We met through a mutual friend who told us both, “You’ll love her. You get angry about all the same things.”

That was almost exactly correct. At the time, Joanne had just started a nonprofit to provide free diapers to families in need. Colleen was a freelance writer who had walked away from a newspaper job to work in a soup kitchen after her editor told her to stop writing so much about poverty.

We found sisterhood raging about injustice over coffee, and devising strategies for change.

Twenty years of collaboration and friendship followed. We’ve worked together, written a book together, talked each other through family crises. But we disagree on one fundamental issue. We are on opposite sides of the abortion debate that splits the country, sides that have become more fixed and hostile with the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. Yet we never argue about abortion because that would be pointless; our positions are formed by deeply held values. We have discussed abortion more since the overturn of Roe than we did in all the years of our friendship that preceded it. These are uncomfortable though not acrimonious talks, with more silent pauses than usual. Still, through these hard conversations defined by respect and humility—largely absent from the public discourse—we have not let the two “camps” define our stances, or our friendship.

Joanne grew up in a justice-oriented, Reform Jewish household where her faith and her family supported the right to abortion. Her mother ran a reproductive health clinic that offered the full range of care including abortion services. Her father was an attorney active in the American Civil Liberties Union. Joanne became a social worker, gravitating toward supporting parents and children.

Her belief in abortion rights never wavered. Joanne believes all women should have the same options when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. Restrictions on abortion disproportionately prevent women and girls with low income from obtaining them. She also recognizes that real “choice” needs to include resources that put all children on path for success.

Colleen’s parents, neither of whom had a high school diploma, had three children in the early years of their marriage and then avoided having another for 11 years. Money was tight. Colleen’s father’s alcoholism was already causing his mental and physical decline. Nevertheless, Colleen appeared.

Observant Catholics, Colleen’s parents believed that life began at conception and that, even in their circumstances, a baby was something to celebrate. Her father was a Conservative, who railed against “welfare queens” and the “goddamned liberals” at every Sunday dinner. One day, young Colleen protested, “You shouldn’t talk like that, Daddy. It’s clear from the Gospels that Jesus was a liberal.” She aspired to spend her life as Jesus did: sticking up for people nobody wanted, particularly people in poverty.

Though she recoiled from her father’s conservativism, the Left’s reasoning on abortion was unpersuasive to Colleen. No one can prove when life begins. For Colleen, abortion risks killing a human being; and Jesus’ favorite kind of human being at that—an unwanted one.

Our partnership would not work if Colleen behaved like the most aggressive abortion opponents—or if Joanne lumped her in with that crowd. Colleen does not harass women walking into clinics. She gets as angry as Joanne at “pro-lifers” who support the death penalty. Joanne donates to advocacy groups that fight for legal abortion. Colleen does no legislative advocacy around abortion and instead works toward life-affirming policies like eradicating poverty and providing free health care. Joanne favors the same policies, not because they would affect the demand for abortion but because everyone has a right to thrive—this is something we agree on absolutely.

Neither of us remembers when Colleen came out to Joanne as pro-life, probably because it was not dramatic. To posit the possibility and protection of life before birth in progressive company is usually uncomfortable. Colleen has left groups supporting immigrant justice, socialism, and voting rights when those entities expanded focus to make statements or take actions supporting abortion rights. Comrades have yelled at her about coat hangers and accused her of not caring about women and girls who are raped. Much like the bloody fetus signs anti-abortion activists wave outside clinics, these are unfair accusations that people on the other side lack compassion. Neither of us believes the other is less of a person because we disagree about abortion.

We tend to support different candidates in presidential primaries: Colleen donated to Bernie Sanders; Joanne to Elizabeth Warren. In general elections, we both have always gotten behind the Democrat, because Democratic policies help more people thrive, especially those living in poverty, than the alternative. But we also believe that some politicians on both sides of this debate are getting a free ride. You are pro-life if you oppose abortion—with no obligation to support paid family leave, quality affordable childcare, or the many other reforms families desperately need to live and thrive. You are pro-choice if you support abortion access—regardless of whether you have done anything to work toward wage parity or push back against the closure of maternity care hospitals, which is exacerbating the already horrendous Black maternal mortality rate.

