Cue the Reactionaries: My Baby Girl Reaches for Rosa Luxemburg

You know what they say: revolutions start in the play yard. Besides, a busy mom’s gotta appease her intellectual curiosity somehow. Calm down, capitalists, the baby still gets a few plastic light-up toys to play with during theory class. On breaks, we boogie to her favourite folk banger: “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell. She’s undoubtedly her mother’s daughter. When I roar, she roars—tiny acts of radical tenderness shaping her spirit. I know it seems silly, but I feel like I’m really making a difference with her. She’s going to burn bright, and she’s going to help heal this rock. My job as a mom is to guide her there.

I’ve always believed that motherhood is an underutilized yet potent site of social transformation. Mothering can serve as fertile ground for resistance and change, illuminating small beams of light through the cracks of a crumbling world, as it were. Though patriarchy has consistently led us to accept the devaluation of mothers through gender and parenting norms that benefit men, being a mother actually demands an unyielding amount of intellectual, political, and social agency. But, in order to harness the full power of mothering, the experience of motherhood ought to be disentangled from the institution of motherhood, which is constantly working off an outdated, impossible script written by men and, more recently, co-opted by a version of feminism that centers white, individualistic ‘boss bitch’ ideals rather than collective care. I don't fit into in either version, which makes me feel like an outcast in the game.

Not to bore you with too much theory, but feminist Sarah Ruddick asserts that motherhood is not just a role we play, it’s a discipline. In any case, the way we’re doing it under capitalism is burning us out and not serving us. That’s why I spent the last year of my undergrad trying to understand what happened to me when I became a mother — why in recent years I felt so out of control, almost adolescent-like, from years of just trying to keep it together. I immersed myself in the work of Ruddick, Adrienne Rich, Andrea O’Reilly, Judith Butler, and other feminist scholars. I dived deep into theories of gender performativity, matricentric feminism, and matrescence. I discovered how intensive parenting forces moms to “do it all,” robbing families of actual quality time with their kids — even in a time when moms seem more invested as parents. But most of all, I learned how motherhood shaped me, and how I can preserve aspects of my identity that are critical to my essence while rediscovering new parts of myself as I move through this abundant, intense, and profoundly transformative season.

For one thing, I know I can still be a mother and fight for what matters to me. Today, we found ourselves in a crowd of pro-Palestine activists chanting rally cries. It was a small moment for her — one she won’t remember — but for me, it was a reminder of who I am at my core. Motherhood hasn’t dulled me at all. Though I’ve always been something of a radical leftist, nothing made me more politically ferocious than becoming a mother. It elucidated the kind of world I want to be part of, and the one I want to leave behind for the next generation.

So we read Rosa on a floor scattered with baby toys. Rosa believed freedom is “always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently,” reminding me that raising a child means fostering her spirit, not shaping her into obedience. I don’t want her to be subservient. I want her to use her voice. That’s why we sing songs lamenting the rapidly changing world from right here in the living room. And we stand in solidarity with Palestine, because, like Rosa, I believe true revolution grows from the power of the masses rising together, not from top-down decrees. We see how everything and everyone is connected. We live for nuance. And we look for good. With every glance upward to the sky, with every inhale of a fragrant bud from a flower, I show her that true beauty can’t be bought in a store — that even in struggle, joy persists.

It gives me hope. Even though I’m world-weary.

They wanted obedient daughters. Girls who sleep, who serve, who wear fragile beauty as a docile mask.

Too bad.

I’m raising a revolutionary — a little one who, like Rosa Luxemburg herself, refuses to be silent or compliant.

As Rosa warned us, “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”