Ladies, We Need To Talk - _Traded a husband for a bestie_ Why these mums moved in together

0:00Yumi StynesHello, it's Yumi here, your parasocial best friend and professional podcast host. Now, I know you're into it, but do you ever wish your kids could discover the joy of screen-free podcast entertainment too? Some of the best, funniest and...CLEARS THROAT Secretly educational podcasts for kids are on ABC Listen. They'll unearth adventures with Gardening Australia Junior, explore big questions with Imagine This and learn about the world with News Time.

0:30Yumi StynesAll of those shows and a whole lot more are available for free in the Child's Safe part of ABC Listen. Just look for the Kids tab. And while your kids are busy with their new favourite podcasts, you'll be able to listen to one of yours. So settle in, my friend. ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. We can all just be in this kind of mess of childbearing together and we'll help each other.

0:59Speaker 3The only ground rules were no men allowed in the house. We have these really strong bonds with each other's kids. We're sharing life together. It's like any other family, I think, only you have double the help.

1:16Yumi StynesHey ladies, have you ever been so over your life of parenting and working and unfulfilled dreams that you have fantasised about starting a commune with only your female friends and raising your kids together in safety, community and shared lolls?

1:34Yumi StynesJust you and your besties having really well-made cups of tea while the kids are playing in a shared backyard and there's a red lentil dial bubbling away on the stove that smells amazing and no man has left skids in the toilet bowl and beards double in the basin. Did you know that instead of fantasising about it, some women are doing it? They're joining forces and building women-only households where common decency and cleanliness prevail.

2:03Yumi StynesThese magical spaces offer a reprieve from the relentless grind of parenting and homemaking that falls on mothers. Here, women share the load and pitch in together to bring up the kids. There's no squabbling about who's unpacking the dishwasher or doing the groceries. Instead, there's a mutual understanding of the need to get shit done, to raise a family and still try to have a semblance of a life. I'm Umi Steins, ladies.

2:33Yumi StynesWe need to talk about the Mamune. Do you want to come out and have breakfast with us, darling? It's a slow start for the toddlers in Nicole's household in Wollongong in coastal New South Wales. They're just waking up, playing with toy cars and digging their spoons into the porridge on the table. Nicole and her two-year-old son Charlie are usually the ones up first.

3:16Yumi StynesEvery morning when Charlie wakes up, he immediately says, where's Sandy? Where's Emma? Sandy and Emma live with Nicole and her son. Emma is an old dear friend and Sandy is Emma's almost two-year-old. These besties and their babies live together but they're sharing more than just a roof.

3:36Speaker 2We're sharing every meal, we're helping each other with the washing and the cleaning and maybe one person's playing with the kids outside while the other person's cooking dinner and there's a lot of collaborating like that. Before Emma and their kids Sandy moved in, Nicole was struggling with single motherhood. It was lonely being in a little apartment, being up all night, the baby screaming.

4:01Speaker 2Not just no one to hand him over to, but no one even to witness what was happening. No one to kind of heat up a meal when you're trapped under an endlessly breastfeeding baby. There was lots of kind of screaming and crying and just really being alone in that. It's a special kind of crazy. Nicole is queer and always wanted to be a mum. As time went on, the desire became more compelling. I'd been

4:30Yumi Styneskind of in and out of a number of relationships and talked about kids with different partners and I was approaching 40 and I didn't have the right partner to have a kid with and it had been kind of brewing in my mind for a while what I would do. The prospect of solo parenting was daunting but Nicole had the necessary determination. She asked a good friend of hers to be a sperm donor and he said yes. She got pregnant and as per the plan eventually in her arms was a screaming baby.

5:00Yumi Stynescompletely reliant on her. The first year was really hard for me. Charlie didn't sleep and he really screamed day and night. In the years leading up to Nicole deciding to have a kid on her own, she was aware that one of her close friends, Emma, was also thinking about having a baby. So they were both considering solo parenting.

5:27Speaker 2And we were having these phone conversations, just throwing out the ideas of like, what would it look like to both be parenting at roughly the same time, you know? Like maybe we could share one kid. Oh yeah. And eventually we're at Landed. Maybe we'd have our own kids and we would parent in parallel and we'd... We can all just be in this kind of mess of child rearing together and we'll help each other. Three months after Nicole had Charlie, Emma had Sandy. Emma uses they-them pronouns, by the way.

