It is the big day. My daughter's history fair competition. When I wake up, she is already at my bedside, fully dressed, munching on a bagel. She's been working for the last three months on this project, and after local competitions, she's managed to make it to the state finals. She talks incessantly while I dress, repeating all the facts she's memorized to tell the judges. In between it all, she slips in the announcement that she's invited not only her grandparents, uncle, and cousin, but her three tias as well. She tells me they all confirmed that they will be attending.

I wonder how my ten-year-old managed to organize an entire family gathering all on her own.

I can't describe the exact moment when I knew that *F*eminism[1] as I had been practicing it would never work. But I do know the moment when I realized I had just spent the last five years of my life building the wrong thing.

It was right about the time that my daughter (with the help of an older friend) figured out that the Internet was more than a few PBS sites and an occasional email to Grandma and Grandpa. As I sat on a conference call with my fellow women of color organizers wondering how to deal with the latest drama, my daughter declared that most of her friends knew how to get around the various Internet monitoring devices their parents had installed on home computers, and that she even had friends who were "hooking up" with older boys and men online.

But because I was "working," I told her to shush. After I got off the phone, I asked her to expand on what she had said. As she described the "flirting" one boy had done with a friend of hers, however, I had to cut her off. There was another phone call I had to be on, and then there were the emails and posts and tweets that had to be posted. I told her we'd talk again after I got my work done and sent her off to play.

But a heavy gnawing sensation that had been in my stomach for a while dug in a little deeper.

That was not the first time that I had made my family wait for me so that "work" could get done. There were the weekends I was out of town, the hours and hours spent in front of the computer, the unexpected crises that had to be solved immediately. I've lost track of the number of times I told my family, "hold on, it will be just a minute," only to finally emerge from behind the computer three hours later. The thing was, it wasn't that I loved my job. It wasn't that most of the work I was doing was even paid work. It was that the work I was doing was "revolutionary." It was "liberatory" and "world changing," and "necessary."

I'd seen with my own eyes the differences the work in which I was engaged was creating. Radical women of color bloggers had claimed a space on the Internet. Mami media makers[2] had demanded a presence at major media conferences, and a CD to fund travel was soon created. What started out as a handful of bloggers looking for friendship and support had become a political force to be reckoned with. We weren't the problem; we were the solution.

So every time I made my family wait for me, every time I disappeared for meetings, it was in the righteous name of liberation. I was making change, and I was doing it for my kids, for myself, for my family. If others were free, we would be. And yet, my daughter's whispered words during a phone call exposed a pressing crisis that I was ignoring and really had no resources or skills to negotiate. All the righteous liberatory work was doing nothing at all to address the sexism and potential violence my daughter was growing in to. And ironically, the activism that did nothing to address her needs was leaving very little time left in the day for me to help her as a mother.

The dynamics I was seeing in the conflict between my daughter's needs and the needs of the movement resembled the dynamics between *F*eminists and feminists. That is, between Organizations and organizing. Between Institutions and communities. Over and over again, I'd read essays and posts written by largely white, young, middle-class, cisgendered, heterosexual U.S. citizens insisting that young women call themselves feminists. As the argument went, young women did everything but claim the title, pulling the "I'm not a feminist, but..." move. It was time, they argued, for young women to eliminate the "but..." and proudly claim feminism for what it is. A movement of women by women and for women.

But it wasn't just that young women should call themselves *F*eminists. It was also that all women should support The Movement, investing all their time into gender liberation for women. Precious few self-proclaimed *F*eminists ever wondered what they meant when they said "woman," and even fewer spent any significant time challenging *F*eminists to consider what they really meant when they said "The Movement." It seemed to be implicit that there was an inherent type of woman and that women needed a singular type of movement that could be encompassed in easy-to-list bullet points: abortion, equal pay, equality. The problem was that *F*eminism has long been something that was and is imposed on women, something that was done to far too many women, with little regard to the very real reasons those same women might rebel at *F*eminism to begin with. Those arguing to get rid of the "but..." were continuing the decades long patter of *F*eminism asking women to mold their needs and beliefs around a *F*eminist Movement, rather than The Movement working for them. And in a world where survivor led protests seemed more and more antiquated and the idea that fishnet stockings and pretty packaging were viable recruitment techniques, *F*eminists were becoming more and more invested in the idea that those who spoke the prettiest, most convincing way were the leaders—rather than the women developing strategies to confront gendered inequality and violence.

