Revolutionary Mothering: The queerest thing to do

Alicia with her four kids and two grand babies.

I am a black mother, which is to say I am well-practiced at picking myself up from the blows of terror and walking through fear, present and alert. I am a black mother, which is to say I know how to carry water through the desert and share it in loving and appropriate portions.  I am a black mother, which means that I am anti-everything-that-seeks-to-destroy-black-people. I am a black mother, which, though it happens that I did, does not necessarily mean that I carried in my uterus and birthed anyone.

The Book “Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines,” jade stones, and a cone from the Sequoias.

I write, think, and breathe about mothering. Recently I was gifted an anthology called “Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines,” edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams.  The epilogue to the book says, “mothering is love by any means necessary.”  From the time I became a mother just weeks after my seventeenth birthday, much of my thinking about motherhood centered on the physical, mental, and emotional labor required in parenting my four black children in the face of a racist, violent system of oppression.  Holding myself to norms generated by a white supremacist, capitalist society often left me feeling inadequate, as is the job of such a system. But “Revolutionary Mothering” offers a broader understanding of mothering. In her introduction to the section of the book called “Out (of) line,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs rejects the notion that queerness and mothering are at odds.  In fact, she suggests that mothering could be the queerest thing that humans do. That which is queer, she says, is that which does not reproduce the status quo.  I think about my community—my friends, loves, the Black Light Arts Collective—the way we care for each other. The way we know joy is resistance. The way that our care multiplies and extends. Care between us, reaches my children, and theirs. Alexis Pauline Gumbs goes on to say, “The queer thing is that we affirm each other beyond the limits of our bodies, our limits, and our imaginations. Mothering is a queer practice of transforming the world through our desire for each other and another way to be.” I read these words and I think about us.

Some of us have uteruses. Some of us do not. It’s not about our genitals or genders. We are black and brown and queer and straight. We are she, he, they, and us.  This is how we mother one another and ourselves:

A full moon in Whitewater, CA

We listen to each other cry.  We bring one another plates of food, Saidiya Hartman books, jade stones, bundles of lavender and sage from our gardens, candles, and Epsom salt. We drive each other to the dentist, sleep at one another’s houses, and we remind each other that it is okay to let our adult sons to try to figure it out themselves. We make sound circles at the edge of rivers, every full moon.  We see each other wholly. We talk about The Parable of The Sower and what is in our go bags. We see each other holy. We hike in the Sequoias and rest together on ancient slabs of rock. We dance to Sister Rosetta Tharpe. We dance to Al Green. We dance to Beyonce. We pitch in and buy Rihanna Coffee Table books for birthdays. We share our weighted blankets. We listen to each other say fuck the exes, fuck the program, fuck the institution.  We don’t ask for exhausting explanations about microaggressions, we understand. We rest and say no and cancel if we need to, we understand.  We text each other about Lovecraft Country and I May Destroy You and how Blanca, on Pose, is such a loving mother.  We give freely, long tropical skirts and dresses made by someone’s padres, intended to sell at the carnival, but then COVID hit; we spin around in them and say thank you, thank you. We read each other’s work. We listen carefully to one another’s visions. We hold each other. We hold space for each other. We say, Ooh Girl, you look cute. We say, I’m just trying to be like you. We say, you are beautiful. You are family, now.  You are divine. 

Alicia Mosley is an artist, mother, writer, and teacher with an Aquarius sun, Scorpio moon, and Taurus rising.