Mothering at the End of the World
April 22, 2025 at 04:30PMIn this essay for The Bitter Southerner, Gray Chapman profiles several women from North Carolina who recount the surreal experience of mothering through natural disaster. When Hurricane Helene destroyed their communities and changed their worlds forever, these mothers stepped up to help—and hold up—their neighbors in need. “The horses and helicopters made national news,” writes Chapman, “but intimate, microcosmic acts of tending and nurturing made life bearable for those who survived.” Chapman writes a beautiful piece and series of profiles on motherhood, solidarity, and survival.
I visited North Carolina two months after the storm. Less than two months after that, the Palisades and Eaton wildfires would ravage Los Angeles, with an estimated 28 direct fatalities as of late January and thousands of homes lost. In the aftermath of both disasters, all I could (and can) think about are the mothers. Delivering babies in a city with no electricity or clean water, or in a city engulfed in flames. Losing everything — clothing and furniture and a roof over one’s head, and also the stick-figure crayon drawings on the fridge, the beloved stuffies and favorite pajamas, the impossibly tiny hospital bracelets — to flood waters or fire. The terror of fleeing. The terror of staying. The precarity of bedtime routines, the bone-deep exhaustion, the mundane and the ecstatic of motherhood’s daily practice, all darkened by the question: What kind of world have I brought my child into?
I’d like to say that experiences like Jenny’s are unthinkable, but I don’t think we have the privilege of using that word anymore. Not in a time when records are constantly being broken for hurricanes, storms, wildfires, heatwaves, and drought; after a year when every single person in the country was under some sort of extreme weather alert at one point. Communities on one side of the country have barely begun rebuilding before communities on the other side of the country are reduced to ashes. Unthinkable? I’m not sure I know a mother who hasn’t thought of it, or who’s read these stories and hasn’t imagined herself living them. Hasn’t pictured what she’d grab and what she’d leave behind, hasn’t imagined the extent to which she’d fight tooth and nail to protect what matters most. Hasn’t hoped like hell that she’ll never have to find out.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/22/mothering-at-the-end-of-the-world/
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