Raising Sons With Clear Eyes And A Soft Heart

I am a mother of sons who is actively interrogating so much — interrogating my position as a mother inside of gender, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the nuclear family, interrogating what it means to be a Black single mother with children by three different men, interrogating what it means to raise sons who I hope, as they grow, come to understand that patriarchy, misogyny, and capitalism are not neutral forces, but systems that shape how we relate to one another, how we understand care, and how we move through the world.

And I am also trying to mother in a way that does not see them as my property, that does not feed them the power-over scripts that are so often normalized inside the nuclear family, where authority, control, and hierarchy become mistaken for love, and obedience becomes mistaken for respect. I don’t get this right all the time — not even close — but I am deeply conscious of it, and that consciousness shapes how I return, how I repair, how I try again.

Part of my work in raising sons in this way is letting them know, over and over again, that they are deeply loved, that their full range of emotions are welcome and honored and necessary, that their feelings are not something to suppress or push through, but something to learn from, something to be in relationship with. I am trying to teach them how to be with their nervous systems, how to put words to what is happening inside of them, how to name frustration and sadness and fear and tenderness, and how to move through those experiences without turning them into hardness or domination.

I am also trying to teach them responsibility, accountability, and kindness toward one another, not as abstract values, but as daily practices, as ways of being that shape how we live together. And as they have grown — as they have turned into teenagers and begun the slow, complicated movement into young men — I have tried to shift how they see themselves in our home, not as people to be taken care of, but as people woven into the fabric of care itself, as participants in tending to one another, in noticing what needs to be done, in holding the emotional and practical life of our household together.

I don’t think of myself as a revolutionary, or an activist, or in broad strokes and titles like that. But I do think of myself as someone who is doing the work, someone who is conscious, someone who is trying to be clear-eyed about the world we are living in and the ways it shapes us. I think of myself as softly strong — and that softness matters to me, because I don’t want to become hardened in response to what I have lived through. There are ways that I am strong, yes, but it is my softness that allows me to parent and mother and be with life in these ways.

Because if I’m truthful, this world has hurt me. It has hurt me, it has scorned me, it has burned me, it has grieved me, it has brought me to my knees. And I am trying to mother from that place — not from bitterness, not from hardness, but from a deep knowing of what it means to be human inside a world that can wound you.

And I want my sons to be able to be with the truth of themselves and the truth of the world without losing their tenderness, without armoring themselves so completely that they become disconnected from their own humanity. I want them to understand that strength does not have to mean domination, that masculinity does not have to mean emotional distance, that care is not weakness, and that being fully human — open, accountable, emotionally alive — is not something to be ashamed of, but something to be cultivated.

This is not light work. It is slow, imperfect, often exhausting work, especially in a world that does not reinforce these values, that continues to hand boys and men scripts of entitlement, disconnection, and power over others. And yet, this is the work I find myself committed to — raising sons while interrogating the systems that shape them, loving them while refusing to prepare them for dominance, and trying, in the small, everyday life of our home, to make room for a different way of being together.