On Saturday night, my friend Chrissy invited me to her house for a conversation with Julianne Smith, the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO under Biden and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights defender and the head of the Center for Civil Liberties. (If you’re thinking that this seems like an unlikely invite, I agree—but Chrissy is a TV writer and she’s been assembling screenwriters and TV writers to confer with NATO about both stories and storytelling. I was happy to be invited along for the ride.)
I got stories—stories that broke my heart. Did you know that between 20,000 and 35,000 Ukranian children have been kidnapped and sent into Russia for forced adoptions, where they’ve been stripped of all identifying factors? (Not only this, but apparently Trump asked the State Department to stop help tracking them.) Putin is attempting to rip the heart out of the Ukrainian people and strip it of its future—along with its capacity to retain its culture. The one story of hope I heard involved a Ukrainian father and his three children, who were kidnapped in Ukraine—once separated, the father was tortured and then dumped into the Russian hinterlands. The oldest of the three kids managed to communicate their location to a family member back in the Ukraine, along with the message that in five days the children would be separated—miraculously, the father pulled off a physical rescue, before he lost his children forever.
The next morning, my own kids (kind of) helped Rob make me breakfast for Mother’s Day and I thought how lucky we are to live where we live, with the rights we’ve become accustomed to expect. And then I opened Instagram and watched video montages of ICE breaking peoples’ car windows and dragging people out of their backyards, in suburbs like our own. We are watching the rise of authoritarianism and the emergence of a new axis of evil. As Matviichuk explained, the shells are Russian, the drones are Iranian, and there are now North Korean soldiers commingling with Russian troops. Here, in the West—Ukraine and Israel are the front lines of Democracy, front lines that are feeling increasingly less far away.
As many of you have noticed, there are a lot of women across the country using their bodies as human shields, surrounding people ICE is dragging away. Another friend flew to Arizona last week to sit in immigration court. As she told me, she went “to witness the rocket dockets—ICE is deporting eight kids under the age of ten tomorrow, without legal representation or anyone they know or love present. I know if I had to do something as brave as sending my babies to another land in hopes they'd live free, I'd spend every night praying that other mothers in that land would show up for my babies and take care of them.” Amen. There are women like Matviichuk on the ground in Ukraine, documenting human rights abuses and war crimes as they happen; women like Former Ambassador Julianne Smith who has devoted her life to service and quiet diplomacy. There are people protesting outside of Congress right now, using their bodies as dissent, because of the massive cuts intended for programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP. (I rely on to titrate my news for me, though at moments like this, it’s hard to titrate anything.) There are legions of people showing up around across the globe, mothering for all of us—in big ways and small ways and important ways all. Men too.
Because this is the thing about mothering—we do a great disservice when we relegate this powerful, archetypal energy of nurturance, love, and care to a gender and a biological function. Some of the finest mothers I know have never given birth to a baby; some of the finest mothers I know are not women.
The etymology of mother is one of my favorites: It’s mater, or matter. Related to material. I wish it were so tidy that the etymology of father were “spirit,” though that’s certainly the functional role that we gave our big old dad in the sky—and all the men who are apparently crafted in his image. Culturally, we relegated the “heady” spiritual, this “rational” masculine, to rule over the base material, or the “irrational” feminine. (Satya and I got into this in last week’s episode of Pulling the Thread: “Understanding Synchronicity and Consulting the I Ching”—and it’s part of the chapter on the creation of patriarchy in On Our Best Behavior.)
Collectively, we’re terrible to the feminine—look at the way we treat the planet, our “mother,” as an example of how we take what we want, often with little care, and expect it to just be there…supporting our devastating whims without complaint. Look how shocked we are when there’s any type of blow-back, or the planet claps back. Look at the way so many are content to rescind women’s rights, to treat us like baby-making vessels who shouldn’t leave the confines of the home. This energy is here, and making itself very apparent.