by: Sam Rivas, Contributor & Guest Author
De-canon contemplates the complexities of things we might think about on Mother’s Day, highlighting a few books by women writers of color on motherhood, mothering, mothers, and inheritance. Below are my favorite glimpses of The Breaks by Julietta Singh, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy, and Bring Down the Little Birds by Carmen Giménez Smith.
Being a daughter to a mother who is 843 miles away, has reminded me of my newborn self—calling every hour and crying to be fed words of reassurance. I am pregnant for the first time and each of these books feels like a Bible designed to understand mothers. They are gems of wisdom holding space in a world that typically focuses on the ugly of motherhood.
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"Mothering at the end of the world is an infinite toggle between wanting to make you feel safe and needing you to know that the earth and its inhabitants are facing a catastrophic crisis."— The Breaks, Julietta Singh
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"…[T]he size of a mother’s brain changes during pregnancy and the early stages of motherhood… Because of my changing brain, I understand things differently… I am, I believe now, more prepared to be accepting of the humanity in all of us. The biggest difference between the smiting God of the Old Testament and the forgiving God of the New, I’d argue, is that the New Testament God went and had a baby." —- Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, Camille T. Dungy
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“Mother is heavy matter, lead. Weighed down with my son in my arms, groceries, a diaper bag, the baby inside me. I am bound to this earth by downward momentum.” —Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen Giménez Smith
