Happy Mothers Day 2021
What is there even to say on a day like today?
I couldn’t let Mothers Day 2021 pass by without a mention from the #landofwomen. I also don’t feel like writing. Or I don’t feel like feeling.
Things are opening up. Only half of us are vaccinated. But the things are opening up. It was inevitable, I suppose, that we would open before we were supposed to. We have failed so miserably. We never offered stipends. We never followed through on contact tracing. There’s whole states that rejected the mask mandate. We have died in droves and it didn’t matter. We have died and the we here is me and you, Black and Brown (or however we are defining it) and add in those who are poor and those who generally lack access to healthcare and anyone who had a health crisis at the peak of the pandemic when emergency room beds were hard to come by.
We have been killed endlessly. Senselessly.
Motherhood in the midst of this particular apocalypse is exhausting. So I’ve put away my mourning for my grandmother and my always mourning for my Titi and my secondary and tertiary mourning for everyone else, those I’ve no right to mourn directly for, but I do, so I can feed and clothe these small people. And today, of all days, I would have loved to celebrate having done that by NOT doing it—by being something other than a mother. By being out in the streets almost like normal almost like BEFORE whatever this is but not the murderous parts just the gathering swishy skirts wing tip eyeliner touch your friends with real touch not anxious half a second of hesitation (do they have it?) touch but I can’t do that.
Because we are not in the before. We are forever in the after.
What is mothering Black in a pandemic and an apocalypse? But also what is this pure power these small people wield? What is this force of nature they are in the world? They needed to be born. They demanded it. And I’m beyond honored to be their guide and for them to be mine.
I trust them. That they knew what they were getting into when they decided to get born. And I trust they are supposed to be here. Which means somewhere, deep inside, I trust that world is not supposed to end yet.
“Make generations,” Ursa said and her Mama said and her grandma said and each meant something different and each meant many things at the time they said it and that’s how saying, “Happy Mothers Day” feels to me this year.