Want to “Make America Healthy Again?” Let Mamas back in the game

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I’ve seen many interviews in the past 4 years–most especially the past few months–from brand new voices in “alternative” medicine, agriculture, wellness, etc who have just had their “epiphanies” and realized that pharmaceutical companies are not looking out for your health, that the food industry is connected to the chemical industry, that the school system is destroying our children’s minds and bodies, and that chronic illness, especially childhood illness is on the rise–dramatically.

Suddenly, there’s an alarmism that we’ve got to listen to these folks who just sauntered to the edge, looked over, and are shouting about how deep the abyss is and that we’d better jump back before the abyss swallows us…

Look, I’m thrilled that we have so many great minds and big hearts realizing how deep the corruption is in our food and health industries and working on bringing awareness to these issues.

Frankly, we need sincere new voices and I’m glad that folks with big platforms and/or family legacies are using that notoriety to pull the curtain back on some of the corruption happening.

And yes, I recognize that some of those folks have been working on these issues for much longer than others.

To the new ones: welcome to the fold.

It’s about time you stepped over the safety rail and up to the edge of that abyss.

But, conspicuously absent from these platforms are the mamas who literally built “the resistance.”

So here is where I have a question for you…

You say you want to make a change. You say you want the corruption to end. You say you want to Make America Healthy Again….

If you want the corruption in our medical and food industry to stop or dramatically cease, why aren’t you asking the mamas who resisted from the beginning?

There’s a new wave of celebrities, “influencers,” and experts from the same institutions that betrayed us to begin with.

How is it that they are JUST now willing to explore what we’ve been saying for years?

In fact, they are standing on our shoulders.

It’s time to ask the mamas how we resisted, and how we ever managed to raise kids without leaning on fast food and pizza delivery.

Because what you’re proposing can’t–and won’t–happen without a tipping point of mothers. Boring mothers. Confused mothers. Plain and ordinary mothers. Older mothers. Democrat mothers. Independent mothers. Conservative mothers. The all-around unglamorous mothers that you probably don’t even want your picture taken with because, honestly, we are sometimes a little weird, sometimes a little fringe and not always so “shiny.”

But we’re here. And we’ve been here for years.

Some of us are looking on from the sidelines, intentionally benched, and wondering when you’re going to ask us how we’ve managed. How we blocked for you when you were afraid to get hit. Simply put, how we’ve continually marched food security and healthy remedies towards the goal line.

Because if you want to build a team to grow “the resistance,” it might help to know how we resisted for so long already.

Go ahead and ask us.

What did we do to keep people from filling our children’s bellies with fast food, candy, and vegetable oils constantly?

What did it take–physically, financially, socially, mentally–to give our children raw milk from clean farms?

How did we manage a home birth while all the doctors were screaming at us about how dangerous it was? Or what it felt like to give birth without the support we longed for because our midwives were criminalized. And please don’t let the phrase “reproductive rights” come out of your mouth without talking about our right to give birth the way we choose, and with whom we choose to have in attendance.

How did we juggle homeschooling through a difficult economy, a difficult relationship, or when we didn’t have resources or strong support for it?

How did we manage the stress, the anxiety, the pressure of a society that vilified us simply because we didn’t follow the norms?

Or ridiculed, demeaned and threatened us simply because we deviated–even slightly–from the childhood vaccine schedule?

What did it cost us?

Ask us what that stress felt like and how we navigated that when everyone else was profiting from their latest “remedies.” Or what it takes to produce some–any–of our own food and how we manage to keep that going when it feels like our lives are falling apart.

Ask us what it took to find the farms we sourced from and to feed our children local food, or GMO free, even though it made us unwelcome at certain places and we had to find a whole new social circle – or create a social circle who understood.

Or what it took to BE that farm and farmer, endlessly working, taking risks that even you wouldn’t take in your secure job with a big salary.

We’ve stood with our midwives and farmers as they stood trial.

Or maybe we were the midwives, farmers, or dissidents who were socially persecuted and legally prosecuted.

If you really want to change a society, ask the mamas who went against all that social pressure, who defied their brainwashed families, their churches, their communities and who faced the fears of rejection-over and over.

Where were you when we were going through our trials?

Ask us about the herbs we use for healing and how we got to that point and how we handle how odd it still makes us feel to be that “fringe.” Or what we know about herbal medicine.

And what it feels like to stand on principles even when we’re standing alone and how it feels to hear our own words come dryly out of your mouths.

Ask us what it feels like to defend our choices to an “academic expert” and be told publicly how foolish we are and to sit down and shut up only for you to tell us privately that we’re right but you can’t speak up about it, because you might lose your job.

Ask us how many hours we’ve spent changing food policies, building networks in our communities, changing policies in our schools only to have big names take our credit.

And yet, we’d do it again in a heartbeat because it’s the right thing to do.

Ask us what it’s like to be so lonely in this work because we don’t have your big name and your notoriety and we don’t get invited to the fancy cocktail parties and the big events, or any events for that matter.

Because we’re nobodies. We’re people you wouldn’t even give the time of day to. You’re way too “important,” yet somehow, we knew this stuff way before you?

We all grew up in the same McDonaldized America. We also grew up hearing strange things about “women like us” and wanting nothing more than to fit in, to belong.

But that first time our child took their first breath and laughed for the first time, it wasn’t a fairy that got her wings that day, it was a new, fire-breathing mama dragon.

Ask us HOW THE HELL WE KEEP GOING.

Because if you want to change American habits and Americans’ food and health policies you’ll need to know how we’ve managed to opt out for all these years already – some families have opted out for several generations.

Yes, we’re a little different, and you might not like the way we dress–some of us look like we just came in from the fields–because we did, or we might have spit up stains on our shirts.

But here we are.

We stared right into that abyss and we didn’t fall in.

Or maybe we did, but we crawled out with nailless bloody fingers to save our children.

Many of us have fought like hell–fought like only mama dragons can–and yes, you’ll see our battle scars from the repeated attacks and the long nights of fighting.

So ask us why we didn’t comply, why we didn’t take our child to “well visits” or why we used alternatives to antibiotics before it was common. Ask us how we chose raw milk and butter and vaccine-free meat even when the propaganda was heavy, or how we said NO to the Standard American Diet. 

And please, don’t forget to listen.

We’ve got wisdom in these answers. Wisdom that’s not compromised or corrupted with salaries, or an NGO that needs to stay funded.

Our children’s smiles are the pay we get. And the hope of dying in our beds in our old age, unhindered by chronic illness and medications.

And yes, the answer might come out in a motherly way and not in the authoritarian way that you’re used to hearing. Because we’re doing it out of love. Not control. Not for another notch on our career belts or another book credit, or even the social media notoriety that every minor celebrity and “influencer” craves at this point.

We don’t preach freedom or resistance. We live it. With every breath and with every moment in the garden, and every fiber of our beings, we embody it.

C’mon, ask us how we did it, instead of congratulating yourselves on just now figuring out how deep the abyss is.

It’s the only way you will make meaningful change you say you want.

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