Helena Andrews-Dyer and "The Mamas"

On the unexpected challenges of being a caregiver, the right questions to ask when choosing a school, and the ways that other moms can show up for you.

Helena Andrews-Dyer is a culture reporter at the Washington Post, and author of three books, including “The Mamas: What I Learned About Kids, Class, and Race from Moms Not Like Me,” published in August 2022. 

Tell me a little bit about your latest book.

It’s a memoir about my experience being a middle-class Black mother in an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, and my experience with the mom group cabal. I was one of the only Black moms in the group, which was surprising to me, because we live in D.C. So I write about what that experience was like.

It was just this insane social cultural experiment that I was sort of dropped into, and I became sort of obsessed with chronicling it. And then George Floyd was murdered a few years later and the “racial reckoning” that the country found itself in put my perspective as a Black mother raising Black daughters among and up against white parents into sharp focus for me. I knew, the stuff I had just been writing down, those things became really important to me. So that is the genesis of the book.

I take my own experience, which was sometimes hilarious, sometimes not; I do a lot of reporting in the book, I talk to motherhood scholars, and sociologists, just about motherhood and privilege and race and class and how all those things get blended up together in modern age parenting. I won't call it “post racial parenting,” because that’s completely untrue.

It was just this insane social cultural experiment that I was sort of dropped into, and I became sort of obsessed with chronicling it.

You write in the book about the dangers of conflating race and class when white parents talk about school choice — what do you think is missing from those conversations?

In D.C., we have universal preschool, but you have to lottery for it, which means you choose which school your child will go for. You rank schools 1-12, and it sent me down this insane rabbit hole of valuing school. What is education, what does school mean, what do you want from a school? All of us are taught that there’s the marque school with its name flashing in lights and that’s the one everyone should go to. You know, I have a master’s degree, I went to an Ivy League school, but we’re talking about 3-year-olds. It gets bonkers.

And when my husband and I really thought about it, and asked ourselves, what do we want? We want diversity. What does that mean? It means diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds, language, race — to teach our children that no one thing is more important than the other. We’re trying to unindoctrinate our children when it comes to white supremacy. So when we went on our school tours, we’re like, Are there any black children here? Is the principal Black? Some of these other parents are just thinking, what are the metrics, what are the test scores? But they’re 3 — they play all day!

And then there is the public school vs. charter school debate, and you have people who are like, We all have to go to the neighborhood school. We all have to support the public school for these and these reasons. But who is the “we” in the “we all”? It’s implied that it’s the white people. Even though there are Black, highly educated, super professional people of color who don’t want to go to the neighborhood school for other reasons that are very valid. Like systemic racism. But there’s this idea that more white people need to go to this school, and that will make it better. What I learned was that even parents of color start to judge a school by how many white kids go there. There’s a certain threshold, let’s imagine it’s 20%, and then it becomes, This is a good school.

Until you become a parent and you have to make that choice, I don’t think you dig into all of the intersectionalities of opinions that come into it. And when it happened to us, we had to look at ourselves. That’s one thing that a good memoir does — it’s not just like, These people are nuts. I have to look at myself and the choices I’m making. For me, what I write isn’t prescriptive. But I always like to show my work and show how I came to the decisions I’ve come to.

Absolutely — and, as you said, with a lot of humor. I’m thinking about the part of the book where you write about how you’ve now seen a particular part of your own mom’s body?

Yes — my mom’s vajayjay.

It’s that phase of life where there’s a lot of things going on, and I feel sometimes like, Did anyone tell me? I don’t remember someone telling me that all these things were going to happen like this.

No one tells you about what it’s going to be like when your parents start getting old for real. We all thought our parents were old when we were young, which is hilarious, because I’m older now than my mom was when she had me. But when they get old for real — we’re talking about 70s and 80s, when they start getting sick, and it’s like, Oh wait, you are the adult. It starts to go backwards.

Everybody's looking at you like, What are we going to do about your mom’s care? I’m like, I don’t know, she’s a grown-up! But she’s not. And nobody tells you about that flip, and what it does to your relationship — how it can damage your relationship. Because they see themselves as the authority, but you’re like Ma’am, you don’t know where your insurance card is.

And especially when you’re raising actual children, young children, the stress of it is so enormous. And I’m an only child, so it’s all on me — me and my husband. That's why I wrote about that, because I just thought, in a book about mothering, I had to examine my own relationship with my mother, and how I am mothering her now in a lot of ways.

It is really hard, and I have a lot of thoughts about the way that we’re socialized to think about care work. I was not raised to really feel that care work was super valuable, as an educated woman who was expected to have a professional career, and then kind of found myself like, Wait a minute, I still have to do all this stuff? when I became a mom.

Exactly. And when you’re doing it, it feels as if it’s repressive in a way, like, We marched our way out of this! No you didn’t girl. You still have to do the laundry. Gendered roles do exist, and they are the norm. We didn’t Title IX our way out of laundry, we didn’t march our way out of having to have every single doctor’s appointment and every other thing in your head. Tomorrow I’m taping a national TV spot, and literally right after, I need to go to my daughter’s school and talk to the principal. It’s endless, and no one’s coming to save you. It’s just you. 