Decisions about having children do not exist in a vacuum but are influenced by a thousand cultural and economic realities. Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree: that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.

We are both horrified by the recklessness of the post-Roe rush to legislate. Some people are finding it impossible to get methotrexate—one of the drugs that saved Colleen’s life (twice) during cancer treatments—because it is used in some abortions. The idea that a lawmaker in the U.S. wrote legislation in 2020 suggesting a physician should “attempt to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy into the woman’s uterus”—which is medically impossible—is at best ignorant, and more likely a blatantly cavalier approach to women’s lives and health.

Laws touching on reproductive health should be written by reputable medical experts—just as legislators turn to legitimate experts in fields ranging from coastal erosion to air traffic control to draft other kinds of bills requiring specialized knowledge. We agree that progressives who are also anti-abortion have a particular obligation to speak up about the ignorance that drives so much of the movement, and harms women.

Abortion is important, and worth fighting over. But making abortion a litmus test issue is helping to steer the country in the wrong direction: one where defining what camp you are in is more important than actually creating a society where more people can thrive.

And so we go about our business working for, almost always, the same thing—the needs of oppressed people who have already been born. This is more productive than an endless argument. But it’s also harder. It requires each of us to acknowledge that people are complicated and that good people can hold beliefs we find absolutely unacceptable. It requires genuine love and humility.

We both came of age after Roe, and we both have friends who’ve had abortions. Shortly after graduate school, when Joanne was a new mother, a friend of hers contemplated abortion, largely for financial reasons. Joanne offered her a home and resources to make raising a child possible—if that was what her friend wanted. About this same time, one of Colleen’s closest friends had an unplanned pregnancy. Colleen volunteered to drop out of college and support the baby so that her friend could get a degree on schedule.

Both young women chose abortion. From extremely different perspectives, we behaved similarly: We offered a helping hand and unwavering love, regardless of our friends’ decisions. We believe that says everything about choosing friends and allies—and envisioning the kind of society we want for ourselves, and future generations.

The post Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a popular retelling of the myth goes, Persephone is picking flowers with her friends near a lake when suddenly the earth splits open and Hades, in his golden chariot, emerges and snatches her away, ferrying her down to the underworld, where she becomes his unwilling queen. Sensing something amiss, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, calls her daughter’s name, but to no avail. She only finds scattered petals floating on the lake’s surface. Raging across the Earth in her search of her daughter, the goddess brings the first winter to mankind as punishment for Persephone’s disappearance. Zeus, ultimately realizing that the world will perish if Demeter doesn’t get her daughter back, eventually returns Persephone to her mother. But because Persephone mistakenly ate four pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, she must return to Hades for a third of every year, forever.

The story of Persephone is used to explain the cycle of the seasons. Fall and winter each year is understood to be the time when Persephone descends into the underworld, and the emergence of spring and summer signals her return to her mother and the world of the living. But the story is also about motherhood and the necessary pain of letting a child go so that she can fully become herself. You could argue this process begins the second a child is born, as being born is the first real separation from the mother, the first rupture that informs the many ruptures and subsequent repairs in the mother-child relationship.

A wise friend reminded me of this soon after I gave birth to my daughter, Lucia. We need to prepare ourselves to let them go, she said, so they can leave and forge their own paths. This, my friend argued, is the true work of motherhood. Our children are only guests in our houses. “It’s like holding a baby bird,” she told me. “Too tight and you crush her. Not close enough and she flies away too soon, unprotected. Hold her with the knowledge of future flight.”

I thought about her words as I soaked up listless afternoons singing to my baby, pacing the bedroom and rocking her in my arms while I stared out at the palm trees and the flat blue line of ocean, the amniotic feeling of oneness coursing between us, as if we were still intertwined by blood and fluid, multiplying cells and placental tissue. It seemed impossible that Lucia would grow up and separate from me, leading a life that didn’t necessarily include me, the Persephone to my Demeter. But who knew, she might even shun everything that I had taught her.

Having Lucia made me more aware of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone had informed my relationship with my own mother. My parents divorced when I was 7, and afterward, I ping-ponged back and forth between their houses. On Sunday nights, I would pack up my duffle to be reunited with my mother after a week apart, or to leave her again. The persistent cycle of rupture and reunification put me on familiar terms with the pain of maternal separation. I was always highly aware of my own distress over my living arrangements. Now a mother myself, I could more fully imagine my own mother’s heartache as she became Demeter, the grieving mother, who had to let her daughter go every week, forever.

