Mother's Day for single moms, and more
A Craft Year update, a new essay by moi, and a few more great Mother's Day reads
Thanks to a burst water main in my neighborhood and a basement wrecked by flood damage (you would not believe what 8 inches of water will do), I’m stuck at home today. While a crew is working on drying out my basement, I’m catching up a bit from the work week gone awry while battling flood waters, and I’m continuing to read through the hundreds of fantastic applications I received for Craft Year, my free online writing workshop for folks without MFAs. I’m still on track to finish by June 1, so if you submitted an application, I’ll be back to you soon. Thank you for submitting such incredible work and making this decision so damn difficult.
I also wanted to share a new essay I wrote with you. It’s a piece about being a single mom on Mother’s Day and how for so many years, I got Mother’s Day wrong.
Earlier this week, I tweeted about wanting more essays about single motherhood and Mother’s Day, and Lyz Lenz over at Men Yell At Me was kind enough to run this piece for me. I haven’t published much in the past year (I’m working on some intensive long form projects), so this piece about this day is really meaningful to me. I hope you’ll read it when you have a moment.
If you’re able, I hope you’ll also take a moment and make a donation to an organization of your choice doing great work to help all mothers. Two of my favorites are National Bail Out and Kentucky Health Justice Network.
A few more great Mother’s Day reads for you:
Lyz wrote a fantastic piece on Heather Armstrong, one of the first bloggers who showed me what it meant to be real and vulnerable about life as a mother. I also linked to it in my essay at Lyz’s Substack, but I wanted to give it its due here. I didn’t always agree with Heather, especially some of her commentary on trans folks in the past few years. But I will never forget her influence, and I hope she and her family both find some peace.
This thread by Dr. Jennifer D. Roberts is an excellent primer on the power of Black motherhood.
From that thread, this piece by A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez on the meaning and legacy of the English legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, or “the status of the child follows the mother” and what free Black motherhood means.
A beautiful piece about being a single mom by Ashley Espinoza at JMWW.
This piece at Texas Monthly about the life of Kimberly Mata-Rubio, who lost her daughter nearly a year ago in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, is devastating and absolutely necessary reading.
Aubrey Hirsch, brilliant as always, at TIME on what we really want for Mother’s Day.
Momfluenced by Sara Peterson is a great read.
Another recent favorite is The Three Mothers by Anna Malika Tubbs.
I hope you all have a safe, relaxing weekend. Mother’s Day can be hard for a lot of us, so be good to yourselves. And let’s take care of each other.
Mother's Day for single moms, and more
Your essay on being a single mother on Mother’s Day speaks to me so deeply. I’m a newly single mom and feel every word of what you said. My life is so much easier and harder at the same time, but I am empowered and driven by the autonomy I’ve bestowed on myself and that I can now make my life whatever I want. No one will drag me down again.
Mother’s Day in the USA originated to honour mothers. In the UK we have a different source - ‘Mothering Sunday’, which has now turned into Mother’s Day but remains linked to Easter.
On the fourth Sunday in Lent people would go ‘mothering’. They would visit their mother church - either the local parish church, or the nearest cathedral (as it is the mother church of all the parishes).
Over time, women started to work away from their home parish, often as domestic servants. The girls left home when they were very young, some only 10 years old. They only had a few hours off duty each week, except on Mothering Sunday, when they were allowed the day off. They would journey home to visit their mother church and their family.
Mothering Sunday is in the middle of Lent, and it is also called Refreshment Sunday, when the fasting associated with Lent is lifted for the day. Because of this, servant women would make cakes and buns not allowed during Lent, and take them home. It is an easy step to see the girls making cakes and gathering flowers to give to their mother, whom they had not seen for a year.