Motherhood In Precarious Times

By Anita Dolman

Parenting brings countless hopes and worries. But when external factors create fear and cast a shadow long and deep across motherhood, what happens to the act of mothering? Through personal and academic essays and poetry from Canada, the United States, and Palestine, these authors explore what it means to mother through times of struggle, uncertainty, danger, and change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772581485

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Times

Motherhood

in Precarious Times

Edited by Anita Dolman, Barbara Schwartz-Bechet, and Dannielle Joy Davis

Motherhood in Precarious Times

Anita Dolman, Barbara Schwartz-Bechet, and Dannielle Joy Davis

Copyright © 2018 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Long Lines to Stave off Suicide from Museum of Accidents and Fridays from The Pedestrians. Copyright 2009 and 2014, respectively, by Rachel Zucker. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Motherhood in precarious times / edited by Anita Dolman, Danielle Joy Davis, Barbara Schwartz-Bechet.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-142-3 (softcover)

1. Motherhood--Social aspects. I. Dolman, Anita, 1974-, editorII. Davis, Danielle Joy, 1974-, editor III. Schwartz-Bechet,Barbara, 1964- editor

Acknowledgments

Long Lines to Stave Off Suicide from Museum of Accidents and Fridays from The Pedestrians. Copyright 2009 and 2014, respectively, by Rachel Zucker. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.

Shoes from Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets (Chaudiere Books 2006). Reprinted with permission of the author.

The editors would like to thank Andrea O’Reilly, Angie Deveau, and the rest of the Demeter Press team for their faith, guidance, and support. They would also individually like to give thanks and dedicate the book as follows.

Barbara Schwartz-Bechet: For my immediate family, Ernest and Josh, for their support and encouragement, my late mother and her strong example of determination, and my co-editors.

Dannielle Joy Davis: To my wonderful son, Bryce, and my mother, Linda.

Anita Dolman: For my Mam, Jacomina (Ietje) Dolman, my fabulous partner, James K. Moran, and our amazing kid, Dylan Moran-Dolman. My thanks, too, to Julia Gualtieri, my co-editors, and every mother, of every kind, who continues to do their best in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Introduction

Anita Dolman, Dannielle Joy Davis, and Barbara Schwartz-Bechet

1. Mama, Your Bruise Is a Beautiful Colour

Gwendolyn Guth

2. On the Future: A Harsh Climate for Motherhood

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli

3. A 6(2) Mother Predicts Death

Brittany Luby

4. Using Contemplation and Motherhood to Reframe Faculty Mentoring in the Professoriate during Challenging Times

Dannielle Joy Davis

5. Sophie Needle Exchange Office

Sarah Tsiang

6. Invisible Disability

Ruth Bradley-St-Cyr

7. Fridays

Rachel Zucker

8. Look How Strong He Is: Social Media Messages and the Communal Mothering of Kodi Gaines

Cassandra Chaney

9. Shoes

Anita Dolman

10. Parenting in the Sexual Borderlands: Thriving despite Invisibility

Alicia I. Jessmon

11. Long Lines to Stave Off Suicide

Rachel Zucker

12. Mothering through Generations

Zubaida Khan

13. This Night

Doris Fiszer

14. Perceptions of Mothers’ Talks and Actions with Children During and Following Periods of Civil and Social Unrest in the United States, 2016-2017: Identifying Social Support Structures

Barbara Schwartz-Bechet

15. Non-objective Poem

Karen Quevillon

16. Othermothering: A Tradition of African American College Student Support

LaTrina Parker

17. After an Election

Sarah Tsiang

18. Long Walk, Painful Path, Joyful Nevertheless: Palestinian Mothers Representing a Promising Model

Jumana Odeh

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Anita Dolman, Dannielle Joy Davis, and Barbara Schwartz-Bechet

When the infrastructure around us fails, when social supports wane, when war or environmental disaster threatens everyone’s safety, what do mothers do? These are the questions we asked the writers whose essays and poems appear in Motherhood in Precarious Times.

