Not just your average book on motherhood, Who's Your Mama? treads new territory, taking on the unvarnished personal narratives of working class women, women of color, single mothers and gay mothers as they explore the complexities of both motherhood and womanhood.

Unlike other “motherhood” books that focus on the experiences of affluent, married white women, Who's Your Mama? centers on the perspectives of women from all cross-sections of society who are actively engaged in crafting identities and family structures (including remaining single and/or childless) that speak practically to their personal beliefs, intimate relationships, and socioeconomic realities.

While most books about motherhood focus on the conflict between mothers who
work and those who stay at home, Who's Your Mama? focuses on the voices, perspectives, and complexities that are most often left out of this
dialogue. From the adoption process for a gay couple, a feminist juggling the roles of activist and mother to a mother's celebration of her own vibrant sexuality, the book explores the intersection between motherhood and the facets of the authors' lives, which include race, class, sexuality, politics and personal tragedy. This collection of personal narratives will illuminate the female experience of parenting under patriarchy without exclusively defining it, and humanize a variety of social and economic issues that affect millions of American women and their families.

In “Living in the Third Sphere,” Marla Tevolia breaks down the traditional image of the stay-at-home mom, describing how she came to be empowered in her role as a mother after giving up her career and finally issuing a clarion call to all mothers to take on the challenge of becoming active, strong and indispensable leaders in their communities, shaping their lives and the lives of their children for the better.

In “Starter Child” Amy Kalisher tackles the considerably less publicized but equally nerve-wracking task of becoming a stepmother to a precocious 11 year old, weaving through her initial insecurities and attempting to reconcile her affection for her new love with the strangeness she feels around her new child. With fresh emotional honesty, Kalisher reveals the challenges of learning to love a child that isn’t your own and understanding that motherhood comes in many different forms.

Kelly Jeske chronicles the long, and often heart-breaking journey of open adoption that she chose to undertake with her gay partner, describing the highs and lows as the couple venture into the unchartered waters of adoption, buoyed by a fervent desire for a child. In “A Shade Called Mama,” Jeske unveils the process of open adoption, the decisions leading up to it and swirling around it, offering readers a fresh look into the nature of gay adoption.

“Namaste Revisited” sees Sonali S. Balajee wrestling with a web of problems both cultural and personal. In lyrical prose, Balajee sifts through her emotions as she plans to go through with an unplanned pregnancy despite the wishes of her conservative and traditional South Asian parents, who are distraught over the shame of their daughter’s situation. Torn between her own wishes and her sense of duty to her parents, Balajee ultimately finds peace by allowing herself to be guided by a mix of personal spiritual beliefs and feminist leanings.

Liz Prato defends her decision to remain childless in “Is Life Without Children Worth Living?,” finding empowerment and fulfillment in her child-free existence, filled as it is with love, music, art and writing. She presents a lifestyle that is so often questioned by her peers, who often find it disconcerting that neither Prato nor her husband harbor any desire to procreate, holding her ground against naysayers and shedding light on a child-free life that is equally as enriching as that of a being a parent.

Yvonne Bynoe is a senior fellow at the Future Focus 2020 Center at Wake Forest University and the author of Stand & Deliver: Political Activism, Leadership and Hip Hop Culture (Soft Skull Press) and the Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture (Greenwood Press). She is a contributor to the anthology, We Got Issues: A Young Woman’s Guide to a Bold, Courageous and Empowered Life (Inner Circle). In 2004 she was a guest speaker for the women’s track of the inaugural Hip Hop Political Convention. The co-founder and former president of the Urban Think Tank, the first Hip Hop generation policy organization, has been acknowledged as an expert on Hip Hop and politics by news outlets such as the New York Times, New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times and The O'Reilly Factor. Her writings have been included in several anthologies, used in numerous college courses and have appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, Washington Post, Colorlines, The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, AlterNet.org, PopandPolitics.com and other publications. Bynoe lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area with her husband and son.

Movement Mami’s: A day in the life of a hip-hop activist mami
by JLove Calderon


The young woman paused for a moment before she spoke. “Um, sure you can bring your baby! We wanna support you, sis.” Not that she had much choice, I was presenting that night for the upcoming police brutality rally, so what could she really say?

