I picked up Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines after reading an excerpt of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned (which made my stage 4 pandemic reading list) in the Boston Review (one of those “I love this so much I’ll love everything you ever do” book purchases). I started reading the book before visiting my mom for the first time in two years because I wanted to reconsider what mothering meant and maybe start to heal some of the rifts between us. What I didn’t anticipate is how much the book would start to heal my soul in general and open me up to better ways of thinking.
Children Are People
“Children are the ways that the world begins again and again. If you fasten upon that concept of their promise, you will have trouble finding anything more awesome, and anything more extraordinarily exhilarating, than the opportunity or/and the obligation to nurture a child into his or her own freedom.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering
We, as June Jordan puts it, “possess a degree of power over the lives of children that we would find inconceivable and unspeakably tyrannical in any other context.” I’m sure this is something every child feels at some point as they grow, it’s the basis of individuation, after all. As the mother of an almost-six-year-old, it’s something I wrestle with every day. There is so much beauty and determination in my small son. I am so grateful to be his mother and also I need him to eat some protein with his lunch (whichever of the four options he’s given). I’m sure my parents wrestled similarly with the little girl who wanted to wear her grandmothers gold glitter pumps to preschool.
Reading Jordan’s essay gave me a lot of fodder for thought about how I parent and how I was parented—about the conscious (and unconscious) choices we make every day and about the consequences of those choices.
“Children are not individual private property, but they are also not objects through which we seek to achieve our political goals or address our emotional needs. To do so would violate children’s human rights.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering
Mothering is Essential Work
“Women are socialized (not created) to care for others and to expect others to care for them. Mothering, radically defined, is the glad gifting of one’s talents, ideas, intellect, and creativity to the universe without recompense.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering
Depending on your race and socioeconomic status, you may be targeted with messages of mother as saint or mother as devil (or even both). There’s a lot packed up in the word, “mother” and in our expectations of the people who undertake this work. What there is not enough of, however, is support for parents from our communities, our government, and sometimes even our own families. The essays in this book reminded me that care work is essential work and that anything we do that fails to celebrate and support the raising of the next generation is a failure to invest in mothers and in children.
“How can a household, a community, or a nation be effectively governed when women are held disproportionately responsible for its future yet are disproportionately neglected, abused, excluded, isolated, and invisible? Two words: it can’t.” – Malkia A. Cyril, Revolutionary Mothering
As much as I love my son, mothering is the hardest thing I have ever done. I do it every waking moment of every day and most of the time I am glad for it, despite general exhaustion and overwhelm. And I write this as a financially secure white person with a deeply involved partner. A lot of ugly has been surfaced during my time as a mother (and I don’t just mean my own inadequacies). I birthed a child into a country that would soon elect a tyrannical, racist, misogynist president, and then #MeToo and George Floyd opened conversations we should have resolved generations ago.
I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that if you don’t know where to start with making the world a better place for the next generation (or even your own), find a parent: offer them your attention and help, ask them how they’d change the world if they had any free time at all. Then read Cynthia Dewi Oka’s “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis” and let it change your life and the lives of those around you.
“We recognize that attacks on this mama work are grounded in anti-feminist, classist, racist, and sexist ideologies.” – tk karakashian tunchez, Revolutionary Mothering
The Reproductive Justice Framework
The introduction by Loretta J. Ross taught me about the Reproductive Justice Framework, the idea that “in addition to fighting for birth control and abortion, equal attention must be paid to the human right to become a mother, and the concomitant and enabling right to parent our children in safe and healthy environments.” There is so much wrapped up in this. First of all, the idea that choice runs both ways and that we should openly embrace all those choices. We spend so much time fighting each other (often impotently on social media) about choices people are making for their own bodies, what if we channeled that energy into fighting for each other’s human rights? What if we celebrated people who chose to have children and people who chose not to? What if we looked at each life that was consciously brought into this world as a gift? What if we invested in our communities and environment to the extent that everyone felt safe and healthy? Some of these ideas might seem radical, but they are not impossible.
Challenging the Welfare Queen Myth
“By discrediting the motherhood of women of color, poor white women, queer mothers, immigrant mothers, etc., this turns maternal virtue on its head, as these ‘bad’ mothers are held responsible for all the ills of society from the Wall Street mortgage crisis to environmental degradation caused by climate change. Because our children (however mothered) are the product of ‘morally impoverished’ mothers, our children become disposable cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism around the world or neo-slaves in the prison industrial complex.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering
As a child of the 80’s, the phrase “welfare queen” is as familiar to me as “trickle-down economics” and I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t really question the idea that people would have more children to get more government money until I had a child of my own and realized how difficult mothering is. I wasn’t running around assigning that name, but I wasn’t actively working against it, either. Reading Revolutionary Mothering I realized how much I’d bought into a racist, classist ideology that was built on heaping blame on our most vulnerable while the wealthy were celebrated for reaping whatever they wanted. Every essay in this book is a bold reminder of how much of the work toward making a better tomorrow is being done by people who get shit on daily by individuals and institutions. We have to do better.
