Dear Readers,
In 2012, when I was pregnant with my first child, I knew I wanted to create a space where we centered the narratives of parents. Not in the ways we were used to seeing online. I wasn’t interested in the daily documentation of life, of sharing the stories of children without their consent, of selling “stuff” to fill—the parts of you you felt you lost, the parts of you you think you should be, the parts of you left in utter confusion.
I didn’t want to take advantage, which unfortunately is central to so much of new parenthood. You have to buy this and this and this and that otherwise you’re not, something. No. Having children actually deepened my curiosity of what makes us, us. Something I’d been drawn to from a young age, listening to the stories my grandmother shared. Listening to the spaces between those stories. Wishing I had more time with her, with a more mature mind to ask her about those spaces.
I wanted to make a room for those stories from all of us. Parenting can feel like writing a lot of the time. It can be isolating. Only you know what’s happening inside your body, inside your mind. There’s a lot to process in a short amount of time, while each day stands as its own eternity. Then we come from under the fog. We reach for our neighbor, our friend. We remember that we belong to a community. We don’t have to be alone. Some of us are more fortunate than others in that regard. Some of us find our people in this revelatory phase of life online. We meet our people.
As Raising Mothers grew, I became more confident in allowing other parts of myself to come forward. Everything I do centers Blackness, as that is my lived experience. In that, I take the responsibility to center the silenced. Raising Mothers will always be for everyone, but we are speaking to the Global Majority. We are sharing our narratives, divorced from the white gaze, divorced from the centering of patriarchy. We’re more expansive than when we began.
As Raising Mothers moves into its ninth year of existence, we want to encourage everyone to support our work by becoming a member. Share this drive with your friends and family. Raising Mothers is a small outfit of volunteer staff and has been since the start. A lot of work goes into building this indie magazine and cultivating this community.
Our goal this year is to be able to pay all contributors honoraria. We do not receive grant funding or have a private investor. We’re 100% reader-funded. In the future, that may change, but we never want to rely on ads to generate revenue.
Membership funds allow us to:
Pay all of our writers and eventually pay them more.
Partner with organizations who align with our values
Keep our archives alive and un-paywalled
Keep submissions free.
Most importantly, to remain independent!
Membership is a sliding scale from $5-$50 per month, and if you sign up for annual membership, you save 8%.
Our goal for the next 5 months is to increase our membership by AT LEAST 100 MEMBERS each month. That can be as simple as our first 100 people convincing 5 friends to become members.
Sincerely, Sherisa de Groot
Founder, Raising Mothers