And yet, it took my daughter's declaration in the middle of a phone call for me to finally realize that I was doing the same thing the *F*eminists were doing in my own organizing. Yes, I had learned to interrogate "woman" through many different lenses—but I had not seen that in my own life the most necessary way was through a lens of age. I was expecting my daughter to grow up and join me, rather than me reaching out to her as she was and listening to her needs. In my own way, I had made women of color feminism the *F*eminism to follow, the singular answer around which she needed to shape her life and of which I was the leader.

Without even realizing it at first, I began backing out of *F*eminist commitments. I stopped attending meetings, declined conference calls, and even wrote about different topics on my blog. The new silence in my life overwhelmed me. First I was bored, and then to my surprise, I physically collapsed. I rarely got out of bed, and when I did, I could only just barely sit straight up in a chair. Climbing stairs was next to impossible, and I was developing an odd body twitch about which I was too scared to ask the doctor. I found myself logging into the computer because it was an easy way to prove I was awake and "productive" rather than because I was really interested in what I was doing.

I spent a lot of time crying, reading, searching for singular magic cures to my problems, and feeling betrayed and hurt. I'd always known that there were problems with institutional *F*eminism; I'd always known that a radical woman of color feminism was formed out of a critique of the singular ideology of *F*eminism. And yet, I'd somehow managed to become so misdirected in my organizing, I'd actually managed to help institutionalize radical woman of color feminism! How had I done that? More importantly, how had I reached a point where I was working so many hours for free, giving up relationships with family and friends, and even sacrificing my own health? Why did I think that The Movement was more important than my own survival? And why was The Movement making it so easy for me to think so?

As so many of us do, I looked for answers in the words of movement elders. I spent so much time rereading Gloria Anzaldua's La Frontera/The Borderlands that the book's binding cracked down the middle. Although Gloria really didn't have too much to say about The Movement, she did reflect deeply on the multiple borders in our lives. She described the physical borders like the one on the U.S./Mexican border, and the personal emotional borders that we all erect as survival mechanisms. She pointed out that those methods of survival sometimes turned into sites of destruction and violence that physically hurt us. She was emphatic to the pain of border crossing, of going home, but understood that liberation couldn't happen without it.

Because I was not strong enough to do much else, I decided to look at the borders in my own life. Just notice them. How tall they were, where they were erected, why I had built them to begin with. It became clear that the most dominant border was between The Movement and my personal life. Any organizer knows what I am talking about—organizers, more often than not, choose to keep their radical lives, their organizing jobs, so separate from their families, their homes, their neighborhoods, that it feels like they live double lives: the life where they are accepted as normal, interesting, and loved for who they are, and the life where they sit in silence, biting tongues and rolling eyes, and are loved for who their families think they are.

I asked my fellow organizers the question I found myself staring at more and more: are you friends with your family on Facebook? Next to nobody answered yes. Most people couldn't even answer no, their mouths dropping open and their eyes widening in shock at the utter implausibility of my question. I would've been a bit exasperated with their reactions, except I knew the truth. I have exactly three people from my own family as Facebook friends, and one of them is my husband. Furthermore, my husband was the only person in my family who knew that I blogged, spoke at conferences, advocated for the dissolving of the nation/state, and more than likely had been subject to FBI surveillance while attending a march with a local anti-war organization that was on the FBI watch list. Without realizing it, I'd done my very best to separate my radical self and my "family" self. I cringed with the same horror that my friends did at the thought of "outing" myself to my family.

I had also managed to create this separation between my radical self and "family" self within my own community. As doctor appointments began to take up more time on the calendar than meetings, and as my own understanding of my health became murkier, I physically felt how few local support systems I actually had. There was nobody to watch the kids when I felt particularly sick, there was nobody to take me to the doctor when the car broke down. And there was nobody with the energy to deal with the stark reality of being a young girl in the age of the Internet.

