Remembering Mom
My mom, Dana Anderson, died two years ago today.
As mentioned in my June 2023 Monthly Roundup, her death was one reason I stepped away from teaching college.
Reading his book, I discovered my decision was not unlike one made by Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues in November 2000, when his mother died of cancer.
“My heart fell a thousand stories that day,” Bogues wrote in, “Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball,” “So, I simply retired. Although I could have played four more seasons and totaled 17, 14 would have to do.”
Bogues, who like me stands about 5’3” — and who also like me was, from what I gather, 35 when his mom passed — wrote that his mom was his “whole world.”
“She was the first person to support me in my life, to love me, to shield me from the jokers, jocks, and jerks,” he explained. “She helped me at every crucial moment in my life. Then she was gone. I had no strength to play basketball.”
I could/can relate.
The shortest hooper to ever play in the NBA also recounted on camera something I think most shorter guys and smaller kids with supportive moms can relate to.
“Many days, many nights, go home and just crying to my mom and just telling her how cruel the kids are out there and, you know, how mean they were,” he shared. “But she was always, you know, always quick to say that — [she] had no idea what basketball was about — but she was quick to say, ‘You know, Ty’ — it was Ty for her at the time, ‘You know, Ty, don’t let them take your joy. If you like playing basketball you go out there and play. You know, know one’s going to be an expert on your life. They don’t know how big your heart [is], or what your capabilities are. But you want to play, you just go out there and play.”
At the time he retired, Bogues was 12th all time in assists and 15th in dimes per contest, as he humbly boasts in his book. For five seasons, he was also top 20 in the league in steals. Over the course of his career, he scored 6,858 points, dropped 6,726 dimes and, notably, blocked 39 shots.
Back in the nineties, a photographer managed to snap an epic photo of Bogues playing against the GOAT, Michael Jordan.
Many might remember that Jordan famously retired from basketball for the first time after his father died. His dad had encouraged him to try baseball, and to honor his late father, he gave it a shot. Upon returning to the hardwood in 1995, he wore the number 45 on his jersey.
Several years later, Jay-Z famously referenced Jordan comeback and his return jersey in the song, “Encore,” a track included on what I would argue might be his best record, “The Black Album”: “As fate would have it, Jay's status appears / To be at an all-time high, perfect time to say goodbye / When I come back like Jordan / Wearing the 4-5, it ain't to play games with you”
As I explained in that last monthly roundup, I’m going to teach college again in the fall. My return to work as an adjunct professor is not infused with the same impetus and, perhaps, is not quite on par with Jay’s bars or Jordan’s return to the NBA. But I’ll try to enjoy it and hone my craft all the same. My mom, who taught eighth grade literature in Hillsboro, Illinois, for about 20 years, would approve of that approach, I think.
In her memory, I’m sharing with you below a piece I wrote for the outlet Parents that documents how single parents have come together to improve their finances. In coincidental, apropos fashion, Parents first published it on my birthday — November 17 — circa 2021, a few months after my mom died. But, per a recent email response from the editor I worked with at the outlet, when Dotdash bought Meredith at the end of that year, and website migrations ensued, some articles/URLs were redirected to higher performing pieces to consolidate website traffic. The article I wrote, “How Marginalized Single Parents Are Uniting to Improve Community Finances on Their Own Terms,” was one that suffered the fate of redirection. Thanks to the magic of the Internet Archive, however, you can still read a version of the original, here. But I also received the green light to take the draft elsewhere. So I’m bringing it right here to you, Waywards reader. You can find it below, beneath the picture of my mom reading to me when I was just a baby.
Under the piece originally authored for Parents, and below the photo my sister took of the gravestone we got for our mother, I’m also resharing an essay I wrote and published here on Waywards for paid subscribers. Since those subscribers are currently nonexistent, I figure why not just make the essay widely available?
And in case you missed it, you can still listen to a conversation I had with my sister about our mother back in December.
How Marginalized Single Parents Are Uniting to Improve Community Finances on Their Own Terms
By James Anderson
Almost 20 years ago, economist-cum-entrepeneur Sylvia Ann Hewlett, then-executive director for the National Parenting Association Nancy Rankin, and inimitable public intellectual Cornel West published Taking Parenting Public: The Case for a New Social Movement, a co-edited book released in 2002.
In the preface, Hewlett and West wrote that "the political invisibility and cultural devaluing of parents has blinded us to their enormously important societal role," adding that, looking forward, "a vigorous parents' movement could well create the energy that would reinvent government and banish the apathy and cynicism that haunt our public life."
The book also makes this clear: We cannot underestimate the role (and the needs!) of single parents in particular—within any such movement.
