From Re/Creation:
On Mother’s Day
- By Marzian Alam, Carolina Soto & Jaclyn Watterson
Mother’s Day can be a difficult day to be a woman. If you’re past a certain age and you’re not a mother, people wonder why and view you with suspicion; you must be selfish, cruel, incompetent, or worse. If you are a mother, our society judges you for every decision you do or do not make—whether or where you work, where your children go to school, what you feed them, how you clothe them and speak to them and touch them and look at them. If your children are grown, their failures are yours.
Many women have lost children. Many have lost mothers. To estrangement, to death.
And regardless of a woman’s status as a mother, she is asked, hundreds of times a day, to perform emotional labor—to manage relationships and schedules, to take everyone’s feelings into consideration, to explain and nurture and make others feel comfortable and safe, often at the expense of her own comfort and safety.
Women, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser point out in Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, are responsible for “people-making” in every sense—“this activity create[s] and sustain[s] life in the biological sense” and “also creates and sustains our capacity to work…and that means fashioning people with the ‘right’ attitudes, dispositions, and values—abilities, competencies, and skills.”
One of the few socially sanctioned rewards women can enjoy for all this endless, unpaid labor is Mother’s Day.
But for women who are incarcerated, this reward is even more fragile and fraught. Separated from their families, often including children, forced to endure the injustices of our carceral system, and unable to enjoy the day freely, they are even more overlooked and under-appreciated than other women.
Incarcerated mothers are punished but never rehabilitated. When they sentence a mother to prison, everything that she does is a fault and everything her children do is her fault. When you are in prison, you have to fight for the right to mother. Your children are hundreds of miles away, your phone time is limited. Every discovered detail of your children's lives preoccupies. Yet women are creative beings—they find their way through the system and into the hearts of their children. Mothering is necessary for the survival of us all. Supporting incarcerated mothers, learning to understand their special burden, is taking down some of the bricks in the wall.
This Mother’s Day, we want to honor the women who are mothers by choice and by circumstance; the women who remember their own mothers, fondly or with trepidation; those who have lost a mother; those who have lost a child; those who never knew their mother or never had a child; those who spend their lives caring for others; and those who dare to carve out a space for themselves in spite of every obstacle—including incarceration.
Writing letters to the women incarcerated in prisons across the country may show you how much you have in common. Making those connections is how we dismantle the prison industrial complex. When you get to know a person in prison and invite them into your life, you come face-to-face with the arbitrary cruelty of incarceration and the legal system—you begin to see there is no they, only we.
Many of us do not have the time or capacity in our own lives to become activists, but we deeply feel the responsibility of working towards a different, more compassionate world. While we cannot always show up on the streets, we can make time in a way that fits into our lives. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a fulfilling and reciprocal correspondence.
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