| |  Illustration by Janna Morton | A few weeks ago, my sister called to let me know that Zoe, my ten-year-old niece, wants to straighten her hair. I sighed. “I knew this day would probably come,” she said, her strained voice radiating distress. My two-year-old daughter, Eve, was already tucked into bed, her hair in neat, geometric cornrows that I take pleasure in styling every week. Even as my sister and I spoke somewhat mournfully about courses of action she should take, why Zoe would suddenly want this hairstyle, and how to come to some sort of compromise, I marveled at the dour tone of the entire conversation. I remember all too well my childhood obsession with long, straight hair that shimmered and shook in the slightest breeze. Loose curls that bounced and swayed with every gentle toss of the head. When I was as young as five years old, I would look in the mirror and prod at my hair, which — even relaxed — refused to slip daintily through my fingers or flip over my shoulder with the practiced ease I saw demonstrated in my fairer-skinned classmates. Rather than obey my fingers’ or comb’s commands, it would stick stubbornly outward, looking like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, whom I understood to be a comedic character. I didn’t want my hair to be funny; I wanted it to be glamorous. Beautiful. Like the Pantene and Herbal Essence commercials: flowing, wavy, free. It was this yearning that I thought of, frowning, with the phone perched between my ear and shoulder. “I mean, it’s definitely normal,” I said to my sister, Sophia. “She’s getting to that age. I was obsessed with having straight hair when I was eleven.” For a significant period in middle school, I had worn my hair in the same exact style every single day: a high bun with a side parted bang. I would stand at my vanity and brush and straighten and brush until my mother implored me to stop. I couldn’t stand the imperfection of a flyaway hair or crooked bump. In high school, my tastes inverted into a desire for effortless disarray: the ever-elusive messy bun. That “I just washed my hair and tossed it up with this scrunchie,” blasé look. I couldn’t understand the mechanics of the style or begin to make sense of the sheer injustice: I was positive that if I’d even attempted to leave the house displaying such a lack of effort, my mother would have marched me right back upstairs to “do something with your hair.” The one time I’d even come close to this sort of devil-may-care approach (washing my hair immediately after taking braids out), my mother had to cut off all my hair. The tangles bested our combs, our conditioners, and our prayers. Messy bun. “I know. Me too. And that’s the problem,” Sophia countered. “I don’t want her to go through what we did. I don’t want to have to deal with the drama. She already spends forever staring into the mirror, playing with her hair.” One of us suggested that she be allowed to wear her hair straightened only for special occasions, I can’t remember who. Let her choose when, but with the explicit stipulation that it was not going to be a normal occurrence. Maybe a texturizer instead of straightener. Or a very soft perm? You know, just leave it in for half the recommended time. Every consideration bore the weight of our lived experience with the drama of our hair: we both knew that this small wish of Zoe’s was the first step of many on her journey to adolescent self-discovery. “I don’t know,” I admitted eventually. “I think it may be inevitable that she’ll have to learn by fire why you don’t want her to do this. And if you forbid it, she’ll want it even more.” *** In 2006, India.Arie crooned I am not my hair, and I sang along, righteously indignant and fully aware that I was lying to myself. I appreciated the message of the song, that of self-love and acceptance regardless of appearance, but my preoccupation with the way I looked consumed much more of my mental and physical energy than India probably would have approved of. Most days, I felt like I was my hair: my moods hinged on my satisfaction with whatever it was doing on a particular day, I played with it constantly, and I cringe to think of the dollars I’ve parted ways with in service of maintenance. It’s the first thing I look at when staring into a mirror, when glancing at strangers, being reunited with friends. What was my hair doing in this pic? Okay, side swoop! Wow, is that her real hair?!  Photo Courtesy of Carla Bruce-Eddings |
My hair has endured much in my 29 years. A perm before I lost the majority of my baby teeth, an abrupt haircut that led to a natural afro in eighth grade, flat-ironed to within an inch of its life in high school. In college I made the grave mistake of dyeing it red in the bathroom of my mother’s house while my best friend looked on, fascinated. Lesson learned. I returned from my junior year abroad with my very first Tumblr page, having spent hours scrolling and reblogging photos of black women joyfully embracing their natural hair. Freshly inspired by these images, I wasted no time before shearing off my straggly permed ends to sport my own teeny-weeny afro (TWA, in natural-hair blog parlance). I’ve sewn, braided, and twisted in all sorts of weaves and extensions, dabbed Jamaican black castor oil on my edges, praying that whatever damage I’d inflicted