An hour later I arrived at the small overcrowded office in downtown Brooklyn. My one year old was crying, nose running, wanting his juice. Of course I didn’t have his juice, because I was not supposed to be on “Mom duty” tonight. It was my night off; my movement night, when I could reclaim my post parent inner activist.

“Mami! Jugo! Jugo?” Gabriel cries in my ear as I struggle up the stairs, off balance from my work bag, my papers for the rally, his backpack from daycare. Damn, I shouldn’t have wore these heels.

“Okay baby, hold on, ‘kay? We gotta get to the meeting on time. Mami just has to talk for 20 minutes, baby, and then mami will get you your jugo. Can you be a good boy for mami? Okay?”

But it wasn’t okay. I was late for the meeting; I had a hungry, tired, and cranky child. I had no food or juice or alternatives. No toys to distract him. My mother would be so disappointed in my lack of preparedness. I was exhausted from working all day. Could I make this happen?

Pushing the buzzer I prayed for some strength. Waiting in the hallway I took a deep breath, trying to stop my son’s cries from gnawing at my nerves. While I wanted nothing more than to just turn around and say ‘fuck it,’ I thought about the young black man who had been shot in the back and killed by a cop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Unarmed, he just walking to a friends house. I had to make it to this meeting.

When my husband, a high school assistant Prinicipal called me earlier I could tell by his voice things were bad. There was a fight among some students, and a rumor spread about some local gang bangers coming to jump one of his students. He had to get the cops involved, which he detested, but there was nothing he could do; he had to protect his students.

As I listened I tried to be supportive to him as my mind began thinking if there was anyone who could pick up Gabriel. Although he hadn’t said it yet, I knew that was the reason for the call. “So honey, I know it’s my turn, but you have to pick up the baby. I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t upset at my husband. If there’s a crisis, he’s gotta stay. No one’s fault. It’s just, it’s just, hard. Hard for me to keep it all together; hard for me to keep working for the cause, when the cause ain’t working for me. Negativity is weighing me down.

The door swings open and a new young volunteer who I’ve seen around greets me and my cranky, now snot nosed toddler.

“Hey JLove, we're all waiting for you,” she says sweetly, but she might as well have said, “YOU’RE LATE!” because that’s all I could hear.

Rushing awkwardly through the crowded room, everyone turned my way as my son began wiggling, pushing his hands against my chest, trying to get down. With the two bags and the papers I can barely hold him.

Anya, a hard core New York organizer jumps up from her chair. “Do you need help?” I want to say yes, but what can I give her? What I need is for someone to take the baby, but in the state he’s in…well, with no other parents in the room I’m not sure it would do any good.

“No, no, girl, its okay, just give me a minute.” I’m sweating now, with my bulky jacket, the heat, the kid, my face flushed from all the attention.

“Mami! Let me down! I wanna get down!” he yells in my face, his hands still pushing against me, twisting his body.

“WAIT!” I snap at him.

“Let me take him,” says Suzanne, our coalition’s legal aid lawyer. I give in, just wanting to try and put my bags down, go over these security notes and get the hell out of there.

“Thank you so much! Here, sweetie, go with Suzanne, okay?” Gabriel, who just a second ago wanted nothing more than to be out of my arms, now clings to me for dear life, pulling away from Suzanne’s outstretched arms.

“Nooooooo,” he wailed. I can tell it is useless.

Ugh! “It’s okay, Suzanne, thanks though, really!” She walked back and sat down .

“We need to get started,” says one of the facilitators, glancing at the clock. I’m acutely aware of the fifteen or so other folks are shifting in their seats, yawning, tapping a pencil on the table. Waiting. Just waiting for me to get it together. Shit! I remember when one of my girlfriends told me that it was impossible I could be a good mom and a good activist, especially as a working mom. No way, I had told her, I would never give up my activism! I could do both! Now I was really beginning to wonder.

