Born From Fire: A Mother's Day Reckoning

On history, resistance, and a holiday that forgot what it was made of.

A Mother's Day Reflection - Year Two

If you were here last year, you're in on my decision to make my mother's day reflection a yearly event. Last year I wrote about the Mother Archetype — the sacred feminine, the ancient encoded power of the womb, and the systematic dismantling of that power over centuries. I didn't know then that I'd be back. But here I am, one year later, because the story isn't finished.

This year, the theme that found me was Mother's Day history. But before I get to the history, I need to tell you who is speaking. Because everything I'm about to say comes from a specific life, a specific set of experiences, and a very specific pair of eyes that have learned, sometimes painfully and always gratefully, how to notice things.

So, let me start there. With my life. With the people who made me who I am.

The Weekend That Made This Piece

This past weekend, we took our family to the beach to celebrate Jackson's and Georgia's birthday. The twins were born on Mother's Day, which means every year my birthday as a mother and their birthday arrive together, folded into the same day. It is one of the stranger and more beautiful accidents of my life.

I sat on the beach and watched my children, and I thought about all the mothers in the world doing the same thing, and all the ones who couldn't. I thought about what it means to love someone the way a mother loves. I thought about what is being done, right now, to that love. To the people who carry it.

I came to motherhood late, and sideways, and completely unprepared, which is to say I came to it the way most people do. I was 37 when my first child arrived. A surprise. One moment I was not a mother, and the next, here is your baby, good luck, everything you thought you knew about yourself is now subject to revision.

I have never recovered. I don't want to.

My Four Teachers

Motherhood has given me four children and, through them, a complete education in what love actually requires of a person.

Mona was my first. The surprise that cracked my life open and remade it. And now, all these years later, they are still teaching me. This time about my own assumptions, my own blind spots, the places where my love was wide but my knowledge was limited. Mona is my heart, completely and without reservation. What they bring me now is a gift I didn't know to ask for: they are showing me the edges of my own understanding, and so I am learning. Not because being Mona's mother is difficult, but because loving someone fully means being willing to grow into the space they actually occupy, not the space you imagined for them. Mona has never once asked me to be perfect. They have only ever asked me to stay curious. I am trying to be worthy of that.

Then came the twins, Jackson and Georgia, and with them another version of myself I had never met before. Three lives born at once: two babies and a brand new mother for the second time.

We call Jackson "Tikki Tikki," after a character in the book Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel. A cheeky, loving tease he wears with the good humor of someone who knows exactly who he is. He is my oldest son, and I am aware that the world assigns a particular weight to that. Culturally, that role carries expectations I find deeply uncomfortable: a narrow script about what a man should be, how he should move through the world, what he is and isn't allowed to feel. Jackson has never read from that script, and I have never asked him to.

What I see when I look at my son is someone strong and deeply, beautifully, sensitive. I watch him with his brother Louis, the patience, the tenderness, the way he shows up without being asked. I watch how he carries his worry for Georgia, his twin, quietly, like something he has decided is his to hold. In our current cultural moment, where the loudest voices are trying to sell our sons a distorted and diminished version of manhood, I am working every day to make sure Jackson knows the real thing. That strength and softness are not opposites. That caring for others is not weakness. It is the whole point. That the men worth becoming are the ones who stay, who notice, who love without apology. Jackson is already that man. I am just trying to make sure the world doesn't talk him out of it.

Georgia is my child with medical complexities. When she came into this world, we were told she wouldn't be with us for long. I am not going to pretend those words didn't crack something open in me permanently, something that will never fully close. But Georgia, stubborn and miraculous, and luminous, is 19 years old. She was at the beach this weekend, feet in the sand, sun on her face, utterly indifferent to every prognosis ever made about her life.

I am undone by that. In the best possible way.

And then there is Louis, my youngest, who was born with Down syndrome. Louis is the one who made me understand that motherhood for me is not a season with a finish line. It is a permanent state of being, a daily ongoing act of loving and championing a child whose needs don't retire when he turns 18, and neither do I.

Four children. Four complete worlds. Four teachers I did absolutely nothing to deserve.

Being a mother is the hardest thing I have ever done. It is relentless. It asks for everything: your sleep, your fear, your ego, your heart, your certainties, your time, your plans. And it is, without question, the greatest experience of my life. Nothing has made me more myself.