Nearly one quarter of children in the United States now live with a single parent, according to the Pew Research Center. Those households can struggle more financially.
In 2020, family households maintained by men without a spouse earned a median income of about $34,000 less than married-couple households, whose median income is just over six figures. Meanwhile, the median income for families maintained by women without a spouse was around $52,000 less than that of married couples—all according to a report on income and poverty issued in September 2021 by the Census Bureau.
Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, recounted in her contribution to Taking Parenting Public how historically, many of our most important "polices have been nurtured by partnerships of government and popularly rooted voluntary associations," and major actors in the "early 1900s state and national legislation for mothers and children were the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the National Congress of Mothers (which eventually turned into the PTA)."
Massive women's associations in the early 20th century championed "mothers' pensions" to assist women who lost a spouse, or in some cases, to aid mothers who never married, Skocpol now tells Parents. She emphasizes the commonplace view at the time: Child-rearing was seen as socially valuable. Today, on the other hand, we assume mothers (especially single mothers) are also working—and Skocpol points to a lack of public support providing single parents cash payments.
Yet, Skocpol also says we seem to have entered "a period where people are reconsidering whether it's a good thing to help—for the public to help children, all children, and particularly to pull children out of poverty, because the United States has one of the highest child poverty rates in the advanced industrial world."
The American Families Plan proposed in 2021 by the Biden administration arguably reflects that ongoing reconsideration; it would augment existing subsidies and keep child care costs for low- and middle-income families below eight percent of their income.
But many communities cannot afford to wait on the federal government.
"We're always fighting for legislation and supports for parents and for childcare," Arelene Inouye, secretary for United Teachers Los Angeles, tells Parents. She also underscores the actions her union has taken on the local level to bolster both the working conditions and financial situations of members.
For example, during negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2021, United Teachers Los Angeles persuaded the district to agree to a child care stipend for teachers. Thanks to the union-garnered agreement, public school educators could worry a little less about the expenses involved in raising their own kids while at work teaching the children of other parents.
"If you're a parent and you're a teacher, how do you do that?" Inouye asks.
While LAUSD does not intend to continue to offer the stipend, Inouye explains, any member with dependent care can elect to participate in a new Online Academy, a remote teaching program not available to educators in most other unions.
"That means even if you have an elderly parent or, you know, you have children, you have the option to work at home by going to the Online Academy," she says, adding that a side letter agreement between the union and LAUSD includes language that protects those actively caring for dependents by preventing the district from disciplining teachers for emergency situations at home during remote instruction.
The Online Academy independent study option, Inouye adds, is a way for the union to help ensure that single-parent teachers and other members with childcare needs are met—so they can keep teaching and earning an income during the pandemic.
The new virtual program, also known as the City of Angels School, started with just 2,000 participating, but the COVID-19 Delta variant created a surge so that the number of educators involved is now close to 20,000, Inouye says.
The union's "bargaining for the common good" approach and related advocacy provides educators and their communities greater say over their finances. UTLA formed a partnership with First Financial Credit Union to provide financial assistance in the form of fixed-rate loans, deferrals on loan repayments, and waiver of early withdrawal fees on certificates of deposit for members impacted by strike actions.
Thanks to the union's payroll disruption relief arrangements with the California Credit Union, educators in Los Angeles are practicing a public pedagogy premised upon improving not just student learning conditions by bettering their working conditions, but also upon securing the financial future of members in ways that reflect the needs of communities and parents—single parents in particular.
The teacher's union continues to offer child care at union meetings and at convocations of the House of Representatives, where UTLA tries to advocate for policies favorable to working families.
Adilah Adi, a member of the Detroit Radical Childcare Collective since 2017, also stresses how important it is for organizations to provide child care at those sorts of meetings.
"At community events when the org is funding the child care, more single parents are able to engage with the community," she tells Parents. "On their own, it can be more difficult."
The collective in Detroit provides child care at conferences, local events, and at the homes of community residents. The child care providers in the collective charge a living wage of $15 to $20 per hour, but in group settings, individual parents do not have to pay. If a family is experiencing a crisis, Adi explains, they can reach out to the DRCC for free child care and other support—such as having people attend court with them or assist with transportation—and the DRCC can reach out to their support network and the broader community they regularly interact with for help as needed.
The collective also engages in trade for services for families who can't afford the child care cost, which is something parents and guardians of different stripes in Detroit can consider when they need to limit expenditures.
The work of the DRCC is explicitly and consciously political, Adi explains. In addition to creating activity stations for kids, they're also talking to them about feminism, anti-racism, Black Power, environmental justice, restorative justice, and progressive as well as liberation politics.
"We're doing that in a way that doesn't traumatize them, but makes them informed," she says.
