Build Your Village
"Maybe we aren't as alone as we think we are," says Heidi Borland, who has set out to build a community of moms in her hometown.
Heidi Borland is sitting in her Idaho Falls home, folding laundry. Baskets and baskets of laundry.
The laundry could be hers– Heidi is a mom of a busy five-year-old who loves arts and crafts and spills things all the time– but it’s not. Instead, it’s from another mother she met on Facebook Marketplace. Another mom who felt overwhelmed, behind in her tasks, and just needed a little help.
“Let me take that off your plate,” Heidi had said to her.
Heidi has plenty on her own plate. Between work, chores, and children, most moms do.
Heidi’s daughter, Lillyth, is an active, busy kid– a streak of blonde hair and pink glasses galloping around the house. But it’s complicated. Lillyth has a congenital diaphragmatic hernia and requires frequent medical visits, monitoring and special care.
Heidi has learned that mother’s plates are so full that anything– anything from a complex medical diagnosis to a simple pile of laundry– can threaten the careful balance they try to maintain. “We just don’t have systems that are made to accommodate anything hard,” Heidi explains. And the truth is, most things are hard.
When Lillyth was born, she and Heidi had to spend months away from home at a Texas hospital that could provide the care they needed. Lillyth was in the NICU for six long months. Not only did the Borlands accrue outrageous, insurmountable medical bills, but Heidi’s husband, Josh, lost his job because he didn’t have enough leave to be able to be with them.
That’s why when Heidi saw a social media post about moms who were fighting for paid leave and other things that would make raising a family better, she clicked the link.
Knowing that taking action with other moms would make her feel more powerful, Heidi started joining Mother Forward’s online meetings. As the social media post had said, these were moms fighting for family-supporting policy. “We can’t just wallow; we need to be part of something so we don’t feel so bad,” Heidi thought. She was glad to be a part of a group of like-minded women.
Heidi set out to be, as she describes it, a worker bee for Mother Forward. “I like to be behind the scenes. I figured I could contribute as I could, be a helper, that sort of thing.” So if the group needed something like a petition for paid leave to be signed, Heidi was all in. She’d share it, send it around to friends, sign it herself.
It was a relief to be a part of good work.
Last fall, Heidi traveled to Ohio to be a part of a Mother Forward leadership training. A group of about 70 moms met for a long weekend to discuss community organizing and campaigns.
“I was so inspired by the other moms and how powerful it felt to all be together,” she explains.
For a long time, she had sat alone with her feelings– her frustration over how hard it was to navigate the medical systems and insurance for Lillyth, how wrong it was that her husband was forced to choose between his family and his job.
But she had always wondered: I’m just a mom. Who am I to do something about it? She felt like an imposter– she could write her legislators and sign petitions to weigh in, but what ideas did she have to make things better? What did she know? Her life was Lillyth, laundry, medical appointments, her husband, family, and friends.
“But in Ohio I had this epiphany. There are so many men in politics making these rules that don’t work. Maybe I’m not the imposter, but they are. They make the laws and policy merely because they have the audacity.”
Back home in Idaho, Heidi kept thinking about the feeling she had when she was with all the Mother Forward moms in Ohio.
She was born and raised in Idaho and loves it tremendously. It’s where she is from and where her family is. Her hometown is conservative in a way that she is familiar with, even if it doesn’t always line up with the way she thinks. Over the years, this fact had often made her think she couldn’t be politically active in the ways others might in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York.
But after Ohio, she kept thinking that there was no way she could be the only mom feeling frustrated in Idaho Falls. “If you are working class,” Heidi realized, ”then we are all trying to make the impossible work in systems that seem stacked against us.”
Through Mother Forward, she had met moms from Nebraska and North Dakota, Alabama, and South Carolina who were all facing the same struggles and feeling the same things.
Idaho couldn’t be any different, she figured. “There have to be other people in my community who want to build change and don’t want the doom and gloom– I just have to go find them.”
Heidi began to think about some of the books she had been reading and a vision board she had made at a recent girls’ night out: Build your village was the recurring theme popping up everywhere in her life. That’s when she decided to start an Idaho Chapter of Mother Forward. “After all, we need this, too. I don’t think we all need to agree on everything to build a chapter. If you are a working-class person, we are all dealing with the same bull crap.”
A year earlier, Heidi had been a helper– spreading information, participating in calls to action– plugging into the work where she could. Now she was stepping out of her comfort zone and becoming a leader, ready to build something new from scratch.
The first meeting of the Idaho Chapter of Mother Forward was just three women in a coffee shop in downtown Idaho Falls. A fourth mother wanted to come, but last-minute mom duties claimed her time. But that fourth chair ended up filled anyway, when another mom getting coffee overheard what they were doing and decided to join.
“It’s small, but exciting,” Heidi says. The next meeting was at her house– two additional moms joined. She figures this is a good pace and encourages the moms who attend to invite a new mom each time.
At another meeting, even more moms gathered. They ate chocolate and sent the empty tins and “break-up” letters to their representatives for failing to pass family-supporting policy, yet again.
For Heidi, the chapter can’t be entirely about politics. Yes, they want to fight for policy that Idaho families deserve, but the work needs to start with connections and, frankly, making life easier for moms. “I want a chapter to get things done, but also be a community. That’s the only way it will make sense here.”
Moms famously don’t have time, but Heidi thinks that shouldn’t cut them out of shaping the future they want. That’s why she and the other moms are building their chapter to be “half politics, half helping each other.” They figure that by supporting other moms with their overload, they will help them create and maintain friendships while getting chores done, so that together they all have more time to speak up for what they need.
The chapter is dedicating a weekend a month to helping each other out. One mother had a craft room that needed reorganizing, so the group headed to her house as a team. Another mom had boxes of donations, but was struggling to sort through them and give items away, so the moms headed there next.
“We are often ashamed about how hard it is to keep up and think we have to do it all alone. But we wouldn’t want our kids to feel this alone and have this much pressure on them, so why do we do it to ourselves?”
Back at her house, Heidi has finished folding the laundry. It smells fresh and is packed tidily back into the laundry baskets, ready to be brought back to the overwhelmed mom across town. Maybe once the mom feels more caught up and supported, she could join the other moms at an organizing meeting.
It’s not the same, maybe, as passing a paid leave bill, but the community Heidi wants to build feels political; even radical. “If good policy and law are about making things work better for families, then so is this,” she reasons. Plus, the Facebook Marketplace mom is one more connection that Heidi can reach out to and invite in.
These moms in Idaho Falls are making time and space for each other to get involved, whether that’s lobbying at the State House or helping fold laundry, babysitting each other’s kids, or cleaning out a garage.
In organizing, people often talk about “meeting people where they are.” Heidi is taking this to heart. “Of course it’s about meeting moms where they are,” she says. “Because it’s where I am, too.”
ICYMI: I’ve been really into mom-organizing lately (I’m a mom!) and recently wrote about moms in Colorado who also started a Mother Forward chapter there. What’s fascinating to me is how DIFFERENT their approach is from the Idaho moms— because they are different and their state is different. There’s no one-size-fits-all in community organizing, after all. Read that story here:
SO inspiring!!
Thanks, Gwen, for your uplifting and encouraging articles about the power of mom's organizing, in Idaho, Colorado, and beyond!