'The Mamas' and the cult of mom groups
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2022
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Today on “Post Reports,” Helena Andrews-Dyer on her new book, “The Mamas” and what it takes to be an authentic Black mother in a mostly White mom group.
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Washington Post culture writer Helena Andrews-Dyer talks about her latest book “The Mamas: What I Learned About Kids, Class and Race from Moms Not Like Me.”
The book is a memoir of Andrews-Dyer’s personal experience of what it was like to be the only Black woman in her neighborhood’s mom group. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to join at first.
“I think for me as a Black mother, immediately just instantly the image that comes up in your head is White women,” Andrews-Dyer said. “It's like strollers taking over the local cafe, going to baby yoga, baby music class in their yoga pants. It's just like all of these images and stereotypes pop into your head and you immediately think, as a Black woman and woman of color, ‘Oh, that's not for me.’”
But in some ways, Andrews-Dyer writes, “I needed this space as much as they did.” Andrews-Dyer is a middle-class, Black professional woman living in a rapidly gentrified neighborhood in Washington, D.C., with two little girls and a husband.
But she “had not seen a story about motherhood that looked like me. … And so I had to tell it.”
“The Mamas” was released by Crown Publishing this week.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You know, you hear the term mom group and first of all one is like everyone just audibly |
| 0:06.1 | groans. |
| 0:07.1 | It's like, oh, what is this? |
| 0:11.3 | That's Helena Andrews' dire, a culture writer with the post. |
| 0:15.5 | And I think for me as a black mother, the image that comes up in your head is white women. |
| 0:19.8 | Taking over the local cafe or going to baby yoga in their yoga pants, right? |
| 0:24.7 | It's just like all of these images and stereotypes pop into your head and you immediately think |
| 0:29.4 | as a black woman, a woman of color, oh, that's not for me. |
| 0:32.4 | But in some ways, it was for Helena. |
| 0:35.2 | She wrote a whole book about mom groups. |
| 0:37.6 | It came out this week and it's called The Mamas. |
| 0:40.4 | What I learned about kids, class, and race from moms not like me. |
| 0:44.8 | The Mamas refers to the motherhood parenting Facebook group of our neighborhood. |
| 0:51.6 | There are hundreds of people in it. |
| 0:54.3 | The fact that I was the only black woman in the group made the barrier of injury that |
| 0:58.6 | much more thick. |
| 1:00.1 | When I was first entered into this world, there weren't a lot of black women in my neighborhood. |
| 1:05.2 | Then all of a sudden, people started moving in. |
| 1:07.5 | Literally, we pass each other on the street. |
| 1:09.6 | Oh, another black mom, another black woman with the stroller, black woman with the baby, |
| 1:13.4 | we have to be buds. |
| 1:14.4 | I hope you've actually pointed at them like you're doing right now. |
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