Mothering Another World
by Allison Connelly-Vetter
It is January 2, 2026, and predictably dark, cold, and wet here in Minneapolis. I am riding in the backseat of our Toyota Corolla, which my wife is driving. In the car seat beside me is our newborn baby, Frances, all of six pounds and ten days old. We are en route to our first (but certainly not our last) anxious-new-parent urgent care appointment.
My wife keeps the lights on in the car for the entire drive to the clinic. Every few minutes she asks me, “Is our baby still breathing?” I lean my face close to Frances, my ears right under her tiny nose. “Yes,” I say. “I can hear her breathing.”
When our daughter was born in late December, she was not the only newcomer to Minneapolis: thousands of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had come to town as well as part of “Operation Metro Surge.” Just five days after my wife and I drove our baby to urgent care, another queer couple and kindred South Minneapolis parents encountered ICE less than two miles from our house. Agents shot and killed one of those parents, Renee Good, with her wife Becca by her side.
The ensuing weeks of occupation were horrific. Everybody was afraid. Families were separated, some permanently. Immigrant neighbors were warehoused in inhumane conditions before disappearing to modern-day concentration camps. Legal observers were terrorized and harassed. Businesses shuttered. Kids lost classroom time they can never get back. Community members released from (often wrongful) detention were abandoned in freezing temperatures in the middle of the night. Peaceful protestors were met with chemical weapons and loaded guns. A family with young children was tear gassed in their van. Alex Pretti was killed.
And yet, while the occupation was strong, the resistance was stronger – and many of the key resisters were moms. Moms walked neighbor kids to school so their immigrant parents could stay safely inside. Moms took ICE watch shifts around preschools. Moms with strollers blew whistles to alert their block to ICE presence. Somali moms (and grandmoms) brought fresh-made sambusa and spiced tea to memorial sites. Moms collected diapers and wipes and postpartum supplies for new parents sheltering at home. One mom started the organization Haven Watch to support people released from detention. When a group of suburban moms heard that one of those newly-released detainees needed help re-starting his barbershop, they all sent their husbands his way for fresh haircuts.
The resistance wasn’t all moms, of course: Minneapolitans of every gender, age, and parenting status found their lane in the movement and stayed there long after the end of Operation Metro Surge was formally announced. And yet, there was something about the role of moms in the ICE resistance that was intensely compelling to me, especially as a new mom. After all, people with power would have us believe that feminists can’t be moms, and that moms certainly can’t be feminists. But the only people who benefit from turning feminists and moms (and, heaven forbid, feminist moms) against each other are white men who need people to birth their children and meekly abide their dominance, and we cannot let them control the narrative.
Arundhati Roy once said, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way… on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”1 Maybe that’s why moms were so key in building another world through the Minneapolis resistance: we have spent long hours listening carefully and desperately for the breathing of another life, another world. A world which, much like our little ones,
needs gestation, tending, and nourishment.
All of us, of all ages and genders and family configurations, can mother this new world into being — and, in fact, we must. Let us mother her together. Let us get so close to each other, and so close to the world-to-be, that we can always – always – hear each other breathing.
1 Roy, Arundhati. “Come September.” 18 September 2002, Lensic Performing Arts Center Santa Fe, New Mexico. Reading.