Precarious times continue all around us. They can be seen in the video footage of Philando Castile’s young daughter leaving the backseat of his car after witnessing him being murdered. Precarious times can be heard as we listen to the child’s mother speak deferentially to the offender, maintaining her calm despite the situation in which she and her daughter have found themselves. Precarious times can be felt by Black women in America at the mere sight of the police officers who have sworn to serve and protect them.

Precarious times are also experienced by women of all colours and cultures who worry about their ability to afford health care and insurance, given their lower salaries compared to their male counterparts. They are felt by mothers hearing and witnessing the hateful rhetoric of the expan-sion of worldwide antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiments, in print and in speeches. Precarious times like these involve microlevel, personal, and familial influences, and their effects can take root in macrolevel dysfunction.

Children, of all ages, are especially vulnerable in difficult economic and emotional times. It’s exactly in such times that family resources are often diverted away from goals like promoting child health and development, education, and knowledge, and toward, instead, the more immediate and life-sustaining goal of meeting minimum basic needs, such as food, shelter, and security (Hayes and Hartmann).

Far too often, children are affected by increases in insecurity, instability, and deprivation. They also bear much of the hardship from both wide-spread and more localized social and environmental crises. Not only do these crises cause them emotional and, possibly, physical trauma, they limit the very resources needed to meet their and their family’s basic needs.

Motherhood can be an essential variable in lessening the effects of precarious times—including those of trauma, terrorism, violence, death, homelessness, foster care, and lack of adequate health care, to name just a few salient, global issues.

Who mothers children in such difficult circumstances? Their mother, grandmother, father, sister, uncle, or teacher? How is mothering defined during periods of loss or trauma? Why is mothering so important during difficult times? In what form does mothering take place?

With this volume, we set out to explore some of the ideas, best practices, models, and creative works that embody the present, past, and future of mothers/mothering in times of austerity, trauma, and upheaval. The essays and poems reflect some of the many, diverse voices and perspectives on motherhood from across the United States, Canada, Palestine, and the world. All such perspectives are rooted in various histories of mothering. The texts presented here ask far more questions than they answer; for example: how is mothering defined? When the future seems even more precarious than the present, how do women decide whether or not to become a mother? What are their choices and their obligations when it comes to caring for future generations? Can we ever truly take away a child’s pain?

Providing care for those who need it, no matter the circumstances, is the power of mothering, regardless of the times, the place, or the situation. Throughout this book, you’ll see evidence of mothers and mothering as guarding members of the next generation; they try to protect and keep their children safe, both physically and psychologically. You will also see mothers in vastly different circumstances, all lighting the brightest candle they can for those who follow behind.

These mothers, of all forms, rely on the knowledge and skills they have gained through their own histories and circumstances—whether as an often vilified, often invisible, polyamorous bisexual trying to explain the variety of romantic relationships to her children, or as a Pakistani imm-igrant attempting to align her past with her children’s future, and teach her children resilience and openness in the face of Islamophobia. Coll-ectively, their stories point to the multifaceted implications mothering has at microlevels (individual families) and macrolevels (media and broader social portrayals of mothering).

The examples and writings in this book remind us that to mother is to continue to have hope. The support needed to keep up that hope and to pass it to those we mother may come in different forms, as shown in Barbara Schwartz-Bechet’s essay about motherhood among protesters in the United States. Meanwhile, the support children need depends on the type of precarity, as illustrated in Cassandra Chaney’s essay detailing the outcomes of an all-too-common tragedy in a place where the symbols of safety and authority can, and frequently do, quickly turn into a family’s greatest threat.

How can studying motherhood during precarious times make a difference in the lives of everyday women and families? With its multi-faceted approaches and viewpoints, this collaborative work reveals the tenacity and creativity of women confronted with difficult circumstances, which may differ from those of their male counterparts. Furthermore, the work may inform leaders of strategies that could improve policies and practices, and help ease the concerns and distress of mothers like those highlighted in this book.