Scarcity vs. Abundance
“Scarcity thinking says that there will never be enough of anything—love, food, energy, or power—so we must horde, or conditionally offer and withdraw, what we have… Abundance thinking says that together, we have enough of what we need, that there is enough for all of us if we recognize our essential interdependence.” – Autumn Brown, Revolutionary Mothering
The capitalist underpinnings of the last section lead naturally to Autumn Brown’s essay, “Scarcity and Abundance,” which sparked the most cogent conversation I was able to have with my husband about this book as we drove to visit my parents this past weekend. In Political Science classes in college, I was drawn to the idea of zero sum versus positive sum thinking. I identified as positive sum, but as I’ve grown older and more tired, I’ve felt pulled back into zero sum (at least at the worst of times). It’s been an ever-present topic during the pandemic on a global and personal level, and Brown contextualized this dichotomy for me in relation to mothering. I realized some of the struggles I have with my mother is that she, too, is drawn to zero sum thinking (or a scarcity model) when she’s at her worst because of how her mother treated her. She has her abundance moments, too, and I think she’s also wrestling with this dichotomy (though we haven’t talked about it).
The important takeaway for me here is that when I’m feeling grumpy or like there isn’t enough, I have to wake myself up to the fact that I don’t believe in a world where there isn’t enough—I, like Brown, believe that “if we develop relationships based on sharing our struggles AND our resources, we do in fact have enough of everything.”
“I experience abundance because I expect abundance, and because humans are social creatures, we live up to cultural expectations, whether they come from outside of us, or from within.” – Autumn Brown, Revolutionary Mothering
Learning to Mother Myself
“You will be beautiful when you are recognized as the person you really are, and that you will be beautiful when you do not try to be something you are not.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering
As the editors write, “We are accountable when we are specific.” For me, my greatest fault is the selfishness that comes from nurturing hurts long past. I realized in reading “m/other ourselves” by Gumbs that not only am I wasting energy in a cycle that will never change itself, I actually have the power to heal myself. As she writes, “love is possible in a world that teaches us to hate ourselves and the selves we see waiting in each other.” This small contextual shift loosed a feeling in me that I have more to offer the world, from beginning to forgive my mother to embracing the amount of love I have in my body for humanity as a whole. Gumbs writes of all kinds of groups where people come together to use the power of mothering to help each other and by God, I want to be part of that.
“To revolt, we must measure the depth not of our victimization but of our capacity and resilience.” – Cynthia Dewi Oka, Revolutionary Mothering
As Cynthia Dewi Oka writes, “The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies.” This is something I felt deeply after the birth of my son—the feeling that I was connected to every human on the planet and that each individual life had value. Lisa Factora-Borchers describes this beautifully throughout her essay, “Birthing a New Feminism.” My specific revolution, for now, is that I will learn to meet my own needs so I can share all the love that I feel with the other residents of this planet.
“The creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering
Next up, I’m waiting for a collection of June Jordan’s work to arrive from my local independent bookstore. The Twitterati were celebrating her birthday as I read this book and I realized that not only did I love her essay in this book but that many of the people in Revolutionary Mothering were inspired by her ideas. I can’t wait to read more of her work for myself and see what sparks. Meanwhile, whether you are a mother or simply were born of one, I highly recommend reading Revolutionary Mothering to see what it opens up for you.
This collection of eerie short stories quickly became one of my most recommended books. I loved it so much I sent a copy to a friend (another way I’m trying to re-engage with life this year). Yap’s stories span parts of Asia and the U.S. and carry with them bits of lore from all over. They are surprising, smart, and delightfully creepy. Because I work in tech, I hardly ever read fiction about tech life, but the way Yap wove together magic with an insider’s view on this subculture in “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” was insightful and wicked and very much worth the read.
I have not finished this book yet, but it is one of the scariest things I’ve read in a long, long time. A true ghost story, I Remember You is also something that’s formed a new habit for my family: my husband reads a few pages some nights after I go to bed, I catch up in the mornings I wake too early, and our son questions us relentlessly about it over breakfast. I love the book. I love the sharing. I hope we get to do this forever.
I bought the book in the minutes following my second vaccination as part of a gleeful armload of treasure acquired during my first visit to a bookstore in over a year. It tells the story of three Muslim women in Scotland on a journey to visit the grave of the first western woman to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. Each of the women is beautifully drawn both in their individual struggles and in the ways they push and pull against one another. 
Speaking of patterns and being doomed to repeat history we haven’t learned from, In the Dream House was not at all what I expected from a memoir of abuse, but it might be the book I need to help me work through some patterns I’d like to shed. Machado’s writing is gorgeous, always, and the book is a tender recounting of a relationship that felt like love, for a time. 