A Painting Called "Helping Mommy"

When I became a mother, I made a deliberate choice to step away from my studio practice. Making art is not something I do. It is something I am. And I chose to lay it down, fully and without reservation, because my children needed me to. For 15 years, I poured myself into raising them and homeschooling them. It was not a sacrifice I resented. It was a calling I answered.

When I finally returned to my easel, I was working on a landscape when one of my kiddos walked into the studio, found a crayon, and drew on my canvas.

Just like that. Right on the painting.

I stood there looking at their small, certain marks in the middle of my careful work and I realized: this is it. This is the whole thing. This is motherhood. You build something. They walk into it. They change it. And if you're paying attention, what they leave behind is more honest, more alive, more real than anything you could have made alone.

"Helping Mommy" is probably the most direct piece I have ever made about what it means to me to be a mother. It is about interrupted work and tender intrusions. It is about the years you give away and the gifts that come back in shapes you never expected. It is about the fact that the "ruined" canvas is sometimes the better painting.

I share it here because it is, in some ways, the visual answer to everything this essay is asking. What do we do with the things that interrupt us? What do we do when something we have carefully built gets marked up by forces we didn't plan for? Do we mourn the original, or do we make something truer from what's left?

I believe we make something truer. I have to believe that.

The Mothers Ahead of Me on the Road

There is one more thing about my life that shapes everything that follows.

In my work alongside adults with disabilities, I have had the profound gift of knowing their mothers. Women ten, twenty years plus ahead of me on this path. Women who have spent their entire lives navigating systems that were not built with their children in mind, building opportunities where none existed, advocating in rooms that didn't want them there, and loving without condition, without an exit, without an end.

These women inspire me every single day. And if I'm being completely honest, they humble me, and they scare me a little too. Because they show me the road ahead. There is no empty nest in my future. Not in the way the world imagines it. Louis will need me in ways that don't stop. I will show up in ways that don't stop. Forever.

But I want to be clear about who these women are, because they are almost never in the Mother's Day narratives. They are not in the brunch photographs or the flower delivery commercials. They are in the IEP meetings that run two hours over. They are on the phone with insurance companies at seven in the morning. They are in the state capitols, testifying for funding that their children's futures depend on. They built the group homes, the day programs, the advocacy organizations that exist today because nobody built them first and their children needed them.

They changed legislation. They built programs from nothing. They showed up, year after year, to a world that kept telling them to lower their expectations, and they said no.

That is what I mean when I say mothers are a powerful force. Not a sentiment. Not a bumper sticker. That. Specifically that.

These women are, in some ways, the truest inheritors of what Mother's Day was supposed to be: a day that honors not the performance of motherhood but the labor of it. Which brings me to what this holiday was actually built on. Because most of us don't know. And once you know, you cannot unknow it.

This Holiday Was Born Angry

Most people think Mother's Day was invented by Hallmark. It wasn't. It was forged by grief, fury, and the unrelenting belief that mothers deserved to be heard, not just celebrated, heard.

The story begins in the 1850s with a young Appalachian woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis, who organized what she called "Mothers' Day Work Clubs" in the hills of West Virginia. These were not social clubs or tea parties. They were grassroots public health organizations, women teaching other women how to care for their children in a region ravaged by disease. Infant mortality was catastrophic. The clubs fought it, neighbor by neighbor, without funding or recognition.

When the Civil War tore her community apart, Jarvis didn't retreat. In 1868, three years after the war ended, she organized a "Mothers' Friendship Day," bringing Union and Confederate families together in an act of radical, dangerous reconciliation. Threats of violence shadowed the event. She held it anyway.

Around the same time, the poet and suffragette Julia Ward Howe was watching the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War with mounting fury. In 1870, she issued what she called the Mother's Day Proclamation, not a greeting card sentiment, but a political declaration. She called on the mothers of the world to rise up, to convene, to demand an end to the machinery of war that kept consuming their children.

She wrote:

"Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

Read that again. That is not a woman asking to be celebrated. That is a woman demanding that the world stop killing her children.

After Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, Anna M. Jarvis, took up the torch. Anna had watched her mother spend a lifetime laboring for her community with almost no recognition. She was determined to change that. She campaigned fiercely, writing to politicians, ministers, businessmen, anyone who would listen, and on May 10, 1908, held the first official Mother's Day church service at her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia.

Six years later, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed Mother's Day into law as a national holiday.

It should have been a triumph. It wasn't. Not for long.

Where We Lost the Thread

Anna Jarvis had won. For a brief moment, she had actually won. Then the flowers arrived.

