“How do we define our own me-ness? Is it always drawn outside the lines of others? Measuring myself up against all the alleged ‘good mom tropes’ strolling through the neighborhood obviously wasn’t working . . . Girl, if anyone needed an Rx for a chill pill, it was me. Instead of running myself ragged about what kind of mother I was, why not just admit there was no blueprint? I was becoming whatever mother, whatever person, I was supposed to be. Your authentic self doesn’t arrive via stork, you have to search it out yourself.”
I loved The Mamas. Full stop. It’s funny, it’s vulnerable-as-hell, it’s validating, and it’s like all good books concerning motherhood in that it invites the reader to engage in self-reflection; it encourages the reader to view her own mothering journey from a perspective she might not yet have considered.
Not only does Helena, a pop culture reporter for the Washington Post, tackle the perennially fascinating subject of maternal identity in The Mamas, she also weaves in cultural criticism about race, class, and how, in the same neighborhood playground, moms can exist as the “us” on Saturday and the “them” on Sunday - depending on context. PLUS Helena includes the interrogation of mom group dynamics I have wanted and needed ever since joining my first prenatal yoga class over a decade ago for the explicit purpose of finding and making “mom friends.” If you’ve ever had thoughts or feelings about mom groups (and your position within them), The Mamas is required reading!
The Mamas is a sharply funny, beautifully honest reflection of how we become ourselves as mothers and how the mothers we mother alongside inform that process of becoming.
Thank you Helena, for both the book, and for this conversation!
Helena! You write so beautifully about identity, specifically about the questions of identity evoked by motherhood. You also write about how finding your “people” as a mom really informs the maternal identity shift. At one point, you write, “Andrea O'Reilly [a motherhood scholar] told me that finding your ‘kind’ is a difficult task in the mom jungle, mainly because of separations in race and class but also— and this is really important—because being a mom isn’t a fixed identity.”
I think this is so relatable to so many people, but the sentiment still feels new and fresh. Like, the idea that we don’t all simply become the same person as soon as we become parents feels revelatory in a way that it shouldn’t, you know?
I think that quote gets at the heart of book, which is about identity and belonging and “authenticity,” which I put in quotes because what does “authenticity” really mean? It took me so long to understand that it doesn't mean anything. It means what you want it to mean. And I think it does feel fresh to point out that maternal identity is not a one-size-fits-all identity, and we have to keep talking about it, because there's still one predominant maternal image for every generation. Whether it's, you know, the 1950s housewife, right, or like Claire Huxtable or Michelle Obama. There's always a prototype.
And too often the default good mother prototype is a white woman. Whether it's what we see in real life, or whether it’s celebrities, or cultural conversations about moms “bouncing” back” or whatever. It’s working moms on TV and in film, or what we see on Instagram, right? Even the moms on Instagram who are like, this is so hard and here’s this big mess. They’re still showing us a mess in a perfect house filled with clean, perfect children.
My point is that there’s a lot of mom content and maternal stories out there showing us very clearly that motherhood is more than what we might have assumed and that there is no true default maternal experience. And yet, we're still buying into this default.
I’ve been in so many different mom groups at this point. You know, with my oldest daughter, I joined a mom group with neighborhood moms, and we’d do the baby yoga, the walks, the classes. And that’s totally me. I love that stuff. But because it didn't look like what I look like, you know, it looked different from me, I felt like, Oh wait, is this what Black moms are doing? Is it not?
And then there’s Mocha Moms, which has been around in D.C. for around 25 years. And then there’s District Motherhood, which is a support network of Black moms. But even with that group, I’ll suggest friends join or whatever, telling them, like, Oh, go join District Motherhood! They have their own stroller strides, their own boobs in the park, they have all the stuff. And my friends will be like, Oh no, that's not me, those girls are too put together, I just couldn't. And I'm like, No, you can.
Ultimately we all feel so othered in so many different ways as new moms because it’s a completely new identity. But at the same time, the person you were before motherhood doesn’t need to be subsumed. Like, I thought I was gonna be the super fun mom, you know? But I’m not! I’m so strict and am the “just get your shoes on!” mom. But my kids don’t care! They’re thriving without me having to take on a Donna Reed or Claire Huxtable version of motherhood.
