really awful.

Jodie: There’s so many studies on that, just how women are treated differently in hospitals and then how black women are treated differently in hospitals and how we don’t survive similar situations, black women compared to non-black women, simply because we are not taken for our words. We’re misdiagnosed. Serena Williams, so many women have spoken about this. Their bodies are, of course, not theirs in the hospital. Also, their sense of what’s going on is not taken into consideration. I had that experience with COVID where I was really torn from my reality being sick, but also being in the hospital and being without family. I had to, interestingly enough, rely on some of the techniques that I had developed from raising my son who identifies as trans. Some of those techniques, I thought, this is a technique to raise a trans kid, but it’s really a technique to deal with life. We were talking about that earlier. I developed some skills raising Penelope that I was able to apply in the hospital to help just mother myself.

Zibby: Like what?

Jodie: Like detachment. This is something, it’s very esoteric in a sense. I think that we need to teach our children, and perhaps ourselves first as mothers, to be able to detach. I don’t mean to disregard, but to detach from the things that define us. As a mother, I needed to learn how to detach. I’ll start from, Penelope needed to be able to detach from anything that I needed him to be. I needed him to be a girl at first because that’s what I thought. I needed him to be this really bubbly, smart, beautiful girl named Penelope in all of these great vintage dresses and this beautiful blond afro. I needed that so badly because that made sense. I had to teach Penelope to detach from certain obligations because you cannot be free if you’re always attached to things. It doesn’t mean forever. As an adult, as a woman, I’ve learned there are some things that define me. Being a mother, my children define me. My husbands have defined me. My morals have defined me, jobs.

At some point during each day or month I detach from all of that. My kids go to their dad’s house. I don’t cook a meal if I don’t want to. I might do something really wild like have sex with my boyfriend in the kitchen on the table and enjoy it. These moments of detachment are radical for women. They’re radical for our children. They don’t last very long. My kids come back. I go back to the routines, but I’m better. I’m more creative. I’m looser. No pun intended, I’m more flexible in my mind. I am a better leader. I have more vision. I had to detach in the hospital. I had practiced that with my son, Penelope, and with my children and with myself. In the hospital, I was able to detach in a sense where the hospital did not bring me down one hundred percent. It didn’t scare me one hundred percent. It didn’t make me depressed one hundred percent. I was able to kind of detach myself and hover above it all. Some people call it mediation.

Zibby: I like the detachment. By the way, I have the same thing as you. I have so few people who I ever talk to about it. I’m remarried. I got divorced five years ago. I have a new husband. We don’t have the kids every other weekend. I have a dual identity. Who I am today versus who I would be if you talk to me Friday is like night and day. It’s amazing. Then I’m so revived because I have time to remember who I was. It’s just insane. It’s hard. I don’t know how you feel, but sometimes when the kids are gone, I’m just crying. I just can’t stop. I feel so torn apart. Other times, I’m like, this isn’t bad. Either way, when they come back, I’m better off for it. It is crazy, that detachment that you’re talking about and the two parts of being a mom and then when you’re without your — anyway, we should just have some coffee at some point.

Jodie: Yes, we can swap stories. I think we get better at detachment over time. At first, it feels reckless. Women, there’s so much around this. We derive our worth from our children, from others. We are really taught how to be good wives and good mothers and good citizens and good employees. Much of the profit of families and of, I would say, the world is on the free labor moms and women. We really have supported a lot of things. We understand how important we are to anchor our families. When we are away from that, it feels reckless. It feels guilty. I feel guilty about it. Over time, I have learned how important it is, not just for me selfishly, but for my children for me to learn how to detach. I’m telling you, when I come back to them after that week or hour, I’m better. I’m better at raising them. It’s not like I’m just doing it for myself. I think we should be doing things for ourselves. Also, the upside of detachment is when we come back to our team, we’re better leaders. That, to me, is the goal. I want to be a really good leader of my team.

Zibby: Yes, you’re absolutely right. Amazing. I just want to ask a couple quick questions because I feel like I’ve — anyway, what books are you working on now? You said you were hard at work. Then I want some advice for aspiring authors.

Jodie: I wrote The Bold World, which is the first book, my memoir. Then I wrote a children’s book entitled Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope. I wrote that with the help of my children because I wanted the child’s perspective, Penelope’s perspective of how he helped his communities to change and to shift and to support him. The Bold World was my story, but The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope is Penelope’s perspective on it. My kids helped me with the language. They helped me with the storyline. That will come out at the end of the year.

Zibby: Exciting.