Like that time we organized a civil disobedience rally and the group was planning on getting arrested. This was nothing new, and I had been arrested and jailed for protesting before, but at that time I was breastfeeding. There was no way I could get locked up. How would I breastfeed my baby? Of course everyone said they understood, but…

“JLove are you ready?” Willie asked. He was the one who had brought the coalition against police brutality together. He once told me he never thought of himself as “political,” but that way before the incident. The summer before his Dominican cousin was maliciously attacked by cops in a bodega buying a café con leche. Another case of mistaken identity. He was buying the coffee for Willie. After that incident Willie paid attention to the news, and when he heard about the sixteen year old who was killed, “I knew I had to do something,” he had explained to me.

“Yes, yes, lemme pull out my notes,” I put my Gabriel down, dropped my bags, and holding on to him with one hand so he wouldn’t crawl away, dug through my bag with the other, pulling out the security protocols.

“Okay everyone, sorry for being late…last minute child care issue,” I looked up to see tired, anxious faces. Luckily Gabriel has quieted down, so I can focus a bit more. “Anyway, let’s start with the color of the day.” As I start going through my notes from the hours of preparation late last night, Gabriel starts picking things off the floor, and they head straight for his mouth.

“No, Gabriel, no! Don’t eat that! It’s sucio!” I grab it from his hand. “I’m gonna give you a pao-pao if you don’t stop!” I was sure the Latinas in the room were cringing at my Spanglish. “How come your husband doesn’t teach you?” everyone would ask me; but my husband and I had such crazy schedules that we barely saw each other during the week, so the weekends we just wanted to relax and try and catch up…it just wasn’t the time to practice Spanish. But we wanted our son to be bilingual, so I used what small vocabulary I knew to get him learning.

My son looked up at me, mouth pouting, eyes tearing, and I knew it was over for me. Why had I snapped at him? Jesus! His fresh cries brought out a searing anger inside of me. I cannot do this. Not tonight.

“Willie, you’re gonna have to take my notes and work this out…I gotta get my son outta here.” He sighed and took my papers. I knew I was letting people down.

“But the security is the most important part of the meeting tonight, J. You know that,” he looked at me with cross eyes. Gabriel sat down on the dirty floor, asking for jugo again. I swear he was never this needy in my apartment!

The fatigue creeping into my body wasn’t just from the long day. It began when my maternity leave ended. I went back to my full-time job and my activist work when by baby was just 3 months old. My husband and I could not afford for me to take a longer leave. Every morning dropping my little baby off for eight hours at a daycare, working to pay someone else to raise my baby? So yeah, for me it was hard to get back into the swing of things. It also didn’t help that I had no support system. My family doesn’t live in New York, and my husband’s parents both have full time jobs. Furthermore, even though I was 28 when I became a mother, none of my activist peers had children; I was left trying to figure it out on my own.

The coalition folks tried to be supportive. Soon I realized they had no idea how, and we had no time to figure out what that meant for me. Time was a commodity we just didn’t have. And I, feeling at times like the outsider, and being a new mom, and still trying to figure it out myself, well, I didn’t push for their support. It felt egocentric to take attention away from our work to focus on my needs. That isn’t activism…is it? Taking care of myself (ourselves)?

I think somewhere in the translation of what it means to be a good activist “martyr” was not named, but defined as the ideal characteristics of an true activist. The gentle nuances of judgement, disapproval, or questioning whether someone is really “down for the cause,” was the order of the day. How did this begin? Why did we activists choose to take it on? Don’t know that I can answer that. What I can say is that as the prevailing wisdom of the day, in my community “the struggle” was exactly that; hard! It wasn’t okay to have fun, to take breaks, to leave meetings on time, to get exercise, to be healthy emotionally and physically; to be happy. It was if we all had a censor in our head that went off when our lives were good, that said how dare you be okay? How dare you be happy when others have nothing? When people our dying from our policies, when there is so much work to do? How does that translate into healthy parenthood?

Shoving the notes into Willie’s hands, I plucked my child off the filthy floor, gathered my bags, practically running out the door, not even stopping to put on our jackets. Leaving the building and hustling to the car, Gabriel whispered “Cold mami!” The tears started flowing down my face. What am I doing? Why am I out here in the cold with my baby without his coat on? What is my problem? I don’t know if I can do this anymore!