They also practice mutual aid as part of their politics—as illustrated in late September 2021, when the DRCC posted an image on their Facebook page that states in all caps, "please help a single mother get food," along with Cashapp, PayPal, and Venmo info.
Journalist Dani McClain tells Parents that, partly as a consequence of the pandemic, we're in a moment wherein "mutual aid" has become common outside of the communities that have relied on it for a long time.
McLain, who authored We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, points to the West African tradition of su-su or sou-sou sharing, now practiced in neighborhoods throughout the United States, which can be "like a rotating loan program, or maybe it would be a grant program, where people are saving funds that they then make available to one person in the circle...every month or whatever time period they're working with, so that someone has a much bigger chunk of money to use for whatever they need than they would if they were saving independently."
In addition to specific practices like su-su, McLain says what she personally experienced and what she observed most often when doing research for her book are the informal examples of mutual aid among families. For instance, she said someone might say to a friend: "Hey, I'm sick, and my kid still needs to eat, and I can't make dinner. Can you bring over a pot of soup?"
Linda Jacobs, author of The Single Parent: Confident and Successful, and the ministry ambassador at the Church Initiative, the parent ministry overseeing the Single & Parenting program, says she prayed that religious institutions "would realize how valuable single parents are, and how much they can add to the church in the community."
Jacobs admits to incessantly pestering those in her organization to do more for single parents, and she says others spoke up about a program for single parents too, which is how S&P was born. It's a 13-week, video-based support group, but it's also much more. Local Single & Parenting support groups convene weekly across the US, some in-person and some virtual since the onset of the pandemic.
"When you are single and parenting, you have a whole community," Jacobs says, adding that parents of similarly-aged children tend to group together.
The program emphasizes budgeting and finances, but participants also share their expenses, and the camaraderie bolstered by collective knowledge encourages single parents to start saving a little on a routine basis.
"I encourage single parents to call each other and talk to each other about things, and they do," Jacobs says. They discuss strategies for saving money, like cutting back on what's not essential and limiting how many times they eat out every week.
In the same vein, Chantel Cox founded Positive Reflections, a non-profit organization that empowers marginalized single women with children to break the cycle of generational trauma that she experienced firsthand—as the daughter of a single mom, raised by her grandmother, and as a single mother of two daughters of her own. In trying to find herself, Cox says she found her way to helping other women, which led to creating a space where women without partners can learn from each other and help themselves.
"With Positive Reflections, you have to look at yourself and like what you see," she tells Parents. "You have to look within yourself and like who you are."
"I'm helping them to get a credit card, and showing them how to use it," Cox says of the single moms she works with in Virginia. "So then we create a space of accountability where we're checking in one with another. We're checking in as a team. Now we have a support system where they've been introduced to other women so they're realizing, now I'm not alone; the world is not against me."
A multitude of examples, only a few of which are mentioned above, illustrate ostensibly growing concern for both the psycho-emotional and the financial well-being of children and parents—particularly those raising kids without the support of a partner.
Examples of that concern translated into solidarity abound, from long-standing institutions such as Parents Without Partners (a support group for single parents and their children in existence since 1959) to the relatively small Oakland-based Moms 4 Housing collective (which made waves in November 2019 when mothers took direct action and moved into a vacant home with their children, kickstarting a new nationwide movement for the unsheltered).
The "vigorous parents' movement" Hewlett and West envisioned back in 2002 may also already be underway in incipient form. It's just that the "political invisibility" they referred to—which arguably applies to the work of single, custodial moms and dads most of all—can keep us from recognizing and appreciating it.
A Modicum of Comfort
By James Anderson
It was mid-afternoon on a Friday in July when I received a fateful phone call from my sister.
I had a plane ticket to fly out of Southern California’s Inland Empire later that night. I had plans to visit family and friends in Illinois.
Then I got that phone call.
My sister, Katy, sounded upset – almost hysterical – when I answered. She told me our mom had stopped breathing. The EMTs performed CPR on my mother in the house she shared with my sister, and then they rushed her to the hospital. Katy was headed there too, and she said she would call once she arrived.
She did. But not before my mom died.
When my sister got to the hospital, she spoke over the phone with my uncle, my mother’s brother.
The doctor emerged and provided a bleak assessment of my mother’s condition to those in the room and on the phone, I learned later.
My mom’s vitals vanished. The doctor needed to know when to make the call and end resuscitation efforts.
Katy deferred to family on the phone. After posing a series of pertinent questions, my uncle and aunt made the decision.
I got another call from my sister. “Mom’s dead,” she said.
Irate and incredulous, I yelled out in anguish at the indifferent universe.
It had been so long since I had seen my mom in person, or hugged her or hung out with her in a way that didn’t involve a virtual video-conferencing platform.
