Labor and Love

The Labored Intersection of Mothering and Activism Taylor Chapman | Final Project for American Motherhood | Carrie Levesque

[thelaborofmothers]

A Big Fat Post about Mothers and Sizeism

I've been fat since I was a child. My mother was always stick-thin and popular with dark hair and bright blue eyes. I got my father's genes. I'm average height, I have green eyes like his mother, and I'm fat. Double chin, soft arms, and an expansive belly in front of me - I'm fat! 

What's more? I like being fat. Granted, it took me a long time to get to this place. Years, in fact. It took a lot of unlearning negative thoughts about my body, a lot of sneering & obscenities in the direction of my television when diet commercials came on (instead of hanging my head in shame), and a lot of fat feminist theory articles and blog posts being made on a daily basis to get here. It took taking pictures and studying them and taking more in order to learn how my body actually looks, rather than what my brain was telling me how it looked.

But what will this mean when I become a mother?

Elizabeth, from the mommy blog "Spilt Milk," talks about this in her blog post titled "Parenting through Obesity Panic."

I love this part of her post because of how honest it is. I love the back-and-forth conversation taking place throughout. I especially appreciate this because of how often I've been faced with these conversations myself. I have two younger brothers and two nephews who I have taken a big part in helping to raise over the course of my life. I've had conversations with my oldest nephew (7 years old) about body size before because, when making a video game character, he wanted me to make my character "skinny like him." I went onto explain that I wanted my character to look like me, so that would mean that my character would also need to be fat like me. I told him that he is short, and I am tall, he is skinny, and I am fat, and that's great, because bodies aren't all supposed to look the same. We spent the rest of the day describing different body types in his favorite cartoons, or the books we were reading, or people we saw in public. He learned new descriptive words, I learned more about how he sees the world, and ultimately, we began a new part of our relationship: the part where we critically think about the ways people's bodies look and function and how that affects society's perception of them. 

Elizabeth goes on...

The struggle to explain to children and teenagers (and even adults!) why the compulsive need to weigh ourselves, to explain the moral value lacking in a cupcake, and the unhealthy need to constantly want to take up less and less space is...hard. Especially because people have already been inundated with the idea that fat people are automatically unhealthy, slovenly, disgusting, ugly, and unlovable. 

I've taught several body positivity classes at a girls' summer camp I've been working at the past two years. In these classes, I usually start off with a story that explains the relationship I have with my body, and I always, always make sure to use the word "fat." In my opinion, neutralizing the word is integral to neutralizing people's feelings around the word, and indeed, the body type. Our girls' ages range from 5-18 years old, which is a huge amount of ground to cover. The youngest girls don't generally care about their appearance, but when worrying about the way they look seems to really take root around age 9 and it only gets worse as they get older. 

As a fat woman, it's important for me to fight for fat people's rights. I don't want or expect everyone to find fat people attractive. But I do want doctors to stop misdiagnosing us, I want the automatic contempt for us to dissipate, and I want to feel welcome in public spaces without negotiating that welcome. Which is why it's so important for me to talk to these campers - girls who I consider my daughters and my sisters - about why it's important that they learn to love their bodies now, not later. Because this is a life or death issue. The way we feel about our bodies directly relates to how we engage with the world. 

The way this relates to our readings is through the Jane Smiley article "Can Mothers Think?" While fat activism is largely held in contempt by...pretty much everyone who isn't fat, I want to be clear in saying that it is a form of activism, it is sorely needed, and it is a form of literature. While I am not a mother, I have still played a direct role in teaching children about body acceptance and how it can make their future (and the futures of everyone else) a more inclusive one. These conversations, whether they happen in person or through blogs like this one, the Full Circles Foundation blog post, or my personal blog (not linked here), this is a cultivation of literature and a movement by fat women to make the world a better place. But more than that (and connected to that) it's a way to teach girls that they are worth more than their weight, and that their weight does not limit them. I think there is a need for women who are considered to be ugly to write about their experiences, especially because so many people believe it is a mother's job to make their daughters adhere to patriarchal notions of beauty. 

