Mothering in a bind

“To survive in the mouth of this dragon, we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson– that we were never meant to survive,” Cecilia Caballero, PhD., a poet, writer, and co-editor of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology, says quoting Black feminist writer and theorist Audre Lorde.  

“Parenting at the mouth of the dragon is what distinguishes us from the ‘normative’ or ‘white mothering,’” she says. “We have to contend with fearing police brutality, disproportionate rates of family separation in CPS families at the border, and an ongoing genocide in Palestine, where generations of families are being murdered.”

Movement toward liberatory mothering models requires honoring this, the additional challenges, and the potential to further harm as we “contend with racial capitalism, scarcity, and fear on an everyday basis.”

I often felt crushed under the awareness of the world that awaited my children. Though partnered, I internalized the pressure to parent perfectly. I held an unrealistic share of responsibility for my children’s future and by helicoptering over them to protect them from the traumas I’d experienced. A 17th-century English legal principle—Partus Sequitur Ventrem, “the child status follows the mother,” showed me my children would follow me in freedom or trauma.  

Despite oppressive patriarchal systems, I would be the one to lead our family toward freedom. The justice movements around me suggested the same. 

“We’ve always led the way,” says Caballero. “When mothers’ needs are met in movements, we gain visionaries, strategists, and life-givers.” She says motherwork, a term coined by Patricia Hill Collins, has been minimized, erased, and even criminalized, especially for those of us raising black and brown children. However, without respect for the knowledge and labors of mothers, communities can’t respond to lived realities. 

She continues, noting that mothering is more than just a biological identifier; it’s a nongender restrictive act of care. “I believe in that vision and possibility, time and time again, in the face of genocide, war, disaster, capitalism, all of the things that we’re experiencing, that mothering is the antidote.”

She notes that many of us are breaking intergenerational trauma and harm and struggling to maintain our complex humanity under the pressure of “prescribed roles of motherhood. “We’re not above reproach—sometimes, we do make mistakes,” she says—but mothers consistently lead efforts to challenge social systems and end patterns of generational trauma.

Mothering toward healing

Today, Black and other mothers of color are parenting their children intentionally and embracing more authoritative parenting models with humanizing, autonomy-based shared decision-making. Still, these movements rarely directly address mothers’ needs and add to our overwhelm. Like Partus Sequirt Ventrim, my children can’t learn autonomy, grace, and healing if they don’t see me model it.  

Caballero says resistance requires individual, interpersonal, and institutional shifts.

“Mothering ourselves is the antidote, but that doesn’t happen in isolation,” says Caballero, describing the importance of community. She notes that community offers the connection and accountability required to end systems of harm in our parenting. These words led me to a revelation. The women in my family weren’t less susceptible to the demands of mothering while Black. They had each other to fill in the gaps and hold each other in comfort and accountability when things were hard. In other words, they mothered each other.

Using “mother” as a fixed role where one person provides care is an underutilization of power. When we embrace the fluidity of the term, we acknowledge that we never stop needing care. Further, dynamic and reciprocal models of care inspire us to care for ourselves and receive care as we raise children. It also poses the unexpected possibility that our children have care to offer. 

“Our children come into the world looking like granny. Could it be possible that they also have her wisdom?” Johnson challenges. If we could lean into this possibility and treat our children like reincarnated ancestors, we could respect their humanity even more.”

Collaborative, shared mothering is revolutionary in a society that expects us to parent in isolation, hints Johnson.

Caballero says this reciprocal element of mothering, often practiced by Black and Brown people, makes it revolutionary. It’s visible in movements rooted in a community, like reproductive justice.

Both experts note mothers are uniquely equipped to revolutionize social norms and community care through mothering. My journey is just starting. But the more I humanize myself, the easier it is to humanize my children. 

Caballero’s words remind me of the duplicity of mothering while marginalized. 

“We’re parenting from a place of survival. But we’re also parenting from a place of being visionaries,” she says. This vision work is what will set us free.”