Tonight we held a tamale cooking class in my home, featuring my amiga Sabina from Oaxaca. We’ve been holding these classes
for over a year now to help her raise funds and bridge our communities, and every time it is the sweetest magic. Everyone lights up and remembers the medicine of coming together, laughing and chatting around the kitchen, and pulling back the threads of all of our ancestral connections to our mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers who endured and nourished and held the families together.
This past week with the women I support, a theme of feeling the heartache of living within patriarchal systems was especially felt. So much is becoming clear at this time and we are seeing with refined eyes.
As mothers we talked about how hard it is when our children don’t want to help around the house. Of course it is normal. I didn’t want to, either, when I was young. But for us, when we are doing the work of the village, without any village..when we feel that intense level of giving and exhaustion, it is deeply heartbreaking when our children don’t want to help us.
It’s not the children’s fault, it’s that we have been expected for so long to do so much with so little support.
It’s not the children’s fault also that they have not received the message from elders, aunties, the village, explaining and modeling kinship/family care. Our ancestors knew that the clan/tribe/community needed to help each other, that survival, contentment and joy were supported this way.
So we often discuss how to teach these threads in a loving way that honors both them and us.
Global capitalism and colonialism (and the trauma and dysfunction it creates in families) have succeeded in separating us from all of our support systems and teaching our children that the answers to success are out there in the global market for their individual success.
And often, when we express our knowing of the need for balance, of the extractive, predatory, upside down nature of these systems, we are discounted or resisted. They are swimming in the propaganda of greed and illusion, and the patriarchy keeps our yin wisdom from being heeded.
We can say it is hard to be counterculture, but this is not counter ‘culture’ it is counter ‘lack of culture.’
Actually, ‘culture’ is to know how to be in community.
Something that has been taken away from most of us.
So it’s helpful for mamas (and everyone) to remember that it is not our children, but the communal ways that are broken and we can have compassion for what we must relearn together.
Tonight I remembered how significant it was for me when as an emancipated foster youth, I was taken under the wing of Friends of the Foster Children. They knew that many of us lacked family/community, so in addition to giving us a small scholarship, the real gift was that they assigned us to a mentor. I had two mentors, a husband and wife team, Steve and Susan Wittmer. They would write me cards on holidays and at this time of year, the whole organization held a cookie baking day for us. I still get teary just remembering how caring these folk were in tending to us.
Because of my felt experience of the pain of disconnection, I know what a balm community is, even when it’s small efforts, even when we have to patch it together.
Even when we have so many hurts it feels there are too many patches needed.
When we turn toward reclaiming our threads of community, the regeneration just unfolds, and magic like in our cooking classes happens in ways we could not imagine.
Tonight, after a week long campaign to help Sabina fund a trip to see her mother after 20 years*, we were able to present her with $2,600. She put her head down, with tears and said, “I never would have imagined this.” She stayed quiet for a long time, letting it sink in.
As the donations came in all week from friends and community near and far, my inner little girl also felt overwhelmed. Sometimes I doubt whether people will care and every donation touched my heart deeply. I was raising funds for Sabina but it was also medicine for me.
Another mama shared that after watching Sabina teach her cooking classes she recognized what a gift it was to have received the teachings of cooking from her mothers and granddmothers, that despite other limitations, she realized they had been giving her a treasure all along.
All in the group shared that it feels so good to cook in community because we are all too often alone in the kitchen. (ding, ding, ding! This is why I always encourage families to cook together)
I cannot change the way all of us have been systematically disconnected from our clans and communal wisdom for hundreds of years, but I can bring us back to each other in small ways; cooking class, helping families be more connected, milpa, nature retreats, conscious mama circles and so on. Supporting wholeness means recognizing that mental health is found not just in individual work but in the collective healing and remembering.
Sometimes we can articulate the problems in detail, we can fear what will happen with all of the systems feeling like they are crashing down and further oppressing us…
this is real and valid because we live in inequitable and patriarchal nation states
And yet, small, steady simple steps toward community and self reclamation
open a door
that invite the spirit of our ancestors, our innate resilience and the vital regeneration of Life to emerge.
Plant the seeds. Follow and trust your Joy. Open to what you cannot imagine.
(Life beyond patriarchy and separation!)
Listen to your ancient grandmothers whose blood and bone live on in you.
xoxoxo
*Migrant workers often go years without seeing their family members and sometimes children. A terrible price to pay to be in service to this country for survival.