Fight Like a Mother

by Shannon Watts

  In addition to being disappointed for my gender, I was crushed because Hillary had been an outspoken advocate for gun violence prevention. During her campaign, she’d called out the NRA as one of her biggest enemies and had made addressing gun violence prevention a pillar of her platform. She’d traveled with the Mothers of the Movement, which included Moms Demand Action spokeswoman Lucy McBath. I was sure we would finally get the chance to play offense and spend the next four years passing laws that would save lives. And now that promising opportunity evaporated like a mirage. After all, Donald Trump had received $30 million in campaign contributions from the NRA. In fact, he had been the earliest Republican candidate to ever be endorsed by the gun lobby. Not only would we not be winning, but we were going to be playing yet more defense, and to a greater extent than ever before.

  The truth is, we hadn’t prepared for Trump winning. We hadn’t even considered it. The polls and momentum pointed to an easy win for our candidate. Even though the gun violence prevention movement didn’t hinge on whether Hillary Clinton was elected or not—ever since Manchin-Toomey we’ve been focused on effective legislative change at the state level, and we still would be—for a week or two, it felt like maybe it did.

  Now it appeared that the NRA had an open pipeline directly into the White House and would be looking for a return on its investment. That fear was amplified a year later, in December 2017, when NRA President Wayne LaPierre showed up at the White House Christmas party, which just so happened to fall on the five-year commemoration of the Sandy Hook shooting. I had attended that same holiday party just a year earlier—along with many gun violence survivors—when it had been hosted by President Obama. The juxtaposition was sobering.

  After a couple days of honoring my postelection sense of loss, my husband said to me, “You need to pull it together, be a leader, and make sure everyone feels hopeful. Because that’s your job.” Begrudgingly, I knew he was right. I needed to dig deep and rely on the resilience muscles I’d been building since the beginning of Moms Demand Action. After all, there’s a reason #KeepGoing is one of our most used hashtags in our volunteers’ social media posts. It’s part of the ethos of our organization, and what we remind each other to do all the time. So I wrote this Facebook post:

  Someone wise (OK, my husband) pointed out to me that wallowing in despondency over the election results is a luxury too many Americans don’t have. Including those who have been shot and killed. So if I want to be sad for someone today, it’s going to be teens with black and brown skin who will be targeted by armed vigilantes. I’ll worry about abused women whose partners have guns and are enabled to kill by weak gun laws. I’ll be concerned for children who are at risk of having guns forced into grade schools and onto college campuses. No more posts about existential despair. We all must decide what we’re going to do and do it.

  Bob Weiss’s daughter, Veronika, was shot and killed at UCSB. He sent me this note: “Since Veronika was murdered, I’ve changed. I’m still grieving. Probably always will but shit doesn’t faze me or scare me anymore. I’ve already survived a fate worse than death. This horrible election result is a temporary detour. We are winning and will continue to. Hillary is our hero. Our job would be a lot easier with her in the White House. Maybe. She would have faced the same roadblocks as Obama did. We can focus on the states during this brief Trump intermission. Hang in there. I’m proud to be with you.”

  That’s the truth: our movement has never been about one election—it’s about saving lives. And you can bet that with their champion newly elected to the White House, the NRA will strike while the iron is hot in Washington and in our statehouses. That’s why I’ll keep waking up every day as a Moms Demand Action volunteer to organize and speak and travel. And that is an HONOR for which I will never be able to repay the universe.

  So here I am, picking my armor back up and putting it on. It’s super fucking heavy right now. But it still fits like a glove.

  Seeking to create systemic change in any area is a huge undertaking that will inevitably have setbacks—some that will fuel your determination to continue, and some that will hit you hard and make you question the wisdom of even trying. Just as motherhood is a job that is never truly over, neither is advocacy. A popular and inspiring quotation from the Jewish tradition says, “Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” Activism and motherhood are both a marathon, not a sprint. As such, they both require resilience, strength, and stamina. Also just like parenting, advocacy will call on you to grow as a person; it requires you to learn how to take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so that you can stay in the game and continually be your best.

  Granted, I’m only six years into this ride, and I have no idea when or how it ends. But there are already several skills and tools that I and the volunteers of Moms Demand Action have honed. Some of them are practical, some are more psychological. They help us keep going, and they can help you keep going, too.

  Be Devoted to Your Self-Care

  When you’re doing the work to rectify a systemic problem, fitting it into the cracks of your life and not getting paid for it, it’s easy to burn out—especially if you let activism take up so much time that you stop doing the things you need to do to take care of yourself. Self-care is a huge component of long-term success. You won’t be able to keep going without it.

  A lot of people hear the term self-care and think it’s a luxury, like visiting a spa or getting a massage. But there are all manner of ways to care for yourself; they all matter, and many of them are free. Saying “no” to a request to take something on can be self-care. So can setting your phone to airplane mode for an afternoon, a day, or even a whole weekend. Honestly, the biggest obstacle to feeling good is often just giving yourself permission to stop “getting things done” and instead doing the things that aren’t on your to-do list.

