The Mothers of Fierce Love

Three moms. Three lanes. One fierce love.

One month ago, I sat in my living room with three GenX moms who have found themselves deep in the Resistance.

A MamaBear to All Cubs

“If this was our kids we would need people for us.”
“We have to be the people for others.”

Fierce Love begins with the mothers, forced with the potential reality of seeing their own babies in danger. When a mother sees somebody’s else’s child endangered, she feels the threat inside herself. That’s when a MamaBear culture emerges.

“My son has a panic attack going to school every single day because he saw someone beat up and thrown into a car like a dog in the car-line in front of us.”

These three moms sit on the couch in front of me and openly admit they are privileged. Their children will never have to face the horrors that their black and brown classmates experience.

And, these moms are very much dealing with the kinds of questions no parent should ever have to answer to their kids.

“I’m just really afraid that you and dad are going to die. And I don’t know what I would do without you guys.”

How is a mom of a 10yo supposed to respond to that? Children of that age don’t understand the legal frameworks or the political policies. All they understand is that their friends’ parents are “being taken”, and in some cases, they are witnessing these violent abductions first hand.

“I’m not going to lie to my kids and say it’s all fine.”

That very real fear is coming out of the children in typically safe suburban neighborhoods in Minnesota. These mothers can no longer shield their children from the damage. They have to deal with it.

When stress happens, the body naturally responds into four different ways: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

These mothers know they can’t flee because to do so would be to surrender their livelihoods, their hard earned lifestyles, their carefully cultivated family and community structures.

These mothers also don’t have the freedom to freeze. They have babies to protect, even if those babies are teenagers. They are still children, with years left before their pre-frontal cortexes fully develop the capacity to understand and comprehend and critically analyze the circumstances for themselves.

These mothers have well-developed skills in fawning, and they know when a threat is so violent that it is well beyond the functions of fawning.

So they fight.

“How do you let this go?”

“But I’m also not going to stop.”

“There’s no stopping at this point.”

“I want my kids to grow up and say ‘My mom loved me so fiercely, regardless of everything.’”

They fight like MamaBears protecting their cubs.

Except these MamaBears expression of Fierce Love has teeth, eyes, instincts, and a PTA bake-sale organizing clipboard.

Pick a Lane

These three moms, all nurses who work in the same medical facility, drive in three different lanes of the same resistance highway.

“You almost have to pick a lane”

Switching lanes in this environment is like driving on black ice during white-out blizzard conditions. Each of them has chosen their specific action within the resistance.

One is deeply embedded in Rapid Response Networks. She monitors a Signal Chat so she can patrol, track, and film ICE in her community. She wears a whistle around her neck and isn’t afraid to get in the face of an agent who might be threatening a child on school grounds or at a bus stop. But rapid responders cannot and will not deliver mutual aid supplies because they might lead ICE right to their targets. So she passes any referrals of families in need to her friend, a pastor’s wife.

The second, the pastor’s wife, shares that her husband’s church has seen a drastic increase in attendance since the surge started. Families are leaving the mega-churches for her smaller outreach based church.

“So many people have left church because they’re all talk and they say, we’re going to pray for you. And that’s it. . . Like prayers are great, but what’s the next step? We need action. . . We have atheists that come to our church every week just because of the community.”

The third has dedicated herself to befriending those in the community in need. She goes to the immigrant businesses, becomes a regular at their bars and restaurants, gets to know them until they trust her, and then, after weeks of building relationship, they let her refer her friend’s church community to support them. When ICE is impersonating a church pastor offering support in order to gain access to the immigrant community, making friends with the new lady who tips big isn’t something that happens in one or two visits.

Together, these three form a trinity of support to their community, stepping up in ways others can’t.

“Do you feel like all this responsibility lands on your shoulders?” I ask.

“I kind of do because when you look out at the pictures and the things, it’s moms. It’s us or gray hairs.”

Because the privilege gives them the power.

GenX Flips the Script

There’s another reason these moms feel particularly responsible to holding this line. They grew up with emotionally distant parents, neglect, and conditional affection. Those parents, now grandparents, proudly wear MAGA hats.

“That’s how GenXers were raised.”

“You have to deserve the love.”

At six years old with the stomach flu we were told, “here’s the bucket, here’s the remote, here’s canned soup, I’m going to work.” And then, when we vomited near, but not in, the garbage can by our bed, we were told to clean it up ourselves. Our parents were too wrapped up in their careers to bother with parenting. What we lived through as children became the moral compass of how we raise our own children. We can’t raise our children the way we were raised. We have to give them the exact opposite.

“My mom laughed when I said my son has a panic attack going to school every single day.”

While they used to live by the "we agree to disagree” rules with their families of origin, the Surge has changed that. They have stepped away from parents and relatives who defend the actions of ICE and condemn these women for their resistance actions.

These three women speak of their relationship to each other as a sisterhood. They barely knew one another a year ago. Their relationships emerged from smile-cordially-at-work-colleagues to flat-tire-4am-friends in a matter of months.

The resistance has turned acquaintance into kinship.

The women form a mycelial network

What these women are building feels less like an organization chart and more like a mycelial network. The neighborhood protests, bridge brigades, fundraising events, and mutual aid distribution packing parties are where the real connections happen now.

“Who are you?”

“Tell me your story.”

“What’s your Signal Chat handle?”

What I heard in this conversation was a definition of Fierce Love that starts with children and keeps widening until it includes the whole future. It reaches from her own child to the child in the next classroom, to the family across the street, the church meal line, the bridge brigade, the Signal chat, and the future that is being shaped right now by who chooses to show up.

These women are mothering far beyond the walls of their own homes. They are feeding people, filming danger, building trust, opening churches, and carrying referrals.

Together they form a living underground network of care, passing support hand to hand, house to house, family to family, until the whole community feels less alone and eventually everyone, every child, every elder, every human-being is connected. When mycelia grow roots underground, they form intelligent connections with each other, not just as roots supporting each other, but as knotted structures growing new connections everywhere.

These women are holding the line with the instinctive intelligence of women who remember exactly what neglect felt like and who chose to grow mycelial connections instead.

That is Fierce Love in Minnesota.

This is how it started. A simple living room conversation with four women. Now, it’s turning into a full-length book. I have been quietly interviewing the WOMN of the Resistance for the last four weeks. Over the coming weeks, I’ll drip out their stories one tator-tot-hotdish bite at a time. If you aren’t already subscribed, join the Fierce Love Community now to get the sneak peeks to the book and a look behind the curtain of my writing process.