Wake Up, Sweet Sister.

A Mother's Day Call.

This Mother’s Day begins with more screams.
Not the curated kind that fits in a card—
but the kind that splits sky.

It begins with the ache
of knowing another mother
is digging a grave
while we are being asked to raise a glass.

A toast to ourselves—
for surviving what we are still trying to name.
A cheers to the mothers who stitched together some version of love
with the scraps of whitewashed generations before.
A quiet nod to our children with an oath to show them a different way.

Or maybe—
you’re one of those
who dares to leave the cup for courage to
name the weight of white woman trauma,
inherited like fine china,
wrapped in silence,
stored in shame,
and polished for appearances.

Our mothers and grandmothers fire was smothered,
not with violence, but with rules.
Left behind for stepping forward.

Shown duty, but never the unconditional anything
that would allow her to become.

Yet, so many of us became mothers anyway.
We sought what was rarely modelled.
We mother with hands that were rarely held.

So don’t say “we can’t even imagine.”
We can.
We know what it is to be erased.
We know what it is to scream into empty space.
To be told: “Your pain is too much.”
To survive systems never built for us.

But still—the spell of comfort hums just loud enough.
Still—we tell ourselves we’ve done enough.
Still—when the moment asks for more than thoughts and prayers,
we avert our gaze
from that sister in that
exact same place.

This Mother's Day,
my body insists—
not to celebrate, but to sit here,
and scroll there.—
to witness.
To scream too.
Anything less would be a betrayal.

Today,
I stay with the mothers
whose families—
even the littlest ones,
their children, sisters, sons—
are being taken from them
one by one.
Executed
while the world watches
with excuses.
Paying no mind
to this day or any other.

Oh, wait. I misspoke.
Some of the world watches.
Many don’t.

I know many mothers—
so deeply colonised
they’ve forgotten how tightly we are all woven.

They fall into line
instead of falling back
into the ancient web of women—
threaded with memory,
woven with breath,
resisting every system
that tried to sever us.

I know mothers
who weren’t raised—
they were trained for this illusion.
Programmed, if you will,
to acutally believe
that neither they nor their daughters
would ever be touched by harm.

Women so disconnected from aliveness,

From collective-ness
they cannot see
how insane it is to sit by and watch the numbers
of dead bodies rise.

100 or 100,000—
all the same when you chose not the meet their eyes

I know mothers
who see the safety they’re wrapped in
as "privilege"—
a replacement for the word oppression

Making the cage is creates invisible.

A cage that keeps them from the
knowing,
feeling,
sleep walking in a society where

you must protect
anything and everything even when
you know—
deep down—
it also be taken away.
Especially
if you keep walking that way.

Today,
my fist stays raised—
angry,
impolite,
unrelenting.
Dedicated to what it is on us women to change.

Get your “It’s not my job”
out of our fucking way.
You’re drowning in busy
cause men designed you that way.
It’s how the system survives—
one gives ‘til they break,
the other gets rest
and calls it a “hard day.”

Today,
my heart hardens
with purpose.
I step past my fragility—and yours.

Look up from colourful bouquets
and finally learn
what the red poppy means.

Start dreaming—
what would the world be
for the darkest-skinned of us to also be seen?
the most ancient of queens.

You would have to say something.
You would need to speak truth
in the face of power that oppresses you too.
You would have to stop pretending
this is unimaginable.

Because it is more than imaginable.

Sweet sister,
Your body was born with empathy thread through.

Imagine:

your child’s body burned by war
with nowhere to take them
because they burned that too.
Your child,
asking why,
body shaking with sobs
as she lays next to the body
of her first friend.

You,
burying your baby
a few months after a natural birth
in the same place.

You can feel this.
You do know this.

Maybe not this war—
but a war nonetheless.

Wake up, sweet sister.
Listen closely for the lies

Try again, don’t forget what we call privilege
is just the same old oppression
with a new name.
It’s inherited.
Passed down
by our lines
who took
and took—
and took.

And this—
this is what brutal taking looks like today:

A murmur of
“Not my fault.”
A whisper of
“It’s too far.”
A sigh of
“It’s too much.”

Exactly
what we were trained to say.

There is no pride in the ability to obey
And I know—I know
you hate it this way.

This Mother’s Day—
Stand with me.
Find a way to pry open the gates
of rage, of grief, of unconditional solidarity.

We stay with them
because their loss is unbearable,
and because the lie that we are untouched
has cost us, too.

All that taking?
It took from us.
It taught us to fear our power.
To numb our knowing.
To trade truth for approval,
and silence for survival.
It made us useful
and hollow.

I can only hope you still feel the aching.

We will stay with them
until our presence becomes
unignorable.
Until the warmth of our defiance
is felt across every manmade border,
and our singing voices
can no longer be bought.

We will stay with them,
every day, until justice breathes again,
and a new mantra from our daughters rings far into the next century,
now screaming, now chanting

HOW CAN I BE, SO YOU CAN ALSO BE FREE?