How I became the Hugging Mom 🧵:

Every day when I drop my son off at preschool, I give him a hug and wish him a good day. I tell him I love him while he runs off to play with his friends. Last week, after I hugged my son, something different happened. His friend Chase appeared behind him. Chase leaned right in and hugged me, too! Oh, this is what we doing? 🥰 Bet. I hugged Chase, absentmindedly rubbing the back of his head like I do my own son's. I wished him a good day and went on about mine.

Sometimes, when I drive over city expressways, I randomly wonder what erased, destroyed Black town lies beneath. The interstate systems snake across this country, in small towns and large cities, and plowed through Black community after community like clockwork. I expect at this point to read local histories and eventually see the interstate as the death of a Black neighborhood.

I was thinking about the "oldest daughter" convo ppl often have on here and how much the commonality of deputizing the eldest girl as second parent says about A) the demands of parenting multiple kids and B) the labor it has always required even in "trad 2-parent" homes. I grew up adjacent to quiverfull communities and I always noticed how they appointed the oldest kid(s), especially daughters, as stand-in parents for younger siblings.

They are HUGE on patriarchy and "dad works, mom keeps home," but if mom has 10 kids, 4 of them are deputies.

It occurred to me that when people accuse a woman/mother of “letting herself go,” they only mean her appearance, not her dreams or aspirations. Maybe it’s because society expects women to have already abandoned any dreams that do not center children by the time they actually have babies.

I wish there was a term *besides* "postpartum" we could colloquially use to discuss long-term postpartum issues.

Because when you start looking for information about postpartum issues 2-5 years after childbirth... all you read about is 0-8 weeks or a year postpartum, max. I really appreciated the "4th trimester" term for reckoning with body changes beyond the traditionally considered 6-8 week point.

Papi’s in Midtown Atlanta. I miss that place so bad 😭 And it only recently occurred to me that a Cuban spot was my favorite place to eat in the A… because I grew up in Tampa, where Cuban food is as ubiquitous as air. And as necessary 😂

All I really have to say about the gorilla glue incident:

“Black girls are trained early in beauty salons to smell smoke on themselves but to never yell ‘fire’.” I wrote it in this essay a few years ago:

trulytafakari.com/shedding-the-s…

My favorite MLK address on rioting isn’t the “language of the unheard” quote.

It’s this paragraph from “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement” (Delivered 9/1/1967): “Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections.”

We have adopted the language of “war” on the coronavirus so we can dub essential workers as “heroes” for their “sacrifice.”

Here’s why it is a convenient lie. It carries an implicit message that those “on the front lines” signed up for this, and they are bravely offering their lives and services to save us all.

A conversation my elders had on Christmas taught me something:

My grandparents’ generation is not accustomed to being open about their finances. It’s “grown folks’ business” they keep even from their adult children, which leaves them vulnerable to predatory interests. My mom was reading an article about reverse mortgages and how lenders especially target elderly black homeowners.

Because the elders kept their finances secret, their adult kids didn’t know about the bad mtgs til after the funeral. And lost the house. 🥺

“And I built a career out of self-deprecating humor. I don’t want to do that anymore. Because do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”

—Hannah Gadsby Hannah Gadsby threw that knife 18 minutes into #Nanette and I just had to pause the whole thing because WHEW. That cut me.

#SurvivingRKelly has dredged up the odd & misplaced resentment many adult men still feel toward the teen girls of their youth who “dated” grown men. 🤔 I put dated in quotes bc that’s not actual dating, but grooming and predation.

The way Americans teach racism as an individual character flaw rather than a defining characteristic of American policy makes it so much easier to gaslight POC. Many White people are ill-equipped to understand disparate impact. Unless a policy explicitly says “NO BLACK PEOPLE ALLOWED” or “WE ARE TRYING TO KILL YA’LL, BLACK PEOPLE” or “RACIST AGAINST THE N***ERS,” they will deny a racist thing is racist.

Okay. So. All I am is a woman who has given birth three different times under three different circumstances, but a few things stick out to me about the push for doulas, midwives, and home births for Black women: I do not think that hiring midwives and doulas, or avoiding hospital births, is an adequate response to the abysmal U.S. Black maternal mortality rates.

Hiring is rarely a meritocracy, period 😭 And I don’t mean that to say “the people who are in X position don’t deserve the job.”

I am saying the mechanisms by which qualified candidates wind up in the hiring manager’s office are hardly level.

Question:

When does family “grown folks’ business” become *your* business because you are an adult and now a custodian of family history, memories? I ask because my grandmother passed away in 2013 without me ever feeling “grown” enough to ask her personal questions about her life.

I regret not doing so.

Daughters are not spiritual retribution for your misogyny. Nor are they tiny spiritual guides sent to newly show you the humanity of girls and women.