Mothering Is The Ultimate Form Of Resistance

I was in the middle of cooking dinner, the house relatively quiet as my three daughters played upstairs, when my tween sidled up next to me. “Will you teach me how to chop an onion?” she asked. I had just been thinking about the ICE raid video I saw that morning, where a woman videoed ICE agents smashing the window of her car to detain her husband. I thought about a neighbor who works in the high school library sharing with me on a walk that attendance was down the last few weeks of school because of deportation fears. I thought about the woman here in Georgia who suffered a stroke, but is being kept alive on machines — for months — because she was pregnant. They don’t even know if the baby will survive when it’s born.

This is what moms do. We make dinner, we turn on Bluey, we flip the laundry, all while our brain reels on the horrors happening in our own country. The terror other mothers feel, it’s deep within us, and we know that we’re just lucky it hasn’t affected us yet. That terrible things are happening every day to families just like ours, and it’s easy to feel helpless even if we’re trying to affect change. It’s overwhelming. We vote and we protest and we petition, but at the end of the day, what else can we do?

We can mother.

I turned to my daughter and held my arms out for her. She’s so tall now, all legs and arms and ponytail, and the hopelessness that had hovered over me like a cloud as I cooked evaporated a bit. Show her how to cook an onion? It suddenly felt like the most important thing in the world to do.

Because this kind of stuff is more than just a life skill, it’s survival. It’s independence. It’s empowerment. It’s teaching my kids how to be confident in the world, to be self-sufficient, to problem solve.

And that kind of love poured into them — into sons, into daughters, into all of our children — is what’s going to make them the kind of adults we need in this world.

I have always maintained that raising kind humans is the most important thing I can do. And in a world where the actual act of mothering, the entire existence of mothers, is considered boring or irrelevant or effortless, it’s easy to think that nothing you do matters. That the bedtime stories you read don’t matter and the games of hide-and-seek don’t matter and the teaching of basic chores doesn’t matter.

But mothering is the ultimate form of resistance. What nobody else sees is you reading a picture book that features a family with two moms, or an anthology of women of color who made an impact on the world. Nobody sees how safe your kids feel running upstairs to climb into your closet, knowing you will always come for them. Nobody sees how your kid learning how to chop an onion for a family dinner gives them a chance to serve and care for others.

It’s all building a foundation of kindness and love in our kids. Every tiny mothering duty, from making sure their favorite pajamas are clean to knowing exactly how much peanut butter they like on their toast, is important. You’re just caring for them. You love them. You want them to feel safe and secure.

And in turn, they will want to do the same for others.

They will grow up to vote, to protest, to sign petitions. They will remember what it was like to be scared, and they will remember how you made them feel safe again. They will watch you speak out against injustices, and they will speak out confidently, too. They will watch your kindness — to teachers, to strangers, to the cashier at the grocery store — and know that this is the way you’re supposed to act to others.

I am overwhelmed by the state of the world. I am tired. But when I remember that I am a mother — that I get to raise the next generation of allies — it feels like hope. It feels like power.

It feels like the ultimate form of resistance.