This week is a difficult one for me. It’s a week that would be challenging anyway – the first full week in August after BlogHer is one in which I am always drained and exhausted – but this is the second year of it being especially challenging – or the third, although I usually don’t count the year that I privately refer to as Year Zero – because it’s been two years since the year that was the best BlogHer year that suddenly became the worst BlogHer year.

The summer of 2009 was the summer that Katie and I did that awesome cross-Canada road trip with GM before BlogHer, and the year of the first Sparklecorn party, for which Tracey and I plotted the first unicorn cake and the first BlogHer appearances by Twilight stars (cardboard, but still) and the first NPH posters, and it was also the year that I did the Community Keynote, during which I sobbed my heart out and made a weepy ass of myself onstage in front of a bajillion women, but which was nonetheless wonderful in an emotionally cathartic kind of way. But it was also the summer that my dad died, the summer that I came home from BlogHer and found out that sometime during those few days, during the unicorns and the sparkle and the emotional catharsis, he’d died, alone.

And then the rest of the summer was all sadness, sadness such as I’d never known, and dark.

And so it’s been, in both of the summers since, that the first week of August, the week of BlogHer, and after, has felt like it marks a transition from light to dark, from sunlight to shadow, from happy to sad. Last year was complicated, of course, because BlogHer itself was complicated, what with the drama around Tanner, but even that – with its moments of heartbursting joy and its stretches of gutwrenching sad – just seemed to confirm what I was already prepared to assume: that this time of year, for me, will always see my heart drop, just at the moment that it is lifted highest.

This year, there are no obvious triggers for heartbreak – on the contrary, this year August marks a transition into some exciting life changes – but the shadows are there, gathered, lurking, and I’m caught between wanting to just linger with them, and acknowledge their presence and their force, and wanting to deny them, to insist upon looking forward and seeing only light.

But I mightn’t appreciate that light so well, if I force myself to forget, to unsee the dark. So I’ll walk in the in-between for a day or two, and work to keep my balance.

I should know by now that when my sister posts on my Facebook wall, it’s a bad sign, because my sister – bless her – believes that Facebook is the best way to reach me when there’s something urgent to communicate. That she could also reach me by phone or email – I’ll grant that I do not always answer my phone, but I do check my email regularly, and in fact only get Facebook messages through email, because I ALMOST NEVER GO ON FACEBOOK – is a detail of modern telecommunications that she has chosen to ignore. She alerted me through Facebook that I needed to call her when my grandfather died, and then again when my dad died, and – here we get to the thing that I really want to talk about – again last night when I needed to be informed that our mom has an aneurysm that is growing at an alarming rate and needs to be surgically removed at the earliest opportunity but, oh god, the doctors aren’t sure her heart can handle it and all of this was signaled to me by a public Facebook posting of CATHY YOU NEED TO CALL ME OR MOM. And then: LIKE, TONIGHT.

So, yeah. This is why I don’t like getting Facebook messages from my sister, who I otherwise adore. When those messages landed in my inbox, my heart dropped, and it dropped hard.

I called my mom immediately. I knew that the news had something to do with her – if the news pertained to Tanner, Chrissie would have just said CALL ME – and because I knew that she’d had a CT scan late last week, I knew that it had to do with the aneurysm, which we had all been hoping was not growing and not going to pose any threat to her life. So I knew that if my sister was freaking out on Facebook about me needing to call Mom, it was because the aneurysm was now posing a threat to her life. As I said, my heart dropped.

“Mom.”

“Sweetie! I was just thinking about you! And I was just opening my computer right this minute!” Presumably to log on to Facebook. Or post her prognosis to Twitter, or to her blog. God, my family.

My mother is probably one of the funnest people on the planet. Even when life takes its grimmest turns, my mother can always find some point of humor. Even when she’s angry, she makes jokes, and cracks herself up, and it was one of the banes of my teenage existence that every time I was mad about something, she would make faces at me until I laughed and forgot what I was mad about, which usually made me madder. It was complicated. She’s complicated. I adore her

“Mom, if I’d gotten an email from you that said oh, hey sweetie, things have taken a turn for the worse and I’m facing life-threatening surgery, but don’t worry! I’d have had to never speak to you again. These are things you call about. Like, immediately.”

“Oh, Catherine Ann.” My mother is able to communicate the rolling of her eyes over the telephone. She did so.

“Oh, Mother.”

My mom and I have gotten to a stage in our relationship wherein our roles are more often than not reversed. I nag her and pester her and give her unsolicited advice. I complain that she doesn’t tell me anything. I complain that she doesn’t call. I say things like, you know I worry. I said it last night. I said it, like, five or six times. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll call when you get news like this. You know I worry so you need to let me know the minute you hear from the doctor again. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll take it easy.

You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll be okay.

You need to be okay.

You know I worry.

