Letter From Minnesota: There is No Time for Mom Guilt

I’m thinking about the mother in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.” The iron goes back and forth, back and forth, and so do her thoughts, tallying up all the ways she was and was not enough as a mother. When we read this story in a class I teach for mother writers, we always talk about mom guilt, and how difficult it is to raise children in the midst of fraught moments in history.

For the narrator in the story, it was the Great Depression and World War II. For us mother writers who gathered this past Wednesday night in downtown Minneapolis, it is the occupation of our city by federal ICE agents who are kidnapping and killing people in broad daylight.

When I found out that an ICE agent had shot Renee Good in the face just a short drive from our home, I was pouring coffee and scrolling on my phone while my three-year-old son raced cars on our living room couch five feet away. He called for me. I set my phone down and pushed the tears off my face with shaking hands. I went to him.

Two weeks later when Alex Pretti was executed in broad daylight on Eat Street, I was holding my feverish son on the couch, watching Cars for the second time already that day. On TV, the cars of Radiator Springs welcomed newcomer Lightning McQueen to their hometown, and I stared out our living room window at the top of the Minneapolis skyline, just visible over our neighborhood’s houses and trees.

Many mothers in the Twin Cities marched the streets in the wake of the murders and terrifying kidnappings by ICE, and many mothers organized in other ways, moving food and money to food shelves, families sheltering-in-place, and rent relief funds. While my son was sick, I did what I could from my phone. When he was better, I shopped for a culturally-specific food drive, and when I dropped the items off, a volunteer with her new baby in a pram accepted the donation. Mothers were doing what mothers do: making webs of care, often nearly invisible, but still there, still strong.

Even as I did what I could, I felt that all-too-familiar guilt that mothers know so well, and that mother, writer, and activist Tillie Olsen wrote about in her oft-anthologized 1956 story. “I will become engulfed in all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.” How could I not feel guilty for not doing more, when there are mothers in my city whose children have been taken from them? When there are children in my city whose mothers have been taken from them? I saw photos online of the marches in my city and I berated myself for not being there. We ordered a pizza for dinner one night, and I thought: we should have eaten whatever was in the fridge and donated what we spent. I scrolled through GoFundMe’s and names of food shelves and organizations working tirelessly to help the vulnerable in our community, each one as worthy as the last, and wondered where to even begin. Where, in this necessary resistance and revolution, did I belong?

There is no time for mom guilt. We cannot become engulfed in what we could or should have done.

Along with being the primary caretaker for my son, I am a writer and a teacher. I have always felt that my calling in life is to create a sense of solidarity through words. But in the weeks that Minnesota has been under siege by the federal government, I have not known what to write, even as Toni Morrison’s words echoed in my mind: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

My own words wouldn’t come to me, so I borrowed others’. I started searching for poems to pair with possible action items to print out and put in my Little Free Library. Typing the poems made me feel better. While I cut them out, I read them aloud to my son. Each time I finished one, he said, “Anulla poem.” Another poem. I read poems about plums, poems about broken chains, poems about living rooms full of food and friends. Poems about buds unfurling in the spring, poems about music, poems about all the work there is to be done. Another poem. Another. I took a breath and read another poem, let the words soothe me and fire me up.

In the class I teach, we read poems, essays, and stories by mothers from various time periods and places. We write and we share our writing. We laugh and we cry. We heal. From our voices and the voices of writers before us, we weave together a community of mothers who raise their voices and inspire one another.

When I opened my car door to drive to class this week, I couldn’t help thinking about Renee Good. About the prize-winning poem she wrote that was shared widely online after her murder. About the image of her driver’s side door, the pocket overflowing with kids’ toys.

There is no time for mom guilt. We cannot become engulfed in what we could or should have done. We can’t sit and stew in our guilt at not having done enough, and we can’t attempt to do it all. Those of us who get to act, must. It is a privilege to show up for our neighbors until it becomes a right that we all have. We must keep at it, this caring for one another, this chipping away at the empire. There is a moment before us, open to change. We must shape it how we can with what we have. Perfection isn’t the goal here. Doing it all isn’t the goal either. Showing up is.

Here is what I am going to do:

I will keep showing up to do what I can for my community, even if it feels insignificant and haphazard at times. This is not going to be a short-term effort. This will be a long road with lots of space for continued mutual aid and support. If we all do something, no matter how small, it will keep adding up. That is the beauty of community supporting community.

I will keep mothering. I will keep raising my son to be emotionally open and aware, to be loving and kind. I will read him poems and stories. I will praise him when he listens, when he asks questions, when he says he is sorry. I will allow him to see me struggle with questions of privilege and guilt, push through and do the work, knowing that while my feelings are valid, it isn’t about me—it’s about us.

I will keep writing, even when I don’t know what to write. I will keep encouraging mothers to write their stories, for stories change lives, and mothers see the world with a compassion charged with caregiving. Their stories nourish us and they give us roadmaps for resistance. They remind us that there is a place for everyone here, that we are all people with dreams and beating hearts and gifts to share.

Above all, I will do what mothers do. I will love, I will love, I will love.