But my mother’s devotion to herself, and to her own professional and spiritual path, also primed me to not abandon my own years of study and work. When Lucia was born, I was in the middle of my graduate studies, with coursework, a looming dissertation, and an unfinished novel hanging in the balance. My mother had always told me to finish my Ph.D., no matter what. But six weeks after giving birth, I didn’t know if I would ever write again; I remember telling my academic advisor that I feared motherhood had swallowed me whole. You will write again, she told me calmly, just give it time.

It took about four more months for me to come around, and realize that I wanted—and needed—to return to my studies. I found a babysitter to watch my daughter. The woman smelled of starch and talked too much, and Lucia wailed the minute she picked her up, but eventually calmed. I got into my car that first morning with still-wet hair, determined to drive to work, determined to leave behind those yawning days of closeness, with all of their intensity and boredom, just for a handful of hours. I repeated under my breath: The baby is a guest in my house; she’s a guest in my house.

I gripped the steering wheel, for a time unable to actually drive away, unable to move, so overcome with guilt and longing for my daughter, overcome by the separation that was occurring then, and by all the future separations we would endure to fully become ourselves. But I did it. I drove away—that day, and the day after, and the day after that, until the pain dulled and became routine, until it became part of me. The sight of my daughter happy, clean, and well-fed greeted me upon my return at the end of each day, and I held her again, inhaled her milky soapy scent, my heart contracting, knowing no greater relief than this.

I poured all the pain, guilt and fear tangled up in our daily partings into a novel—the tale of a mother separated from her daughter by war, who rages, grieves, and searches for her daughter amid the ruins of postwar France. I heard my mother’s voice, telling me to keep writing, to keep going, that separating from the all-encompassing demands of domesticity was imperative to creating art.

Lucia is 10 now, and I also have a son who is eight. My book is completed and published. But I will never forget the pain of that initial separation, and all the subsequent ones that followed. Our family has been pushed together again these last 14 months, trapped in the enforced closeness of COVID-19, with its lack of normal boundaries and separations. This time together has been a joyful gift, but it’s also been a strange suffocation. It has been infantilizing for my children to be tucked so tightly under my wing again, as I anxiously monitor their every move, from school Zoom meetings to walks around the block. It is time, again, to step away.

Recently, just after her 10th birthday, Lucia put her arms around me and announced that she was really going to miss me. She said this with a knowing sadness, as though her leaving was inevitable and imminent. “When I’m a teenager, which is just a few years away, I’m moving into my own apartment,” she said, a glimmer of mischief and delight in her eye. We joked about it, and I held her tight. I envisioned her tearing down the Pacific Coast Highway on a Harley, desperate to cross the border into adulthood while I raced after her on my own motorcycle, determined to stay in her rearview mirror, wherever she went.

Sometimes I fantasize that I will keep Lucia close, like the mother in the children’s book Runaway Bunny, who vows to follow her baby bunny no matter how far afield the baby bunny tries to go. But I also hope that I will release her into the world with the same confidence and trust my own mother offered to me. Of course Lucia is dreaming of escape. We all are. This past year was stolen from her, and from all our children. Her world became as small as a pomegranate seed; its seasons, disrupted. The winter when Persephone separates from her mother, descending into the underworld where she discovers her own autonomy, evaporated into a seemingly eternal quarantine summer of togetherness without reprieve.

After 13 months sequestered at home, my children finally returned to in-person school last week. Because the virus is still a threat and classrooms can’t be full, it’s a hybrid setup. We separate for three hours each morning and then come back together again.

It felt strange that first morning to drop them off and watch them disappear into their classrooms, echoing that morning long ago when I first left Lucia in the care of someone else, crying in my car, white-knuckling the steering wheel. But as I stood on the empty school lawn, I realized that we’ve always been doing this, like Demeter and Persephone, and we will continue to do this: letting each other go so we can come back together again.

The post The Story of Demeter and Persephone Taught Me the True Work of Motherhood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.