I do worry. I worry relentlessly about my mother, and have done since my dad died. When my dad died, it was the realization of my worst fear, the fear that I knew would be realized someday but had nonetheless managed to stay in denial about because, god, it is just easier on the heart and soul to believe that your parents are immortal. It doesn’t matter if death is already your shadowy companion, a persistence presence in your life, because even when you know, you know, that death is inevitable, you can still deny it, and you do, because death is just not conceivable until it happens. So it is that we all of us in our family live with Tanner’s prognosis in a manner that is best described as ‘mindful denial;’ we know that his death is inevitable and proximate, but we live with him in the spirit of death’s impossibility. The Tanner-less future is inconceivable. Or, rather, has been inconceivable. It is more and more difficult to deny that future. That’s a crushing thing, and it’s because it is a crushing thing that we’ve compartmentalized it for so long.

My dad’s death made all these things more complicated, because his death, as I said, was the realization of my fear of his death, and the confirmation that, yes, death happens, which is to say, it made death conceivable in a way that it just never before had been for me, not even with the death of my grandparents or my beloved cat Sam or that one baby bird that I saw get run over by a car that one time. It made death real. It showed me what the world looked like without my dad, a world that had heretofore been unimaginable to me. And it made it possible for me to imagine a world without other people that I love. It made it possible for me to imagine a world without my mom.

My mom and me, in our world, back when it was still black and white.

I am terrified of that world. Terrified. I don’t even have words for that terror. It’s a terror that makes me feel small, that takes me back to being six or seven years old and slipping into my parents’ room in the middle of the night, blanket in hand, to sleep on their floor so that I could make sure that nothing happened to them, that they didn’t just somehow disappear.

But I know that the day will come when I will have to live in that world. I know that because I am already living in a world without my dad. I know that it’s inevitable, unless something happens to me first, which, god, is a whole other bag of soul-rattling anxiety related to fears concerning my children and my own role as a parent. So I have to live with that knowledge, that fear. I have to live with it, but not let it get in the way of living and loving, and living with and loving my mom. I have to not let it get in the way of celebrating my mom. I have to let it be a reason – to be more reason – to always celebrate my mom, to exult in the wonderfulness of my life with her.

Because she is awesome, and I am lucky to have her, and that’s all that matters.

I just need to keep her off Facebook.

(I had intended to write a post today about how my mom was and is my mentor mom – she’s the original bad mother – but I’ve been so rattled by the news from last night and all I can think about when I think about my mom is all the hand-wringy stuff that I rambled on about above, which is entirely against the spirit of the last few lines of that post, but this is a process, people, okay?

Anyway. I made a dedication to her here, at the mothers2mothers Tree Of Hope. You can make a dedication to your own mentor mom. Celebrating moms is a good thing. Celebration is a good thing, full stop. I need some of that spirit today.)

Last Friday morning I was sitting in a conference room at the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans, listening to Abigail Disney speak about her documentary films and about her belief in the importance of telling women’s stories. She made a film about women and war, she said, because women have historically been written out of that story. And why have they been written out the story? she asked.

Ooh, I thought. Excellent question. I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling. We could ask that about the story of the family, I wrote, thinking of all the times that I’ve argued that mothers have historically not been the tellers of stories about the family. Why have women been written out of that story?

And then I scrawled a big inky question mark beside those notes. Wrong question, I wrote, and drew a fat black arrow back to Abigail Disney’s original remark. It isn’t that women have been written out of the story – it’s that we don’t like how they’ve been written in. And we don’t like how they – how we – have been written in, because it hasn’t been us telling those stories.

Women have long had a place in stories and theories of war. As causes of war (Helen of Troy, anyone?), as beings – alongside children – who are particularly vulnerable to harm in war, as supporters or protesters of war, and as warriors in their own right. Athena was a warrior goddess. Boudicca was a warrior queen. Joan of Arc was a warrior girl. Spartan mothers were legendary for their ferocity in matters of battle (Jean Jacques Rousseau used the example of the ‘Spartan Mother’ – the woman who, upon asking a messenger for news of the war and receiving his response that her sons had been slain, said, ‘vile slave, was that what I asked?‘ – as his primary example of the hypothetical good citizen.) Machiavelli reminds us that Caterina Sforza abandoned her children to avenge a political conspiracy against her husband (‘and to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital parts, saying that she still had the mode for making more of them.‘ One of the original bad mothers, she.) And there’s been excellent academic work on the rhetorical use of language related to mothers and motherhood in popular discourse around contemporary war-making. Women are all over these stories. Mothers are all over these stories. Our inclusion is not the problem. Our authority is the problem.

So it is with motherhood, as I’ve argued in this space many times. Parenthood and the family have been topics of concern and rich sources of ideas for writers and thinkers throughout human history – the family, after all, is the core unit of human society – and mothers figure centrally in the stories and theories and general discourse emerging out of those interrogations of parenting and the family. But mothers have rarely been the tellers of those stories. Men – and not even necessarily fathers, which is another topic altogether – have been the tellers of those stories. Until now. The Internet has provided us with the space and the means to be the authors of our own stories, and we have, for some years now, been busily taking advantage of that space and that means to assert our authority, in all senses of the world. We have, as my friend Liz reminded me in a discussion this past weekend, built an entire industry upon that authority – hence the existence of conferences devoted to examining the art and craft and business of that authority. We are mothers, and the Internet has given us the space in which to roar.

