A Broader Definition

There's always someone asking you to
underline one piece of yourself—whether it's Black, woman,
mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that's the piece
that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
—Audre Lourde

Mother's Day, Muttertag, La Festa della Mamma,Bonne fete des meres, Gelukkige Moederdag—

We were late in celebrating mothers compared to the Greeks and Romans. They were doing so thousands of years before we jumped on the bandwagon, but we've made up for our tardy entrance. Florists report more flowers are sold on Mother's Day—even more than on Valentine's Day.

It's always been jarring, to me, to see the adoration paid to mothers on this day when I compare it to the inequalities meted out to women throughout history. While we were being lauded for being mothers— we had to fight tooth and nail to be able to vote, to have control of our bodies.

While the flowers sat in vases women marched and shouted for equal pay. There's a disconnect between putting mothers on pedestals and according them the same equality as men. To many men, women are either or—saints or "fallen women".

When Audre Lourde named herself "a black feminist lesbian mother poet" she stated for all women the necessity to name the myriad facets of any woman. Each woman may use different words to encompass her identity, but all the words are necessary. When I first read Loude's definition of herself, it released me to define myself—and mother was only one of many words.

I once heard Audre Lourde speak and I recall her saying that it wasn't that women didn't have enough power, it was that they didn't use the power they had.