We're all somebody's baby
It's really that simple, my friends
Sunday is Mother’s Day. This doesn’t mean for me what it means for a lot of folks. I don’t care about cards or flowers or being taken to brunch. What I do care about is the origins of it all.
Do you know how Mother’s Day started?
The seeds were planted when Julia Ward Howe— a feminist and a pacifist— issued a Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870. It read in part:
Arise, then... women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
Howe’s call for a council of mothers never materialized. But in 1905, Anna Jarvis, the daughter of one of Howe’s compatriots, began a campaign calling for a national holiday in honor of her mother, also Anna Jarvis. Anna Jarvis, the older, known as “Mother Jarvis”, organized women in West Virginia to nurse soldiers after the Civil War regardless of what side of the war they’d been on.
Anna Jarvis, the younger, whose campaign resulted in our modern Mother’s Day, sought a national holiday that honored the role of motherhood, which might suggest it should only be a day about birthing children. But don’t we all have the capacity to mother? Are we not all called to nurture something or someone?
If not, how does the world go on?
We are all birthed by someone. For years after birth, we must be fed and protected and nurtured. Without this mothering labor, none of us makes it to the point of becoming anything else. Not artist, worker, leader, lover, or friend. And without the mothering we do in turn, the cycle is broken.
Mothering as a practice, a human function, is a linchpin of our continued existence as a species, the central shaft that keeps the wheels on our vulnerable, imperfect human cart so we can move forward together.
Per the Cambridge Dictionary, a linchpin is “the most important member of a group or part of a system, that holds together the other members or parts or makes it possible for them to operate as intended.”
I started thinking about linchpins this week, even before I started thinking about Mother’s Day, because of Tyre Nichols.
We Do The Things We Do
I was catching up on podcasts recently. I heard Glennon Doyle say something on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast and it struck clear through me, like a bell:
Tyre Nichols, you may or may not remember, was stopped by police in Memphis as he drove home from his job as a UPS driver in early 2023. They pulled him from his car, physically assaulted and restrained him, and when he fled in fear, five officers caught him and beat him senseless. He died three days later.
Three of those officers, who killed an unarmed man during a traffic stop, were acquitted of all state charges against them this past week.
It’s important, in the wake of that decision and in honor of the true origins of Mother’s Day, for me to recall Tyre to our attention. He was a father whose murder left his baby without him, but he was also RowVaughn Wells’ son.
Every person brutally killed by police is somebody’s baby.
Every immigrant detained and deported is somebody’s baby.
Every person starving in Gaza because of lack of access to aid is somebody’s baby.
Every person killed by bombs in Yemen. Every Ukrainian and Russian soldier. Every civilian slaughtered in Sudan and Myanmar and Ethiopia is somebody’s baby.
Every person dying from diseases that are preventable with vaccines is somebody’s baby.
Every disabled person. Every sick person. Every elder and veteran and prisoner denied dignity and care is somebody’s baby.
Every trans person just trying to work, live, and love in peace is somebody’s baby.
I could argue that every person stopped by police, every immigrant, has a right to due process, as stipulated in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution:
”No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
“... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”
The right of every individual to due process is the linchpin of our democratic republic. But due process arguments, as important as they are right now in the U.S. don’t gather in everyone. They don’t get us down to the center of things, the thing that makes it possible for us, as humans, to “operate as intended.”
Because I cannot believe that we are meant to subjugate and decimate each other until one lone, mad king and his sycophants are left teetering at the top of a pile of bones.
I believe we are meant to mother each other forward. To do whatever we have to do, as mothers always have, to keep everyone safe, nurtured, honored, and loved.
Is there a resonant frequency for humanity? Could there be a single sound that all humanity feels the same about? That sound, I believe, is the sound that everybody in here, when they hear that sound, the cooing of a child, feels the same thing. No matter how mean you are, no matter what race you are, no matter your sexual orientation, your religious beliefs, no matter, none of it matters. We don’t even know what race the child is. We don’t know the gender of the child, sex and gender of the child, we don’t know what the child look like, if the baby bald-headed or not, we don’t know nothing about this child, and it doesn’t matter because that sound, for some reason, connects us all.— Jason Reynolds, On Being Young in America
On the level of the human, governmental systems and national borders don’t matter. Tribal affiliations have no meaning. All systems that seek to establish and maintain hierarchies of human value weigh less than nothing.
If we continue to fight each other for scraps, attack each other over our differences, and ignore our obligations to each other we will die. Our societies will crumble. Our species will wither on the vine.
In the end, every single one of us, is simply somebody’s baby. And we are all mothers, called to protect the safety and welfare of everybody’s children.