I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, of course. But it’s worth repeating, again and again and again and again, because even though we know the power of that authority, we’re still not asserting it enough, nor are we, I think, recognizing its revolutionary character. We still hem and haw over whether to embrace or reject the term ‘mommy blogger.’ We still clutch our pearls and demur when asked to celebrate and share the stories of our personal success. We still cling a little bit to the idea that we aren’t real writers or real activists or real business people or real artists if we aren’t doing at least some of that work – and receiving recognition for that work – offline. We still hesitate, sometimes, to call ourselves writers and activists and business people and artists. We still hold back from fully asserting and celebrating – publicly and widely – our authority.

We still think, I think, that there’s something about motherhood, about parenthood, that requires us to maybe keep just a little bit quiet about it. We still think, I think, that it’s all fine and good for us to discuss these things amongst ourselves, but that we should not expect anyone else to listen or to care. That has something to do, I’d argue, with the pervasive cultural idea that parenthood is and always will be a matter for the private sphere, and not the public. It’s aggravated by the fact that we live in a society that often openly snickers or rolls its collective eyes at the discourse of parenthood, and that openly expresses its discomfort, and sometimes irritation, with the work of parenthood (we chuckle at STFU Parents; we cringe when a child has a meltdown in public; we still, some of us, ask why women can’t just cover up while breastfeeding.) It’s a problem that feeds upon itself, because the more reluctant we are to insist that our stories – told by us, on our own terms – really matter in the bigger scheme of public discourse, the more endures the doubt that fuels that reluctance, and the more endure the cultural expectations about the private character of the family that fuel that doubt.

So we need not only to keep telling our stories, we need to keep insisting upon and asserting and celebrating the importance of those stories. We need to keep raising our voices. We need to keep ignoring anyone who tells us to keep them down. We need to ignore our own impulses to tell ourselves to keep it down. We need to be warriors for our own cause.

We need to be story warriors. I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that – maybe you can help me figure that out – but still. I think we need it.

The other week, my mom wrote about something that I’d been unable to write about: my sister’s struggle to cope as the single mom of a dying and disabled child, and the dark, difficult space of that struggle, and the breakdown that came when that space became too difficult to occupy. I’d been unable to write about it – even though my sister had given her full blessing for the telling of the story – because it was stuff that just seemed too hard to articulate adequately; it was the stuff, I said the other week, ‘about guilt and shame and anger and mental and emotional breakdowns and how when you have a suffering child the suffering extends beyond what you can imagine and how that’s hard to talk about because shouldn’t you contain your suffering on your child’s behalf?’ The hard stuff. The stuff that raises questions – and few answers – about the tension between selfishness and selfishness in parenting and where the line is between doing the very best for your child and acknowledging that that best comes, often, at costs that are sometimes hard to bear. The stuff that complicates the whole idea of the long-suffering mother of a dying and disabled child as a hero.

It’s stuff that I don’t have words for. There are limits to telling other peoples’ stories, even when they tell you everything, even when you’re living right alongside their story, even when you share so very much of their story. There are limits, because no matter how intimately you share another’s story, the deeper and more complicated strands of that story remain, sometimes, just out of reach, such that you can see them but not quite wrap your hands around them. I don’t know anything about being heroic. I don’t know anything about being expected to be heroic. I’ve watched my sister be heroic, and watched her struggle under the weight of the expectation to be heroic, but I haven’t lived it, so I don’t have the words to really explain it.

Here are her words:

On the harder days, the harder moments… I do not feel like a hero… I feel, actually, that it has all been a farce. That if I was hero, I wouldn’t have these emotions… that I would be able to do it without complaint, without question. I was too scared to face these emotions and feelings, too scared to admit that sometimes at night I prayed to God to spare Tanner and me and Sophie, all of us, all of this. Please God, even though he is brave and courageous, please, why put him through this? And then I prayed to God to forgive me for even having such thoughts. What would people think? My heart aches when he says that he hates his wheelchair, when he says that he doesn’t want to be in it anymore. My heart aches that he can’t run and jump and play with the other kids. He just trails along in his powerchair and watches, wistfully. I cry sometimes for the things that all parents want for their families but that we will never have, and then I cry for crying about it. I just want to spare him this. Or is it me? Do I want to just spare me the heartache?

Tanner is a gift, I know. And he has given me so so much. Taught me so much, made me so alive and so aware of how absolutely precious life is…. so how can I possibly have these emotions? Let alone say them out loud. But we have to face our demons, otherwise we are not really living, are we?

These past few months really did bring me to my knees, life in general was not kind and then it all crashed together and two months ago I really thought – what the FUCK? (can you swear on a blog? sorry but no other word can really encompass the emotion!) (sisterly editorial note: of course you can, honey.) WHY ME??? Isn’t it all just enough? Really, God, I know they say life only gives you what you can handle, but I feel like God, the gods, karma, the force… they must think that I am Mount Olympus. I didn’t think I would make it… thoughts of my father haunted me… but you know? In the crucial moment, I did reach out. To be truthful, it was more that I fell, and HARD, and could not get up again. The people that love me picked me up and steadied me. And for the first time ever, I let them. My friends and family saw me at my most raw, undignified moments. They stroked my hair as I cried… well, wept uncontrollably is more like it. They simply held me while the numbness set in and then finally abated… and I was real for the first time in a very long time… the velveteen rabbit, limp but real.

