Dear Reader,
To be perfectly frank, when we were brainstorming ideas for issue themes during some long-ago staff meeting, we were kind of screwing around with the Mommy Issue idea. We thought it would be funny, maybe a little kinky. Also, the Daddy Issue had already been published in 2016, which was too soon to recycle. I, at least, wasn’t thinking about my own mom at the time at all. In fact, I bet I hadn’t called her in a while, or that if I had, it had been brief and I’d been the one to hang up first, telling her I was too busy to talk. I’d probably reverted to some younger, more fragile, and much more impatient version of myself. I’m not sure why I always do this, maybe because there’s something really vulnerable about being reminded that you might be just a little bit homesick. I can’t pretend that I’m far away and on my own now—my mom lives an hour away from here. But still, it’s feels melancholy somehow to distill my life too quickly on the phone to someone who used to be so constantly present in it.
There’s something vulnerable, too, in the pieces by our writers this block, who have carefully and completely blown up the “Mommy” theme that we arrived at so lightly. This issue examines motherhood in its many forms and connotations. Joshua Kalenga memorializes Miriam Makeba, a South African singer also known as “Mama Africa” whose anti-Apartheid music empowered people within her country and around the world to combat racism. Madison Wells explores motherhood more personally, recounting the experience of meeting her birth mom for the first time, while Pi Campbell delves into the feeling of realizing that she is no longer in the backseat of her mom’s minivan. Heather Rolph mothers the tiniest children of all, garden snails (which, incidentally, are prolific, genderless mothers themselves). Courtney Knerr confronts motherhood in excess: feral cats reproducing at rates so staggering that they’re threatening the native species of Australia. And even people who post on Craigslist looking for the kind of Mommy that we had in mind at the beginning of the semester have their own kind of vulnerability, according to Logan Smith’s analysis of the lonely hearts of Craigslist’s Missed Connections page.
As these pieces convey, motherhood can have absolutely nothing to do with the traditional nuclear family. It can mean a place, a time, a person, a population, a feeling, even pet snails in a salad container. But it’s also pretty simple at the same time. As in, I miss my mom, and I should probably give her a call.
Thank you for making us take the Mommy Issue seriously,
Emma and the rest of the Cipher staff
Mommy Issue | December 2019