Can We Talk About Mother's Day? - Intro

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In 2010 I had one of those jobs that had "other duties as required" pinned on at the end of the job description. In non-profit work - particularly amongst underfunded grassroots organizations - "hybrid roles" are pretty commonplace. A couple of years into my role with this organization, one of my my many scopes came to include the handling of all its social media.

I always enjoyed avenues for creativity and welcomed the challenge. Aligning always with non-terf/swerf values, the social media content I created related to self-identified women, with intersectional feminist spotlights on gendered issues, stigmas and barriers experienced by the marginalized women my employer served.  The website and Facebook page were newly launched and had been online for less than a year when I was asked for the first time to create a post for Mother's Day.

As a provider of long-term, low-barrier inpatient residential programs for adult women, any mothers accessing our services had intersected with child protection systems, or had otherwise already lost or relinquished custody of their children.  My own years of service provision aside, I personally lost my own first child to coerced adoption in 1990 (she was 18 months old, and I was 19 years old). By 2010 I had long carried an internalized, deep awareness and empathy for women who are unwilling or unable to publicly identify as mothers because of stigmatized loss and/or shame.

But when it came to that very first Mother's Day post I created, I was consumed by thoughts and empathy for my co-worker Joanne, whose 19 year-old son had died of an accidental overdose two days before Christmas in 2009.  It had been less than six months since his passing, and it was her first Mother's Day without him.  My single goal was writing a message that could somehow honour and respect Joanne's excruciatingly raw and fresh pain as much as it could otherwise encapsulate all the traditionally conditioned espousements assigned annually to the second Sunday in May.

That first message I created was received well enough, and I was satisfied with my own efforts and the sincerity of the intentions that drove them.  In 2010 it was posted on the organization's website, and in 2011 it was additionally posted on Facebook.  The original piece evolved to a lengthier version, and the second piece became (and remains) the organization's annual "Mother's Day message."  These had been my first conscious attempts to expand the concept of motherhood beyond the dominant "Hallmark" platitudes most commonly associated with Mother's Day.

By 2015 I remain ever tasked with the boundless demand for content creation.  Combined with some of my geekier predispositions, my ongoing responsibility to produce and publish fueled a mildly obsessive research addiction.  I like to believe some at least objectively interesting content resulted.

All my deep-dive rabbit hole researching had led to my regular posts about not only the lesser-acknowledged political origins of Mother's Day, but also acknowledgement of the healing and recoveries of adult survivors of narcissistic parents.  I came to refer to these cohorts as "all those for whom Mother's Day isn't exactly all warm fuzzies and smiles," and I certainly share some core connections with them). Within a year, the Mother’s Day content I was creating expanded to include explicit messaging intended to reduce stigmas associated with sex working moms and the exceptionally vilified women who drink alcohol and/or use drugs during pregnancy.

While I was honing my posting-prowess and otherwise gaining a microscopic measure of "tweet-cred" (not gonna lie - since my resignation from that role I do not miss Twitter), I'd become extremely comfortable in the anonymity provided by my online alter-ego (the name of the organization I worked for).  Only those who knew me personally knew I was authoring my employer's public content, and it became a regular sidebar exercise for me to channel my own personal ego and opinions through "rants" on my personal Facebook page.

And so over years, my personal rant about Mother's Day grew and evolved, and was honed and distilled into an annual piece that was necessarily separate from the annual pieces I was publishing for my employer (it would have been strictly verboten for my alter-ego to use the colourful yet wholly unprofessional phrase "douchesnozzel-cunty-horribleness," for instance; for all my technically uneducated leanings, I knew that much).

And so I felt the finalized piece - Can We Talk About Mother's Day? (aka: "Hallmark can go fuck itself - how about that?") - has a place here, and I share it now with the same gratitude and intentions I always had, as both myself and as my former alter-ego: to resonate genuine meaning and connection, inclusively and for all.

Happy Mother's Day~*