Stay-at-home moms can’t hold this pyramid up much longer
It took me a full decade to realize I was part of a multilevel marketing scheme. I should have seen the signs: the business model was unclear, my participation was so costly I fell into debt, and when I needed help meeting quotas, I was forced to rely on family members and recruit other women. It didn’t feel like multilevel marketing (MLM) at first; I never had to sit in an arena and listen to Rachel Hollis tell me to clean my face. I wasn’t selling “butter-soft leggings” or shilling Amway — I was a part of Motherhood in America.
Motherhood in America is a scam. We’re told if we work hard enough, raise our children well, and faithfully support the American dream, then we’ll end up on top. No one ever mentions how the hierarchy of success is shaped like a pyramid. A few mothers get to the top. They give TED Talks and write self-help books. But mostly, we’re the cracking base of a condemned structure. America has never really cared about mothers. If I wasn’t certain of this before, 2020 has made it abundantly clear. The pandemic hit mothers the hardest, yet no one came to help us. …
I finally understand that help is not coming
I spent the first six months of the pandemic sure that help for mothers was on its way. Bills would be passed, systems would be reworked. Workplaces would shift to include caretaking within their cultures. A year of the country “staying home” would validate the work of stay-at-home mothers. As the fall brought more remote learning, we’d reconfigure school standards to keep children safe from virtual truancy and failing grades given over Zoom in the name of academic rigor. …
We can’t depend on a president to save the country any more than we can allow a president to destroy it
A virus and violence converged to give the early weeks of 2021 a familiar feel. Terrorists stormed our most sacred spaces. The New York Times told us 400,000 people are dead from the pandemic. Thousands of troops stood outside (and slept inside) our most precious landmarks. It was all unprecedented. The new felt known because the real-life footage looked like scenes from the “End of America” movies I grew up watching in the 1990s.
The villains in those films varied: Sometimes they were from outer space; sometimes they were from Russia. But the fix was always the same — one man would save the country. Often that man was Harrison Ford. I was a kid when Air Force One came out in 1997. R-rated movies were off-limits, but I was certain any movie starring Indiana Jones was a must-see. When my dad added Air Force One to the weekend’s Blockbuster rental run, I blessed my luck. My parents watched it after we all were supposed to be in bed, and I watched it with them from the top of the stairs. It kind of worked. I couldn’t hear much. And whenever my parents shifted on the couch, I panicked and tiptoed back to my bedroom. I’d wait a few minutes and then sneak back out. …
In the end, Utah Sen. Mike Lee rejected the voter fraud conspiracy. It’s time for repentance.
After the Capitol was cleared of rioters on January 6, lawmakers returned to the Hill to finish counting the nation’s electoral votes. Sen. Josh Hawley continued to support the voter fraud conspiracy theory by challenging Pennsylvania’s election results, but the Senate rejected his challenge by a vote of 92 to seven. Sen. Mike Lee was among the few Trump supporters who diverged from Hawley’s challenge; he registered his vote with a strident “hell no.”
Mike Lee and I are both Mormons. Mormons do not support Trump with the same fervor as some religious groups, but a majority of Mormons do support him—even though Joe Biden received the most votes of any Democratic presidential candidate in Utah since LBJ. Coming into the 2020 election, Lee was a powerful voice in that majority, and plenty of prominent Mormons joined Lee over the past four years: Former Sen. Orrin Hatch, Rep. Burgess Owens, and Rep. Chris Stewart are all Donald Trump loyalists. (Both Owens and Stewart supported the voter fraud conspiracy.) Utah’s Attorney General Sean Reyes was on the board of the election committee “Latter-day Saints for Trump.” Tim Ballard, a former DHS agent, known for his controversial anti-trafficking work, championed Trump’s border wall. …
My eleven year old watched the coup at home over Zoom. Her journalism teacher said hello to all the students’ little faces in all their little boxes and then turned on the news. Within a few clips, my daughter caught up on everything I’d been following all day.
She knew that a treasonous mob stormed the US Capitol. (Is storming the right word for it since the Capitol Police let them in and then took selfies with them? A question for another day, perhaps.) She knew a woman involved in the riot got shot in the neck. (Since her class it’s been confirmed the woman is dead.) She knew the President incited the insurrection. …
I timed dinner for the closing of the polls. I wanted to be talking with my kids around the table instead of looking at the New York Times Battleground States needles. We picked up Popeyes, a treat that confused and delighted my kids. Eating out on a weekday is unheard of in our house. The kids spend the meal engaged in that classic childhood dinnertime chatter that accompanies unexpected good fortune. My nine year old laughs, so I do too. I don’t know what she’s laughing about because my plan hasn’t worked. I brought my laptop to the table along with the biscuits and spicy fried chicken. It sits next to me and I’m watching the needles move. …
This Is Us
The cultural norms around miscarriage are not serving any of us well
Not so long ago, talking about pregnancy was considered indelicate. Acknowledging a woman was pregnant meant acknowledging women have sex and, well… heaven forbid. We talk a little more openly about sex and pregnancy now, but we still rarely talk about something that can often happen next—pregnancy loss. We’ve never been comfortable with women and death, women and blood, women and something outside of living childbirth.
I think the thing that surprised me the most about my own miscarriage is perhaps the thing that should have been the most obvious about it. It was a work of loneliness. I didn’t get pregnant alone, but I miscarried alone. …
What has crying in the home looked like over the centuries?
I’ve been contemplating an odd question lately,
“What has crying in the home looked like over the centuries?”
The answer’s got to be fairly straightforward — crying in the home has always looked like crying in the home. And you know what? That’s probably right. I spent a few days trying to prove it right. The fact that sobbing-at-home (not to be confused with staying-at-home) has always been as it is now shouldn’t have kept it from ethnographic inquiry. Surely at some point in the millennia someone sat down to write a historical account about domestic tears. And you know, someone probably has. But either the document hasn’t survived or its digital form doesn’t have good enough SEO to be found online. …
Who will protect Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lifework while Donald Trump is still president?
The news lit up my husband’s watch while we sat outside waiting to pick up dinner. He threw his hands in the air and started to cry. I cried too.
We cried not because it wasn’t time. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87 years old. She’d been battling cancer on and off since 1999. Marty Ginsburg, her beloved, had been dead for 10 years. She’d had a full career and a full life. Her death at an old age, after a life of great impact, should have been a peaceful thing for people like me who had never even met her. She once said her life was so good she felt she was born under a bright star. …
Mighty Kind is a woman of color-owned and mom-run business. Leading with the conviction that kindness, empathy and compassion are teachable skills, Mighty Kind gives children the opportunity to practice those skills. Mighty Kind helps children understand that compassion should extend beyond commonalities and that often practicing kindness doesn’t mean being “nice”. Instead being kind means being mighty — standing up in the face of injustice and working for a better world for everyone. With a gorgeous layout and engaging content, the magazine takes complicated issues adults grapple with and makes them accessible and actionable for kids.
Mighty Kind was co-founded by Nadine Fonseca, the daughter of a Guatemalan immigrant who grew up in the diverse metropolis of the San Francisco Bay Area. She is passionate about the work of impactful kindness and is anxious to get our kids engaged. Mighty Kind recently received a woman of color-owned business grant from IFundWomen. In the middle of a pandemic that is hurting BIPOC owned businesses the most, they’re also partnering with IFW to raise capital from donors like you and me to help their business become…well…mighty. …
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