Like so much media, Instagram momfluencer culture is still stubbornly white. You know, the momfluencers who make the most money are still predominantly white, and especially post 2016, there’s been a real proliferation of maternal imagery in momfluencer culture which glorifies the evangelical white mother growing her own veggies and homeschooling her gingham-clad kids. And I’m wondering what you think about the pervasiveness of the Ideal white mom on Instagram? How is it seeping into the broader culture?
Absolutely. It’s dangerous. Because even if you are the type of mother like me, who knows full well that that type of motherhood is not sustainable, that it’s ridiculous, that it’s not representative of real life, you still see it and in the back of your mind, might think, Am I supposed to be building a kitchen garden in my backyard? I’m always like, Why don’t we have a kitchen garden? And it’s because I don’t want to fucking garden! That’s why! But the fact that this maternal ideal exists and is being constantly shoved down our throats gets us stuck in a mindset that we’re never doing enough and never doing it right. As if there is any right way to do motherhood.
This type of Instagram ideal also makes it so hard to define motherhood for yourself. There’s so much content informing what a good mother is supposed to do and what she’s supposed to look like. Am I reading enough of the right books? Am I cooking enough homemade meals? Am I making enough cute bento box lunches? And do those cute bento box lunches define me as a good mother? No, they don’t. But it takes a lot of self-reflection to get to that truth.
For me, the joy of writing this book came from being able to do so much self-reflection about the various seasons of motherhood. I mean, I’m still relatively new to motherhood – my oldest is only five - and the mother I am now might be completely different from the mother I am to preteens or teenagers, right? I just think that as my kids grow, I’ll also continue to grow as a mother.
I think you're so right that when we're thinking about motherhood, we imagine ourselves as mothers based on whatever prototypes we've consumed, but the identity that we're imagining has everything to do with us and nothing to do with the actual labor of mothering. Even the bento box lunches, you could easily argue that’s more for us than it is for our kids, right? I'm continuously learning and unlearning that mothering is what we do for our families and our children and like, the identity of motherhood is something that is often foisted upon us by external forces.
Yeah, absolutely. When I first started writing this book, some of my friends were like, Oh great, because I need advice. And I was like, I have no advice to give. That’s not what this book is about. This book is about me existing as Helena versus what I’m doing with, for, or to my kids. It’s about me existing in this new world, emerging from this chrysalis to be like, Ok, now I am a mother. Hello, world!
And I also think a lot about how we judge what “good mothering” is. Like, if a mother has her nanny pick up the kids from school, is she somehow less of a good mother? Of course not. Like, what does that have to do with anything? Or if a mom has help with housecleaning, is she also somehow not as good of a mother?
When I think about when I feel most myself as a mom, it’s when I’m walking the girls home from school. Because I’m not stressed about any domestic chores, I’m not worrying about getting anywhere on time. I feel more like a mother in those 45 minutes than I ever do. It’s when we're just talking, the girls are doing all kinds of silly stuff, they’re listening to me, I’m listening to them. It’s just a really enjoyable time for me. Versus, like, trying to get them in the bath, and get them into their pajamas, and read them books so they can sleep and I can finally have a glass of wine and relax, right?
And I think this really differs from generation to generation. I’m 42, and for my grandparents, I think the work of mothering was a huge part of presenting as a good parent. And for Black people, it’s also very different. And that’s the thing, we assume the default maternal experience is informed by white identity, but for Black parents, it’s obviously not. I mean, because the default parent is assumed to be white, Black parents in America get so worried about, like, our kids not looking ashy, right? Or having our kids’ clothes pressed and looking good, because then it means I’m doing this thing of motheringright. But of course, we’re doing these things for totally oppressive reasons.
So, a Black mother will have her kids showing up to school in their Sunday best, right, while a rich white mother might not care if her kids show up to school in dirty, wrinkled clothes. That rich white mother can assume people won’t make judgements based on her kids looking messy. But we, as Black parents, can’t make that same assumption.
And that becomes part of your mothering: making sure your kids’ hair is always neat, making sure your kids are always polite, all of these things that parents of color specifically worry a lot more about than white parents because we know we’ll always be judged on these external appearances. We feel pressure to do this invisible labor on top of all the other types of labor white parents have to do: you know, showing up at PTO meetings, volunteering for events, keeping up with homework, etc.