would reverse itself. And finally, in the early days of fall 2013, I adopted what I hoped would become my last style: locs. In Cheryl Thompson’s 2009 study for the University of Michigan “Black Women and Identity: What’s Hair Got to Do With It?,” she posits, “For young black girls, hair is not just something to play with, it is something that is laden with messages, and it has the power to dictate how others treat you, and in turn, how you feel about yourself.” It’s a double-edged sword, this hyperawareness of our appearance, because for many black women, coming to terms with how we feel about our image in the mirror and anticipating how others will perceive us are simply opposite sides of the same coin. It’s the same principle that underlies the truth of “twice as good to receive half as much.” I’ve caught myself falling victim to this mentality, which justified judging myself and others more harshly before someone else could. I probably spend more money experimenting with organic conditioners and oils for my daughter’s hair than I should. Schedules are created around the times that I know I’ll need to style her hair for the week. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that a very deep and primal part of me recoils at the idea of anyone ever looking at my daughter’s hair and wondering, Her mother really let that baby leave the house looking like that? In November 2017, a corner of the Internet erupted when a black model for J. Crew was depicted with a “messy bun.” The brand is known for its signature casual style, which includes low-key, “I woke up like this” chic, but for this particular model, whose hair is clearly natural, the aesthetic didn’t quite hit the mark for many, including me. Although the model, Marihenny Rivera Pasible, eventually took to Instagram to address the backlash head-on (“these days it is all about women embracing their natural looks so here it is! We as human beings are never satisfied…”), the sheer outrage that a seemingly harmless ad caused spoke volumes. I’ll admit that the photo gave me pause as well — “I bet the stylist was white,” I remembering muttering to myself. Maybe it was the angles, maybe the lighting, but I couldn’t help thinking that there were a multitude of styles better suited for her hair type. The high ponytail seemed awkward considering the length of her hair, and the wisps of escaping hair seemed more slapdash than styled. I am an advocate for natural hair; I want women of all shades to feel comfortable wearing their hair as it grows from their head, but I believe in the power of styling product as one’s hair type demands: to moisturize, to sculpt, to illustrate its innate beauty rather than imitate another’s. It’s a position that is inherently contradictory but one I cannot in truth say I have evolved away from. Yet again, the messy bun eludes me. *** A few weeks after our initial conversation, I texted my sister to ask what she had decided. “Did you ever end up letting Zoe straighten her hair?” She had. “Hate to admit it was so much easier to handle, and so cute!” She attached several photos of my niece with her response, showing Zoe glancing at the camera in a clearly candid pose, sporting thick, wavy hair that brushed just past her shoulders. In another photo, long, braided pigtails are tossed elegantly over her shoulder as she sips from a Starbucks cup, staring pensively to her right. My heart ached with reminiscence: I could almost feel the preteen angst and attitude wafting from my phone screen, so bittersweet and lovely in the face that I’ve watched grow and shift over the years. “You’ll find zero judgment here,” I typed back to my sister, followed by a string of heart-eye emojis. In truth, sometimes I worry about the tenacity with which we cling to the natural-hair ideal. I wonder how Eve, in 2026, will negotiate the complexities of her identity as a black girl in whatever version of the USA we’ll be living in. Will the concept of “natural” and “real” and “synthetic” even communicate the same meaning? How much will our conversation about the politics of our appearance have shifted? When she looks at me, her mother with locs, what will she see? I want to be meticulous and measured in how I approach these thorny topics, the same way that I schedule time to deep condition her delicate curls and rub coconut and jojoba oils into her soft scalp. But I know the day will come that she will resist the childish styles I adore, the same way I did, and my sister did, and her daughter did. I’ll have to relinquish that control and allow her to stumble into whoever she is meant to be. Bumps, flyaway hairs, imperfections. I’ll be there to document it all. Carla Bruce-Eddings is an associate publicist at Riverhead Books and a freelance writer and books editor for Well-Read Black Girl. Her writing has been featured in New York Magazine, Refinery29, the Establishment, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. | | | | |  Illustration by Hanna Barczyk | To the Parents of My Unvaccinated Patients: Let’s get a few things out of the way before we begin, so we have a better chance of understanding one another: I’m a pediatrician who works in a hospital. It’s true that sick kids pay my bills, but I would much rather that kids never got sick, even if it meant losing my job. (I’m adaptable. I’m