*The following Mother's Day Manifesto is made up of ideas and statements taken from Mia Birdsong's [[Reference Notes/How We Show Up]]. I take no credit for any of it. In fact, I have plagiarised whole sentences, and have recast them as the defiant words of an imaginary mother:* I will no longer accept the nuclear family as the ideal social unit. The nuclear family is a legal construction consisting of a man and woman raising biological children. It is insular and tries to be self-sufficient, but in fact, it is toxic individualism in family form. It is a reinforcing of the independent individual, recast as the independent couple. Our culture is made for, supports, and privileges the nuclear family I’m part of. Divesting from that privilege is important because it’s unearned and harms other people. We belong in a bundle of life that transcends any boundary or box we try to put around ourselves. I reject my society's binaries of class, race, sex, gender, sexuality, ableism, beauty, and age. My heroes are the queers among us who escape definition, who are fluid and limitless, who are too strange to be conquered, who dare to imagine what love can look like, and pursue it with defiance. These are souls who, at great cost, just by insisting on existence and self-definition, have created more room for the rest of us to be expansive and self-determined in our identities and relationships. We owe a debt to those who have challenged the norms our culture has defined for us—norms that limit who we can be, how we present ourselves, how we love, who we call family. I love queerness as a beautiful and belligerent tradition of people whose sense of love and beauty and justice and art and adventure and family is too expansive for the examples that were set for us. But rather than keep quiet, they insist on something truer for themselves. I find inspiration, strength, and clarity from these words from Audre Lorde, “The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last, you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” I am fierce in my belief that we must remove labels and replace them with a question. I cast a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics, and ask in return, "I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’” Family and community can and should be where we find belonging, care, and love. But they are often also the source of our deepest wounds and our greatest damage. We all have the capacity to hurt as well as the capacity to love, we have the power to diminish and lift up, to harm and heal. And inevitably, we run the spectrum of these intentions and actions, often with the same people (on the same damn day). As with all things centered on people and relationships, nothing we create together with our whole selves, our baggage and damage, our dreams and passions, is going to be clear or static or definitive. Not only are there not limited ways of creating family and community, but there are not limited ways of staying family and community. It’s all mutable and evolving. So many of us struggle with feelings of obligation toward people just because we are related to them. This sometimes compels us to stay in relationship with people. But we do not have to stay attached to our given (as opposed to chosen) families. My chosen family consits of aunties and uncles who are not related to my children, who play the role of rule-breakers, and who supplement my motherhood by seeing my children as whole people in a way that I cannot. It means they can engage with my kids as they really are and see what they are capable of. The mirror they hold up allows my kids to think more deeply about who they are and extend themselves into the world more. My chosen family also includes friends who just show up at my doorstep, or call me when they are five minutes from my house, asking, "What are you doing?" They are less boundaried in that area, willing to insert themselves into my life. They are close enough to me that they can anticipate my needs, know what I want, and take their place in my life. This also means that I have to let go of some of my orientation toward privacy and seclusion. In turn, I try to be more specific in terms of how I offer my support to people, without taking away their autonomy or initiative. ‘I want to come and do your dishes and throw some laundry in. Would that be okay with you?’ Or ‘I know this is really hard. Can I maybe look into where you could get some resources for this?’ Or ‘Can I take your kids? Because I’d really love to have them today while you go do something for yourself.’ I believe that if we do all of the above, we will create an abundance of mothering, in which we are all mothering each other, all of the time, with ease and pleasure and creativity. We will no longer need this empty convention called Mother's Day, which pretends to celebrate mothers, but in fact incarcerates them in a prison of false sufficiency.