Community Tuesdays: Complicated Mother's Day Edition
Plus: catch me and The Auntie Bulletin's Lisa Sibbett on Substack Live at 11am PST/2pm EST
Last week, I interviewed
, caregiver and auntie extraordinaire, about the caregivers who inspired her own acts of care.Lisa shared that she herself was fortunate to be raised by “multiple wise, compassionate, loving, wonderful women” who modeled love and care for children, and that her family’s rituals on Mother’s Day were fairly simple and low-key. However, Lisa also recently did a readers’ survey that revealed that for far too many of us, Mother’s Day is a time when we’re forced to reckon with what we didn’t get, or may not get, or do not want to pass on, in terms of mothering and motherhood.
For some of us, all of these things can also be true, all at once. Mother is a word that contains multitudes.
With Mother's Day coming up, I’d like to extend the invitation to all of us here in the In Tending community to consider how we’ll be reckoning with our care inheritance, in one way or another, and to share our answers with each other in the chat.
For this week’s Mutual Aid chat, my invitation is to consider what your own caregivers taught you about being in relationship with others.
What caregivers in your own childhood most influence the way you think about care now (for better or worse)?
What did they teach you about receiving?
For this upcoming Mother's Day, how would you like to honor, revise, and/or set aside that inheritance, in a way that lets you take good care of you?
If you like, you can light a candle, pull out a journal, and noodle on this one with pen and paper before posting in the chat. The topic of motherhood is a weighty one, and I know that many of us won’t otherwise get the chance to actually step back and think about it before the big day is upon us.
P.S. If you’re looking for other ways to reclaim this day and make it your own, or just looking for ways to survive it if it’s hard for you, I invite you to join me and on Substack Live today at 11am PST/2pm EST!
During our ~30-min conversation, we’ll be talking about:
What makes this day hard for child-free folks
What makes this day hard even if you have living children
How you can allow your feelings about the day to take up space, while
Creating rituals that are realistic and low-lift to hold it all
You can add our conversation to your calendar by clicking here.
If you have questions or comments you’d like to share with us along these lines, feel free to share below! Otherwise, we’ll hope to see you live or in the chat…
Related reading:
I’ve written previously about Complicated Mother’s Day, and about ways people can support their loved ones if they know they’re grieving or struggling on this day. That post lives here. Note: I was in a very 90s mood when I made it, so it contains a lot of graphics like the one above.
If you missed my interview with Lisa last week, you can check it out here.
In a slap in the face to would-be parents everywhere, the infertility research team at the CDC has been eliminated. I collaborated with ResistBot to publish a sternly wooded letter to my reps in response. While I know many of us have weird feelings about AI, I’m not going to let my fear of being oppressed by sentient machines in the future stop me from fighting actual oppression that is happening right now. (Also, they could be nice?
has me reading Becky Chambers’ thought-provoking Galactic Commons series , which explores this possibility in detail, as does her big-hearted Monk and Robot series — highly recommend.)If you live in New England, you’ve got to check out this rad mutual aid-minded project from my friend Mike Fournier and his crew at Outer Limits. We talk a lot in the community + care space about just renting a church basement and building your community from there, but they’ve actually done it, and are bringing some very cool underground music to the very un-punk shores of Cape Cod as a result.