So the moral of this story is everything does happen for a reason… everything. Though it can be crushing, life sometimes, we have to have faith and know that this too shall pass and maybe it will be hard, harder than you can imagine, but it will pass, somehow. And all there is to do is love well and be well loved and let yourself be well loved.

I wish that loving her well was enough. I too often worry that it isn’t. Heroes need so much more than love to carry on in heroism, not least the understanding that they do not need to be heroes. Or that they do not need to be heroes alone. Because they can’t do it alone. None of us can.

Which, god. How often do we tell ourselves that, tell each other that? We can be heroes. It takes a village. Save a mother, save the world. And we do it, we make our efforts, we do our level best to be there for whoever needs it, but at the end of the day, the people – the women – on the front lines are there alone, slogging through the trenches, taking the fire. There’s a reason that the hero, in myth, is archetypically a loner; the heroism of self-sacrifice derives, in large part, from the distinguishing nature of that sacrifice – the sacrifice distinguishes the hero, sets her apart from the crowd, the community. I have to do this alone, says the hero, and we believe her, because wouldn’t she be less of a hero if she didn’t do it alone? Doesn’t heroism require that kind of unique, individualistic bravery? Doesn’t it require self-sacrifice, which itself can only be undertaken by one lonely self?

In which case, fuck heroism.

Let’s not be heroes. Let’s just be people, with big hearts and strong hands and a willingness to bind those together and let’s surround anyone who is being pulled to heroism – even if it’s just (just!) the mundane heroism of motherhood or caregiving or loving – and whisper to her – shout to her – we don’t need another hero. Let’s just be ordinary, and do this together.

Here’s to ordinary. Here’s to ordinary, and to love. May they save us.

Closing comments, sorry. Too much heavy here.

For all my talk of the world-changing power of sharing our stories, there are some stories that I have trouble sharing, because they’re too hard to write about, or because I worry about the impact of sharing them, or because they’re not my stories, and even if I have permission to share someone else’s story – like, say, Tanner’s – sharing someone else’s story is always an enterprise that pitches me into a state of anxiety. What if I tell it wrong? What if I don’t do it justice? What if it provokes the kind of ugly reaction that I’m comfortable receiving on my own behalf but which sends me into emotional turmoil when it involves others, and especially those whom I love?

I’ve had these worries about sharing my sister’s story, the story of what it’s like to be the mother of a disabled and dying child. I still have those worries. And so there is much that I haven’t told, haven’t shared, even though Chrissie has said that it would be okay, even though so much of that story is so important, so worth being shared. Because I am, sometimes, not so brave. But my mom is. She decided (with the blessing of my sister) to tell the parts of the story that I haven’t been able to, the parts about guilt and shame and anger and mental and emotional breakdowns and how when you have a suffering child the suffering extends beyond what you can imagine and how that’s hard to talk about because shouldn’t you contain your suffering on your child’s behalf? Shouldn’t you be able to hold it together?

This is a story about not holding it together. It’s a hard one.

(Meanwhile, there’s this, which is is happier. You could join me to stand for Tanner and all boys with Duchennes and, for that matter, all the children – and people – who can’t stand and speak for themselves.)

Motherhood can be scary, you know? Even when you’re not grappling with complicated demons, even when motherhood presents itself to you more or less straightforwardly, it’s scary, because it’s just so loaded, because children are so small and they get sick and they seem so fragile and you always think that you don’t know what you’re doing – what if you don’t breastfeed for the full recommended 6 months? what if you don’t breastfeed at all? what if you don’t hand-blend organic baby food? what if your kid doesn’t get into the ‘good’ preschool? what if she falls out of her crib? what if she falls off her bicycle? what if she falls in front of a moving vehicle? WHAT IF? – because the stakes are so freaking high. But it’s important to remember that it’s scary for everybody, that everybody is at least somewhat scared, some of the time, because that’s motherhood. Fear and love and joy and fear, people. Fear and love and joy and fear, and also hefty doses of snot and fecal matter.

Daphne Brogdon, Teresa Strasser and I chatted about this at Momversation this question – were you scared to become a mom? – this week. Contrary to what you might expect, given the topic – fear! anxiety! – we laughed a lot. Ask me someday about the outtakes, which involved flying cats:

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Thus spake Martin Luther King. Sort of.

He actually said this:

I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer  to mankind’s problems. And  I’m going  to  talk about it everywhere  I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when  I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding  love.  For  I have seen  too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on  the  faces of too many Klansmen and  too many White Citizens Councilors in  the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear.  I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.

