Bad Is the New Good

Here’s something that I said yesterday: “Being a mom is the closest you’ll ever get to feeling like a superhero.” I said it in response to something that Christy Turlington Burns said about the remarkable experience that one has, when one becomes a mother, of suddenly finding oneself able to move figurative mountains, that moment or series of moments when one realizes that, as impossible as it seems, one can feed other human beings with one’s own body and go days without sleep and lift multiple children in a single arm and just keep going, even when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed and your heart and brain are exploding, you can just keep going. Christy was making a point about how the work that we do as mothers lends itself to other work, more global work, the work of making the world better place. We can do this, she said, we do do this, because it’s just what we do.

We were talking about this, because we were speaking on a panel at the WIE (Women, Inspiration and Enterprise) Symposium on the topic of moms and social change, and, of course, one of the obvious questions that comes up when you talk about mom s and social change is how does one do it? One does it by doing it, obviously, but when we talk about just doing it (do it because you want to make the world a better place for your children, do it because you want to help other moms, do it because becoming a mom made you recognize just how lucky you are, do it because your grew three sizes the day that you had children and you just need to put that heart-power somewhere, do it because it matters, do it because it’s urgent), are we not, maybe, complicating the discourse of motherhood a little? (Continue reading this post at Bad Mother Confidential…)

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