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We prepare to return to the small town we left in 2020 to speak at a church exploring same sex marriage and what it means to be an affirming congregation - openly welcoming and supportive of 2SLGBTQ+ people. If feels complicated. But why we agreed to do it isn't. It's an act of faith.

If it's true that creative ideas come to us because they're begging to be brought into the world, then maybe it's also true that our lives - and the ideas and dreams we have about them and the next version of ourselves - are also begging to be brought into the world. In this episode, we talk about our own creativity and what it's teaching us - that similar to life, it's about surrendering to the process.

In a continuation of the failure discussion from S2/E2, we talk about shame - which touches all of our lives at some point. It's about what happens when shame is deeply internalized and allowed to become the narrator of a life story. It's about the inability to set boundaries, the acceptance of a story told by others as your own, and the belief that who you are at your core - and who you are becoming - is your biggest failure.

In an unexpected episode - recorded just after Episode 1 of Season 2 - we turned the mics back on to capture a conversation about what we weren't planning to talk about. Two divorce stories playing out with much different outcomes - one much more common than the other. Not every story has a happy ending. Some endings feel like failures. Sometimes you learn that the real work is just accept the ending that you have so that something new can begin.

More and more, we’re each learning that the podcast has been a journey to owning for ourselves both the hard and beautiful aspects of our story. One year after taking a one-year break from podcasting, we’re “beginning again” after experiencing a profound moment of closure. In this first episode of the new season, we talk about that moment, why we’re back, what has changed over the last year, our regrets from the first season, and what it is that we don’t want to talk about anymore.

As mothers and wives with young families, we knew there would be no right time and no right way to open the closet door.  Listen as we talk about some of the things that inspired courage in us, that guided us to the eventual decision and that we had to consider - including the losses we would likely face.

Over these 23 episodes, we’ve chronicled our coming out story — and our life in the decade after that. We’ve honoured and loved and struggled to make meaning of all that came before — and so much of what has followed. These real and raw conversations every other week have healed and changed us both. And recently, they’ve left us with another unexpected gift. The realization that as much as the podcast has been about telling the story — it has also been about letting go of it.

The past is gone but, so often, it defines the present. After reliving this many-faceted coming out story over more than 20 episodes, we talk about why it’s been important to make meaning of what happened in those initial coming out years. How we needed to find a truth about those events which is true for each of us, individually. How we discovered that our understanding of the truth continues to evolve and change over time. And, how all of this has pushed us to re-examine faith, flaws and even how we imagine the future.

We’ve all felt like outsiders at one time or another. In those times, we don’t feel seen or witnessed in some way. Because of who we believe we are, what we dream about, what we do or do not believe in, who or how we love, what we do for a living – and a whole string of other reasons. In this episode, we talk about how so many of us stay closeted and unseen about the things we feel might cause disconnection or rejection in our social circles – and the price attached to those choices.

We’re back at it after a month-long break to talk about the future of the podcast, vulnerability hangovers, making mistakes on the air, what reliving this story for you through these episodes has revealed for us, and the unexpected grief that healing brings. It’s almost like we’re not the same people who started doing this podcast nine months ago.

The stories we create in order to justify our actions and choices become, in so many ways, who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. But what if some of those stories were nothing more than comfortable lies? Things we’ve told ourselves to maintain a level of peace about our lives that, if we were honest, eat at us because they don’t reflect our reality. In this episode, we talk about the comfortable lies we’ve told ourselves over the last decade and what happened as we gradually allowed them to become uncomfortable truths.

We love to hear from listeners and, in this episode, we answer some of your most frequently asked questions. How do we know this isn’t a phase? Initially, what did you say to yourselves in order to begin to absorb your changing sexuality? What has been the hardest thing about this journey? What about the best thing? And…the most commonly-asked sex question we get from straight women. (You’ll have to listen to find out.)

On a cool fall night in October, 2020, we surprised our kids and got married in the backyard of our home. The eight-year journey to that night was curved like a road through the mountains, with stops for each of us along the way. In this episode, we talk about some of them – the notion of “living in sin”, internalized homophobia, letting go of the past, and the lack of rituals for the ending of a first marriage. And how, for a time, just the thought of having a wedding was enough to stop us from having a marriage.

As humans we’re hard-wired to see patterns. Like on a grilled cheese, in the stars, in events, or in nature. But we often miss them in ourselves. In this episode, we let you in on a self-proclaimed “messy patch” that has revealed some of the unhealthy patterns we’ve each written over our lifetimes. Patterns that have followed us through first marriages — and now a second. There’s truth in patterns that can be hard to accept. The truth we don’t always see because we aren’t looking. Or, because we don’t want to look.

Family is a tough subject for many people. Us, too. We’ve had a hard time talking about the concept of family – even to each other sometimes – over the last decade since we came out. With four kids who didn’t ask for this new journey and two moms with admittedly naïve and different ideas about how and when to move on from the families we had before all of this – it’s been messy. And good. And ragged. And new. And a work in progress. We’re not an idyllic blended family. But you can be real at our house.