Flying out of Ontario, Calif., around midnight, I tried to sleep and tried not to cry. Unsuccessful at the former and only partially successful at the latter, the flight dragged on.
After we touched down, I made my way to Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood and walked around in a surreal state, before a friend picked me up. We drove down to Southern Illinois, and he dropped me off at the house my sister had shared with my mother.
My sister and I prepared a track list to be played during the visitation and funeral the night before our mom would be buried. Songs ranged from Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” to “Handle with Care” by the Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup whose music, along with cigarette smoke, I recall wafting up from the downstairs when my parents, prior to their divorce, used to have parties with other adults in our basement when Katy and I were young.
The visitation and funeral went as well as could be expected, but the services hardly healed the hole in my heart.
When I got back to California the grieving started anew.
A friend from Illinois suggested via text that I try “talking” to my (dead) mother. I think he meant that if I made a statement or posed a question for her that I could arrive at an intuitive understanding of what she would likely say in response, which could in turn provide solace and guidance.
When I returned to my studio unit in Riverside, Calif., I started involuntarily conversing with my mom, but not in the way my friend had in mind. Alone and overcome with grief, I experienced ephemeral infantile regression, for lack of a less embarrassing way to put it.
For the first few weeks back I’d cry out to my empty room, “Why’d you leave me, mama? My mama wouldn’t leave me.” The cries seem puerile in retrospect. But they also didn’t exactly seem optional at the time.
Ever the agnostic, I lent little credence to the conventional Judeo-Christian conception of “heaven”; however, I witnessed myself asking, as irrationally as the inquiry seemed even at the time, “Will I see you again in heaven, mama? Will I see you again in heaven?”
Heart-wrenching sadness ensued, as did an awareness my previously unacknowledged best friend had forever exited my life.
I thought about a book that my mom read to me when I was young – Robert Munsch’s “Love You Forever,” with illustrations by Sheila McGraw. A few years ago, I sent my mom a copy of the book for Mother’s Day. The boy who grows into a man in the story got to be there for his mom in her final hours the way I wanted to be there for mine, but life doesn’t always unfold like a children’s book.
As I continued to grieve off and on, I found myself apologizing (aloud and alone) for all of the things I might’ve faulted my mom for doing or not doing when I was a kid, knowing more deeply now than ever before that she did her best and that her best was better than she ever knew.
Yet, my mom and I spoke on the phone often. She was going to help me navigate a career pivot I soon planned to make away from teaching college as an adjunct professor and toward writing, journalistic and media-related work.
Long conversations with my sister helped, as did conversations with and text messages back and forth between friends. Some consistently helped make life bearable, others waited patiently for me to get a grip and a few left an indelible impression, helping me heal before also, even understandably, exiting the scene and unleashing a fire whirl of fresh emotional anguish. Still, the discussions we had and the passage of time probably made the biggest difference for me in terms of processing grief.
And then about a month after my mom’s death, a coincidence marked a turning point.
Late one night in August 2021 I returned to reading a book I bought back in May. After I finished reading a section from “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Deaths and Entrances,” by David and Loucy Boucher, I glimpsed a pocket-sized pamphlet between the front cover and the first page of the book that I had not noticed before. Upon first glance, I could see the card had “In Remembrance” written on the front, and inside it included information on memorial services for a man born 120 years ago in Mulberry Grove, Ill., a rural town located only about 10 miles from where I grew up.
On the back of the card I encountered a poem, “Comfort,” by William Cullen Bryant. The short verses immediately caught my eye as I was still trying to figure out how the card ended up inside the book and how I had not noticed it until just then.
I must have come across the card in Illinois when my sister and I sorted through documents my mom saved. But I have no recollection of finding it or placing it in that book I took with me but barely touched on the trip. As I read Bryant’s words to myself late that night, a heightened sensibility stirred and allayed in part my melancholy mood.
With its testament to human suffering coupled with hopeful sentiment that even the most atheistic among us might appreciate, the poem, true to its title, provided a modicum of comfort.
Whether my mother and I are afforded the opportunity to embrace each other again in an afterlife or some realm unfathomable to mere mortals – a notion that probably provides people comfort to a greater degree than it offers us a true image of any ethereal reality – the wisdom and fortitude she imparted here on earth will forever inform what I do, and ineluctably, then, I write this with her in an excruciatingly real sense as much as I write this for her. For me, the writing, whether I like it or not, functions as a reminder of how simultaneously sensitive and strong Dana Anderson, my mom for 35 years who raised two kids more or less as a single parent for a not-insignificant amount of time, remained until the day she died. I doubt I could separate myself from her spirit, or disposition, even if I wanted to. Knowing that strangely affords some comfort as well.