My oldest daughter turns 10 this summer and I have been reflecting on a full decade of motherhood.
She was born in July 2015, the same year that Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. While that experience of becoming a mother brought a lot of joy and love into my life, I also expended a great deal of energy protecting my newly formed nest from the traumatizing and unending news cycle that began in earnest in fall of 2016.
Fast forward to 2017, and I am beyond frazzled. Despite help from my supportive husband, mother and a cherished neighbor, I never had enough child care and was always spread thin between home life and my work as a teacher and small-farm owner. As I awaited my second daughter, I watched the historic Women’s March on TV, fearful of what raising these girls in this country would mean in the years going forward. Being a woman and a mother in America has always been a fight for visibility.
While I delighted in many aspects of early motherhood, the new baby didn’t sleep through the night for the first nine months and the oldest, then at the age of 2, became extremely sensitive to foods, the texture of clothing and certain sounds. Stress took its toll on my mental and physical health. Stress, I see now, caused by the parts of motherhood no one warns you about and augmented by the political tensions forming in our otherwise strong, rural community.
Enter a global pandemic.
Schools closed and families, especially mothers, were left to fend for themselves. Did it need to be that hard? The death toll for COVID-19 in the United State exceeded other developed countries by a significant amount, in part because of the rash of misinformation and distrust of science that trailed behind Trump as he left office the first time. On top of his abusive language and public bullying, his unpresidential way of being president eroded our ability as a nation to have thoughtful debate and respectful disagreement. Everything was personal, and petty revenge was normalized on a national stage. These are not the lessons I want to be teaching my children.
My daughters are now of school age, and I’ve learned on the job that mothers these days need a low-key Ph.D. in neurobiology (my Ph.D. is horticulture, so I needed to make some leaps). The number of students with ADHD, autism and dyslexia, or an assemblage of the three, is growing. This is, in part, because: 1) All three conditions occur on a spectrum and can occur concurrently, 2) New research continues to expand our understanding of how the brain works, including some amazing work with functional magnetic resonance imaging (aka fMRI) and 3) Widely held misconceptions exist about how these conditions present in girls versus boys and at various stage of growth and development.
Navigating these waters as a parent in a post-pandemic world has been difficult, to say the least. Support for teachers and schools continues to dwindle (to put it mildly — the entire Department of Education is being dismantled in real time!) when we should be investing more in an equitable and versatile public education system.
The institution of motherhood is under direct attack, to the detriment of Republicans and Democratcs alike. The first six months of the Trump 2.0 presidency are eroding my last shreds of patience.
Proposed cuts to services that support families (like Head Start) are wasteful and uninformed. Termination of the National Institutes of Health’s long-term study on aging in women leaves a vacant hole in our understanding of mothers’ bodies. The rash of firings and closures across our public agencies, under the banner of efficiency, feels vengeful and greedy. Many of my fellow mothers who work for these agencies — who have been dedicated civil servants for decades — have been living in a state of fear and anxiety these past several months. It is unfair to them and their families and makes absolutely no sense.
I do not have enough space here to talk about the stress and violence this administration has inflicted on mothers across the world, by withholding aid and stoking conflicts that should have ended years ago, but that needs to be acknowledged. Violent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are causing disruptive and unnecessary stress on thousands of hardworking families that are in no way a threat to this country’s safety.
Do you actually know who picks your strawberries? Farm labor is highly specialized and can’t be replaced by Medicaid recipients, as our current Secretary of Agriculture so rudely suggested. Many farmworkers in our area are mothers as well as dedicated employees who need to be treated with respect, regardless of their citizenship status.
As our country approaches its 250th anniversary next year, let’s do more for our mothers. I am reclaiming my motherhood and demand retribution for these last 10 years. The question all leaders in this country need to be asking right now is this: How do we help mothers flourish? If we finally put families first — and by extension mothers — this country will find itself closer to our Founding Fathers’ vision of faith and freedom than it ever has before.