sure I’d be OK.) I’m also a person who thinks that when young people become seriously ill from diseases that might have otherwise been prevented, it’s a tragedy. Pertussis outbreaks in this country are on the rise; paralytic polio quickly returned to Syria after immunization rates dropped due to the war; the measles outbreak currently taking young lives in Europe may now do the same in Texas. When children die of these diseases, it’s unconscionable. I am, as you might have guessed, pro-vaccine. I am amazingly grateful that my own children are growing up in an era in which it is highly unlikely that I will have to watch them die. One hundred years ago, it was ordinary to lose a child before they reached the age of five. Can you imagine? I don’t even want to. That’s me, in a nutshell. What about you? Statistically speaking, I know that you are smart and educated people. You love your children as much as I love mine. You want what’s best for them. You are not and do not want to be confused with the unhinged anti-vax bloggers who believe vaccines are part of a government conspiracy to intentionally injure children. You probably aren’t personally responsible for the sharp uptick of online anti-vaccine posts on Twitter, statements that are as far removed from reality as their wealthy authors are from the median income. A new study even suggests that these posts are coming from only very localized areas in California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. You’re normal and rational enough to know that while there is formaldehyde in some vaccines, it’s also present in pears, which your children have probably enjoyed in both puréed and solid forms. And you are not, no matter what I say, going to vaccinate your son or daughter just because I think you should. Communicating effectively is something doctors are meant to do well, so it’s tempting for me to just try harder to convince you that vaccinations are not harmful. After all, the diseases that standard childhood immunizations protect against — pertussis, pneumococcus, meningococcus, etc. — aren’t in the same league as, say, the common cold. These are the sorts of bugs that kill. Paradoxically, though, it may be better if I don’t say anything at all. Research suggests that if you express concern about the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and I respond by teaching you about measles infections and their dangerous complications (pneumonia, encephalitis, death), you walk out of that room more convinced that MMR causes autism (it doesn’t) than you were when you went in. I never said the word autism. Neither did you. But I pushed back against your hesitation to vaccinate with information that sounded scary, and so you doubled down. I understand. In the face of uncertainty, doing something can often feel more frightening than doing nothing. Saying yes to a vaccine may feel weightier than saying no. Considering all this, one might conclude that we have no common ground at all, but there is one very important thing that we do agree on: we both want your children to be healthy. If you choose not to immunize your family, I can’t force you to. But that means to minimize your child’s risk of exposure to a potentially life-threatening infection, it is absolutely necessary that the children your own kids come into contact with (at school, on the playground, in the grocery store) be vaccinated themselves. The antibodies in those vaccinated children’s immune systems are what’s keeping your own family safe. You know this. You understand that these are real and lethal illnesses. Roald Dahl was not lying when he described how his daughter Olivia, seemingly on the mend from measles, suddenly had trouble moving her hands and told him she felt “all sleepy.” Hours later, she was dead. Medicine has progressed in leaps and bounds since Olivia died in 1962, but even so, treatment for measles remains supportive — there are no medicines that can cure the virus itself, and the more severe cases will still result in death. I know that you would never knowingly put your child at risk. You must believe it’s safe for your children to skip their vaccines because, being surrounded by other vaccinated individuals, it’s incredibly unlikely that being unvaccinated will kill them. But that math changes when someone online convinces a new mom — who has never watched an infant turn blue from pertussis — that vaccines aren’t worth the risk. That math changes when a celebrity — who has never seen a healthy toddler be placed on life support, only to die anyway from pneumococcus — goes on television and tells parents that vaccines will harm their children. It changes when candidates for public office — who have never watched a college-football quarterback seize and be killed by meningitis — waffle and cave to public opinion instead of asserting that the best evidence available says that vaccines are incredibly safe. The fact that vaccine refusal has turned into a movement is what makes it dangerous. But it’s not my children who are most in jeopardy. It’s yours. Do what you believe is best for your family, but if that means not vaccinating, I’m imploring you to keep it to yourself. Otherwise, you are putting your children at increased risk. Steer clear of private schools where immunization rates are so low that