All in Empty Altar Essays
It isn’t about perfection. Or sacrifice. It isn’t about judgment. Or competition.
Patriarchy tells us that women can’t form supportive networks and hold them. Capitalism tells us that we must live in scarcity and competition and that abundance comes only with wealth.
We know that isn’t true.
Every mother knows that what we say matters very little, but what we do makes an immediate and lasting impact. We can tell our children about consent all day every day, but when we violate their boundaries or allow them to violate ours they learn that we don’t mean what we say.
Communities of support are possible, they exist, and they are necessary for both mother and child to claim their full humanity at the same time. This does not mean that both get to do everything they wish anytime they wish. This means that neither is sacrificing SELF for the other. It means that both mother and child are seen as human beings worthy of care, time, and respect.
All around me I see moms praising their own mothers for their sacrifice. I see folks talking about how their mothers gave up everything for them and how their mothers lived for them or through them. The child’s accomplishments became the mother’s because the mother had no dreams left.
We must begin to think more deeply about these norms and whether or not they are healthy.
Patriarchy has taught us to devalue the caring, nurturing, emotional work of motherhood. Capitalism has taught us to define work as production. White Supremacy has taught us that white women are at once fragile and superior and that women of color are at once unbreakable and inhuman.
We don’t want to admit that we are living out an abusive cycle of motherhood. Some of us will say that mothering is hard, more of us will agree that our own mothers had it hard, but almost no one will look behind the altar and name the emptiness.