That evening when we’re back to the apartment I put Gabriel in a bubble bath. I grabbed a beer, sat on top of the toilet seat to keep an eye on him, and called Willie’s cell. It had been about an hour, and I knew the meeting would be ending soon. Willie picked up on the second ring.

“Hey JLove, did everything go okay with your son?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. I was calling to see if you guys had any questions about the information,” I said, smiling at my son playing with the bubbles.

“I am so glad you called, yeah, we just had questions on number six, the formation with the young people in the middle…do we have enough adults to keep them safe?”

Willie and I talked through the plan while Gabriel splashed in the water all over my papers. “Word, JLove, this is good; we’ll be ready for them cops at this rally, for sure. Thanks for taking the lead on this.” Willie and I hung up. I stayed for a while, watching Gabriel go crazy with the bubbles, his happy sounds echoing off the bathroom walls. A deep feeling emerged from my body. Heavy, I was filled with despair and elation, a dark fatigue yet a hopeful spark of possibility.

I have been an activist for over eight years and now as a mother I finally understood the rites of passage into motherhood came with complexities that many people did not speak of or share. And for my childless activist community, despite their good intentions, most of them simply did not understand my new life. It caused a schism between us that presented different challenges: How do you serve the movement and raise a healthy child? What does ‘balance’ look like, feel like, taste like? It is such an easy word to say…it just rolls off the tongue. “Just trying to find that balance,” many of us say.

But the meaning of that, how do I measure the success of balance? Is it missing a critical meeting and dropping the ball so that I can be a better mother to my son? So that he gets fed on time, gets his bath, and is happy? Do I sacrifice his needs for the peoples’ needs? Is it a trade off? Okay Gabriel tonight is gonna be hard on you because instead of coming home after day care like we usually do, we’re gonna pull an extra shift and handle some business…come on Gabriel, its called struggle for a reason!

My friend recently shared with me that she’s read about famous activist parents whose children felt abandoned by them because they were never there for them, only for the struggle. As she spoke I felt a pang in my heart. Would my son say the same thing about me? Am I putting politics before my baby?


Five years have passed since these questions first came to light, and I had another baby boy. It was life altering for my husband and I; Camilo almost died during the birth. He became our miracle baby.

Now with two children my activism looks a bit different. Experience has taught me the difference between contribution and ‘sacrifice.’ Part of the difference is in the intention. Part is the lived experience. Contribution feels good and whole. Sacrifice hurts, emotionally, and sometimes taking the physical toll as well. Years of not taking care of myself, having other priorities cost me my gallbladder and a lifetime of medication.

Wisdom provided by my mentors has taught me ‘the struggle’ doesn’t have to be ‘a struggle.’ Purpose has integrated my life, helping me decide on priorities and providing clarity. Leadership development brought more capacity—the ability to hold more—gracefully.

Some of my single friends ask me how I do it, this mami activist thing. Although there are still many questions swimming in my mind and heart and I am learning as I go, there are some fundamentals that I have chosen to live by in my life: I am dedicated to truth, love, and freedom. I am committed to creating community, building healthy tribe, and loving completely.

As a hip-hop activist movement mami, I promise to love my children and love the movement. Understand that I cannot do it all, but what I chose to take on I do 100%. Stretch my capacity as a leader and a mother. Work within a framework of vision versus victim. Apply the wisdom of deep listening to the essential needs of my children. Answer them. Sometimes that looks like a huge hug, or an acknowledgment that I’ve ‘been on the computer too much,’ or taking time to talk to a teacher about something that is going on in the classroom. Recognizing when they do something well, as opposed to always harping when they don’t.

What I have come to is that it is not what comes first: movement or mami. This paradigm suggests that they are not interconnected. But, my dear friends, they so are connected. I am a woman raising two boys. I am white, my husband is Latino and our boys are mixed heritage. An aspect of my movement mami work is bringing them up as feminist revolutionaries fighting for social justice worldwide. As a movement mami my work is to show them, lovingly and patiently, the injustices of the world; teach them their power in shifting male privilege; explore the inherent harmony that physically created them; love them. Love them. Love them.

As a hip-hop activist movement mami I pledge to serve the movement by being a good mother and being a good activist.