5:57Speaker 2So first Emma moved into a house around the corner from Nicole and when Emma's baby was seven months old, they combined homes. I remember the day they moved in, Charlie pushing Sandy around the living room in drawers and they'd already seen heaps of each other by then and they were so thrilled and they remained thrilled. Every morning when they wake up, they're like delighted to see each other. It's almost like you have to teach men how to be a dad or a husband.

6:27Yumi StynesAnd I never wanted to take on that role. Ladies, meet Bernie. She's a 38-year-old schoolteacher in New York City. Bernie loved being a mum to her two boys, but she resented being the more capable caregiver. I don't think the same skill set is coming from someone who's grown up gendered as a woman and somebody who's grown up gendered as a man.

6:57Speaker 3You're not coming with the same skill set on how to run a household, how to parent. Bernie, you told my producer, every time I've had a romantic partnership, it has competed with my own needs. Can you tell me more about that? I think as a woman, you're already making a lot of concessions for being in the partnership to begin with. And so then when you start chipping away at

7:26Yumi Stynesbeing so restricted for time that you need to sacrifice. What are the first things to go? The first things to go for Bernie were the hobbies that she loved, writing and dancing. But she sucked it up because that's what moms do. Eventually she split from the father of her youngest son and there she was, a single mom in New York City. I lived on a four-floor walk-up with two kids, a stroller, No washer and dryer, even in the building. Childcare was equal to the cost of renting her crusty and tiny apartment, and the whole situation was profoundly unsustainable. One day, while out and feeling ghastly, Bernie bumped into an old college friend that she'd lost touch with. Annabelle was also a burnt-out single mum. We both knew that we were struggling. It was very... ..that both of us were having a tough time.

8:24Yumi StynesSo she looked a bit like shit. Is that what you're saying? And then I definitely was going through it. It's that kindred recognition, right? You just saw somebody and you were like, oh yeah, yeah, she gets it. Yeah, I can't even say anything because I'm like, girl, I see you. I'm here too. Bernie and her boys, aged three and seven, started hanging out with Annabel and her daughter who was five all the time. Annabel would come over and set herself up in the kitchen and cook dinner while the kids played.

8:55Speaker 3I have two boys. The amount of cooking you have to do for two boys, it's non-stop. And Annabelle was in a place where she was burnt out and so she was buying out all the time. And so this kind of natural exchange started to happen where she came into the kitchen excited to be able to cook a meal. And

9:23Yumi StynesI came into the kitchen and was able to sit down and like have a glass of wine and connect with my friend. Bernie didn't just want her friend Annabelle to share the cooking and parenting load every now and then. She wanted her to move in. They were great together. This could work. But there was one condition Bernie wasn't budging on.

9:48Yumi StynesI asked her, hey, do you want to move in together? You know, we can actually move to a nice neighborhood. But your boyfriend can't. Annabelle was dating a guy at the time who, in Bernie's opinion, was not it. I was like, hey, you seem to be having relationship troubles. That's cool. Come and live with me. We can eat ice cream and cry about it together. Annabelle initially said no to Bernie's suggestion.

10:16Yumi StynesBut after three more months of the single mum grind, in August 2024, Annabelle and her daughter moved in to the cosy casa. The only ground worlds were no men allowed in the house. Or no kens in the Barbie. Is that your language? No kens in the Barbie dream house. Does that mean no sleepovers for kens? No kens entering the apartment. Wow, OK. No kens even coming for dinner.

10:46Yumi StynesNo. She would be worthy enough. She would be worthy enough. Hey, remember Nicole, our single mum in Wollongong? She's recorded little snippets of life in her Aussie version of a mummune.

11:08Speaker 2After a difficult first year of solo parenting, doing it with her friend wasn't just an improvement, it was low-key glorious. It was like a relief. It was like somebody else was carrying something with me. Just them being there. And the things that you can't even really describe, and you don't even really want to spend all day complaining about, but just to know that it was seen.

11:37Yumi StynesYou would know this, as parents like, you do so much work, silent, constant, domestic work. All parents do this right. But just to have someone in there with you for that is, yeah, it's just priceless. That's really beautiful, Nicole. It's someone seeing that you are doing a good job and you don't need more than that sometimes. It's just a little bit of acknowledgement, a little bit of a witness. It's just a relief of being seen.