Because Gloria wondered, I wondered. What would happen if I went home? What would it mean to me, my family, my health, if I built my own home? If I crossed and merged the borders cutting through my life?

I still did not have the energy or even the desire to try to return to The Movement, but I did know that it was time to reach out to my daughter. She was lucky enough to have made it this far relatively safely, but I knew that we could not count on her luck lasting forever. I decided to see what would happen if instead of dismissing her abilities and knowledge as an activist in her own right, I honored it. I spent time exploring the different borders and boundaries in her life to see how I could help her to cross and merge them before they became too solid or real.

Our immediate physical community was the first space in which I saw potential for movement-making. It turns out that she and the kids in the neighborhood were bored by the limits all the families on the street had imposed on them. Play dates were what made the grown ups feel comfortable, in control. But running over to play four square because there was nothing else to do was what the kids needed. Kids acted as the ultimate border crossers. Efficient and tireless, the kids paid little attention to capitalism, preferring to share toys so there was more. And then I discovered that my daughter was acting as a model on how to negotiate community problems. My daughter and another boy were the oldest kids on the block, and really didn't care for each other too much. But their choices were to play with the little kids, play with each other, or don't play at all. Eventually, out of necessity, they talked through problems and came up with solutions to get what they both desired, a break in the continuous monotony of summer. My daughter ignored the quirks of the boy that irked her but didn't harm her, and in return, the boy agreed to join her games rather than impose his own agenda on her.

We parents eventually were smart enough to follow the kid's lead. We had to negotiate any dislike or discomfort with fellow neighbors; the kid's crossing through the boundaries of parental dislike over the bridge of friendship gave us no choice. Potlucks soon seemed easier and even more fun than isolated meals, and parents agreed to watch children while other parents ran errands because they knew they'd get the favor repaid eventually. Without ever calling an official meeting or a rally to decide as much, the community agreed: the kids' safety was the community priority, and thus the safety of the block, and even the surrounding community, was an integral part of our parenting responsibilities.

And I learned that I didn't have to be a radical woman of color or a part of *F*eminism or attend a rally to know that every time I looked out the window to double check on the kids, I was participating in a deeply political necessary world-changing act.

But if my daughter's needs led to the formation of a "community movement," it was mine that led to the "tia movement." Tia is Spanish for aunt, but in the context of what I was thinking of for my daughter, a closer translation would be auntie, or sistah. I had grown up so far away from both sides of my family that I never experienced a tia relationship, but as an adult I realized how desperately I had needed such a relationship. Puberty alone had left me deeply scarred and unable to trust any grownup. I had learned to accept abandonment and neglect as a normal part of Chicana youth.

As I played around with the idea of finding tias for my daughter, I realized that although I was acting from a place of love for her, I was also trying to give my younger self what she had needed. I should've had tias and sistahs and aunties surrounding me as a girl, helping me to negotiate growing up. The girl I was deserved tenderness and compassion and protection from adults, just like my daughter did. Acknowledging my own needs made asking each of the three women I had chosen to be my daughter's tias much harder than I thought it would be. I wanted to find the perfect time, the amazing space where we could talk, where I could share my love for them and invite them to share the most precious thing I'd ever created. But the kid who I was was too excited and scared, and wound up blurting the question out in the middle of a restaurant to one woman, emailing another, and asking another while she cut my hair.

But even as the little girl I was took up so much space in my adult life, I soon realized that these women were no longer my friends or even the tias I had so longed for, they were my partners. My life partners. In committing to my daughter, we were making a lifetime commitment to each other. We found ourselves negotiating the same things that life partners do—long distance relationships, hurt feelings, mistakes made, jealousies. An example: one tia agreed to pick up my daughter from school one day while I was at work. I didn't think twice about the situation until I got the call from the school wondering where I was and when I was going to get my daughter. As I was on the phone with the school, the call waiting buzzed, and it turned out to be the frantic tia almost sobbing into the phone that she was lost and couldn't figure out where the school was.

