I wrote a letter

By Jaime Jenett

Jaime (left) with Laura and Simon

[This post is part of a Mama’s Day Series by The Strong Families Initiative. To follow all of the Mama's Day events, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.]

As Mother’s Day approaches I have been thinking a lot about what life is like as a non-biological lesbian mother of a child with severe medical issues. Before my wife Laura gave birth to our son Simon, gay marriage was mostly a political issue for me. On principal I wanted me and all other queer people to have the same rights and privileges as straight people. However, when Simon was born in 2008, and especially when he got critically ill and spent 4 months in the hospital, policies designed to prevent same sex families from having legal protections took on a whole new meaning for me.

I realized that in another state, as his non-biological mother, I could very easily have been denied leave from my job when he got sick. In another state, I wouldn't be allowed to adopt him. I could have been denied access to visit him in the hospital by hospital staff. When Laura was forced to quit her job to take care of him, they could both have been without health insurance because they wouldn't be legally linked to me. I realized, on a really visceral level, just how cruel and destructive these types of policies are and what they're really about.

My immigrant mom

[This post is part of a Mama’s Day Series by The Strong Families Initiative. To follow all of the Mama's Day events, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.]

By Yvonne Tran

I always knew my mom worked hard. She would wake up at 6:30 AM every morning to wake us up and make us breakfast (buttered toast with sugar, my favorite) and sometimes, even lunch. Then she would get ready for work around 2 PM and go to work till 11 PM or 12 AM. I remember her coming back late while I was up late doing homework. She would eat the dinner that my dad saved for her and watch TV till she fell asleep. She would wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

When I was 7, I remember doing laundry with my mother in the garage. She decided to make me her counselor and divulged way to much for my 7 year-old mind to comprehend. Reasons why she's upset with my dad. Naming his flaws. Her unhappiness. Her young days dancing the night away. Her dreams. The what-ifs. Her life before me. Before two jobs, two kids, two dogs, a house, and a husband to support.

The stigma test

[This post is part of a Mama’s Day Series by The Strong Families Initiative. To follow all of the Mama's Day events, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.]

By Lisa Russ

Toppenish, WA high school senior Gaby Rodriguez

I spent some time today thinking about stigma. I talked with the always fabulous Adriann Barboa of Young Women United about her experiences as a young mom, and she described the stigma she faced, and how that affected her heart, soul, and decisions about how to parent and live her life.  She felt people's low expectations of her....and was determined to prove them wrong. She started her sophomore year of college just one week after her son was born, proving that she wasn't walking away from the life that she had known, but rather stepping into a new life with it's own challenges and rewards.

I finally had a chance today to read some of the buzz about Gaby Rodiguez and her experiment—you may have heard she faked a pregnancy during her senior year of high school to measure how her classmates, friends, teachers and advisors would respond.  Only her mother, boyfriend, best friend and principal knew the truth.  For more on her story, go to The Yakima Herald-Republic.

Khalil and his parents on love, coming out, and more

[This post is part of a Mama’s Day Series by The Strong Families Initiative. To follow all of the Mama's Day events, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.]


Khalil is the leader of Black PFLAG in Portland.  He is part of our Mama's Day celebration this year...and his own mother inspired us with this.  Thanks Khalil and your family for sharing your story.

My mom, the rockstar!

Me and my mom at the Uno train station

[This post is part of a Mama’s Day Series by The Strong Families Initiative. To follow all of the Mama's Day events, visit us on Facebook and Twitter.]

by Maria Nakae

By pure coincidence, my mom and I were in Japan for the 1-month anniversary of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami that devastated Northern Japan. We had bought our tickets back in January; I was joining her for her annual trip to Naoshima, the island where she was born and raised, and where much of her side of the family still lives. To go to Japan so soon after the disaster was quite something…but I’m not writing about that. I’m writing about my mom, who has achieved a new level of rock star status in my eyes.

My family moved to the U.S. when I was almost 3 years old, and while my brother and I quickly assimilated into American culture, my parents never truly did. I appreciate that we held on to our language, traditions, and cultural values, but my parents – especially my mom – have never felt entirely at home. After thirty years her English is still pretty broken, she only reads and watches Japanese news, and, working in a Japanese restaurant, most of her friends are also Japanese. Like many kids in immigrant families, I have always been a cultural ambassador for her.

