The lights went down and all the moms-maybe 300 of them total-claimed their place among the thousands of empty seats in the arena. (I bought a necklace.)īut this wasn’t a potluck-alas, or I’d be sure to get some of that green pea cheddar cheese mayonnaise salad I love/think is disgusting-it was a political rally. I liked Sue, who was selling jewelry she made of her original paintings of women saints and who was thrilled to have someone at her booth who knew who St. (I even still liked her after I saw that one of her quilts was the Axis of Evil, and had photos of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama next to Stalin and Hitler.) I liked the teen girl who will definitely turn into one of these moms and who runs a charity with her own mom, sewing burial gowns for infants who have passed, gifted freely to families who can’t afford to buy something special for their dead son or daughter. I liked Bev, who looked strikingly like the photo of her grandmother she had in her quilting booth, and who cried speaking of how proud she was of this woman who had run a one-room school house on the Wisconsin plains and who she was so sad never to have met. I even like their food, like the radioactive yellow potato salad, deviled eggs, and buckets of fried chicken bought from the grocery store. They seem to have an endless supply of love and attention (for the right people), and they pour it out every which way. It’s their toughness, their sense of humor, their sense of community and duty. These moms populate and repopulate the Kansas town of my childhood.ĭespite being absolutely ideologically opposed to every firmly held belief of these moms, I do really like them. These moms populate and repopulate the Kansas town of my childhood, and I know all of their variations well. The Quiverfull movement was represented (a conservative Christian movement that wants to outnumber the heathens and so requires you to keep birthing babies until your reproductive organs fall out of your body), the Gold Star moms were represented, the God Made Adam and Eve Not. In other words, these were the moms of my family and I was a little surprised not to see any of them here. It was a very specific type of mom being pandered to at this event: the right-wing, Christian, traditional, home-schooling, six-to-eight-seat-capacity-vehicle-driving, assumed-to-be-white mom. The mother, she is the selfish one who thinks it’s okay to have a child and a life and a career. It is a word of sacrifice, someone who has forsaken sleep, pleasure, sex, education, career, a social life, all for you. “Mom” is an identity that conjures up mental images of cat sweatshirts and dopey texts and embarrassing displays of emotion and cheap, practical haircuts. Stay-at-Home Moms debate started decades ago. The word “mom” has long been weaponized, ever since the Working Mother vs. It was such an insignificant blip on the timeline of the culture wars that no one even thought to protest it in return. The Mom’s March, set to be a right-wing answer to the anti-Trump Women’s March back in January, was a bust. When a friend logged on in the middle of the event to watch the livefeed, he reported that Facebook showed only sixty-five other streamers. For an event that had booked conservative superstars like Palin and rented out a 4,500+ seat arena, there were maybe a dozen exhibitors and a couple hundred attendees. I would say, what were any of us doing here, but no one was here. Ben, the inexplicable head of HUD), and an aggressive bottle blonde called Activist Mommy? Why was I making small talk with a woman waving around a small rubber fetus (a medically correct representation of a twelve-week pregnancy, she said, right before “you can have one for free if you want”) and enduring hours of speakers in a venue that didn’t even seem to have alcohol for sale? If I weren’t a mom, why would I even be here, in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, at the Mom’s March for America that was not a march-more like a Mom’s Milling Around-to hear speakers like Sarah Palin, Candy Carson (wife of Dr. I was not sure how she’d react given my advanced age. I was not a mom-nor a mother-but the woman was talking about how I’d need to protect my family come Judgment Day and I did not feel like antagonizing her with the information that I had not used my uterus to spread God’s message of love here on earth. “Well, you know, you’re a mom,” the mom in front of me said, gesturing in my direction.
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