  Self-care is so important that at Moms Demand Action we’ve baked it into our organizational structure: we train volunteers on self-care and even host yoga classes, nature outings, and meditation seminars. One of the biggest things we emphasize in our self-care training is that everyone needs to know how and when to say “no” and, just as important, to not feel bad about saying it. To that end, we have a process that allows people to pass the baton when they need to. After all, we know that the majority of our volunteers have families, and there will always be times when family comes first, no matter what you’re working on with Moms Demand Action or how pressing it may feel.

  For self-care, our members report doing things like reading, bird watching, taking walks in the woods, drinking (non-boxed) wine, eating chocolate, watching The Golden Girls, lifting weights, doing yoga, and running. Personally, I try to meditate and exercise every day (I particularly enjoy hiking).

  Making space for self-care in your life can help you have the physical stamina you need to keep showing up—after all, it’s hard to get to the statehouse if you’ve thrown your back out after too many hours of sitting at your computer, or skipped so much sleep that you got run-down and caught a virus. Self-care also goes much deeper than that; it provides an outlet for you to clear your head, reduce your stress, and give yourself space to process your emotions. And let’s face it, any advocacy work can be an emotional roller coaster—particularly in an area where loss of life is such a big component. Think of it this way: If your kids were dealing with something really hard, would you push them to do more than they were capable of, or would you try to comfort them, support them, and soothe them however you could? Well, sometimes you need to mother yourself as well as you mother others.

  Put Your Powerful Emotions to Use

  After the 2016 election, the emotion I felt most strongly was grief. The fact that we were so close to having a gun-sense advocate in the White House only to be denied felt like a huge loss. In that instance, my grief felt temporarily debilitating. But it was also grief over the thoug
ht of those twenty children and six educators murdered inside Sandy Hook Elementary School that made me decide to start the original Moms Demand Action Facebook page in 2012. While emotions don’t generally bend to our will, and they can require that we devote time and energy to our own healing above anything else, they can also be a powerful instigator of change.

  Tragically, we encounter grief regularly in the gun violence prevention movement. Every tragedy shakes us as a nation and rips loved ones out of survivors’ lives. As a society, we tend to try to avoid grief as much as we can, but gun violence forces us to reckon with it again and again, whether we experience a loss directly or we’re mourning for others and for the overall state of things for our kids and our country. It’s such a shape-shifting emotion that everyone experiences it differently—sometimes it morphs into rage; for others it looks a lot like depression; sometimes it takes multiple forms within the space of a day.

  Like any emotion, grief seeks an outlet for release, and advocacy can be an empowering and cathartic way to facilitate that. Moms Demand Action is often approached by survivors within a couple of days of losing a loved one. Of course we want to support them and help them give voice to their feelings and use their voice to effect change; we also want to refute the idea that immediately after a tragedy is “too soon” to talk about changing gun laws. But we also have to be sensitive to the waves of emotions any survivor inevitably is subject to. We weren’t always great at this—we’ve had to learn a lot as we’ve gone along, with a ton of feedback from survivors and from Debbie Weir, our managing director, who had so much experience working with grieving people during her tenure as CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Now we have policies in place that ensure that survivors have psychological support (and we have volunteer psychologists to work with them) before they dive into activism. We have an entire team of people dedicated to supporting and working with survivors, running our survivor support network, and training our volunteers to be supportive of and sensitive to survivors’ needs in the short term and the long term.

  A frequent companion to grief and another big emotion that can be channeled into action is anger. As I mentioned back in Chapter 1, anger is a loaded subject, particularly for women. If we raise our voices, we get characterized as being hysterical or some kind of fire-spewing monster. And granted, getting angry can make anyone, male or female, do things they later regret. But anger is like inflammation—finite amounts of it in response to a triggering event are purifying, even healing. It’s only when anger becomes chronic and your go-to response to any threat—no matter how big—that it becomes a problem.

  Rebecca Traister in her 2018 book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger writes how women’s anger is mostly denigrated and even punished. Think of Serena Williams getting penalized in the 2018 US Open final for defending herself after an unfair call from the umpire, and how she was penalized even more harshly for her response to the initial injustice. But, Traister says, when a woman’s anger is related to her status as a mom, it becomes a lot more acceptable. Think of the conservative women who ran for office during the Tea Party uprising in 2010 whom Sarah Palin dubbed “grizzly moms,” or even Mary Harris Jones, who advocated successfully for the rights of miners in the late 1800s: she referred to the miners as “my boys” and became known as Mother Jones. There’s a long history of a mother’s indignation being a force for political change, and there may be times when it’s just the thing to propel you into action.

  Allowing yourself to feel your righteous anger about the state of the country your kids are growing up in—no matter what cause may be fueling your passion—makes you more powerful, not less. As a mom, I know you’ve had to learn how to balance anger and love. And that’s a potent recipe for getting back to the work that needs to be done anytime you find your motivation waning. Sadly, there are ample opportunities to feel that anger when there’s another shooting; we have to use these tragic incidents to help us stay vigilant so that they happen less and less instead of more and more.