infections would spread right through the entire community like wildfire. Don’t click on articles by anti-vax conspiracy theorists just so you can feel validated in your worldview. If someone tells you they’re an expert on vaccination because they Googled it, it’s all right to laugh. And when conversations at the office or the park turn to whether or not to immunize, just say that you feel lucky to live in an age when death from childhood infections is at an all-time low. Because of course you do. Who doesn’t? My children don’t enjoy getting jabbed, but they get their shots with a normal degree of grumbling. Afterward, when their Band-Aids are in place and I have dried their tears, I remind them of how important it is to keep their friends and those around them safe and that doing their part should make them proud. I hope enough people in your community feel the same as I do and will create a protective bubble around your own children, even if you’re not willing to do so for theirs. Appreciate that gift for what it is. Don’t poke the bubble, or it might pop. Instead, consider saying thank you. Sincerely, Meghan MacLean Weir, MD Meghan MacLean Weir is a pediatrician and the author of Between Expectations: Lessons From a Pediatric Residency and the upcoming novel The Book of Essie. | | | | |  Illustration by Barbara Ott | The woman on the message said her name was Barb. She explained that her friend Raissa had died and — Barb knew how crazy this all sounded — she’d found my name on Raissa’s life-insurance policy. I assumed it was a scam. I called her back, anyway. How could I not? My father’s family is small and disconnected. Whoever had managed to survive the gulags during WWII had come to America, but they existed like distant satellites, wholly unconnected to one another. I had never even met my uncle — my father’s only sibling — or any of my first cousins. Dad wasn’t a particularly sentimental type. Being born in Ukraine in the 1930s will do that to you, I guess. I do not know if Raissa was my father’s first or second cousin. I simply referred to her as my aunt, though I’d met her exactly once when I was a toddler. She and my mother kept in touch sporadically over the years, long after my parents divorced, and I’d occasionally be pulled into a phone call with a woman who would address me as “my hon” in a Russian accent tinged with a Midwestern twang. I wrote to her throughout elementary school and high school, collecting her return letters in a box. When I was seventeen, she sent me a bracelet that had belonged to her as a teenager, adorned with dangling charms commemorating her sweet sixteen and graduation. “It’s a family heirloom,” Raissa explained. I didn’t understand why she was giving something so personal to me or how something so insular could be an heirloom. It would take me years to finally figure it out. Sometime when I was in college, Raissa disappeared out of the periphery of my life. The letters my mother and I wrote to her came back undeliverable; the phone number we had for her was disconnected. It was just before the birth of social media, and finding someone was harder then. My mother and I called the police station closest to her last address, but she wasn’t technically a missing person. Raissa had our information. I told myself that if she wanted to reach out, she would. *** After I got the voicemail, I called Barb back, and we awkwardly explained the roles we had in Raissa’s life. I told her about my father, who had just died a few months earlier. She told me how she and Raissa had become friends through work, and she told me about my aunt’s life for the past few years. Around the time I’d lost touch with Raissa, she’d had a series of strokes (I vaguely remembered one letter where her penmanship was rough and crooked — she had taught herself to write with her left hand). Barb told me she moved around, jumping from the home of one friend to another's as her health declined. “Why didn’t she call us?” I asked Barb. She didn’t have an answer. I’ve had the same phone number for twenty years; Barb had looked it up in Raissa’s address book shortly after she’d found the life-insurance policy. She told me dozens of numbers had been scratched out over the years, but my ten digits were pristine. By the time I learned of her death, Raissa had been gone for two years. I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly two decades. My last attempt to contact her had been nine years earlier — when her invitation to my wedding had come back undeliverable. My mother and I would occasionally do an Internet search for her name, which yielded nothing besides an old address (even today, this is still true). Over time, Mom went from musing about what happened to Raissa to saying, quietly, “I think she’s dead.” I dismissed this idea until a few years ago, when I realized the probability of it and told her that she was likely right. After that, I stopped doing Internet searches. Mom still did. The storied cliché is that when a distant relative dies and leaves us an inheritance, it is a blessing. We get to benefit from someone’s largesse without having to feel the grief of loss. But the reality is that the grief is still there. It is not the clear anguish of having lost someone close to us but the murky, strange pain of losing someone we barely