Her Creation Story
How Grandma Knows Best Came to Be
One man’s princess is another man’s whore.
I was raised on fairytales that promised white heroes, royal destinies, and men who would save me.
No one told me the truth:
That I would need to save myself—and that the instructions would never come in the mail.
Life has taken me through motherhood, grandmotherhood, education, grief, survival, advocacy, and more than a few lessons I never volunteered to learn. Somewhere along the way, I began paying closer attention to the stories society tells us about who matters, who belongs, who deserves care, and whose wisdom is worth hearing.
Grandma Knows Best began with something seemingly simple.
I searched online for images of grandmothers and noticed how rarely I saw anyone who looked like me. The grandmothers presented to the world seemed to come from a very narrow imagination: usually white, elderly, conventional, and safely contained within familiar ideas about what a grandmother should be.
But grandmothers come in every colour, age, shape, style, history, and state of becoming.
We are scholars, workers, caregivers, artists, advocates, survivors, troublemakers, truth-tellers, and community builders. We carry tenderness and anger, knowledge and uncertainty, tradition and change. We are not relics of the past. We are living, thinking women whose stories continue to shape the present.
I wanted to make that visible.
At first, I imagined Grandma Knows Best as a place where women who looked like me could find accessible information about mental health and well-being. That purpose still matters. Black people continue to face barriers to culturally relevant, affordable, and respectful care, and too many of us are expected to survive pain without adequate support.
But as I continued writing and building, the vision grew.
Grandma Knows Best became a home for Black storytelling, mental wellness, intergenerational wisdom, education, advocacy, and community care. It is a place where lived experience is treated as knowledge, stories can become medicine, and difficult truths do not have to be softened to make others comfortable.
Here, I write about grief, motherhood, grandmotherhood, higher education, disability, housing, racism, institutional power, survival, healing, and the complicated work of becoming. I also share resources, reflections, and tools that may help people find language for what they are experiencing and remind them that they are not alone.
This is not a clinical practice, counselling service, or crisis-response program. Grandma Knows Best does not replace professional medical or mental-health care. It is an independent platform for storytelling, learning, reflection, connection, and collective care.
It is also an invitation.
An invitation to listen across generations.
To question what we have been taught.
To honour knowledge that was earned outside classrooms as well as within them.
To make room for Black women, elders, caregivers, students, survivors, and others whose experiences are too often dismissed, misunderstood, or left out of the official record.
Grandma Knows Best is still growing because I am still growing.
What began with the absence of a face became a determination to create a space where more of us could see ourselves—not merely represented, but recognized.
Welcome to Grandma Knows Best.
Come sit on the porch.
There is room for your story here.
About Carla Rodney
Carla Rodney is a writer, educator, mother, grandmother, and social-justice advocate. Her work draws upon lived experience, academic study, intergenerational knowledge, and a longstanding commitment to examining how race, gender, disability, grief, education, and institutional power shape people’s lives. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Women and Gender Studies and Equity Studies and a Master of Education in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto.
Through Grandma Knows Best, Carla creates writing, educational resources, and community-centred projects grounded in Black life, truth-telling, mental well-being, and collective care.
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