I am trying to figure out what mama solidarity means.
I am holding this infant whose tiny hands ball into fists and push on my breasts because they're one of the few comfortable sensations she recognizes; one of the few wonderful things she has ever experienced. I laugh and kiss her bald head, "You ain't getting nothing out of those, missy." The baby is light to hold and kind of curls around all the round parts of my body, head on boobs, tiny butt nesting in the crook of my arm, body tucked into the dip of my waist, resting on hips. Babies take all the sexy parts of people and give them whole new meanings; they take that incredible joy of discovering two bodies that fit together like puzzle pieces and level it up. I looked down at the baby whose head laid on my chest just like lovers have done and relaxed. This kid will be easy to love. Unconditional.
When my best friend told me she was pregnant I got suddenly vicious at the world around me, like I'd slipped on 3D goggles that made everything oppressive and isolating to parents and children get all up in my face. I was sitting at her kitchen table listening to her tell me about the incredible things her body was doing, the awful and annoying and the mesmerizing, magical, miraculous. She stopped getting hiccups but could feel her baby hiccuping inside her! Another friend had given her this book of horrible, funny tropes about what shit (like, literally, poopy poopy diapers) to expect when one's expecting. One of those pages had a picture of a bunch of legs in high heels and shiny skirts, and the caption said something about never going out with your friends again. It was funny, haha, but just like all the baby barf jokes in the book were funny because they were totally true, there was some really harsh reality going on there. Click, right? Like all other kinds of allyship, keeping my parenting friends in my life, activism, and geography is gonna require action and alertness on my part, listening to and adapting along with them. Learning to recognize where the world is making it easy for me to slip into it effortlessly while it throws up material and social impediments in front of parents and kids.
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