Introducing...Werking Mom

A monthly column about motherhood, mental health and more

Welcome to Werking Mom, my new monthly column for paid subscribers! This space will explore the reality of juggling personal well-being, professional pursuits and raising a tiny human in today’s frantic world. Issues will be delivered every fourth Sunday of the month. Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy this month’s column!

---

Black Moms, White Moms…All Moms?

Earlier this month, three other Black moms and I braved the Chicago cold to convene for brunch. We’d had this date on the calendar for a few weeks and, as luck would have it, our outing coincided with the first cold snap of the year. And by cold, I mean below-freezing temps. As in, the actual temperature was -8 and, with the wind chill, it felt like -31. Nevertheless, we persisted. After all, it’s not every day four working moms are healthy enough themselves (and their kids are healthy enough!!) to leave the house on a Sunday afternoon. Also, we needed this.

In a city that is 61% white, we needed a space created for us and by us. No such space existed (to our knowledge…or, at least, not for toddler moms), so we created it, as Black women are wont to do. 

While sitting there sipping our mimosas, I couldn’t help but reflect on two things:

1. An essay I’d written for Kindred (Parent.com’s Black vertical) last fall about a white-only mom and tot group that was never published

2. The “twice as hard, half as much” Black girl mantra seems to be even more necessary as we become moms

I was in a coffee shop last September scrolling Twitter as I do when I saw a tweet with a sign advertising a whites-only mom and tots space at a bus stop in Port Coquitlam, a city in Canada’s British Columbia that is 57% European, according to the 2021 Census of Population.  The black-and-white sign asks passerby “Are you looking for somewhere your children can play with others that look like them? Are they tired of being a minority in their school or daycare?”

I almost laughed when I saw it because it was like finally these parents have gotten a taste of their own medicine and they didn’t like it. For every Black mom who is looking for, craving and building diverse spaces for her children, there’s a white mom who feels threatened by those same spaces.