He’s right, of course. And he’s still right that talking about love isn’t popular in some circles, that for some, talk of love is just so much bosh and crap and none of us really believes that stuff, do we? Because talking about love is too easy, and real problems require real solutions, not sentimentalism, and isn’t everyone who prattles on about love at best a misguided optimist, of the cock-eyed variety, at worst an insincere manipulator, and shouldn’t we all just be getting angry?

No. No. Because nothing good was ever achieved through anger and hate. Because moving through the world wearing shit-colored glasses blinds us to the world-changing possibilities of hope and friendship and community and, yes, love. Because whether we’re talking about the assholes that wander the Internet looking for opportunities to spread ugliness and hostility or the pundits and politicos who put their enemies in crosshairs or the poor, miserable souls who think – or claim to think – that God tells them to hate – we’re talking about the same thing. We’re talking about the burden of hate. It drags us down. Whether it comes in small parcels or large, it weighs us down. It breaks our backs and it binds our arms and it (alongside, I would argue, apathy, which is just hate leached of its color and energy) is the thing that prevents us from seeing good and feeling good and realizing real change. It blinds us. It makes us ugly, and it makes it so that we can’t see how ugly we’ve become.

But. We can refuse it. We can decide to refuse the burden of hate; we can opt to not let it touch our shoulders. We can choose to stick with love, whatever that looks like. We can choose to stick with love. It’s not always easy – I get angry; I get lots angry and I get bitchy and I sometimes really struggle with the whole love thy neighbor thing because, seriously, the global neighborhood includes people like the Westboro Baptists – but still. We can choose to stick with love.

Let’s.

Please.

(Consider doing a kindness today. Consider doing two.)

It was sometime early on in one of the first sessions of TEDWomen last week that the question occurred to me: are we saying to each other here – in this go go women go celebration of everything that women can do – that women are the new men? And if that’s the case, is the corollary that men are the new women? Or that less-advantaged women are the new (and old) women? Whither women qua women, if women are trying to escape themselves?

No one actually said that women are the new men, of course. Hanna Rosin, in her talk, argued explicitly against it, or at least against the idea that women could or should or would replace men as men. Ted Turner stated – awkwardly, it must be said – that women needed a place at the table precisely because they weren’t men (“women are less likely to push the [nuclear] button,” he said, forgetting entirely about Margaret Thatcher.) And Tony Porter, who gave a spine-tingling, tear-jerking talk about the need for men to break out of the ‘man box’ and raise their boys to be less manly, in all the worst senses of the term, made an explicit call for men to become, in some ways, the new women. There was, in other words, a very clear celebration of women as women, and not just as replacement figures for men in traditionally male roles.

But still, but still: this was still a celebration, for the most part, of the extraordinary, and what is extraordinary, for women, is to achieve success in domains historically dominated by men. We celebrate as extraordinary the Nancy Pelosis and the Madeleine Albrights and the Hilary Clintons and the Donna Karans because they have succeeded in politics and business, because they have succeeded in the public domain, the domain that has been traditionally closed to all but the most extraordinary women, the domain that remains closed, in some important measure, to all but the most extraordinary women. And when we talk about women reshaping the future, when we celebrate women reshaping the future, this is what and who we’re talking about: extraordinary women making a difference in the domain that has, for all of human history, been dominated by men. We really are talking about women becoming the new men, or, at least, women joining ranks with the old men, the ones who are not interested in becoming, with Tony Porter, the new women.

This is fine, of course. When I dream dreams for my daughter, that is exactly the shape they take: she becomes Prime Minister of Canada, or Secretary-General of the United Nations, or a Nobel-prize winning scientist. I dream dreams in which she takes her (rightful) place in the public domain and succeeds there. I do not dream that she becomes a stay-at-home mother, or a daycare worker, or a primary school teacher, or even a nurse. When I say to her, you can be whatever you want when you grow up, dream big, shoot for the stars! I mean, aim far and away from the domain of the hearth and the home. Because nobody ever made a difference from there, right?

Well, no. Ironically, it took a man to say it: Tony Porter argued that the most important work to be done in securing a better future for our daughters and our sons was raising them right. Raising them to be respectful, and caring. Raising them to do unto others as they have others do unto them, regardless of sex or gender or orientation or ability or appearance or whatever. Raising them to be good citizens of civil society. Raising them to be good. The liberation of women and girls, he said, is tied to the liberation of men and boys, and vice-versa. We all need to be liberated from closed ideas of what is manly and what is womanly and what is weak and what is strong. And that liberation begins in the home.

This is not a new idea, of course. Aristotle argued in his Politics that the first political education occurs in the household, in the raising of children. Rousseau devoted an entire work to the question of how to raise a child to be a good citizen. That good politics – that is to say, a robust civil society and a community of citizens devoted to their best collective good – requires a people that are educated in the fundamentals of good citizenship from a very early age should be obvious (Everything I Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten could be regarded as an important statement of political philosophy, except that it gets one crucial thing wrong: the fundamentals of good citizenship must be in place well before kindergarten.) That this is, and long has been, historically, the work of mothers should also be obvious (it was, at least, to Aristotle, who argued that even if women weren’t leaders in the political sphere, they should be regarded as such within the household, alternating power with their husbands, lest children learn that the most natural model of politics is despotism.) Except that it isn’t. When women say, the work of ordinary motherhood is important, necessary, crucial, fundamental to our future, we nod our heads – yes, yes, of course – and then we turn our attention back to the extraordinary, to the public stars, to the Hilary Clintons and the Nancy Pelosis, and we say, that, there; that is where change will come from. And we are right, but only very partially right, and in that partiality resides the problem.

