Maternal Love & the Mama Bear

The color of the mother doesn't matter

Not all mothers protect their children.

Most frog mamas never even meet their babies. In a frenzied nighttime free-for-all, gametes are released—eggs from the female frogs, sperm from the males—and some of them come together to form new life. Those fertilized eggs which hatch into tadpoles before metamorphosing into frogs, though—they have to do it all on their own. Their mothers aren’t around to help.

Ants have mothers that they never see—although they know their sisters well. Vipers, while not totally absentee mothers, don’t have a particularly close relationship with their babies, and everyone wanders off to go their own way soon enough. Cuckoos trick mothers of entirely different species into raising their young for them.

Every animal on the planet has a mother. But most don’t have a relationship with her.¹

Mammal mamas, though, we defend our children.

For well over one hundred million years, we have had the ability—and the obligation—to nourish our children from our own bodies. From this early truth has emerged another: among mammals, all mothers defend our children. We have an ancient, unbreachable bond. We mammals are—some more metaphorically than others—mama  bears.

This is true for polar bears and for black bears. Their color makes no difference.

It is even true for spectacled bears, who have a particular fondness for avocados. Their fondness for avocados does not get in the way of their mothering.

It is true for rabbits and for rats, for beavers and for bats.

It is true for dolphins. Even the pink ones.

The color of the mother doesn’t matter. Obviously.

And yet The New York Times has published a piece declaring that “mama bear” is a dog whistle to white conservatives, because, we are told, there has certainly never been a mama bear with brown skin. “No one who looks like [Kamala] Harris can be a mama bear….The power of [black mothers’] grief visibly threatens the power structures of white supremacy.”²

Come again?

The author of the New York Times op-ed further attests that there are “racial fears that nonwhite motherhood stokes in this nation’s soul.”

Such claims are false and weak, but they are also inflammatory. Oh, it’s a powerful brew. Such claims have no bearing on reality, yet will land on some people and enrage them and, upon seeing that rage, they will land on others as if the claims are true.

“If people are so upset by the idea that “mama bear” is a white thing, well, I guess it must be true. They wouldn’t be upset about it if it didn’t have a grain of truth, right?”

Wrong.

In my Open Letter last week, I addressed Van Badham, the woman who wrote an op-ed for The Guardian, by name. Why am I not doing the same this week—why have I not addressed this to Tressie McMillan Cottom, the author of the New York Times op-ed? Is it because I, apparently like all white Americans, nay, all white people everywhere and throughout time, am fundamentally fearful of and hateful towards black people?

Nah. It’s because Tressie McMillan Cottom, the person who makes fabulist claims about the racist underpinnings of the term “mama bear,” preemptively blocked me on twitter.

It’s almost as if she doesn’t want a conversation. Doesn’t want to hear what other people have to say. Isn’t interested in discovering where her model of the world might be overly simplistic, or just plain wrong.

Why are we being told, over and over again, but without evidence, that we are a country filled with hatred? So many of us fall prey to suggestions that become hypnotic, when repeated endlessly, that of course we dislike those who look different from ourselves, of course we distrust our neighbors, of course we can never get along, as the pain is too deep, the rifts too ancient.

The telling and retelling and retelling serve to divide us. To fracture us, slicing through our psyches. We forget. Too easily, we forget.

We forget that actually, we care about one another. Yes, we notice each other’s differences. Sometimes we embrace those differences, and sometimes we don’t. Very often, we just don’t care. Our shared humanity is what matters.

And one of the things that makes us very, very human is the fact that we love our children so much that we will defend them with a focus that can be staggering to witness.

Here is some of what I said about Mama Bears back in October 2022:

Mothers have a special bond with, and a particular ferocity around protecting, their children. Mothers, like everyone, can be conned into thinking that the very wrong thing that they are doing is the very right thing. But once they discover that they’ve been duped, that their children are being hurt? Mama bears need to spring into action to right the wrong.

Mama bears, do not hesitate because you are concerned that you have already caused harm. Do not wait because you are embarrassed, or ashamed. Do not fail to act because you are afraid of what your child will think of you, or say to you. Your child may well distance herself from you now if you go against her wishes, and that will be hard. Do not focus on that hardship.

Instead, consider your child in one year, in five years, in ten, and in twenty. Consider the conversation that you will have with your child then, if you fail to intervene now.

Mama bears, stand up for your children against that which would do them harm.

Halting puberty harms children.

Putting teenagers on cross-sex hormones harms them.

Embracing misogynistic, regressive sex stereotypes harms children.

Cutting off the healthy breasts of girls and young women harms them.

Injecting children and teenagers with experimental treatments that are particularly risky for young people, to protect them against a disease for which they are at very low risk, harms them.

Encouraging your children to wear masks at home, or outside, harms them.

Encouraging fear in your children, rather than curiosity, harms them. Demanding acquiescent safety behaviors to protect from all that you can see, while leaving the children exposed to myriad more dangers that you cannot, harms them.

Presenting a simple world in which you focus on a single parameter—gender, a virus—harms your children. It is a deceit. Your children will come to understand that. And then what? What will you say to them then? Do right by them now.

What do you want for your children? Do you want them to be insightful and merciful, capable of generating wisdom, and kind to all who merit kindness? Do you want them to be curious and capable, generative and generous? I do. I want these things for my children, and I want them for all children.

All children.

Do not believe the divisive rhetoric that we are being fed by the mainstream media. We can be made to fight amongst ourselves. It keeps us narrowly focused, bitter, and fearful. That trick has been working for a very long time.

But we don’t need to take the bait. It’s better that we not.

Recognize the differences that you have with your neighbors—discuss them even—and also recognize that, in the final accounting, there is far more that we all have in common. That, too, warrants discussion.

Mama lion with her cub, Maasai Mara, Kenya. Photo credit: Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography

1. The preponderance and diversity of parental care across animals is extraordinary, however. Many birds not only have maternal care, they have paternal care, the parents pair-bonded to one another and attentive to their eggs’ and hatchlings’ needs. In some species of octopus, mothers literally provide their body as sustenance for their developing brood, not living to see the little ones grow up. Cichlid fish, among others, keep their babies safe by brooding them in their mouths. Some species of dragonflies have nurseries in which they collectively raise their young. Even many species of frogs provide for their babies, including by feeding them unfertilized eggs on which to feast. But it is the combination of the eponymous trait of mammals—our mammary glands, and therefore our ability to lactate—and the nearly ubiquitous mammalian trait of gestation—carrying our babies inside of us as they grow—which render all mammal mothers caregivers, at least in the beginning. For more about the developing relationship between not just mammal mothers and babies, but human mothers and babies more specifically, see Parenthood and Relationship, chapter 8 of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century.

2. The “power structures of white supremacy” did exist, and some of their effects are still felt, but invoking them as if they are a reality in 2024 America is either naïve or dishonest. Such claims serve to keep us embittered and embattled.