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Learning to Mother the World

And how everyone can have a roll in this work

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“In her pelvis she holds her labors, long and
slippery. In her clavicle, silent things. (Money
and power. Safety and choice. Tiny banquets
of shame.)

In her hands she carries their egos, small and
flimsy. In her mouth she holds their laughter,
gentle currents, a cosmos of everything.”

~Kate Baer

When I was pregnant with my son, I remember feeling surprised at the beginning by how indistinguishable the early fetal movements can be from any of the other little pangs and flutters of daily life lived in our quirky human bodies. By contrast, in the final weeks, I remember being equally surprised by how knowable the growing being inside me had become. By then, I could differentiate between a small foot moving across my abdomen, little fingers wiggling, or the rhythm of his hiccups, and I could see many of those gestures in the visible undulations of my own skin.

In all the years that have passed since, one of the most persistent lessons of parenting has been that this sensation of embodying another person’s experiences within our own skin and our own hearts doesn’t ever entirely go away. Sometimes it’s subtle, like those early flutters, and sometimes it’s more overwhelming. But that visceral feeling of symbiosis lingers in the body forever. It’s as though evolution has provided a training period of actual physical connection to prepare us for a lifetime of feeling this precious other person imprinted on our own heart, on the intuition of our gut, and on our neural pathways.

While I can’t speak personally to other journeys into parenthood, I suspect that this feeling of embodying the highs and lows or our children’s experiences through the beat of our own pulse is not exclusive to the biological history of pregnancy or of motherhood. The obvious physicality of carrying a child may offer the most literal manifestation, but I think we are all capable of inscribing others within our own veins. As the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye writes of a father carrying his son on his shoulder in the rain,

“His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.”

Or as Joseph Fasano writes,

“I kneel there, and I lay a hand
like small rain on his trembling chest
and I feel his heart
as it croons its little music—

and I listen, I sit awake
and listen: this little heart
that sings the hymn
of living…”

I think we all have this capacity to internalize the breath of others' dreams and the song of others' heartbeats.

Like the air in our lungs, we bring our children into us, release them out on their own adventurous paths, welcome them back into our embrace, and let them go again. It’s probably the deepest challenge of parenting—the extent to which we are always so entwined, while also knowing it is our job to let them unravel themselves. As hard as this can be sometimes, this letting go and welcoming and letting go, I also think it is the most significant gift of parenting, and one we can carry forward into wider circles of care, if we choose to extend the lessons of our children beyond the limits of those bonds. This embodied care is so powerful it can usurp our own self-interest at times, both in the bringing close and in the letting go. But in the depths of this experience there is something to be learned about how we might interact with one another—with those who are not so obviously our own.

Usually, we let this lesson of bringing another person’s needs into our own being stretch only as far as our most intimate relationships, our own children and those others we hold closest to us. And, surely, there is some necessary self-protection in this. There are days when it can feel impossibly vulnerable just to care as deeply as we do about those with whom we have the most personal relationships. But, if there is anything recent months have taught us, I hope it is that people are capable of extending such deep, risky, personal investment in one another much more widely than we may believe we can bear.

Last May, I wrote about the history of Mother’s Day and its roots in an idea much bigger than the commercialized ways we celebrate today. The women whose vision and labor sowed the seeds for a day honoring mothers held a much broader and more powerful view of what mothering could mean, and of the impact that elevating mothering could have. They were women who had, themselves, already stretched their personal capacity for care well beyond the reach of their own children.

Julia Ward Howe, who originally conceived of a day for mothers, imagined it as an international gathering, “a general congress of women without limit of nationality,” working toward practical paths to peace. She was, herself, an abolitionist and a suffragist, and, as she described in her Mother’s Day Proclamation, she envisioned a Mother’s Day for Peace as an opportunity for world-changing solutions. She said,

“Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace…”

Howe’s contemporary, Ann Jarvis, whose daughter would eventually succeed in establishing Mother’s Day in her honor, was similarly driven to care for children who were not hers and for the world beyond the walls of her own home. An Appalachian mother, who lost several children to diseases like measles, she became a local public health organizer, mobilizing other mothers into “Mothers’ Work Clubs” to build a public health movement. Like Howe, she also became an advocate for peace, nursing soldiers during and after the American Civil War and enlisting other mothers to help heal fractured communities.