  Draw Strength from Camaraderie

  Having a strong support system is a crucial component of working through the big emotions that advocacy can stir up. Luckily, getting involved in a cause you care about is also an incredible way to forge deep and meaningful friendships—the kind of friends who’ll be by your side through thick and through thin.

  Something I’ve heard from volunteers over and over is the grateful phrase “I’ve found my tribe!” It’s common to meet people because of an external circumstance you share—your kids are the same age, or you live on the same block, or you were invited to the same party. There’s not one thing wrong with that, and I’ve made many friends this way. But when you connect with others because of a value you hold dear, it takes the friendship to another level.

  No matter where you live, but especially if you live in a state or community where you feel outnumbered by people who don’t share your values, connecting with others who share those views is a balm for the soul. It also provides a support system that helps you stay in the game. You can lean on your soul sisters when the going gets rough, and count on them to pick up the slack when you need a break.

  Erica Lafferty Garbatini’s mom, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, was the Sandy Hook school principal who was murdered as she tried to save the lives of students and educators. Erica started out as a Connecticut Moms Demand Action volunteer and now she’s a staff member who says her activist friends feel like a second family. “I lean on the Moms when I need a mom,” she says. “They’ve hugged me, sent me cozy jammies, given me trips to the spa, and opened their homes to me. Through them, I’ve learned to ask for help before I crash and to accept help when I need it.”

  Collaborating with others on a cause you care about also helps you stay motivated over the long term, because once you find your tribe, you don’t want to leave it. Even if you get tired and take a break, you’ll come back as soon as your batteries are recharged not only because you want to keep making progress on the cause, but also because you miss your peeps.

  Sara Kerai, a longtime Moms Demand Action volunteer and part of the leadership team of our Washington, DC, chapter, says: “What keeps me going is the utter dedication and professionalism of our volunteers. If they keep going, why would I quit? To watch more TV? This is my tribe now—my Moms sisters have become some of my closest friends.”

  Having a group of friends with whom you’re working toward a common goal also gives you a welcoming space to commiserate after a setback and—even more important—celebrate the successes you’ve had.

  Celebrate Your Wins

  You know what’s really motivating? Winning. The only problem is that when you’re working on a cause that has a lot of fronts and a lot of fires that need to be put out, it’s way, way too easy to gloss over your successes and focus on your defeats and setbacks. And when you do that, it’s easy to lose sight of all the ground you’ve covered.

  This isn’t because of you, personally—it’s how our minds are wired. The so-called negativity bias is the evolutionary tendency of our brains to remember everything that goes wrong. It’s a survival mechanism, a holdout from the days when we had to remember which berries could kill us or what triggered that bear to attack. It can also make us mentally skip right over anything that doesn’t end in disaster.

  That’s why Moms Demand Action makes it a point to celebrate every win, whether it’s an outright victory—such as a passing a good law—or a key defensive play—like killing a bad bill. It’s so important to focus on your triumphs, no matter how big or how small, because it reminds you and your tribe that your efforts are making a difference, which, in turn, inspires you to keep going.

  At Moms Demand Action, we celebrate in many different ways. Sometimes we throw a big party so volunteers can let loose together. Other times we post a series of social media messages with graphics we’ve created to help draw more attention to a victory. Or we honor a volunteer or a team with an award at our annual Gun Sen
se University meeting. I also make it a point to spend a good portion of every speech I give thanking individuals, chapters, and volunteers in general for the incredible gains that they work hard to make. And we have a page devoted to keeping track of our victories on our website (you can check it out for yourself at momsdemandaction.org/our-victories/).

  It’s also important to publicly celebrate your wins so casual observers are aware of all the little victories that might otherwise go unnoticed. The idea that there hasn’t been any progress on gun violence prevention is something I encounter all the time. People often ask me, “How do you keep the faith? Aren’t you dejected?” What they don’t realize is that we’re winning, and winning big. In 2018 alone, we stopped more than one thousand bad gun lobby bills, for a win rate of more than 90 percent for the fourth year in a row. We also helped pass more good gun bills than in any prior legislative session. Even though we make it a point to talk about these successes every chance we get—in press releases, on our social media feeds, in speeches and statements—most people still don’t realize how much we’ve accomplished.

  In some ways, I get it: killing bad bills isn’t terribly sexy. It doesn’t make headlines. Yet it’s every bit as important as passing good bills. If Moms Demand Action didn’t exist, these bad bills—which seek to pass permitless carry, guns on college campuses, and guns in K-12 schools—would be sailing through statehouses. All our lives would be so much more at-risk and our kids would be even more vulnerable than they already are to school shootings.

  For the record, here’s an official tally of our wins during our first five years of existence:

  Eleven states have passed laws requiring background checks on all gun sales or strengthening existing background check requirements.