In Pursuit of Clean Countertops is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I want to talk about the invisible labor and the additional mental load of Black parenting. You write in the book, “Forget partying like a white girl, what I really wanted, deep down in the sunken place, was to parent like one.” This passage appears in the section of the book where you really lay bare what is entailed of Black motherhood. Not only the additional labor you just mentioned, but also the exhaustion you felt within one of your (predominantly white) mom groups. Can you talk a bit more about the additional labor Black moms carry and also about the exhaustion of being “the only one” (in this case, the the only Black mom in a mom group)?
As research for the book, I interviewed a ton of academics, and one sociologist specifically had spoken to a ton of white and Black parents, and she realized the Black parents were doing a lot more than the white parents, right? She didn’t know how to categorize the type of work they were doing at first, but it was clearly a separate type of work these Black parents were doing, and unique to Black parents.
A lot of Black parents today grew up in white spaces, because when our parents were raising us, white spaces were assumed to be better, right? Our parents had grown up in segregated spaces, so they sent us to fancy private schools thinking it would help us move up the socioeconomic ladder, but they weren’t necessarily thinking about how growing up in predominantly white spaces would impact their kids’ mental health.
So now, those of us who grew up in these white spaces are thinking, Maybe we want something different for our kids. So we’re helicoptering and bulldozing and tiger-mothering as a way of course-correcting. It’s a response to the trauma many of us experienced during our childhoods in white institutions, and the trauma we continue to experience in white workplaces. The trauma of being “the only one.”
Here's a story that sort of illustrates the additional labor of protecting my kid from being “the only one.” Ok, so I want to sign my girls up for a dance class. But it has to be a Black dance class. And not only does it have to Black, and have a Black teacher, but it can’t be a Black dance class that subscribes to white European ideals (telling girls to tuck their butts in and that sort of thing). It’s gotta be a Black, Black-affirming dance class. And thankfully, I live in Washington D.C. - I live in Chocolate City. So yeah, I have to do a ton of work to find the right dance class, but not as much work as the Black mom living in rural Kansas or whatever has to do, right? There are some Black parents willing to do this type of work but are unable to give their children affirming experiences due to geographical or financial hurdles.
So I’m doing all this extra work to ensure my kids aren’t subjected to the microaggressions and blatant racism I experienced as a kid. I know it’s coming eventually, but I don’t want it for my three-year-old. I don’t want it for my five-year-old.
So yeah, it’s a lot of work. It’s PhD level research and a mess of logistics to find a dance class for our girls. There ended up being three classes to choose from but we were also trying to coordinate with some of our Black friends, because we knew that if they were all together, then that class would be guaranteed to be at least half Black, right? And these kids are different ages, so we had to find a class that took the right age range, and we all live in different neighborhoods, and we needed to find a class that was close enough to all of us, and we needed to find a class that worked with our various school schedules.
We finally found a class.It started last Saturday and it’s perfect. Being able to see all these little Black kids in their blue and pink leotards and their beautiful Afro puffs is such a joy. And these kids, they have no clue the work that went into this moment! And I want to be clear that though this work is exhausting, it allows my kid to be carefree in this space. And not only that, but I can feel better knowing that in this one place at this one time, I don’t have to worry about racism. It’s such a release, it’s such joy.
I can’t protect my kids from racism forever, but I do this type of work to try and instill in them the confidence that they belong everywhere. And that’s really hard to do in America.
This is reminding me of the story you tell in the book about a Black friend who went out of her way to ensure her kids were in primarily Black spaces, but despite doing a TON of additional labor to make this possible, her kid still encountered a white kid who told her Black people were bad (or something equally awful). You make the point that Black parents can do everything in their power to protect their kids from racism, but ultimately it’s up to white parents, because you can find all the beautiful Black dance classes in the world, but it just takes one white kid to say something racist and harmful.
Right, and we know these things will happen, and knowing these things will happen informs a lot of parenting choices. I certainly can’t speak for all Black parents, but it’s important to my husband and me that we raise Black children with Black identities rooted in Black culture as we have experienced Black culture. And I don't think white parents realize that they're raising white children, right? And so when their kid says some crazy thing to a Black child, they’re like Oh, where did it come from? And it’s like, It came from you.You are showing them everything; not just in your words, but in your deeds, in you not having any friends of color, in you not having a diverse friend group. You are putting them in spaces that are homogenous.
So despite the books you might own, despite your yard sign, despite what you say about race, white kids are getting the message loud and clear that white is the assumed norm.