12:06Yumi StynesYou put so much of yourself into parenting. In all those moments, you put so much of yourself into it, and it means something for that to be seen and acknowledged and understood. Nicole and Emma's arrangement required both of them to be all-in. Apart from sharing obvious things like cooking and cleaning, they've built a kind of family together. We are all so deeply embedded in each other's chaotic existence.

12:37Speaker 2Sandy Emma's kid has started calling me mummy sometimes. I'm not mummy to Sandy. Like we have very clearly delineated kind of parent relationships. But obviously we have these really strong bonds with each other's kids. The bond that Emma and I have now is like it's hard to put words to, right? We've just been through a lot together. Like we're sharing life together. We're really sharing life and we're sharing all of those.

13:06Speaker 2precious little moments, the hard little moments. The morning that I spoke to Nicole, she'd been hanging out with the toddlers before daycare. We were sitting on the floor. The two kids were sitting on my legs brushing their teeth and we were watching this rainbow across the sky in a flock of cockatoos flying across the sky while Emma was pottering around. And it's those moments that are just like, this is some kind of domestic bliss. This is some kind of sublime.

13:35Speaker 2moment as much as parenting can be so exhausting. And it's so bonding, right? I don't know that this situation that we've got in a small apartment with kids so young would work if we weren't so all in it together. To share a space like this, it cannot work if there's a housemate who is sort of half in. That's just like not a possibility. So yeah, we're...

14:03Yumi StynesWe're in the thick of it. Can you talk me through a typical afternoon routine at your place? Like how the transfer of care and domestic labor happens between the lot of you? So yeah, often we'll be doing our own things in the day. In the afternoon we'll come back and then one of us will be downstairs usually playing with the kids. They'll be playing on their bikes. The other person will go up to the flat and get dinner ready.

14:29Speaker 2We'll all have dinner together. We'll try and manage the food throwing and the yelling and the food refusal. Try and get an adult conversation in but often fail. And then the kids will have a bit of a play and then it's bath time. And then we do a dance party because often they're getting a bit haywire by that time and it's a small space. So to get all the energy out, kids dance music on and they like leap around the living room having a dance party.

14:57Yumi Stynesuntil they're kind of tired and then it's books and bed and we take them separately off to bed. Even though they're not a married couple, Nicole and Emma still catch themselves falling through that trap that you hear about where whole days go by and all you've talked about is the kids. There's been times where we've been like, do you know what, we know we're both tired but let's just kind of hang out when the kids have gone to bed and do something nice even if it's just watch something funny because yeah, like all relationships need.

15:27Yumi Stynestending and work. Now, I know you're both queer, but are there any moments when not having a man in the house has been, you know, a deficit? I'll point to one time that it bothers me is when I can't open a jar. Oh, look, you mean I'm really strong. I'm really strong. I can't open a fucking jar. I don't think so. I don't think. But recently, like a few months ago, Charlie was starting to clock that a lot of other kids have daddies. Charlie has made the connection in his beautiful toddler brain that men wearing high veers like you know the vests or the tops that those men are daddies. He came back from daycare one day and they'd been doing work on the roof at daycare men in high veers and he comes home and he's like I saw my daddy on the roof at daycare today. And it's this moment where you're like

16:29Yumi StynesI feel kind of brutal being like, babe, you don't have a daddy. The reality of the living arrangements in Nicole's Momune is actually pretty cramped. The four of them live in a two bedroom apartment and each parent shares a room with their child. I really think space matters and I think having a bigger space would make it easier for us. Yeah. It's really hectic. It's really chaotic. Do you think it's cramping your sex life? Absolutely. Yeah.

17:01Yumi StynesNicole and Emma's plan was to trial this arrangement in Nicole's apartment and then eventually move into a bigger space. But they ended up living together for over a year, and now Emma and their little one are planning their next chapter. They've decided to move back to Melbourne for the family support. Oh, no. Yeah. No. So... So the dream and the chaos will all come to an end mostly because, you know, you know how...