knew and all the potential our relationship held. I thought that I would one day visit my aunt and she’d tell me that I reminded her of my paternal grandmother, whom I had never known. I’d hear stories of my father when he was young (had she even known my father when he was young? Was he ever young?). I imagined a bond composed of heart-to-hearts that would never happen and strengthened by all the things I hadn’t known we had in common. The most perfect relationships are the ones that never come to be. Over the years, my mother would tell me that I reminded her of Raissa. “You know,” she would say, nonjudgmentally, “she never had children either.” In the wake of her death, finding myself her only heir, I think of this often. When I imagine her final years, I am sad not just because I wasn’t there but also because I wonder if I’m seeing a prophecy of my own end. *** A short time later, I receive a check from her insurance company. The life of a writer isn’t particularly lucrative, so for me, the amount is substantial — roughly 20 percent of my annual income. I email Barb, gently asking if there were any associated costs with my aunt’s death that had been unaccounted for, or …? I try to leave it open-ended, in case Barb needs anything. She tells me that there are none. My aunt had had enough in savings to cover everything. I don’t know if I can keep money from a woman I barely knew, but selfishly, I want to hold on to it. It’s the last thing I have of her. Also, hello? It’s money. For now, it sits in my bank account, where it holds infinite potential. I could take my mother to Lake Michigan, where Raissa’s ashes were scattered. Or go to New York and finally meet my father’s brother. Or put it in my nephew’s college fund. I can’t say which of these choices Raissa would prefer. I never knew her well enough to figure that out. I try not to dwell on the relationship that never was. Instead, I focus on what is real. That my aunt worried about my future and my well-being. That for me, our relationship held potential, but for her, what we had was enough. After her death, I dig up the charm bracelet and put it on. Someone compliments me on it, and I thank them. “It’s a family heirloom,” I say. Geraldine DeRuiter is the founder of the award-winning Everywhereist blog and author of All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, a memoir. @everywhereist | | | | |  Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador Photo by Danielle Villasana | Her body reads violence, a pale script of wide, jagged scars that run across her stomach, chest, and back, punctuated only by the circular scars left by bullet wounds. Living openly as an HIV-positive trans woman, Karla Avelar, 39, has survived three assassination attempts and five years in a men’s prison. Her mere existence challenges societal norms in her conservative birth country of El Salvador. That’s why she founded the NGO Comcavis Trans Association in San Salvador in 2008. Avelar, who was born in Chalatenango, in northwest El Salvador, is tall with unruly hair. She is soft-spoken and has a wide, easy smile, but her presence is commanding. Through pure willpower and self-education, Avelar, who never finished elementary school, has learned how to navigate the world of human rights on her own. Avelar and her staff of seven, which includes trans women and men, as well as several volunteers, provide support to the LGBTI community, defending and protecting their rights when no one else will. According to Avelar, trans women migrate from El Salvador to the United States in great numbers because they have no guarantee of basic human rights in their home country, including access to education and health care. Although the United States offers more opportunities for the trans population, Avelar has become increasingly worried about President Trump’s statements and policies regarding the LGBTI community. “The US is taking drastic actions, and they are resulting in a worsening human-rights situation,” she says. “It not only affects one country — it affects the whole world, because other countries could copy his actions.” *** I spent three weeks with Avelar in San Salvador last August getting to know her work and the trans women whom she helps. Avelar introduces me to Nicole Rosales, 22, a trans woman and sex worker who has a cascade of waist-length curly brown hair with golden highlights. Rosales dreamed of an education, but because of discrimination, she never had that opportunity. “At fifteen, I decided to become a transgender woman. There are no options for work aside from being a prostitute,” she explains. “I have been beaten, raped, assaulted. It’s not easy. Clients tell you, ‘You are worth $5!’ They say that trans people have HIV — that we are worthless. But there are many trans people who have shown society what we are worth.” When I ask Rosales what her aspirations would be if she could do anything, she says, “Ever since I was little, I wanted to be a lawyer.” Seeking better opportunities, Rosales had attempted to migrate to the United States earlier in the year, but before reaching Mexico, she turned back, in fear of being kidnapped and forced into prostitution by a gang.  Trans activist Karla Avelar, left, talks with Sadira Saldaña, right, in a park in San Salvador. Photo by Danielle Villasana |