I tell this story in the book about this white friend of mine, who I’m not holding up as like, this shining example of what you should be doing, or giving her any gold stars or whatever, but I notice a real difference between how she raises her kid and how other white parents raise their kids. She makes sure to include parents and children of color, she initiates invites, she makes sure her kid’s extracurriculars are diverse, and not just Black and white, but diverse in all sorts of ways. And I think a lot of parents just don’t think these types of things are important until all of a sudden their kid says or does something racist. And it’s just a reflection of what those parents have exposed their kids to, but they still feel surprised by it. So I do hope that white parents who read the book will understand that Black parents have been doing the work. We’re out here doing all this additional labor and carrying all this additional anxiety, and white parents need to do some of the work too if things are really going to change. If we want to move forward instead of backwards.
When you say you identify as a Black parent raising Black children in Black culture, I think this self-awareness is so important. Because I think many white parents don't often recognize that when we’re raising white kids in predominantly white spaces, we are setting up whiteness as the norm and we are raising kids in white cultures. So I think it's really up to white parents to recognize white culture as a unique culture, not as The Culture. Not as the default, not as the norm.
Yeah. It is a thing that’s been created and something we’ve all been seeped in for centuries in this country. And I think white people are like, if I’m a super progressive liberal, I’m not a part of white culture. White culture is like, cowboys, and like, Marjorie Taylor Greene. And, that's not me. And it's like, wellllll. You don't have to be that extreme to be sending those same white-as-norm messages to kids.
And just because you live next door to someone who's Black, have you ever talked to them? Have you ever invited them into your home? And again, we need to actively recognize these things, actively see them. For parents of color, race is always part of parenting. We always have to do this extra work that no one wants to do. Nobody wants to. But it’s work I take seriously and it’s work I have to do. And this extra labor should be on all of us, not just Black parents.
I mean, there are mom groups that have imploded under the weight of the question of race. After the murder of George Floyd, I’d be in mom groups where race would come up, and white parents would be like, Oh that’s not what we’re here for. This group isn’t about race. It’s about diaper rash advice or whatever. But parenting is always about race, right? Anti-racism should be part of your job as a parent. Black parents have always had to worry about it. And when confronted with an uncomfortable question of race, more often than not, white parents just back out. And that’s why Black parents don’t trust white parents. Because they back out. And they have the option to back out.
Yeah, it’s really misguided to believe in the fallacy of apolitical parenting. Like, apolitical parenting does not exist. You also write about Black friends opting out of white mom groups in the book, because of this very example you just mentioned. Like, of course Black moms are opting out. Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to that type of thing?
Exactly. It’s just like, No thank you.
You have an incredible chapter about the intersection of race and class in your D.C. neighborhood of Bloomingdale. It’s about how racism was explicitly codified in real estate law, it’s about gentrification, and it provides a clear example of how systemic racism works. I’m wondering about the power of storytelling when it comes to distinguishing between the concept of racism as an individual moral failing versus racism as a widespread systemic issue.
I think this is so relevant especially when we’re having fucking debates about teaching critical race theory in schools. I mean, history is so white-washed, and the Bloomingdale chapter struck me as a an example of storytelling as a way to disrupt oppressive systems of power.
I wanted to talk about gentrification because when it comes to this idea of identity, authenticity, and being, all of those things are braided up together within the concept of gentrification. There are tens of thousands of neighborhoods like ours in the country, neighborhoods that have been gentrified so quickly.
We tend to think of gentrification happening over decades, so that, like, eventually a Black neighborhood becomes a white neighborhood, right? But in a neighborhood like ours, you have old and new together, and it’s happened really fast. You have million dollar homes next to homes like ours, homes that haven’t been updated since 1985. You have people who live here for a couple years and never invest in the community.
You have people like one of my Black friends (who went to Columbia, so that tells you where she is in life). She says she’s not a gentrifier because she explicitly moved here in the 2010s because it was still a predominantly Black neighborhood. She got her house for cheaper than she would have gotten it in most other places in the city, but it was a Black neighborhood and she moved here for that reason, right? Whereas I’m like, we’re not from here, therefore we are gentrifiers. We constantly argue about this.
And so all these different types of people are butting up against each other in really interesting ways: at the neighborhood school, at the farmer’s market, on the sidewalk. At the playground. In one of the waves of gentrification, an elementary school was under-enrolled and subsequently torn down, and a playground was built there situated between public housing and million dollar homes. In the book, I tell the story of my encounter with Band Dad [a typical white dad in a hipster-esque band t-shirt] at this playground because here we are: me and my husband, and Band Dad. And we’re all in the same class, right? We’re all upper middle class.