One of Two: PFLAG Portland Black Chapter

By Khalil Edwards

[Editor's Note: This week I had the joyful opportunity to learn more about an organization that has joined our Strong Families Mama’s Day of National Action, Black PFLAG. If you are wondering why you have never heard of a Black chapter of PFLAG, that’s because there are only two Black chapters in the nation, and one is based in our very own west coast city of Portland, Oregon. Yesterday I spoke with Khalil Edwards, coordinator of Portland’s Black PFLAG, about the organization and how he got involved. Here’s what he shared. —Dana Ginn Paredes]

I got involved through my mom, Antoinette Edwards. She was one of the founders of Black PFLAG and has been an LGBTQ advocate for a really long time. She helped to start a Gay Straight Alliance group (GSA) at the local high school where she worked as a family resource center coordinator and has been a constant advocate for legislative action and policies that support acceptance of the LGBTQ members of the black community.

It's Equal Pay Day...what does that mean for women of color?

By Lisa Russ

Today is an important day. It is called (by some) Equal Pay Day and symbolizes how far into 2011 women must work to earn what men earned in 2010 in the United States. Click here for a good OpEd about it by Linda Meric, the Executive Director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women.

Using numbers for the "average" woman, she puts the pay gap in perspective:

The pay gap is evident in almost every occupational category, in every income bracket; it's a constant despite education, despite experience. The National Women's Law Center found the gap represents $10,622 a year, with which a family could: buy a year's worth of groceries ($3,210); arrange for three months of child care ($1,748); pay three months of rent and utilities ($2,265); cover six months of health insurance ($1,697); pay down six months on a student loan ($1,602); and purchase three full tanks of gas ($100).

While overall, full-time, full-year working women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn, the wage gap is even larger when you look at women of color. African-American women earn 61 cents and Latinas earn 52 cents for every dollar a white non-Hispanic man earns.  So....Latina women need to work 18 months to earn what men earn in a year.  How many bags of groceries and months of child care does THAT wage gap represent?

Malkia Cyril rocks it at the National Media Reform Conference

This weekend in Boston is the National Conference on Media Reform. Our dear friend and colleague Malkia Cyril from the Center for Media Justice was part of the opening plenary—along with Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, among others.

Malkia makes a great case for why media reform is everybody's issue. And why (and how) we need to work together to get there.

Check out these two videos...

Watching and waiting in New Mexico

By Lisa Russ

There is big news out of Mexico today. According to Reuters:

Thousands of Mexicans protested the country's raging drug war Wednesday as dozens of bodies were found in graves near the country's border with the United States.

Demonstrators marched in cities across Mexico, holding signs condemning the wave of killing that has claimed more than 37,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and launched a military-led crackdown against drug cartels.

"We are fed up with this war that nobody asked for," said protester Leticia Ruiz in the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, where some businesses have closed because of gun battles in the streets and rampant extortion by cartel members. 

There were protests all over the country in the last few days with as many as 10,000 people participating.  For many the last straw was last week's assasination of the son of poet Javier Sicilia, along with six other young men. He wrote a moving open letter in which he said, "We're sick of you politicians.  In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war, you have put the country into a state of emergency."

We in the US face our own end of the awful war on drugs, and our own state of emergency. Our version of the war is fought on the streets, but also through the courts and the jails, where we are locking up people who struggle with addiction, rather than giving them a chance at recovery.

The criminalization of women--a new low

Lynn Paltrow from National Advocates for Pregnant Women shares this heart-breaking story:

In December of 2010, Bei Bei Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman living in Indiana, attempted to end her own life. She did so in one of the slowest and most painful ways possible: she consumed rat poison. With help from friends who intervened, however, she made it to a hospital and survived. The premature newborn she delivered by undergoing cesarean surgery did not. An Indiana prosecutor’s response has been to charge her with the crimes of murder (defined to include viable fetuses) and feticide (defined to include ending a human pregnancy at any stage). She has been arrested, denied bail, and will, unless bail is granted, be imprisoned for as long as her case proceeds through the court system.

Read more on RH Reality Check.