My son entered a spooky place sometime during the pandemic where he latched on to Scooby-Doo and began asking for more. Although he’s only five, I thought he might be ready for The Dark is Rising series, one of my favorites from childhood. And I was right. I’ve loved every night we’ve cuddled late past bedtime reading just one more page. Over Sea, Under Stone taught me something important, too. As Jane, Barney and Simon crept up to the attic to explore the treasures of the Grey House, I found myself on an adventure with my son. And I remembered what that felt like. How essential adventure used to be to my sense of being, even when I was actively resisting it. 
I am a writer. This is a through line of my life that I have had to fight for. It is also what carries me forward in the hardest times (like the past year). I often look to Agodon as a model—a successful poet and publisher who lives on the side of the water I dream of. Dialogues with Rising Tides reminded me that her writing is also something I can learn from. I particularly enjoy the breadth of her voice, the way she embraces the quotidian “we’re replacing our cabinet knobs / because we can’t change the world,” casual wit “the apocalypse always shows up / uninvited with a half-eaten bag of chips,” deep insights “She tells me the reason I wake up / screaming is because / no one ever dealt with that pain,” and artful imagery “This is postpartum with suicide corsages.” I don’t always re-read poetry books (the way I should), but I will be re-reading this one.
Nell Zink is the best writer of my generation. She captures the essence of what makes us tick (for better or worse) as individuals and as a society and she’s not afraid to call bullshit when necessary. I was sucked into Nicotine by the descriptions of Penny trying to support her father through hospice and death while the rest of her family found anything else to do. What held me, though, was the nuanced descriptions of the squatters Penny encounters in her grandparents’ former home and the ways that Zink allows her characters to break past the labels we might want to place on them. 
Speaking of a post-capitalist life…this book is a gorgeous look at what life would look like if we embraced love and humanity as our underlying values, and it’s filled with reminders of the damage we do to ourselves and our planet every day we do not. The ideas lap like ocean tides against loving descriptions of sea life we don’t look at closely enough.
Five and a half years into this parenting thing, I see around me the beginnings of a new generation of dads—men who are in touch with their own feelings and who understand their role in a family is not just to provide, but also to nurture. But I don’t see a lot of that in popular culture, yet. Even the empathetic fathers on TV and in books are too often hapless doofs, when they even exist. Victor LaValle’s portrayal of Apollo Kagwa as a deeply believable New Dad in The Changeling was the first reason I fell in love with this book. There’s a lot more to love about this book—from the writing to the incorporation of classic myths to the explorations of friendship and what it’s like to start a family with not enough support—but Apollo helped me appreciate even more deeply my husband as a partner and a father. 
This polyphonic history of post-Soviet Russia is fascinating. It’s fascinating as events unfold with Navalny in Russia. It’s fascinating as the U.S. seems intent on forgetting our own attempted coup. It’s fascinating in general to remember what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union and the clashes and shifts in that country in the years following. It’s also fascinating for me as someone who’s always been interested in the Eastern European parts of my heritage. 
My Russian deep-dive may have started with an attempt to finally get this tome off my to-read shelf before the opening the stack of books awaiting me for my birthday. It might also have started because I was remembering 
I was thrilled when I found this gem in a local Little Free Library one day this past fall, because Ozeki and Abani are two of my very favorite writers. I was also excited to delve into the very personal stories in the book as I work to learn more about individual experiences of race. 
This book is actually fiction based on stories from someone who experienced the same deportation to the gulag. I’ve lost the book somewhere (or given it away, it was oh so very depressing), so I cannot treat you to any of Müller’s sentences or the fantastic imagery she imbues into this bleak, bleak experience, but this book is one of the most beautifully written things I’ve read in a very long while and it will make almost any pandemic experience seem cheery. 
Now we’re snowed in for the long weekend, and after finally finishing the Alexievich book (so good, so long, such small print), I decided to treat myself to Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I’m not very far along, but already it’s a bit like 
I started reading this collection of essays during the post-election drama when all sense dictated what should happen next and yet we all knew that sense was out the window. Reading about Gabbert’s obsession with disasters was relatable and timely and her thoughts about everything from survivor’s guilt to the way we glamorize disasters to “slow violence” feel important right now as we struggle to get through now, some of us while excitedly tweeting the worst headlines we can find.
One of the things I’ve been deeply lacking for the last ten months was hope. Enter Michelle Obama. I knew regrettably little about her before reading this book. The fact that she seemed kind was more than enough to pedestalize her in comparison to our current reality. I had no idea when I opened the book that she’d help me reengage with so many things that matter dearly to me:
I’m not very far into this book yet as it was a much-longed-for Christmas gift, but already Kingsolver is helping me think about the kind of life I want to lead, particularly when it comes to food.
It’s never too early to start working on the future, even when it’s too late (Gabbert quotes a statistic that the climate effects we’re experiencing now were actually instigated 40 years ago). Perez’s book of poetry hit me hard in the face with all the climate facts that I mostly want to ignore, and while we’re hunkered down seems like a good time to start changing some of our habits. Even the ones that have sustained us until now (like the almost daily boxes that help us mark time with goods we do not need).