I’ve been doing care work for longer than I can remember. I was babysitting when I was probably too young to be a decent babysitter, and to this day my parents remind me that I was dreaming of motherhood, or what I imagined motherhood to be, as a three year old. I lived the next 20 years of my life romanticizing birth, motherhood and parenting, knowing surely that I would become a mother, and that I would love every minute of it. What I wasn’t told, is that motherhood cracks you, your soul, and every part of your being wide open. I cannot imagine a more raw, vulnerable and transformative experience.

I got pregnant in January of 2020, three months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. and forever changed the landscape of care for so many of us. What started as a vision of connection and community quickly pivoted to a reality of fear and isolation. I started my position as the North Carolina Coordinator with SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective just three months later, when businesses and establishments were forced to close their doors. In fact, I caught the last flight out of Atlanta back home at the end of my first week on the job. Without realizing it at the time, I was thrown into motherhood and the Reproductive Justice movement during a period of immense grief that I believe still ripples through all of us.

At SisterSong, I was responsible for building out our statewide strategy in North Carolina, developing and implementing programming initiatives, building relationships with other reproductive health, rights and justice organizations, and showing up at the General Assembly to understand what was happening at the state legislature and how it might impact our people’s wellbeing and access to care. Over the last four-and-a-half years, I have come to understand Reproductive Justice not as some academic framework, but as a call to action and way of being. We carry our people’s histories with us, and our lineages inform the ways we show up for ourselves and each other. Reproductive Justice demands that we confront history and take action as a collective of people who are committed to improving the lives and futures of all.

I am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to begin my journey into motherhood while immersing myself in the movement for Reproductive Justice. Having a political framework to make sense of my own experience and grief as a new mom allowed me to release much of the shame and guilt that still pops up from time to time. However, I couldn’t escape the deep sense of loneliness and grief that many new parents feel, especially while navigating the depths of a global pandemic, multiple genocides, global uprisings for Black lives, and the shifting landscape of birth, abortion and postpartum.

As a multiracial, queer mom, I knew I couldn’t separate my experience from the organizing and advocacy work I was doing at SisterSong. I also knew that if I needed space to be in the practice of sharing honestly and vulnerably about my feelings regarding motherhood, so did new moms and all parents. I was committed to using my position at SisterSong to build out a program that would both celebrate the labor of love that is mothering (and done by people of all genders), as well as training mothering people in the Reproductive Justice framework.

The result was Mothering in Abundance, a title inspired by Revolutionary Mothering, an anthology that centers the experiences of women of color and all historically oppressed birthing people. In the text, mothering is defined as “love by any means necessary”, an expansive definition that makes room for all of the ways we mother ourselves, our children and families, and our communities. Furthermore, mothering is described as “creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life”. I felt empowered and excited by the way this book celebrates all that mothering asks of us, and highlights the fact that most care work tends to be performed by working class women. The definition also demands that we include the mothering and caretaking experiences of queer and trans people.

There are now two graduating cohorts of the Mothering in Abundance cohort. The pilot cohort took place in North Carolina in 2022. Sixteen Black people and birthing people of color completed the six month long cohort, which consisted of monthly leadership development and political education trainings, as well as monthly community building exercises. Some of the topics of the training sessions included Birth Justice, Abortion Justice, and Queer and Trans Liberation. The creative and collaborative community spaces included exercises in poetry writing, collage making and somatic embodiment. The pilot cohort successfully created a blueprint for long-term sustainable leadership development programming in the South.

In 2024, the cohort expanded to include all three of SisterSong’s key states: North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. Twenty-four mothering people of color joined together to participate in monthly virtual political education trainings, and monthly in-person community building exercises within their respective states. This year’s cohort culminated at SisterSong’s Let’s Talk About Sex! Conference in Washington, D.C., coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Reproductive Justice movement.

My hope is that the Mothering in Abundance program will continue to find success in training mothering people to take action in the fight for reproductive freedom. We must all be able to identify our self-interest in joining the movement, and what is at stake for our people in the current political landscape. I deeply believe in the power, knowledge and creativity held within all caretakers, and know what we are capable of when we come together to grieve, confide in one another, and take action to improve the conditions for ourselves and future generations. It is for this reason that I believe the materialization of Reproductive Justice depends on our ability to name, honor and celebrate the labor of care workers.