Within years of the holiday's official founding, she watched in horror as it was hijacked. Florists raised prices. Greeting card companies churned out saccharine sentiments by the millions. Candy makers cashed in. The day her mother had dedicated to grassroots organizing, community healing, and the political power of motherhood was repackaged and sold back to the public as a consumer holiday. A day for brunch, not action. A day to buy flowers, not demand change.

Anna Jarvis spent the rest of her life fighting it. She sued greeting card companies. She crashed a confectioners' convention and was promptly arrested. She called the commercialization a desecration and a crime. She said, and I want you to sit with this, that she was sorry she had ever started the holiday.

She died in 1948, in a sanitarium, penniless and broken. Historians note the bitter irony that her final medical bills were paid in part by the very flower and greeting card industries she had spent decades fighting. The woman who created Mother's Day died still fighting to restore it.

I have thought about Anna Jarvis a great deal this week. Because what happened to her holiday is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern, and pattern recognition is one of the things being an artist has given me. This is the pattern: women build something powerful and the culture strips out its teeth and sells it back as decoration. The sacred is made sentimental. The political is made personal. The demand is softened into a gesture.

The pattern I see right now, in this cultural moment, is the same one Anna Jarvis spent her life fighting.

The Reckoning

This past Mother's Day, while the flower industry had its best weekend of the year and women were being told they deserved a break, relax, and handed a mimosa, a piece of legislation was moving through South Carolina that would send women to prison for ending a pregnancy. Rape victims. Women carrying pregnancies with fatal fetal abnormalities. Women in medical crisis. Two years in prison.

The legislation is SB 1095. The organization that endorsed it is Students for Life, one of the most powerful anti-abortion lobbying groups in the country, with direct access to legislators and the White House. And here is what makes it particularly clarifying: Students for Life had promised, publicly and explicitly, that they would never support criminalizing the women themselves. That was a line, they said, that they would never cross.

They crossed it.

Buy her flowers on Sunday. Put her in prison on Monday.

This is control dressed in sentiment, the same trick performed again, the same way Mother's Day was stripped of its politics and dressed in carnations. The performance of honoring women, running alongside the machinery of punishing them.

If this were genuinely about life, all life, life as a consistent and sacred principle, the same energy would flow toward the children failing in underfunded schools, toward common sense gun legislation, toward lunch programs, toward healthcare, toward the children sleeping on concrete floors in detention facilities after being separated from their mothers. The energy does not flow there. It flows, reliably and specifically, toward controlling what happens inside a woman's body. That is not a coincidence. It is a tell.

The through line is not care. It is control: control over women's bodies, control over who belongs, control over whose children count as fully human and whose do not. When you hold a zygote as sacred and a living, breathing, crying child in a cage as a policy outcome, you have revealed what this was always about. It was never uniformly about life. It was about power over the conditions of life, and about who gets to hold that power.

And then there is this. We live in a culture with a long, well-documented history of powerful institutions closing ranks around powerful men who harm children. The coaches, the religious leaders, the doctors, the handlers whose names we now know. The networks whose reach turned out to extend into the highest corridors of power. In every case, the machinery of protection ran. In every case, children paid the price. And in every case, the same political class that uses "the children" as a rhetorical shield was nowhere near the room when actual children needed protecting. I am not making a political argument. I am naming a pattern that is visible to anyone paying attention. And as a mother, I am paying attention.

We are going around and around the same patterns. At worst, we are regressing. I see it, all of it: the hypocrisy, the cruelty dressed as virtue, the performance of caring about children while enacting policies that harm them. And I am scared. Scared for my children. Scared for the mothers and children I know. Scared for the ones I don't.

I know I am not alone in that. Mothers across this country and around the world are watching the same things and feeling the same furious horror. We are not imagining it. We are not being hysterical. We are paying attention. And we are not going to stop screaming from the rooftops.

The Weight We Carry

I want to pause and honor the full range of what Mother's Day holds.

For some of you, Mother's Day is layered with loss: a child gone, a pregnancy that didn't hold, an absence the world kept celebrating around you. I have thought about you this weekend, not in the abstract. I sat with the weight of what you carry and I felt it. I send you my love, not as a phrase, but as a real thing, from my heart to yours. Your grief is not invisible to me.

And I want to acknowledge something else. Not everyone has a mother who was loving, or safe, or present. Some of you are estranged. Some of you are healing from wounds that weren't supposed to come from the person who brought you into this world. I know this terrain personally. Motherhood, the word, the day, the ideal, can be its own kind of complicated grief. You belong in this conversation too. Perhaps especially.