Marfil Estrella Pérez Mendoza, 25, a trans woman and sex worker, came to Comcavis Trans to get help preparing the necessary documents to request asylum in the United States. She had survived an assassination attempt by a man with an ice pick who had attacked her late one night while she was walking home from work. Trans women in El Salvador are particularly vulnerable to violence and have been targeted by both death squads and gangs since the civil war in the 1980s. Marfil Estrella, whose name translates to Ivory Star, felt like she had to leave the country in order to stay alive. Describing her experience as a trans woman, she says, “It is an odyssey. People see a transgender person, and they start looking at you like an alien — especially if you don’t look like a woman and you have more masculine features.” Pérez Mendoza fled El Salvador in August. I accompanied her via bus from San Salvador to Tapachula, Mexico, and witnessed firsthand the level of unwanted attention that Pérez Mendoza experienced on her journey. She continued to do sex work as she traveled through Guatemala and Mexico to pay for her transportation to Tijuana. In November, she crossed the border from Tijuana into the United States and requested asylum. She was immediately sent to a detention center for men, a US detention policy that often creates violence for trans women. If her request is granted, she hopes to enroll in high school. Avelar and I also met with Alejandra Jiménez, 31, a trans woman with the lithe body and graceful movements of a ballet dancer. She had migrated from El Salvador to Italy when she was nineteen. Jiménez returned to El Salvador this past summer to challenge the law that prohibits trans women and men from changing their names on legal documents. “I left the country when I was nineteen years old because I understood that in this country, I would not have the security and tranquility to be able to express my identity in the deepest sense,” she tells me. “A person close to me had been murdered because she was a transvestite. I was very afraid, and with the support of my family, I emigrated.” For Jiménez and other trans women, the discrepancy between their appearance and the names on their official documents often results in employment discrimination and harassment. “Not being able to change names limits trans people,” explains Avelar. “Unfortunately, in El Salvador, women and men are defined by their genitals.” Gabriel Escobar, 21, a trans man who volunteers at Comcavis Trans, is aware of the difference between his trans experience and that of trans women. Escobar has a slight frame and a calm manner and recognizes that, physically, he can pass as a man. He says that he has experienced no violence and little discrimination and laments, “I wish life were easier for trans women. People congratulate trans men when they transition, but they kill trans women.” Avelar, who mentors Escobar and her younger colleagues, continues to receive death threats and recently had to move homes for her safety. She is aware that one day she might have to flee El Salvador, just as so many trans women before her have done. “This is a country that requires committed people,” she argues, “people that will fight to achieve equality. If we don’t achieve that, at least we are making the effort so that future generations can live in a just country.” Alice Driver is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City, and she is currently covering migration in Central America for Longreads. | | | | |  Illustration by Naï Zakharia | The birth of my second daughter, Coraline, was a marvel of planning and community. I’m a single mother, so it wasn’t a matter of simply waking my partner to drive us to the birth center. I needed two people, one for me and one for my oldest daughter, to make sure we were physically and emotionally cared for. Or, at the very least, to get us where we needed to go. Hours after my due date, I called two friends from the darkness of my room. They arrived immediately, sitting with me while I bounced on a yoga ball, contemplating if this was the real thing. In the twenty-minute drive that morning, a bit before 5 a.m., my water broke in the seat of my friend’s truck. My six-year-old, Mia, in fuzzy pajama pants and a hooded sweatshirt, arrived minutes behind us. Coraline, at nearly nine pounds, came into the world fast, with only a single, near-barbaric push. The midwife told me if she’d been any smaller, I would have had her in the truck on the way there. My three best friends are single mothers, or have spent the majority of their time mothering alone. We have a primal connection that supported mothers just don’t understand. But I am dependent on my friends for another reason. Over the last decade of single mothering, I hadn’t had a supportive partner until this year. I’d chosen to have Coraline knowing I would have no help from her birth father. I chose to have her at the beginning of my senior year of college, not knowing what my job options would be after graduation. I chose to have her during a battle for adequate child support for Mia. I chose to have her when I still depended on food stamps and free school lunches to feed my family. My parents were barely involved in the beginning of Mia’s life, and I haven’t spoken to them in more than five years. I