This was Tony Porter’s point: that if you save a boy (from dominant narrow social conventions of what it means to be manly) (and, unspoken, but nonetheless asserted: if you save a girl, from dominant narrow social conventions of what it means to womanly), you save the world – let’s repeat that, save a child, save the world – and that that saving power is the power of fathers, and mothers, and other caregivers. It is not (at least, is not fundamentally) the power of the university professor or the politician or the therapist or the inspirational speaker or the world leader or the TED session. It is not a power that is exercised in the Assembly of the United Nations or the Oval Office or the head office of the World Bank. It is a power exercised by parents, by caregivers, in the home, and to some extent by teachers, in the schools, and by all of us, in the mundane corners of our lives, in how we treat each other. It is a power that is exercised, for the most part, in the private sphere.

And this is the sphere that we most want to turn our backs on, most of the time, or, at least, when we’re talking about celebrating the extraordinariness of women, when we’re talking about ‘ideas worth talking about.’ We don’t celebrate the ordinary act of motherhood. We do celebrate fatherhood – Tony Porter received the first standing ovation of TEDWomen – which is another topic entirely (men embracing fatherhood and celebrating fatherhood is a wonderful thing, but why is it so special when a man does what women have been doing without praise for millenia? Can we find ways of celebrating fatherhood – especially the unconventional modes of fatherhood that see fathers embracing the work that has been traditionally done by mothers – that also celebrate the work itself, and the place of that work in women’s history?), and we sort of celebrate parenthood – the ‘parenting’ talk at TEDWomen was given not by a mother, but by a couple – and rightly so, but what about motherhood, qua motherhood, full stop? Can we imagine a talk at TEDWomen – or, better, TED, or TEDGlobal – that featured a mother who was just – “just” – a mother? Who would stand up and say: this work, this ordinary work of motherhood, is what changes the world. Or, to riff on Mona Eltahaway’s wonderful talk on being a Muslim woman, and borrow her rhetoric about the radical power of confounding others’ expectation: I am a feminist mother, and I love to confuse people; I love diaper bags, and Carole Pateman; I breastfed my babies, and believe that formula-feeding is okay, too; I co-sleep, and cry-it-out; I am attachment parent who lets her children run free-range; I love my post-partum body, and wish that my nethers hadn’t been torn in the birth of my children; I quote Oprah, and Judith Butler; I let both my son and my daughter wear princess costumes; I tell both my son and my daughter that they can be astronauts or nurses or rock stars or stay-at-home parents; I believe that motherhood – ordinary motherhood – can be a feminist act; I believe that well-intentioned motherhood can change the world; I am a feminist mother and confusion is my left hook and my right hook.

This is the dream. It’s not a crazy dream. If you look at the speaker list for TEDWomen, first page, you’ll see this:

Aicha El-Wafi and Phyllis Rodriguez are listed, simply, as mothers, which belies their story, in a way – they were not there to speak about motherhood so much as they were there to speak about friendship between mothers, and between women generally, and the unifying power of such friendship – but still. They were there as mothers whose motherhood, and whose experience of loss as mothers (Phyllis Rodriguez lost her son on 9/11; Aicha El-Wafi is the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged ’20th hijacker’ in those attacks), brought them together as friends, and it is the ordinariness of their heroism, and of their heroic example, that makes them memorable. They are not world leaders, or captains of industry; they are just – “just” – mothers whose empathy for each other as mothers became the basis for a demonstration of what good global citizenship should look like, of the power of looking beyond otherness and enmity and finding likeness in the heart (they were so lovely, so sweet, so obviously true friends, that one’s heart could burst just talking to them. I could not hope to capture that here.) They were, they are, an example of the extraordinary ordinary, of the radical potential for heroism that is carried within every human heart, no matter how humble, and of the transformative power of just being a good person. They were an example of the lesson that we should be teaching our children: aim for the stars, if you want, but never forget that we are all made of stars, and that it is possible to be stellar in the humblest of actions and most mundane of enterprises, and that that – that – is what matters. Be your own star, in your own way.

We should be telling our children, and ourselves: you can be a star simply by having an open heart. And we should celebrate that kind of stardom more often. That TEDWomen did a little of that augers well for this hope. But still: it remains that in conversation Aicha El-Wafi told me, I am just a mother, and that I said, too, I am just a mother (and then hastily added, but also a writer, and an activist, and a former academic, and, and, and… qualification piled upon qualification, even to a fellow mother), and that this is so common, this qualified assertion of what we do, even when we believe so firmly in what we do, even when we believe in the saving power of what we do, even when we believe in the saving power of our open hearts. It remains that we so often insist upon saying this: I am just – just – a mother.