The world may be an ugly place, but beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. 

[thelaborofmothers]

"It took me 6 years, 2 children, an on-and-off history with welfare, a short stint of homelessness, and creative childcare arrangements, including the Early Learning Center at Baruch, to graduate. ...What you have done today is no easy feat. I walked across a stage much like this one in 2006, and let me tell you a little bit about what it took me to get across that stage and then actually end up here in front of you. I had my first child at 22 and my second at 23, both while trying to pursue my undergraduate degree at Baruch. I was pregnant so long that I bumped into professors on campus, confused, not entirely sure how one could be pregnant longer than 40 weeks." 

These words are spoken by an activist and mother named Tanya Fields, though sometimes she goes by "Mama Tanya." She's also the founder of The BLK ProjeK which is a non-profit that "seeks to address food justice and economic development by harnessing the local, good food movement and creating small business and career opportunities for underserved women and youth of color." 

I had the opportunity to meet Tanya Fields in September of 2013. We met at a weekend-long event hosted by some friends of mine that focused on solidarity and cooperative economics. She was one of our keynote speakers, and she was amazing - even beyond her formal talks that weekend. I remember specifically when she was conversing with another attendee about the struggles of being a poor, Black mother and activist and the incredible challenges between wanting to transform the world around us while also attempting to survive. I resonated with so much of what she was saying, because although I am not yet a mother, and though as a white person I will never understand what it is like to be a victim of racism and white supremacy, I am also trying to figure out how to drastically change capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy and what it means to be a poor person while doing it. Needless to say, it isn't easy. 

But what gives me the most hope is how dedicated Tanya is to her children. That weekend, she told us their names and silly stories about them. She told us about how smart they are, how they are thinking critically at such young ages, and how they like to dance sometimes when they walk around their neighborhood at her side. There was nothing but pure love and a will to fight for the lives of her children when she spoke of them. It was clear in this moment that she wasn't just out to change the world because it's what's right - she's out to change the world because her children deserve to live in a better world. Tanya Fields is the kind of mother that I hope I can one day become. 

Tanya moved forward in her speech by saying "I faced some insurmountable struggles during the time I was in school. Childcare was a constant struggle and parenting was even harder. Was I even parenting? I dropped my children off at 7 in the morning while they were sleeping, and picked them up at 9 or 10pm while they were sleeping. I missed their first steps, I didn't potty-train them, and I didn't hear them utter their first words. And it killed me every day. But in my bones, in the pit of stomach, I felt, no, I knew, that what I was doing was the right decision for both me and them." 

At this point in her speech, I thought about the Crittendon articles we read in class, and how mother's choices, no matter how difficult or painful, are said to be justified because they are choices - that mothers "don't have" to make them. That if mothers wanted "an easier way out" they have every right to take one, it's just that they "choose" not to. This is a form of victim-blaming, and it makes invisible all the struggles that mothers have to face in the wake of raising their children. Tanya Fields and mothers like her are who we must focus on when these arguments are made, specifically because of what they embody. During this speech, Tanya isn't making excuses, or complaining about having to work hard, as I'm sure many people would suggest. Instead, she is detailing her fight, and she is highlighting her struggles in an effort to let the world know that it doesn't have to be this way. 

Yes, Tanya Fields made the choice to continue going to school, to graduate, and to continue her hard work in her community in NYC. But no, Tanya Fields didn't choose to live in an economic climate that exploits the people within it in order to make more profit, instead of making people's lives worth living. But she is choosing to do something about that climate. She's choosing to "actualize the potential of [her] best self" and change the world she's living in. As of now, society is set up in a way that gives certain people power over others. This means that non-mothers get to make decisions that negatively affect the lives of mothers while blaming women for becoming mothers in the first place. The good news is, however, there are mothers in the world like Tanya Fields, who are standing up, getting their hands dirty, and changing the world in their own way.

Tanya Fields is living proof that mothers can and do make change, and we need to recognize her labor as important, as valuable, and as a model that will truly make this world a better place. 

[lostinurbanism]

Mother and Daughter, From the Series, The Study of Kin by Marcia Michael