But when this little Black boy from public housing was cutting up one day at the playground, Band Dad immediately assumed we were his parents. This white person sees me, my husband, and this little boy as all the same, right?
And it just made me think, like, What is all this for? What do all my degrees and my fancy job at a legacy newspaper mean? What it is all for, if, at the end of the day, you can’t see me? And maybe you can’t see my child, right?
But at the same time it’s icky because I don’t want to be seen as separate from this little boy, you know? Just because we’re in different classes. I don’t subscribe to that. It was a very weird moment for me to confront.
And then in that same chapter, I tell a story about a Black friend of mine, Lynne, literally the nicest person on earth. And she sees a Black boy messing around at the park and you know, sees that he’s done, and takes him to his mother, right. And Lynne goes off and plays with her kids, and this boy’s mom comes over to me and is like, What did he do?I would expect that from them but not from one of us.
And it’s this question of, who is Them? Who is Us? And this notion of how the gatekeeper changes according to context. These are all very uncomfortable questions, right? And I don’t have the answers. But I think these questions are so important for us to better understand our values as parents. I’m constantly reevaluating my values as a parent and reimagining and reexamining them. Because if we don’t do this self-interrogation, we won’t be clear on our values, and our kids won’t be clear on our values.
Here's another story. So we’re sending our kids to the neighborhood school, and like, I’m seeing white parents at school that I’ve definitely seen before. On the sidewalk, in the coffee shop, at the playground, whatever. And they’ve never said a word to me, but now that I’m in this context, suddenly it’s ok for them to interact with me. A lot of my Black friends are feeling this, and it’s icky, you know? Because we’ve lived here. We’ve been here. But it’s only once we’re the PTO president or the class mom or whatever that we visible to you, that we have value.
It's passive versus active meaning-making, right? And it’s so bound up in the pervasiveness of white supremacy, because like, Nice White Parents are assumed to be “nice” simply because they’re white not because they’ve been actively engaged with understanding and communicating certain, specific values. Whiteness has long been confused with moral untouchability.
Exactly. And also, white parents make choices so often based on what they imagine is best for their kids and their kids only. So at our school, throughout the pandemic, parents had to drop the kids off at the front, right? They couldn’t walk their kids into the school and into the classrooms. And recently, a white parent decided this was simply wrong. And she decided it had to change and she started a petition and the whole thing. And I just wonder if she stopped to consider for even a second how this would impact all kids and all parents, not simply her child and her experience as a parent.
It’s this very white “I'm gonna call the manager” attitude, which happens when you believe something is owed to you by virtue of your identity. It’s annoying, but at the same time, sometimes I think we Black parents should assume that stance, you know?
I told you via email I wish this book had existed when I was a new mom traversing mom groups, because mom groups are so weirdly fraught, and your book really speaks to that thorniness. I mean, mom groups make you feel validated when you really, desperately need to feel validated. But they can also make you feel strangely lost and alone in unique ways. Do you have any insights about the particulars of mom groups you want to share?
I am a mom group evangelist. I really am. I’m the type of person who likes to be in concert with other people. Mom groups are funny though because they change! I mean, you will count women as your best friends and see them weekly and they’re a huge part of your life, and then your kids go to elementary school and you don’t see them for years. The changing seasons, right? I’m in the mom group season right now.
But when you enter a mom group, you have to go in as your full self. That’s the biggest thing. Like, this is who I am, take it or leave it.
And also understand you don’t have to be best friends with everyone simply because you all happen to be mothers. Say you find a mom group of 12 people, maybe 6 of them will become close friends, right? You’ll find 6 who share the same values, the same tastes, whatever. You forge meaningful bonds, you trust each other. And that’s awesome. But I also love that I’m in community with moms totally different from me. I have this one mom friend, and she’s like supermom, and that doesn’t mean I have to buy into being a supermom like her, BUT she’s definitely the friend who will always pick up my kids from school if I can’t get there in time or whatever. And there’s my mom friend who always know the best mom product, or the mom friend who knows about whatever kid-friendly event is happening on the weekend. And I love that my kids get to grow up around so many different types of mothers, you know? Especially for those of us raising kids in urban spaces without a ton of family around. I love how my mom friends make it possible for me to not feel the pressure to be every type of mom all at once.
