Welcome to Chairman Me!

Hello from Chairman Me’s Daily Dose, the new name for the long-time Chairman Mom Mama Bear newsletter! You’ll get the same great content — it’ll just look a little different.

Thanksgiving is coming up, and you know what that means: Awkward conversation central. 

Maybe it’s the debate about whether or not your family is going to have an in-person celebration because Uncle Stu won’t get vaccinated. 

Maybe it’s the dread of listening to your grandpa’s racist jokes again. 

Maybe it’s just the holiday that serves to gloss over a genocide that is triggering in and of itself. 

We’ve broken with a lot of tradition over the last few years in my house. I don’t cook; we go out to a fancy meal. Why should a great dinner mean I do days’ more work? I do not have the bandwidth for that, and with a house under construction, I literally don’t have a kitchen for it. 

My kids know that they don’t have to clean their plates, but they do have to BEHAVE and let me thoroughly enjoy my favorite meal of the year. 

In the time that I would have been meal prepping, I go on a long desert run, and then we all go see whatever kids movie was just released in movie theatres. 

The last time we got to do this, pre-COVID, it was Frozen II, which is the story of white people stealing Indigenous land and lying about it and how the white descendents had to divest themselves of privilege to make that right. When we were leaving, Eli said, “I guess I see why they released that on Thanksgiving! It’s like the real story of Thanksgiving.” 

We make sure to acknowledge what the holiday really is all about and learn more about the Indigenous land we are living on. 

We don’t go see my parents. They don’t accept Eli, and she shouldn’t spend any holidays or any other days pretending to be someone else. We don’t see Paul’s family because...he’s British and Thanksgiving isn’t a thing. We don’t have an obligation to see anyone. 

I guess what I’m saying is Thanksgiving is one of the best holidays for us, because we’ve already had or opted out of all the awkward conversations that can come with it. It’s a fight-free day. 

I’m sharing this because we are starting a month of focus on anti-biased parenting which is ALL about embracing the awkward conversations. GOING THERE. It’s a belief that it all gets better once you do, and it’s not nearly as hard or as bad as you were expecting. 

The centerpiece of this month is our ONLY course we are running for the rest of the year: “Raise Better Humans: A Masterclass for Time Pressed Parents Who Want a Better World.”

Adimika and I are curating an incredible roster of guest lecturers to cover conversations and strategies around race, gender, LGBTQ+ issues, ableism, religious freedom, and respect for Indigenious people. 

In this course, you’ll learn how to have regular daily car conversations about some of the topics that can tie us up in knots, even as adults. You’ll learn how your kids can be allies to kids whose lives are at greater risk simply because of how they were born. You’ll learn how your family can develop a more diverse community and do this work together. It’s not about shame, it’s heart-forward solutions that will heal us all. 

If you are interested at all, come to our free Zoom tonight. Catherine and Adimika will be leading a conversation about raising good digital citizens, specifically because technology and our over-reliance on it during the last year has exacerbated ALL of this. (Literally, I tweeted about this last night and had a gun-toting Karen come at me calling me “sick” because I want to raise anti-racist kids...that takes a toll on me. I cannot imagine what it does to teens and tweens just starting their digital journeys!) 

And if you attend tonight, we have a special gift for you! 

Lastly, we have a lot of new stuff beyond this rebrand coming your way. It’s pretty exciting.

If you have thoughts, drop me a note. You’ll still get me at mom@chairmanmom.com, but officially my new email is chairman@chairmanme.com.

Thank you for being the inspiration that gets us up in the morning and fuels us working late into the night. We are so impressed with everything you do all day, every day.

What advice or support can you offer to fellow members today?

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• Tips for starting a corporate job later in life?
• Anyone else cracking from trying to keep it all together?