I also want to name the mothers we rarely include in our cultural conversation about motherhood at all: the ones beyond our borders, our zip codes, our comfort. Immigrant women fleeing conflict, persecution, and gender-based violence. They have already lived the version of the world some of our policies are building toward. And here is what I believe, plainly: you cannot claim to care about mothers while endorsing border policies that abandon mothers fleeing sexual violence and conflict. You cannot speak of family values while refusing sanctuary to families asking for refuge.

What We Actually Do

So what do we do? Because I refuse to end here, in the fear and the anger alone, without talking about the path forward.

I'll start with something that has been sitting with me, something that came across my feed this week and hasn't left me alone.

I am an artist. And I hear, regularly, that artists are going to change the world. That artists are superhuman. That art will save us all. People at very expensive events, with vast fortunes, resources that could genuinely reshape policy, fund movements, and protect vulnerable communities, they say these things while buying art, collecting art, treating art as an appreciating asset. I want to say this clearly, knowing full well it may cost me: this is the dirty secret of the art world, and it mirrors something much larger.

Mothers are told the same thing. That their love will save us. That their labor, emotional, physical, invisible, relentless, will hold society together. And like artists, they are celebrated for it while the people with actual resources collect the credit and keep the money. Both are forms of the same extraction: take the love and the labor from the people without power, frame it as a calling, and use it to excuse the people with power from doing their share.

If you have a fortune and you are looking to artists to carry what your checkbook could lift with one signature, I say this with full respect: sit down. And write the check.

For the rest of us, it looks like this.

It looks like showing up for the mother on your street who is struggling, not with a casserole alone, but with your time, your attention, your willingness to truly witness her life.

It looks like voting. Every time. At every level. School boards, city councils, state legislatures, federal offices. Vote like the children are watching, because they are.

It looks like knowing what SB 1095 is. Knowing what Students for Life has endorsed. Knowing the name of your state legislator and what they have voted for. The machinery of regression runs, in part, on our not paying attention. Pay attention.

It looks like refusing to stay quiet when a policy, a conversation, or a culture tries to make women smaller, or tells our sons that tenderness is weakness, or makes any child feel that who they are is something to be managed or ashamed of. Speak up in the room where it happens. Especially when your voice shakes.

It looks like extending your definition of mother and child past your own borders. The refugee mother is a mother. The child in a detention center is a child. The woman imprisoned for a medical procedure is someone's daughter, sister, mother.

It looks like supporting the mothers who are already fighting: the disability advocates, the reproductive rights lawyers, the teachers holding the line in underfunded classrooms, the community organizers who never make the news.

And yes, sometimes it looks like making art. Like painting what you have lived so that someone else can feel less alone in what they are living. Like writing, year after year, on the second Sunday of May, because the story is not finished and silence is not acceptable.

Mothers have always known what the world needs. They have known it in the middle of the night, in the waiting room, in the IEP meeting, at the graveside, in the courtroom, in the quiet of a very long day that nobody saw.

The question has never been whether that knowledge and that strength exist. The question is whether the rest of the world will finally get out of the way and let them use it.

I believe it will. Because we must.

Year Two. To Be Continued.

I didn't know when I wrote last year's piece that I was starting a tradition. But here we are. And I think I understand now why this writing on this day bears repeating: because its story doesn't fit in a single essay. The mother archetype, the history, the personal, the political, the grief, the fire. It is a living thing, and it keeps growing.

Every year a theme presents itself. Last year it was the sacred feminine. This year it is the history we forgot, the thread we lost, and the hypocrisy of a culture that tells mothers they are cherished while building the machinery to punish them. I don't know what next year brings. I suspect the world will tell me.

What I know is this: the women who built this holiday were not asking for one day. They were asking for a world. They didn't get it in their lifetimes. We are still asking.

We ask with our art. With our votes. With our money directed toward the people doing the work for change. With our refusal to be softened into silence. With the children we raise and champion and refuse to surrender to a world not yet worthy of them. We ask by remembering what this holiday was supposed to be, and saying clearly and without apology, that a greeting card was never going to be enough.

Happy Mother's Day. A few days late. Exactly on time.

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If you missed Year One, The Mother Archetype: Power, Legacy, and Leadership, these two pieces are in conversation with each other.

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P.S. Happy Birthday, Jackson. Happy Birthday, Georgia. You are two of my greatest teachers, and my greatest joy. I love you both to the moon and back. ❤️❤️

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