Of Mice and Moms

Mother’s Day approaches. This will be my 16th as both daughter and mother. I get grouchier every year.

I have poured my life into my children. I’ve given them myself, all of it, to  give them to you. And they, I have to tell you, are awesome. I think you might be too.

And you know what? Fuck the stupid media debate going on right now about who gets to stay home with their kids and whether or not one should. Fucking “Mommy Wars.” You know what? The mothers I know — from sex workers to hippie crunchy mamas, to lawyers — do not sit around having this debate. We just do not. Yes, there is a basic hypocrisy in saying that an upper class woman should stay home with her children and a lower class woman should not. Let me tell you, hypocrisy from the dumb asses of the world is the least of my concerns.

And this crap a few months ago about Rush Limbaugh calling someone a whore and  the War on Women from the Right — only from the Right? I am here to testify that I have been called a whore, to my face, by men I love, by politically better men than Rush, if by better one means Leftist. “Blah blah blah, misogyny is bad, blah blah blah; by the way Windy, I am unhappy with you, I will call you are whore now, in words and deeds.” I have been bewhored up and down and all around for no other reason than someone with good progressive, Lefty politics was angry with me and that was how he knew to hurt me the most deeply. And you know how I made him so angry? By prioritizing my children over him because I am a mother.

I have been told I work too much and work too little by both men and women because I prioritize my children, if the person in question needs something else from me, even an emotional ax to grind.

I’m grumpy.

I just don’t get us. Peanut allergies are bad, so we ban the peanuts, stridently. War is killing mother’s children by the truck load, poverty is killing mother’s children by the truck load, lack of education is killing them, lack of medical care is killing them. You know what we do? We “blah blah blah, misogyny. Blah blah blah blah, Mommy Wars. Yeah, that’s right Mommy Wars. Did I cite the right people?”

The media debate about abortion. Also stupid. Not only do we clearly not have a  problem murdering anyone, baby or adult, in this country, but speaking as a former teen mom who is not anti-abortion — does not think it, unlike war and poverty, is murder — I can tell you, if you do not know, that abortion is often a sad thing worth preventing. If you care about women and if you care about babies, for god’s sake, do something to make it possible for us to raise our children in peace. Stop offering to take our children from us. Stop telling us anything but our full right to have motherhood or to not have motherhood is what we are fighting for. Stop putting our babies in ROTC, stop bombing our babies, and feeding them pink goddamn slime with a side order of bullshit and brainwashing in school. Jesus. Stop degrading our babies’ mothers and stop killing our babies. Even our grown up babies.

You know what mother’s want? We want our children to grow up healthy and strong and good and moral. We’d like some help. We don’t give it even to each other far too often. Why is this so hard? That is what I want to see in the media. I want to see an expose on why this is so hard.

There will be more on this with less primal scream. But I need to scream a bit right now as I countdown to Mother’s Day.

Happy Mother’s Day, mother fuckers.

Windy Cooler is a psychology student at Goddard College. A long-time organizer and former teenage-mother-welfare-queen, she writes about the emotional lives of activists. She has two sons and lives in suburban DC. She can be reached at: WindyCooler@gmail.com.