guess I stopped trying to force the relationship with their granddaughter. They haven’t met their second. Without family at the ready to help with child care, I’ve had to turn to my friends, neighbors, and sometimes even strangers to help get me out of a bind. A home with a single mother and children is the second-most-common family type in the nation — we make up 23 percent of all households. And yet we receive no broader societal support, which might be why the poverty rate for single-mother-led families was over 36 percent in 2015. Legislators and voters have expected single mothers to raise our children at a major disadvantage — without partners to provide physical, emotional, and financial support — while being told to pull up our bootstraps and work harder. Already doing the job of two people, we watch, helpless, as people fight to decrease the limited resources made available to us through safety-net programs to help with the conundrum of wages that are too low matched with housing costs that are too high. Add food and day care, with an older car that needs even a minor repair, and it’s a fight for survival. On top of that, there is the social stigma of single parenthood. They assume we have babies for a bigger welfare check. I brought my older daughter into this aggression and could only imagine what they’d think if somehow knew I’d had an abortion between those two pregnancies. When I announced my second pregnancy on my Facebook page, I got hate-filled messages that asked me what the hell I was thinking. One woman told me to “knock off the Jerry Springer shit and get an abortion.” I also internalized conservative rhetoric like holding an aspirin in between my knees for birth control, finding new ways to slut-shame myself. And conservatives are trying to codify that shaming rhetoric into law. Bills requiring unmarried women to name a father on a birth certificate as a prerequisite for state assistance have been drafted, named, and presented. Former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce went so far as to suggest that Medicaid recipients — a big chunk of whom are single mothers – should be forced to take birth control or be sterilized. This goes beyond controlling women’s right to choose, rights to birth control, and access to safety networks for their children in the absence of a supportive partner, affordable housing, or decent wages. This is telling millions of Americans they don’t deserve to be human. Among the unsung horrors of the single-mother shaming practiced by right wingers like Rick Santorum (who called out single mothers for “breeding criminals”): It erodes your ability to love yourself. I didn’t feel proud of or empowered by my herculean achievements, like when I held the baby in one arm while I stirred milk into powdered cheese for Mia’s dinner. It was her seventh birthday in just a few days. Her presents had been donated by the YWCA and a friend. I had barely had enough money to get a few cupcakes for her. Looking back on my decision to have a baby alone the first time around, I call it masochistic. I couldn’t take care of myself. I lamely wrote a post on Facebook, asking if people might be able to bring dinner. A friend came by almost immediately with a whole roasted chicken and a container of cooked vegetables. I ate it with my fingers, dripping on the baby sucking at my nipples that had begun to crack. When my friend’s son asked if he could have some chicken, I nearly growled. It never occurred to me to ask for help otherwise. I didn’t think I deserved it. In some kind of way, my stubbornness decided that I’d made the bed I had to lie in. I’d chosen to do this on my own, and on my own was how it’d go. People like Russell Pearce blame people like me for our dire straits, but they are systemic more than they are some weakness of our will. Another friend had a baby when Coraline was six months old. I sat with her one afternoon, with her house cleaner and mother-in-law fluttering in and out, surrounded by baby items she’d have to return. She complained about things that most first-time mothers do. Her husband had to go back to work immediately. She was up all night nursing. Diaper changes at midnight were a drag. All of these completely normal things that I’d experienced alone, with the added stress of wondering if I’d have to sell our vehicle to pay rent. In that moment, I realized what I’d accomplished in the face of virulent backlash, like the assumption that I am only respected as a mother if there’s a doting father involved. I know I will one day fully love the person who made it through so many years with nothing but herself to depend on. I haven’t gotten there yet — maybe American messaging won’t let me. But for now, I’m overjoyed by the wonderful girls I have made: They are marvels of intelligence, empathy, and humor. Mia recently completed testing for her school’s gifted program and goes through a book a week. Coraline makes friends with anyone she passes. They are, without a doubt, far from the criminals conservatives assume rise from mothers like me. This piece was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Stephanie Land is a social- and economic-justice writer and the author of MAID, forthcoming through Hachette Books. | | | | | | | | |
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