Later on, after everybody was picked up and safe at home, we talked about what happened. She shared how she had been unprepared to deal with the traumatic feelings of her youth and remembered being in a similar situation as my daughter: left at school alone, not knowing when or even if her parents would be there to get her. After a lot of talking, we eventually came to the understanding that waiting a little longer than expected for a ride is entirely different than being abandoned. And being abandoned was what both she and I had experienced. My daughter had to wait a little longer to be picked up, and her response was indicative of that. She was bored. Rolled her eyes at the stress both her tia and me were struggling with and asked what was for dinner as she plopped on the couch. She knew somebody would be at the school eventually—she has grown up with the privilege of steady unconditional love surrounding her.

Her tia and I, on the other hand, used the situation to remember and relive the insecurity that being daughters in Latino households created in us. We began to understand exactly how stressful it was to be the perfect Latina oldest daughter who never ever made any mistakes. Through our commitment to each other and to our daughter, we began to see ourselves more clearly and to heal old wounds, just like my husband and I had been doing for the past ten years.

So far, the loving familia built around my daughter has not prevented other girls who know how to get around Internet parental controls from sharing their secrets with her. She still knows and interacts with girls who are more interested in hooking up than playing four square. But now she has somebody to talk to about it all. She has people who can help her make healthy decisions and are listening specifically for her voice, looking for her presence.

In centering and prioritizing my daughter, societal pressure to be the best supermother a daughter could possibly have eased rather than increased. Rather than becoming a martyr mommy who lives for her child, queering up mommyhood, or rather the mamihood, has opened space for creativity, ambiguity, and free time. An organizing meeting is no longer something for which I have to find a babysitter or pack a massive amount of toys, food, and books, it's something that my daughter attends as an equal. She is a part of the community we are organizing—why wouldn't she be there? The pressure on me to attend to two separate communities at the same time fades a little more each time we, as a community, deconstruct old borders and embrace the reality that feminism*s* is where the answers are, because we all need more than one answer, just like we all need more than one mami.

Because of course, the reality is that the infrastructure in far too many neighborhoods does not make looking out the window a simple act. Violence and identity policing prevent children from safely engaging in true border crossing in more neighborhoods than we think. And of course the question must be asked (and is surely being screamed right now by feminists from across the board) what happens with those who don't want kids? Who are childless by choice? Is this new feminism*s* going to demand or require those who politically reject parenthood of any kind to become parents?

I could answer a resounding, "No!" Everything in me wants to, and is pushing to point to how great feminism*s* truly could be—when you have "movements" instead of The Movement, when there are 20 different groups organizing on one block alone, when you have the energy and time to organize with multiple "movements" under the same premise (i.e. community movement, tia movement, etc.) there would be no need to demand anything out of a person that the person isn't willing to give freely. There would also be a compact efficiency to the organizing that would rely less on money and manpower and more on social gatherings and saying hello.

But who knows? Maybe there are problems with feminism*s* that I simply can't see because of my own position in the world. The truly great thing is that in not investing in the idea of one massive all encompassing Movement, when things become totally fucked up, there will still be energy and space to move in a different direction, try something new, or even abandon the project entirely. Massive break-downs will no longer be necessary. The most important thing would be the creating and sharing of different strategies—a pleasant change from the current demand to reify borders that should've never been built to begin with.

One thing I do know for sure, however, is that if I can't act in solidarity with my daughter, if I can expressly reject solidarity with her in the name of a Movement she has little in common with or need of, what kind of organizer would I be? Truly?

My life for the past two years has been a journey of the best sort. It's been productive and life-affirming in a way I never thought was possible. I still only have three family members on Facebook, and things are still at the point where I wonder if that will ever change. But more and more, the little girl I once was is spending her time in the past where she belongs, and my own little girl is learning to count on the queerness that every child deserves.

She finished third at the history competition. As she walked up to the stage to collect her ribbon, her entire family, her tias, grandparents, cousins, parents, and friends were standing in the audience cheering for her. They were there because they loved her, and because of her magnificent organizational skills as a leader of her own movements.

Endnotes

1. *F*eminism = Institutional based feminists (i.e. Feminist Majority, NOW, etc) and/or self-described "professional feminists." [Return to text]

2. Mami media makers = radical women of color organizers that recognize their motherhood (the mamihood) as a political identity that stands in stark contrast to the "mommyhood." [Return to text]