Why do we not say, simply, I am a mother? Why do we not say: I am a feminist mother whose greatest contribution to making the world a better place is raising children with open searching loving hearts, children who might be world leaders or who might not be world leaders but who will, I hope, be caring human beings who will demand that the world be a better place? Why do we not say, I am a mother, and the work that I do as a mother – the care I give, the love that I offer – extends far beyond hearth and home, far beyond my own children, and causes ripples and waves that will shift sand on shores that I cannot see (Aicha El-Wafi could not know, raising her son, that her own example would emerge from such a dark shadow and shine a light in such unforeseen directions.) Why do we not say, I am a mother, full stop? Why do I not say that?

Not all mothers are heroines, not all mothers are feminists, not all mothers raise good citizens, not all mothers have the best intentions, even mothers with the best intentions do not always see those intentions fulfilled in the ways that they expect, or at all. None of that matters. What matters is this: ordinary motherhood, undertaken in ordinary ways, can be as extraordinary, can have as extraordinary an impact, as any work undertaken in the public sphere. And: that this work that we do – out here, in the wilds of the interwebs, exchanging our stories and airing our discourses, living our motherhood virtually, but publicly – is important for the fact that it makes motherhood part of the public sphere, it forces motherhood into the space of public discussion and asserts it as necessary and given and there. And that is the best first start, I think, to making it possible for us to say, simply: I am a mother, and my motherhood is important, my motherhood can be radical, my motherhood is a feminist act.

I am a mother. I am a mother, and I am working toward saying those things. I start by saying them here.

In September, while I was in Lesotho, I received this email:

Catherine,

I’m a frequent peruser of your blog but haven’t had much time for blog reading lately. My husband and I have been working our asses off to get the paperwork together to adopt two little boys from Lesotho. I was amazed when I clicked on your blog this morning and saw where you were. We’ve not seen our sons faces yet. We heard about two little boys (one who is HIV positive, one who has vision issues, both under the age of 3), knew they were ours even though it’s foolish, and started working on getting all the paperwork together. My fool heart hopes that one of the children you’ll take a picture of will be one of my boys because I’m aching to know their faces, but I know that’s unlikely. Still, I hope.

Please, I know you’re going to promote this project but you have such a voice, please promote the truth about living with HIV. Please tell people they CAN adopt HIV positive children. Tell people they cannot get HIV from anything other than birth, needles, breastfeeding and sex. Tell people that HIV in the modern industrialized world is not a death sentence and that they wouldn’t know someone was positive unless they were told. Tell people that in Africa, HIV almost always leads to AIDS because those same medications that save lives in America and Canada are expensive and almost impossible to get in the worst affected places in Africa. Tell people that AIDS is stealing entire generations the same way it stole my son’s biological parents, the same way it’s stealing the parents of countless children. Tell people that it doesn’t have to be like this. No one has to die from AIDS. Please, please tell them. I wish I had half the reach you have because I’m fighting a losing battle here with trying to convince people that my son will not be someone who should be avoided or feared.

I am so glad you’re in Lesotho. Nothing but good can come from you opening people’s eyes to the realities of HIV and life in Lesotho.

A big fan,
K

I wrote her back, after I returned home. I thanked her for writing me. I told her that her message had made me cry. I told her that I didn’t have words that could match the force of what she’d written. I asked her if I could post what she said.

Because, I don’t have words to match these. I don’t have words that even come close. I’ve written a lot of words about HIV and AIDS, and about mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and about prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and about the experience of meeting people – of meeting mothers and babies and children and grandmothers and aunties and teachers and caregivers – whose lives have been affected by HIV and AIDS. About visiting a country where almost everyone’s lives have been affected by HIV and AIDS. About feeling the heavy weight of my own privilege, coming from a country where the word ‘pandemic’ is heard more often on television series about zombies than it is in real life. I wrote a lot of words about a lot of things. But none of them came close to capturing the urgency of the situation, to communicating the complicated balance of hope and fear that rules the lives of the women and children that crowd the corridors of the ramshackle clinics, waiting for their anti-retroviral treatments, waiting to find out if their babies are HIV free, to expressing how viciously unfair it seems that this is what motherhood looks like for so many women when for me it is just one long lament for more sleep and a better stroller, to expressing how viciously unfair it is that this young girl will probably never get to live out her dreams, while here young girls end up on My Super Sweet Sixteen bitching about how their daddy got them a Bentley instead of a Beamer.

I don’t have words to comfort an adoptive mother who fears that her HIV-positive sons will face persecution here from communities that don’t understand. I don’t know how to make those communities understand. I don’t know how to make anyone understand. I don’t know how to change the world. I wish that I did.