Jodie: That was really exciting to do a children’s book. Then my third book that I’m working on now which is still taking me some time is about radical parenting and these lessons that I’ve learned over time that develop in the home but can be used beyond the home. It’s looking at mothering at this architectural power structure. I’m not talking about mothering like hugs and kisses mothering. I’m talking about the strategies that we mothers, some mothers, have used to build up our community of children. Then you take that strategy — I use it actually in the boardroom. I use it on the streets or in classrooms or in startup communities when I’m going to talk to businesses. It’s mothering as architectural power structure.

Zibby: I love that, oh, my gosh. I’m here if you need a proofreader of something. I need that book like tomorrow. I need better management of my community here. That’s awesome. Any advice to aspiring authors?

Jodie: I like to brain dump. I think it’s really scary to write a book or even conceive of writing a book. I like to start with brain dumping. That is, get a journal or get several journals or your laptop and just brain dump on a topic. Don’t think of structure. Don’t think of order. Spend a few months brain dumping on topics. I have about a thousand notes that were just brain dumps that turned into a book. Brain dumping is one great way if you’re really interested in writing a book. Then this is a big leap after that. Find an agent. It is really a business. You can’t write a book and then think it’s going to just get published. You need a team. Get an agent also can be broadened to start thinking of the structure of the team. You need an agent. You need a publisher. You need a best friend who might want to read some of your pages. I have a few friends of mine that read my brain dumps. They go, ooh, that’s a good point, build on that, or that’s the book, forget everything, that brain dump right there is the book. I’d say brain dump first and then start to build your team with possible agents and possible best friends who can help you edit through your brain.

Zibby: Wow. I might have to borrow your best friends at some point. I think I’ll start sending them my emails and see what happens. If it ends up in books as good as this, oh, my gosh. I don’t even want to stop talking to you because I have a thousand other things. I didn’t even read any of my quotes. Every other page is dogeared in here.

Jodie: Give me one quote. Give me one good quote.

Zibby: Give you one quote. I’m going to pick one at random. “I thought this was ridiculous thinking lingerie could dissolve what I knew what sexism plain and simple, but I tried taking my mother’s approach of being less combative and more grateful with Joe. Sometimes it worked and I could hold my tongue, but as the disparities in our relationship grew, it became harder for me to diffuse our fights, and often, I was adding my own fuel to the fire.” Sticking my finger anywhere in this book is a passage like that.

Jodie: That quote is, you’re the only person that’s pulled that one out in all the conversations that I’ve had. That moment with my mom was so important. I had been battling with my husband at the time on so many different topics, power and children and money and all the stuff that we battle on. I confided in my mom. She said, “What about lingerie? Men love lingerie. If you put some on, it will make everything better.” I was just frustrated by the fact that we have for so long just not called sexism for what it is. We’re seeing that now in the Me Too movement. We have not called racism for what it is. We’re seeing that now in Black Lives Matter. We haven’t called so many things out for what they are. I think as we get older and more mature, we just start to not want to lie about stuff anymore. We want to call it for what it is. You noticing that, you’re definitely on the mom side that just no longer wants to keep quiet about stuff. We’re on the, I’ve got to call it for what it is at this point.

Zibby: PS, my mother, in my previous marriage which I shouldn’t even be talking about, but was like, “Put on some lipstick. Put makeup on when he gets home. Have a drink ready. Come on. Show him your –” I’m like, what?

Jodie: How is that going to help?

Zibby: Have a drink ready? What about my freaking day? Anyway, I think I related to that advice from an older generation. I think that’s what made me pull it out among a zillion other things that I was like, oh, yeah.

Jodie: That’s the one.

Zibby: That’s the one.

Jodie: It’s a generational divide in some ways. My kids have pointed out ways in which my language was all wrong. As my mom did and as I have done, we shift our language. Today, my mom is on board with a new approach to life. I’m on board with a new approach to life. We’ve listened to our kids. She apparently listened to me a little bit. I definitely listened to my kids when they were like, “Mom, if you don’t change, you’re just going to be old and weird. No one’s going to want to be around you anymore.”

Zibby: That’s so true. That might be the best advice of this whole conversation. If you don’t change, you’re going to be old and weird. I feel old and weird every day these days. Yes, that is great advice. Thank you. Thanks for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” I hope we can continue this in some form one way or another. Thank you for this amazing memoir. I just loved it.

Jodie: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I will come back anytime. We can pick this conversation up at any moment.

Zibby: Perfect. Thanks, Jodie.

Jodie: Talk soon.

Zibby: Okay, bye.

Jodie: Bye.