Mothers and approaches to mothering vary not only from culture to culture, but from family to family, and person to person. No parent, child, or circumstance is perfect. But in all manner of precarious times, we find motherhood standing as a symbol for human strength. As contributor Zubaida Khan writes in her essay in this collection, Motherhood in turbulent times is the unyielding power that rises up when you realize a child depends on you for everything.

Work Cited

Hayes, Jeff, and Heidi Hartmann. Women and Men Living on the Edge: Economic Insecurity after the Great Recession. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2011. 1.

1.

Mama, Your Bruise Is a Beautiful Colour

Gwendolyn Guth

Like an eggplant, or my grape’s smooth chilly skin.

It’s a purple pansy face in a giant’s garden.

A colour that holds its breath longer

than thirty-seven days of rain.

Mama, let me kiss your bruise, and scatter

its baby spiders in all directions.

I will make a dress from their silver

webs, and you will be my princess.

2.

On the Future: A Harsh Climate for Motherhood

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli

If I choose not to have children, and I’m open to having conversations about why, then … who knows what that will spark in the minds and hearts of others, in terms of how they do raise the children that they choose to have?

—Jessica Zimmerle, Seattle, Washington

I would rather have a child and fight like hell for that child’s future than give up.

—Katherine Fisher, age thirty-four, Newton, Massachusetts

I really love children, and I love babies in particular…. But, I at this point feel that it’s very unlikely that I will have children.… It’s a feeling: like my body just observes when I go to the forest where my family lives … that things are changing and there’s a problem, and it wouldn’t be fair or a good idea to bring someone else into this change, this uncertainty.

—Hannah Harpole (doula), age thirty-four, New York, New York

I’ve engaged my kids in activism, but I’ve also shielded them from the worst of the climate news, from the worst of the science that I actively seek to know.

—Andree Zaleska, age forty-eight, Boston, Massachusetts

Conceivable Future asks, How is climate change affecting your repro-ductive life?. We use this question to begin the conversation and help people stake their own claims to climate justice. We—sociologist Meghan Kallman and writer Josephine Ferorelli—founded Conceivable Future in 2014 and have been working at the intersection of climate and repro-ductive justice since. We organize house parties, facilitate conversations, and gather testimonies from participants. Our goal is to change the national conversation on the climate crisis from one trapped in remote, chilly legalese to a widespread, vital, moral one.

But rarely in our everyday work on this project do we get to reflect on what this conversation means to each of us. In interwoven personal essays, interspersed with quotes from participants, we’ve tried to address what brought us together to work on this difficult subject, what we’ve learned through doing this work, and what conclusions we’ve drawn, personally and strategically, through conversation, contemplation and activism.

Meghan

In 2013, I watched my dearest friend block a coal ship. He and his partner anchored their lobster boat in front of the Brayton Point Coal Plant, straight in the path of the oncoming coal ship Energy Enterprise, and announced they wouldn’t move. The ensuing trial played up the small-ness of their vessel, and the quiet conviction of the two men. One photo of the tiny lobster boat, pictured against the backdrop of the impossibly large Enterprise, became the action’s emblem and was reprinted in magazines and newspapers nationwide. Over the course of a few months, the narrative built—the tiny climate heroes fought Goliath—and in a final, shocking, twist, the prosecutor dropped the charges against them. Somerset mayor Sam Sutton joined the People’s Climate March in New York City alongside throngs of other activists. The climate movement rejoiced. David had won—that round anyway.

The lobster boat trial was close to my heart. My mother is a biology teacher, and I’d grown up in the woods, close to nature, and with a con-scious understanding of what, at the time, we quaintly called global warming. My attention to specific threats (acid rain, the rainforest) ebbed and flowed alongside popular narrative, but I knew there was a problem. I’d been a climate activist for my whole adult life simply because it seemed like critical work that needed doing.

During Jay’s trial I had begun thinking about what made the action successful—certainly the David-and-Goliath narrative was important. But I wondered as well how much gender had to do with it. Even the language in the press was telling; it described the boat as manned, which conjured visions of hardy and principled John Waynes at sea. Specifically, I wondered if the outcome would