New Lesbian Podcast Pulls The Curtain Back On A Two-Mom Family

The year was 2008—pants were low cut, Flo Rida’s “Low” was No. 1 on the charts, and MTV was king. Enter Lisa Rizzo (above, left), a new queer contestant on the hit dating show. When the show ended and she made a series of appearances at clubs throughout the country, she took a picture with a fan that would end up changing her life forever. 

The fan, Jaimee (above, right), was only 16 at the time and had snuck in with the help of her cousin and a fake ID. The duo wouldn’t see one another for five years until, at a Pride party in 2012, they reunited. They’ve been together ever since. 

Now with flourishing careers, two kids, and twins on the way, the Rizzo family has decided to take on a new adventure—a podcast. The Two Mom Edit podcast, which launched a few weeks ago, will be a place where they share their stories, their advice, and the ups and downs of being a two-mom household. GO chatted with the moms about everything from the joys of raising a family together, the power of manifestation, and why they chose to start their podcasting journey.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

GO: You’re two busy moms with successful careers, what inspired you to take on this new journey and start a podcast together? 

Lisa: The first thing I would say that inspired us is that we really missed being involved in the community the way we were before we had children. We wanted to connect with the community in a true, authentic way of where we are in our lives right now. Before, we were throwing queer events in New York City, and we don’t really do that anymore, so we wanted to reconnect with our lives and our authentic selves now as a two mom family. 

So I have a business, Limitless Slides. It’s a footwear line, and I was doing a podcast to help expand that and have that grow. And Jamie’s like, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at this podcasting thing. Why don’t we do something authentic for ourselves?’ You know, showing ourselves as two moms and how we’re navigating. We never had any examples to follow for ourselves. 

Jaimee: I came up with that because for years we were the first out of all our friends to get engaged, to get married, and to go through IVF. We didn’t have anybody to turn to because we were the first ones. We had so many people reach out to us over the last 10 years about how we did everything, and what is the right way—not that there’s any right way. We would just share how we did things, like how you picked your bridal party, or how you decided who’s gonna carry, and what finding the donor was like. 

I always loved being able to be a part of that, too, and helping people navigate such a scary new experience and chapter. This is our way to expand that to a lot of different people and give them that outlet and make them feel like they’re not alone if they don’t have anybody to turn to or they are the first out of all their friends, or maybe they don’t even know any lesbians at all, and they’re having challenging times. It’s not easy being a two-mom family or being in a relationship for that long. Our relationship has gotten so strong with all the different chapters of our life that we’ve been through but I feel like if I would have had a heads up from a lot of things, we might have been able to avoid a lot of arguments and a lot of fights, and maybe we wouldn’t have had to figure so much out for ourselves. So if we could even help one person navigate a challenging time or an exciting time, then that’s why we would do it.

GO: As the daughter of a two mom household myself, I know that it can be a blast but right now politically a lot of people are afraid of queer parenting as if it’s some dangerous thing. So, what are the joys of raising kids in a two-mom household that you wish the world knew?

L: It’s a certain type of dynamic of teamwork. We’re really big on building a team in our household and making our kids extremely proud of who we are as their parents, by just being so engaged with them, just by being who we are. We want to spend as much time with them as possible. We both kind of take on that mama bear role. We are very active in their physical and emotional family experiences. We have such emotional intelligence, Jamie and I, that we feel like we bring a different dynamic to our household. I feel like we’re very powerful as a two-mom family, and we’re able to have a certain kind of superpower. We share that with our children.

J: We always tell them we’re a unicorn family. 

L: We try to educate them early on that they’re very lucky. I’ll never forget Carmella, our daughter, got a ride to a birthday party, and we’re in a very suburban area. I think we’re probably the only lesbian couple. So, Carmella got a ride from her friend, and all of a sudden, this little boy is like, ‘You know, Carmella, you’re really lucky. You get to have two mommies,’ and the person who was driving came home and told us. That really hit home, because it is something special that we try to teach her, so when she does get older and faces the reality of what she will face, which is judgment and criticism from people with different views and kids that are raised in different types of households, I want her to have that strength and that pride in us as her family. 

J: We never knew if what we were doing was the right thing. We’re doing our best, and we don’t know if that’s enough. But, for example, just last week there was a little boy who was like, ‘Well, who’s your dad? Who’s your dad?’ Lisa’s brother was there, and the boy was like ‘Is that your dad? Tell your dad to get this. Tell your dad to get that.’ And she’s like,’ That’s not my dad. That’s my uncle.’ Then the kid said it again and again, and she said, ‘I told you, I don’t have a dad.’ She’s only five, and she said it with such confidence, like, ‘This is who I am, get over it.’ That was just really cool. I guess we’re doing something right, because that’s all we can hope for, is that she has the confidence to be proud of who she is and who we are as a family.

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GO: In your first episode, you spoke about how both taking on the mama bear role can be a challenge. What are some other challenges that come with being a two-mom household that you wish you knew about?

