Essay: M is for Mona

Unmothering On Mother's Day

Image: Robert E. Rutledge

When fascism flexes its muscles and Fertilization President tightens his meaty, tiny fingers around our wombs, Mother’s Day in the U.S. must become a day of resistance. Refuse to be enlisted into fascism’s forced birth industrial complex. Resist white Christian nationalism’s demands for more workers, soldiers, and lineage. Seize the means of your reproduction and tell capitalist patriarchy to fuck off.

Listen to the joy of being childfree by choice on a day the purpose of which is to drum into us the misery of being childless by extolling a motherhood that on most other days is ignored at best, taken for granted at worst, and simply expected as a matter of course for anyone with a womb and ovaries.

Walk back and forth for a few minutes between -free and -less. Childfree and childless. Do you feel the difference? Can you discern where the autonomy of the former disintegrates into the weight of judgement of the latter?

In a country where mothers take to GoFundMe to afford everything from diapers to just a few days off work to recover from the violence of childbirth, President Fertilization with his $5,000 “Baby Bonus” and Medal for Motherhood is the Mother of All Trolls.