For the Mothers, with a capital “M”.
For Mothers of children or adolescents experiencing “gender” ideation, Mothers Day 2023 might be anticipated with unease, sadness or even dread. The unrelenting knowledge that the child you bore and raised has disengaged from him or herself, to the best of their juvenile abilities, may lead you, and many other Mothers, to stay under the covers on Sunday morning.
With school policies undermining our rights, non-evidence-based treatments, and an allied bandwagon of social dystopia pushing our kids from behind, we Mothers find ourselves in last place without so much as a participation ribbon in hand.
As Mothers, we have carefully crafted our parenting over the years, acting with intent to provide our children with the insights, values, cultural awareness and a myriad of vital tools that they will take with them into their independent adult lives. And then one day, out of the blue, and with an unprecedented level of misplaced scrutiny of our otherwise incredible, great, good or good enough Mothering, we have become the enemy to our child, a threat to the “gender identity” he or she has taken on.
Upon the first utterance of, “Mom, I am not your daughter, I am your son”, or vice versa, most of us offered genuine support, compassion, eagerness to understand and most of all unfettered love for our child. Some of us asked what we could do to make our children feel more comfortable within the home, with his or her extended family, in the classroom and within a society that many of us feared would not accept them. Some of us adopted new names and pronouns without hesitation. Some made appointments to gender clinics, seeking the best possible care.
Red flags began to pop up for many of us in the form of scripted sounding language, the attempted rewriting of an entire childhood, and demands to immediately participate in a one-size-fits-all regiment of binders, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries. Our concern was and is for the psychological, physical and medical harm set to come to our children should we silently fall in line, as this invasive ideology so forcefully demands of us.
Often immediately following our initial concern is the realization that our actual support of the child or adolescent, whom we know better than anyone else does, is quickly contorted into faux-pas parenting at best, and transphobic bigotry with legal, vocational, social and custodial consequences at worst.
We continue on this journey through the novel concept of “gender identity” with the sense of secrecy, restraint and aloneness that seems necessary to remain unscathed by social cancellation or even criminalization for refusing to unquestioningly assign boy to girl or girl to boy. Still, this is not enough for most of us Mothers to give up, give in or stay on the proverbial floor.
Committed to completing our primal jobs as Mothers to our children, and despite the counter-cultural and bureaucratic roadblocks placed in our way, we carry on. We carry on by telling our children the truth about a movement for which they have become unwitting prey. We move forward by regularly reaching out to our kids who have followed the leader out of our homes and often our lives. We put one foot in front of the other as we love our sons and daughters from afar when we no longer know whether they’re getting enough to eat or sleeping in a warm bed at night.
We remain steadfast in our Mothering no matter how much this malicious movement has taken from us and regardless of the reduced repertoire of resources we have unscrupulously ended up with.
This Mothers Day, we can and should be proud of our pressure-cooked parenting, our perseverance as Mothers who find ways to love and support our children through the disillusioning mouse maze that we have found ourselves in. This Sunday, we can take pride in the fact that we refuse to give up on our children, boys and girls, young men and women, who have so clearly been captured by a nefarious nexus of purported inclusivity. This year we can sit with the knowledge that we are Mothers, despite all efforts to strip us of this immutable title for the crime of not believing.
To us, Mother is spelled with a capital M. For us, Mothering has become a fight from the trenches that we have been carelessly tossed into by the destructive doctrine that so boldly takes our children by their troubled hands, with false promises and outright lies whispered into their vulnerable ears. And because of us, glimmers of hope for change can be seen every single day.
To all of the Mothers standing strong in the truth, connecting with others to preserve it and doing everything you can to share it with your beloved children, an empowering Mothers Day to you.