L: It’s got to be hormones. There’s no lie that once a month, I feel emotionally different. So it’s very challenging navigating my emotions and my hormones, and also raising children on little sleep, and being a mom, being a wife, supporting my pregnant wife, and dealing with that because it is challenging. Sometimes you feel like you don’t really have anybody to talk to as your vent because you don’t want to put that on your wife, but you buckle down and you just work through it. You’ve got to work through it, knowing that this is temporary. It’s this time of the month, or it may not be just this time of the month. It may just be the stressors of life in general. I think we take turns showing up for each other, but with Jamie now pregnant, I try to show up as much as possible and just be a little more solid if I’m feeling my hormones in full effect. 

J: Definitely. And then, kind of what we were just talking about with Carmella, and how we try to build our kids’ confidence. That itself is challenging, knowing how to navigate certain conversations with your children about how we are different, but making them still feel like they are normal. Because obviously we are normal, and we are so lucky in the town that we live in, because we have such an amazing community, and everybody really does treat us very similarly to all the other families. 

But like Lisa said, you never know when we’re going to meet that one other person, and it’s definitely challenging to know how to respond. There was a Father-Daughter Dance through the local Junior Women’s Club, and we didn’t send Carmella. We felt like she was too young to bring somebody else and really understand that concept. Then recently, one of the kids must have been talking about it at school, because she brought it up out of the blue, and we were kind of caught off guard with how to navigate this conversation. So just being able to know how to respond, that’s definitely a challenge.

L: There’s actually another one real quick that pops up— there’s limited representation of two-mom families. So all the books that we have, all the books that are read to her at school, the shows, wherever it’s a dad in a book, I would say Mommy and Mama. I would always reword the book. 

GO: In the first episode, you mentioned these family dance parties. I want to know what’s on the playlist?

L: I bring it back. I love the Temptations, oldies, and Motown. But then I’ll hit up a little Stevie Nicks, Elton John. So I go old school.

J: I’ll put on Kids Bop, which plays the most popular pop hits. Our kids like all music. It’s honestly amazing. Our donor played like seven instruments, so I feel like it’s kind of in their bones to have that. They know all the words to all the oldies and also all the newbies. 

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GO: In the first episode, you also speak a lot about the power of manifestation. For me, or readers like me, who might not know too much about it, could you give a little crash course on what manifestation looks like in your lives?

J: So manifestation, to us, is essentially deciding what you want to happen in your life and what your true self is, and then guiding yourself there. During COVID, we really started doing a deep dive into learning a lot more and getting deeper into how to create, really, our dream life that we really are living right now. I mean, is our life perfect? No, we’re still having lots of goals, but we are living a life that five years ago, we wouldn’t have dreamed that we could even get this far.

L: The word “manifestation” has been thrown around so much, and it’s super trendy and popular. So I go back to like, it’s just the law of attraction, which is basically like believing that your thoughts or energy and emotions attract your experiences. 

It starts with your imagination. I grew up with a single parent, on food stamps and welfare, in a very small apartment. We didn’t have anything, and I always imagined and played pretend in my mind of just this beautiful life, whether it was, you know, superficial things or monetary things, or emotional things. And I really started to create that for myself. A big thing that we do is write a story of your future life and your future self. I break it down into different topics like how I feel, physically, emotionally, our financial situation, and then also what you want for your relationship. You read the story as if it already happened, and you feel it to be real, and then you subconsciously see what comes your way, but you gotta do it every morning and night.

J: One of the biggest things is being consistent with whatever you’re trying to manifest for your future self. So sometimes, when people are brand new to this, and they’re completely a non-believer, sometimes they say to do something as simple as trying to manifest something that feels very realistic. Because the point is, the universe doesn’t really know the difference between something big and something small. It doesn’t know if you’re trying to manifest one dollar or a million dollars. The point is that you have to be able to actually believe that it’s possible and be able to feel the feeling of what the outcome is. That’s the only way it manifests. If you can get yourself to feel as if you already have it.

GO: You have such an interesting life together and spoke about all of the different things you are excited to tackle on the podcast. What do you hope listeners get out of the podcast?

J: First, I hope they walk away feeling like they have some more representation. I just feel like it’s so important right now that people feel connected to other people, and feel like there are people out there who are putting a good name out for us as a whole community. 

Number two, I hope people learn about the physical things, like what it’s like to plan your wedding as two women, or however you want to do it. I hope people get that they can create whatever they want. If they want to have a two-mom family, great. If they want to have a kid by themselves, great. Whatever you want to do, I hope people realize that whatever they want to do is possible. 

L: We want people to feel inspired and empowered, that any version of their family is valid and special, and they make their family what they make their family. There’s no book on what a family looks like or how it should be. I think at the end of the day, it’s just empowering people to create the life that they want for themselves, while also being vulnerable and sharing our truths and our challenges in our relationship.