17:29Yumi Stynescrucial family supporters. I understand that, but we'll really miss them. It'll be sad. Yeah. Have you made plans to keep the relationship between the boys strong once Emma and their son leave? Yeah, we have planned a holiday for a few months after they leave to visit them in Melbourne. And then the intention is to keep holidaying together, to keep in touch and

17:56Speaker 2Certainly, I have full confidence that we will stay friends and that they'll stay friends. But they're so tight now. What are your emotions around them leaving? It's mixed emotions around them leaving. Like, we're going to really, really miss them and there's a sadness. There's also a relief because it would be really tricky to continue to stay in such a small space together. But yeah, we're going to miss them. The rhythm of our day is going to look so different without them. Would you look for somebody else to move in?

18:26Speaker 2I'm not actively looking for someone else to move in. I think if a close friend who really wants to get in the muck of Todd the Life wants to move in, then that would be so great. But I'm not sort of actively looking for just somebody to help pay the rent. Over in New York City, Bernie is a complete convert to Momune Life.

18:52Speaker 3When her little family first moved in with Annabelle and her daughter, she kept comparing it to living with male partners. Even in the little details, like, oh, I gotta go and grab the laundry from downstairs. She'll notice that my son wants to get out of the bath, and I'll come upstairs five, 10 minutes later, and my son is in pajamas, in his pull-up, his teeth are brushed, and he's picking out his story.

19:20Yumi StynesNot because I asked her to but because she knew I was getting the laundry and it's just he wanted to get out of the bath. Is there something about how women initiate chores and see the work involved in keeping a family going that makes the mom-yoon work so well? Yeah, I think that's what I'm trying to describe because I get this question often like how do you do it and

19:47Speaker 3It just happens in a very fluid way that I think only women that have like gone on vacation with their friends and kids can understand. The day-to-day in Bernie's Momune involves a bit of tag-teaming between the mums designed to give each other some breathing room. So Annabelle will sometimes wake me up in the morning, she'll like knock on my door. She is an early riser and does her morning routine with her daughter.

20:15Speaker 3And then it's my time for madness. Get your shoes on. You're going to miss the bus. And Annabelle's just like stirring her coffee like, listen to your mother. She will like help me get my younger son ready while I'm dropping my eldest off at the bus. And then I drive Annabelle to work. And then we commute home together. One of us makes dinner and the other one entertains the kids and plays with the kids.

20:44Speaker 3and then we each do our separate bedtime routines. So a lot of people think that it's like cramped or, you know, you don't get any private space, but it does work. I like it. When Bernie and Annabelle moved into the Momune, their kids were moving into the completely new dynamic of their merged families. The kids call themselves a kidzoon. They call themselves brother and sister.

21:12Speaker 3And we didn't ask them to. They do have an important bond. And my older son did have a lot of questions about it, though, for sure. Was he said that he doesn't live with dad? Yes. That was his thing. He said, if you don't want to be alone, why are you not moving in with dad? And I had to explain to him that...

21:41Yumi StynesI love your father very much. I don't want to live with him. And that's okay. How has the ease of the Momune life made you think differently about women's work in a heteronormative family dynamic? I think this is the snake eating its tail in the sense that the structural...

22:02Speaker 3of using marriage to create a form of what I believe to be entrapment. I think it's a great option for some people, but I think for many women it is too much. It's just not sustainable. At least not for me. I found it very, very difficult. I walk in my house and I see my kids. I come from a job that I really enjoy.

22:30Speaker 3I get to have coffee with my best friend at the table and hear about everybody's day and what they learned. And, you know, the kids like run down the hall into their hallway. And I'm like, this is a joke. It's too good.

22:50Yumi StynesThe thing I like about hearing from Bernie and Nicole is that they're doing the thing. The fantasy that so many of us talk about with our girlfriends but don't actually ever take the concrete steps to make happen. And they're succeeding at what they set out to do. Even the fact that Nicole's situation is winding up is not a failure. It's reality. No family is final.

23:15Yumi StynesWe're all continuously evolving and changing, and the dynamic of one's living situation is never permanent, even if we try and make it so. The idea of being able to enjoy the domestic competence of a fellow mother is, quite frankly, very appealing. You just need to make sure at least one of you can open a jar. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gadigal, Muwanina and Daruwal people.

23:46Yumi StynesLadies We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie De Bettencore. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein and Sarah Mashman. Our supervising producer is Emma Morris and our executive producer is Taymar Kranswick. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.