Who's Your Mama?

I've thought about this for some time--in my spare time, on walks at night when inspiration bubbles up in me, in those rare quiet times of peaceful solitude or when I'm driving and I hear my favorite soul-inspiring song--I've thought about this. Bottom line we need to think about mothers. We need to call them into our frame of reference, move them to the forefront and remind ourselves where we come from. NOT to condemn them, not to criticize their decisions or mothering practices, not to question their level of devotion to their children or their relationship status. We need to reflect on how we treat mothers. What messages are we sending the women who nurture and attend to the children that will populate the public sphere as the generations cycle through? Are we doing enough to help them? Are we backing them and supporting them or are we stifling their process and killing their spirit?

Mothers are overlooked, under-funded, under-valued--devalued even, marginalized, demoted to the periphery of our regard, if they are regarded at all and missing from the public conversation we should be having. We should be asking them what they need. We should be uniting them together and abolishing the isolation that separates them from each other--that denies them their sisterhood. We should be aiding them in raising their children--our children. The village mentality is missing here as we relegate mom to the confines of her home, with bars on the windows of her soul and her aspirations as the world moves forward without her, in spite of her and certainly, at her expense.

Motherhood as we know it, when we dare to know it--when we dare to consider for one single second that children have mothers who sacrifice for them and care for them and later gift them to the world--motherhood is tainted with prejudice, judgment and patriarchal ideas of women's destinies, ambitions and abilities. Motherhood is the space in which mothers get lost if they relinquish control over the experience with their children--a relinquishment they will not even realize as the stage was set for this subterfuge long before they came. We owe it to mothers to explore this terrain and understand the effect we have on their care work when we disregard their process, their product and their potential. Who will start this conversation and who will partake in the dialogue that ensues? Are we ready for the questions, and above all, are we ready for the answers? It's time...