When I was in Lesotho, I met a young woman named Mammope, and her 18 month old daughter, Katleho. Mammope is HIV-positive, and has been since before Katleho was born. She followed a strict regimen of PMTCT treatment and, as of when I spoke to her, Katleho was HIV free. We spoke of her treatment, about her life as single mother, the difficulties that she faced just getting by, her determination to do everything in her power to keep her daughter well and safe. We talked and we talked, and then, just as we were about to say our goodbyes, she paused, and turned away from the translator, and asked, in hesitant English, this: “can you tell me, in America, is there a cure? Will you find a cure?” She paused again. “Because I want to live for my baby, for her.” And then she started to cry.

I cry every time I remember her. I don’t need to break that down for you. How and why she affected me is completely incidental to this story. That she affected me is completely incidental to this story. All that matters is that she is, and her daughter is, and they are just one mother and one child among too, too many, and maybe it’s enough that I can tell you part of their story – that I can play some part in, as my reader K said, above, “opening people’s eyes to the reality of HIV” – and maybe it’s not – what good is opening eyes if our hands aren’t sufficient to the work? -  but it’s all that I’ve got, all that I can do.

My heart breaks because it’s not enough.

(Not enough, but still worth doing. Also, this: learn, blush, shop, watch, listen, drum, donate, tweet,dare. And share: the stories that move you, the resources that help you learn, the programs that help, everything and anything that distributes hope. Spread it around. Please.)

When my sister was very young, she appointed herself my protector. It didn’t matter that she was two years younger: I was a shy, ashmatic child, gangling of limb and totally lacking in physical grace, whereas she was athletic and boisterous and tending toward ferociousness, and those qualities more than made up for our age difference in confrontations with bullies. If somebody teased me, she’d be right there, waving chubby fists and hollering profanities (where she learned them – raised, as she was, in the bosom of a very Catholic family – my parents were never able to figure out) and daring, daring, whoever it was that had the temerity to confront her sister to take on her as well. And there we’d stand, together: me, tall and awkward, blushing and stammering and willing myself to disappear, and her, chubby and gap-toothed, stomping and yelling and demanding our antagonists to BRING IT, and although it was sort of embarrassing to me – having my little sister stick up for me – I was also always grateful, and proud.

It was her and me against the world, and we were happy that way. We moved, a lot – every two years or so – and so we were, by necessity, each other’s best friend. Our circle was us, and our parents, and our first loyalty was always to that circle, and if my loyalty was quiet and intense, recorded in diaries and squeezed tightly, privately, to my heart, hers was loud and insistent, proclaimed in ferocious outbursts to anyone who would listen. We were the Connors girls, Cathy and Chrissy, Chrissy and Cathy, and we came as a package. An odd package, to be sure – one so thin and quiet, the other so robust and loud – but one that was nonetheless bound tightly and, I think now, in hindsight, beautifully.

The dynamic between us shifted as we grew older, and family life became more complicated – a long story, that, and one that can be put aside for another time – and there were more and more times that I became the protector and stood up against whatever forces of the universe were bullying my girl and waved my fists and shouted BRING IT. And becoming her protector became part of my growing up, and had everything to do with me leaving the shy, awkward girl that I was behind and moving forward to become the strong, confident woman that I am. And yet no matter how much strength and confidence I believe that I possess, I worry, now, that it’s not enough, and that fear touches a part of me that I had almost forgotten, the part of me that was bullied in grade school and that looked to my younger, more spirited sister for strength and inspiration. For protection.

I’m doing everything that I can to protect her now, but the forces bearing down on her are too strong – her son, dying; her heart, breaking; her life, collapsing around her – and I can’t stop them, and I’m afraid, and I feel like a kid again, a kid who couldn’t fight her battles alone, a kid who is suddenly missing her chief ally, a kid who suddenly needs to get brave and protect her chief ally, her best friend, because she needs her help, my help, like, now. And although I know that I’m not really alone – I have our family, and I have all of you, friends and supporters in this amazing space right here – it still feels that way, in the darker moments, like when I had to fly away from her while she was mid-crisis, like now, when I can’t reach her on the phone, like this whole span of time stretching before us, the weeks during which she’ll be on her own, the weeks during which I wish that I could just whisk her away, take her away from everything that is hurting her and give her a break, give her respite, give her peace, if only for a day or two or four.

Because I can’t stop what’s happening, and even when I throw myself in front of it and try to deflect some the hail of badness, it’s not quite enough, it’s never quite enough, and if only I could just pull her away, grab her by her hand and run, run fast and hard, to somewhere that we can hide, together, like we used to – in the trees or under blankets or in whatever fort or camp we could construct in our imaginations – and catch our breath and tell each other that we’re brave enough to go back out there, we are.

And then go back out there. And be brave again, because we must be.

I don’t have that fort, that treehouse, that wall of blankets, not anymore, and I don’t know where to find it. And I feel exposed. And I feel like I’m letting her down. I’m doing my best, but it feels insufficient, and although I say that I have to let go of the idea of saving, of needing to save, I can’t quite let go entirely, because this is my sister, this is my best friend, this is the girl who always did her very best to save me, and don’t I have to try?

I have to try. Whatever that means, whatever that looks like, however un-save-y that turns out to be – even if that turns out to look nothing like saving at all, and everything like just waving fists and then running and hiding and escaping, even if only for a little while – I have to try.