In the year since I last wrote about the history of Mother’s Day, and the potential it holds to inspire our care for the world beyond our own homes and families today, many more frightening things have happened to children. From the children of Minneapolis and all across the country, who still languish in detention centers like Dilley, to those who have lost medical care, disability aid, or food access due to funding cuts, to the children suffering in the wake of the decimation of USAID, to trans kids, whose access to medical care and safety grows more precarious each day, to the children of Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, who live in the constant shadow of fear cast by drones and bombs—it has been a heartbreaking year for children. In so many ways, as Mother’s Day approaches, we are failing to honor the values that originally anchored a movement for peace and care.

And yet, despite all this heartbreak, the year has also forced a resurgence of exactly the kind of practical care Howe and Jarvis called for and practiced. As a result, even amidst so many causes for despair, I’m strangely more hopeful for our capacity to mother the world, in all its beauty and devastation, today than I was a year ago. We may seem to see terrors multiply each day, but we’ve also seen people rise up with spirit, determination, and urgency to extend the reach of their care in ways I suspect Howe and Jarvis would have recognized. Though they would likely also have recognized some of the threats we currently face. The court has reminded us that the work of abolitionists and suffragists like Howe was never finished, and that Reconstruction is an ongoing project that can never be left untended or unguarded. And many of the same illnesses Jarvis fought to protect children from are once again ravaging their small bodies.

But, as stark as it is to feel we are slipping back toward the same battles these women and so many others fought over a hundred years ago, there are also reminders everywhere of the power of practical care, particularly when it is organized and extended. The ability to exercise the muscles of mothering writ large has been evident in everything from the walking school buses and neighborhood laundry and grocery networks of LA, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis, to the outpouring of mutual aid in the face of SNAP cuts, to the more than 71,000 boxes of cookies bought from trans Girl Scouts, to the communities that have rallied successfully to bring children home from detention.

There are many more examples, but the point is that all of these efforts are rooted in extending very personal acts of pragmatic care beyond our own families and our most immediate circles of connection, and of expanding the ripple of those acts of care wider and wider. These are not examples of big organizations or institutions rising up to protect people, but of individuals tapping into our very human capacity to feel each other’s suffering in our own hearts and our own bodies and to act accordingly, looking out for each other in very intimate ways—rolling up our sleeves and mothering the world, child by child, block by block, city by city. As Ashley Fairbanks, the creator of Stand with Minnesota, has said,

“We’re building a helper reflex where, instead of encountering a problem and saying that we can’t do anything, we’re just trying to do it.”

That, I think, is the same reflex that animated Howe and Jarvis and that originally underpinned the idea of Mother’s Day, not as a day for celebration or rest, or even as a day focused on our own families, but as a day of mothering action for others. And it is this reflex that gives me the most hope today.

Importantly, just as you don’t have to have physically carried a child in your body to feel profoundly connected to a child, the notion of mothering the world needn’t be limited to mothers. This is, perhaps, where it is most important to grow our understanding of care beyond the foundation laid by Howe and Jarvis so long ago. A commitment to the spirit of mothering the world is rooted in a mindset of personal investment in other people’s wellbeing, and this mindset is available to anyone willing to take up the mantle.

The extent to which we have a biological and neurological capacity to feel the experiences of others within ourselves is integral to our evolution as humans, not only to those who are mothers in the most literal sense. A capacity for profound care is not exclusive to motherhood or to women. But I think the conceptualization of extending a mindset of mothering beyond our own kin is a useful frame when considering the many ways we can all register the needs of others in our own hearts and engage in the vulnerable, personal, practical work of real care. The work of mothering the world is work we can all be a part of, and we have seen evidence of this every day.

So, as Mother’s Day approaches, I encourage you to look for evidence in our present day world of the spirit of Howe’s gathering to devise pragmatic paths to peace and of Jarvis’ work clubs, mobilizing her neighbors on behalf of everyone’s children. And I encourage you to look for opportunities to participate in mothering the world yourself, wherever your own heart and individual reach might extend and whatever your own personal identity might be. We can all have a place in this work.

Wishing you the sensitivity to feel others’ hearts beating in your own and the willingness to act with practical, mothering care, whomever you might be,

Alicia

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A few things I found helpful and hopeful this week…