SheFlexx May 2021
Mother Trees
SheFlexx Respects
Nora Sandigo, aka “La Gran Madre,” who came to the U.S. from Nicaragua over three decades ago as a fifteen year old. Since then she has helped over 200,000 migrants from Central America and Mexico. Currently she advocates for children who have crossed the border on their own as well as their parents to help speed reunification. That’s takin’ it to the Maxi-mom.
Luana Nelson-Brown, Bridget Neely, and Shalome Musigñac-Jordán who started the Johnston Parents for Equity and Anti-Racism, a group of Black, Latina, and white mothers who advocate for change in their primarily white Iowa school district. Sisterhood is powerful.
Project Matriarchs, a new non-profit started by two college-age Bay Area women to support mothers during the pandemic. PM connects college student tutors with school-age children of struggling single moms. They’re now moving into advocating for workplace policies that make motherhood and career more compatible. Brace yourself, glass ceiling.
Home Stretch
Nomadland took my breath away. (It also took the Oscar.) Breaking all the conventional Hollywood rules - eschewing intense action, special effects, and beautiful people - it seemed more powerful for it. A “quiet film” that made my action movie-loving husband cry, and that he ranks in his “top five.” Why was it so compelling? Yes, the landscapes were gorgeous. Yes, the music was lovely. But it was so much more.
Director Chloé Zhao is known for a style that blends fiction and documentary. “I’m looking for some kind of truth,” she explains. To find it, she cast most of the “actors” as versions of themselves. Even Fern is real in a sense. McDormand once told her husband that when she turned 65, she planned to change her name to Fern, “start smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Wild Turkey and hit the road in my RV.” That aspiration - along with the fact that McDormand is an anti-celebrity who eschews botox, make-up, publicity, Los Angeles itself - made her perfect for the role. Still, McDormand had her limits in blending her “real life” and the film. All I can say is: it worked. The film illuminates how the inevitable losses of aging entwine with the wisdom and beauty time and those losses can spawn. Brava.
One Tough Mother(‘s Day)
COVID-19 has exacerbated challenges for working moms. Far more women than men have had to leave the workforce because of family care needs during the pandemic. So… moms probably aren’t too surprised by the news that the birth rate has gone down markedly this year, a so-called “baby bust.” While some folks call this situation a crisis, other experts (who happen to be women) have a more measured take or even advocate celebration.
The past year has led to some re-thinking around mothering and Mother’s Day. President Biden has re-defined the notion of infrastructure to include “care infrastructure,” as part of his proposal to greatly increase federal funding for child and elder care. This year a number of brands clued in to the fact that Mother’s Day can be traumatic for those of us whose moms have died. This is a nice development as there is very little acknowledgement or psychological inquiry on this topic, which many (like me) consider a major life passage. I did find one sweet reflection.
Mother Superior
The 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, by Richard Powers centers on the late 1980s-1990s fight to save the last of California’s old growth redwoods, 200-foot giants some of which are/were close to 2,000 years old. The character of Patricia Westerford is based on the real-life Dr. Suzanne Simard, whose book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, is just out. Simard’s findings were inspired in part by the work of her mentor, “mother of symbiosis” Lynne Margulis as well as Indigenous knowledge. Her research demonstrates how trees and other plants communicate and share resources through fungal systems which resemble the neural networks of the human brain. At the hub of these “wood-wide-webs” is often an older tree Simard calls a “mother tree,” which coordinates the network that heals, feeds, and sustains other members of the forest.
Dr. Simard’s book is a journey of discovery and connection, triumph over adversity, but ultimately a call to remember how closely we are of the earth, how much we rely on her. Let’s read this book! And then, let’s bring the metaphor full circle, and be the mother trees of our communities.
SheFlexx Recs
The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs. “A re-framing of African-American history, providing a much-needed Black female perspective,” from Wapo review.
Watch this touching video of a mother grey whale and her newborn calf, then donate to the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County, which rescues stranded animals and is investigating an alarming number of recent grey whale deaths in the San Francisco Bay.
The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods, by Julia Butterfly Hill. In the late 1990s, Hill spent over two years 180 feet up in the canopy of an 1800-year-old redwood she named “Luna.”
Photo by Navesh Chitrakar