I assumed, OK, It’s caregiving time and I’m going to know what I’m doing and not be annoyed and a brat about it, and that was not the case. I was very resentful and very upset when it happened. It put me in a position where I had to realize, I’m actually not good at this. I never really had to do it before. I’ve never practiced this, this is a muscle, and hopefully I get my weight up. 

I very much related to that, and similarly, the parts where you write about the ambiguity of, do I want to be a mother, do I want to have kids, is it time, and all of that. It’s a whole journey, becoming a mother, navigating the world of moms. I’m curious if there’s anything you understand or know now that you wish you had known back then. 

The biggest part is that no one knows what the heck they are doing. That was the biggest thing. I got this advice from the Michelle Obama, who I met once. I asked her about marriage, and she said, It’s hard for everyone. Nobody has the cheat code; nobody has the secret password. It is hard for everyone. And that’s very much true about motherhood. 

I went into it thinking, I have read the books, I’ve got things going, I’ve got my Emily Oster, I’ve got the Mayo Clinic book that I’ve read up to Year 5, I know what I’m doing. And then you get this kid, and you’re like, What the hell. Not only is it hard, but also the loss of self, the new identity, all of it — I did not know that going in. 

You think all the sudden you’re going to wear this mantle of mother, and you will become this soft squishy person, and that’s not my identity. And it’s fine. What I’ve learned, and what I know now having 5- and 3-year-olds instead of newborns, is that my girls appreciate me for my personality and who I am. They’re not expecting something else. They get what they got, and they’re cool with it.  

There is one piece of advice that my mother-in-law gave me — she said, You have the rest of your life to love that baby. Just because someone handed you a baby, you’re supposed to immediately feel this swell of love and heartstrings. I felt a lot of responsibility and all of that, but I remember getting the baby and thinking, All right. OK. You can think there’s something wrong with you, but there’s nothing wrong with you. So many other women feel this way, so many men feel this way, and just knowing that it’s a struggle for everybody.

That’s one of the things that was great about the mom group. Some women are up there presenting their Instagram self and some of them are coming to the mom group disheveled, boobs out, and when you see that, it helps you along your journey. 

There was a video I remember a couple years ago, it was like “The different moms you’ll meet in mom group,” and I was like, Oh, I’m the hot mess. I’m the one that’s 10 minutes late, feeding their kid a granola bar they found in the backseat. 

Yes, that’s 1000% me. What’s great about the women I know is that they recognize it and they will fill in the gaps. Just the other day, I had to get my daughter a vaccine, and surprise surprise, I dropped the ball and I was two weeks late, but I texted my one mom friend who is ON TOP of it. I was like What am I supposed to do? She literally sent me like a Google pin of exactly where I needed to go. You need those people, and I know sometimes it can be intimidating, especially as a woman of color, to go into a group of people who do not look like you, and for good reason. I think some women will just shut off the idea of mom friends, like, I’m not the PTA mom, so I’m not going to talk to anybody. But what I’ve found is that they will pick up so many things that I leave off on, and it’s been a boon for me, overall. 

When you’re working, where are your kids? Because we all know the work day and the school day are not the same length. 

Our younger daughter is at day care during summer break — the same one my older daughter went to as well, which is incredible. I found it literally on my walk to work and it is half the price for what a lot of people pay for these hoity-toity day cares where people are speaking French to your kids and they’re playing on IKEA furniture. They love the kids, and I love them, and it’s amazing. So she’ll be there for a couple more weeks before she starts preschool.

And our older daughter is at camp, which is sponsored by our city’s parks and rec, which was literally like a Hunger Games to get into, because it is markedly cheaper, and there are limited spots. I was doing a praise dance when I got her in. 

What’s challenging about parenting for you at this time in your life?

Right now for us it’s whining. Our older daughter is sort of out of it, but our younger is about to be 3, and she is just Whine Time. It’s so high-pitched and we can’t even understand the words she’s saying, and there’s no way to switch it off. We’re just like We can’t even understand you. She sounds like one of those Muppets. 

Tell me something wonderful about your kid(s):  

They’re so different, the two of them, and they're the sweetest little things. Even though I’m not a morning person and never have been, both girls love to come in the morning and fight over who gets to lay on my stomach and wake me up. They lay on my stomach just like when they were newborns. And it is just the sweetest thing. Even though they’re so huge now, and even though I’m like Now we have to deal with a million things, it’s the greatest way to start the day. Knowing that they feel so safe with us and so comforted with us and knowing that I am that for someone — while it’s a huge responsibility, it is very inspiring for me, and I love that about the two of them. Even when they are fighting over who gets the prime mom tummy real estate, they’re still just the sweetest little things. 

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Thanks to Helena for speaking with me. You can find Helena on Twitter and Instagram at @helena_andrews.