Motherhood as Praxis: A Marxist Mama and Her Bolshie Baby

This is the pinnacle of unpaid labor, right here. It's an embodied experience---and it demands your full engagement. For starters, it's a messy job. Did you know babies have an impressive poop velocity of 3 to 4 feet per second? That’s around 2 to 3 miles per hour. I’ve seen it. I’ve immersed myself in it. Theory to action, baby. And let’s not forget who’s really in charge. The demand for milk production runs round the clock in these parts, and you will supply—lest you invite wails and dialectical confrontation. Nobody cares how tired you are. Nobody’s asking how many of your own needs you’ve met today. There are no paid breaks. No weekends. It’s just—keep the milk flowing—or else. My baby doesn’t just seize the means of production—she is the revolution. She lays claim to the body that capitalism pretends it doesn’t need. She doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t delay gratification. She latches and suckles like a tiny union boss with no patience for red tape. She redistributes resources with the fury of a thousand Bolsheviks. She has no interest in profit, only in plenitude. She will not be pacified.

But as I’m discovering for the third and final time, there’s something profound buried beneath the mess of motherhood. Because this isn’t about ownership—it’s about stewardship. There’s something deeply political, even intellectual, about raising children. Something that demands attention, imagination, and yes—activism. It’s not a passive role. It requires the ability to be subversive, to resist conformity, to question rules and roles alike. And it means adding your own voice—not just the voices that came before you. For example, teaching my children that they’re connected to everything, and that they’re only free so long as others are free. This matters to me. Beyond that, allowing them to find their voices too, to raise their fists to the sky, to demand a better, more just world—that’s the hidden gold.

Children are teachers themselves. For her part, my baby is proving to be quite the tiny anarchist. In the process, she’s teaching me about resistance in its most primal form. She will not be fed the artificial nipple of passive consumerism. She is a master of dissent. In her tiny revolution of one, she engages in daily acts of protest—partaking in nap strikes, shutting down systems (schedules, plans, and sleep—all out the window), railing against diaper changes and chucking every brightly coloured, plastic-wrapped promise of baby capitalism out of her stroller and off of her high chair. Every night she wails like a tiny revolutionary—every sleep regression a rebellion against alienation, a call for radical attachment.

But here’s the thing—I’m learning to lean into the civil disobedience. To let her be her own revolutionary. And three kids in, I finally understand that I don’t need to do things perfectly in order for her to thrive. I just need to be present. To show each of them what really matters to me, and what my values are. Not just give them the kind of mothering expected by a society that places the full moral weight of raising children on women—while simultaneously allowing for their erasure. I’ve been there once before, and I want no part in that. I want to be here for my family because I choose it--not because it's what capitalism demands of me.

Forget shrinking and succumbing to the drudgery that is intensive parenting in the modern age. I don't want to be weary and robotic. I want to be my full, authentic self in this. I want my children to seek their full, authentic selves too. Even if they’re a little bit Bolshie. Even if their small acts of rebellion feel overwhelming in the moment. Imagine if we raised kids like this—where they weren’t forced to suppress parts of themselves? Where they could explore ideas and identities and thoughts and feelings without repercussions?

Imagine the freedom in that—the sovereignty of personhood it creates. As radical as it may seem, that’s the kind of motherhood that resonates with me. Not just ideology, not just instinct—but praxis. The daily, imperfect, embodied work of raising revolutionaries while trying to stay human myself. Of choosing presence over performance. Of refusing to disappear into the labor, and instead, using it to carve out a different future. One feed, one protest, one messy, miraculous moment at a time.