Today is a zine day. My partner is taking primary care of our two year old (who does drop by for the occasional nurse) while I spend the day writing, editing, and generally putting together my zine, Red Diaper Baby. Before I gave birth to Eli, my involvement in writing and zine-making had been limited, even though it had always been the main medium in which I expressed myself. I had written an occasional article for a radical newspaper in Australia and I had an essay published in the journal Canadian Woman Studies. However, I was not writing regularly as a part of my life. Now, writing and independent publishing have become crucial to my existence and my identity.

Motherhood is what drew the creative side out of me, the side that needs to write and express my feelings and my political musings. I wouldn’t have imagined that motherhood would play that role in my life. Before the baby came along, I was a pretty lazy student. Not that all, or even most university students are lazy, but I was. My days were sometimes spent going to classes, but more often than not my partner--who was a fairly lazy grad student--and I hung out at our favourite bar sucking back the frozen margaritas and black bean soup. Other than regular financial crises, our life was pretty relaxed and carefree. I had thought that having a baby would give me less time to pursue the things that interested me like activism and writing. However, after I had my baby, I threw myself into both and integrated them with each other in a manner that has enriched my life enormously.

While pregnant, I became very isolated from radical activism and I really had no other focus in my life. I liked to write but I certainly did not think of myself as a writer. I was a student but I wasn’t studying something that really impassioned me. So the story of my zine is the story of me losing something about myself only to discover it later as something even more important and profound.

What I lost was my life as an activist. After years of being connected to socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-poverty activism, I slowly drifted away. At first, I had worries about going to demonstrations where tear gas and other forms of police violence would be used against protestors. Big anti-globalization demonstrations were happening at the time and tear gas and pepper spray were known to be especially harmful to pregnant women, so I stayed away. At some point, though, I had stopped attending almost any type of demonstration or protest and I had long ago stopped attending activist meetings. I felt disconnected from the various social movements that I had been a part of since early in my teens because I was so focussed on the major change that a baby would bring to my life. My partner went to demonstrations by himself and told me the details later. My only political outlet during pregnancy and early parenthood were various progressive parenting discussion boards.

This is not how I had originally wanted to be a radical parent. I had always imagined myself as someone who would teach my child progressive values of solidarity and anti-oppression. I always thought that my child would learn about struggles against oppression and exploitation through actually seeing those struggles take place. At some point in the beginning of my parenting career, I realized that this wasn’t happening. I was isolated from progressive movements, hanging out at parent-child drop-ins where women talked triumphantly about kicking the prostitutes out of their neighbourhoods (by having police harass and arrest women sex workers). My cynicism with the world grew because all I saw were the horrors of our society: war, torture, violence, and oppression. I realized at one point that I was passing on this cynical worldview to my child. I couldn’t pretend that horrible things didn’t happen in the world but being isolated from the struggles of people for positive social change and social justice led me to believe temporarily that people were horrible. I know this isn’t true. There are many people in the world who are raging at the oppression and exploitation in the world and who have dedicated their lives to creating a better world. Being an activist was more important to my child’s welfare than I had imagined. It wouldn’t just give him an education about the way in which the world works; it wouldn’t just help to promote values that I feel are crucial to humanity; it would help to foster a sense of optimism in him about the future and present world. It would help to make my parenting optimistic so that I could help him to see that there are many compassionate people in the world who are filled with energy and inspiration at the prospect of changing the world for the better.

My child was born a little over a month after the WTC towers were destroyed by terrorists. Around the time he was born, the US was invading Afghanistan and I knew that they would soon invade Iraq. I thought to myself many times about what kind of world I was bringing my child into. Becoming an activist again gave me the answer: a world where people stand together against injustice even at the risk of their own lives. A world that we can and will change.

I began to see how important activism really was in radical parenting and I began to want to connect with other activist parents. I wanted to help create a culture of and for activist parenting and activist children. I would constantly think about political issues and how to integrate them with my parenting. How would I help to raise an anti-racist white child? How could I connect with other activist parents? How could I help to minimise the damaging effect of gender stereotyping on my child? What does it mean to be a feminist and socialist parent? These were some of the questions I would think about and form opinions and ideas about. I clearly needed a place to express these ideas and it was even clearer that I needed a forum for which to share ideas about radical parenting. In my real life I had very few people with whom to discuss my ideas about radical, alternative parenting. My partner was a good start but when he was working I felt very lonely. When Eli was six weeks, we had moved to a new city and I knew no one there. I had no friends, much less radical, feminist friends, with whom I could share these ideas.

For quite a while, I participated on various progressive parenting bulletin boards online but I found that forum to be limiting. I really wanted to write things out and that desire became stronger as Eli grew older. I really started to lose my sense of identity. I was very happy being a mama but the intensity of it left me yearning for some time to think and write away from the baby. Identity became a very important issue to me. I wanted to become a mama who integrated parenthood with others aspects of myself. I wanted to expand my life and make it more balanced so that I could have time to analyse, read, and create. Before I had Eli, I had a lot of time in which I could do these things but I did not value the time I had or the importance of expression and creation in my life and to my sense of self. It was only after I had a baby that my life became focussed. I had someone to take care of and I had a very specific and important job being the mama of the most amazing baby ever. Suddenly my life became filled with many things that I had to do and many things that I wanted to think about. Sometimes people talk of the lack of intellectual stimulation of full-time parenthood. I actually had a lot of intellectual stimulation as parenting brought up a lot of political and philosophical issues to analyse. The real problem, at least in my life during early parenthood, was the lack of an intellectual and creative outlet. Due to the fact that my life and the goals and hopes I had for it were becoming more focussed, I could see more clearly what other things I needed to include in my life besides parenting. I needed very much to have a creative outlet in which I could express my political ideas and opinions, in which I could hash out what it means to parent radically, both on an individual and on a societal level.

At first I wasn’t sure about exactly how to find this outlet in my life. It wasn’t always easy to find time for myself at first to write and even to think away from Eli. I felt very guilty about leaving Eli to work on writing, that harmful and oppressive mama’s guilt that creeps up at the most ridiculous times. I felt that maybe my focus should always be on my child and taking time away to have an intellectual, political or artistic moment would somehow be neglectful or selfish.

It wasn’t until I read a comment on a bulletin board that really upset me that I started to feel passionate about the idea of creating a zine about radical parenting. It was a comment that really seemed to be slandering activism. However, the content of the post is not important. The point was that the anger I felt quickly turned into passion: I had to help contribute to the culture of radical parenting. I had all these ideas and these opinions that I needed to express and no adequate forum in which to do so. I knew of some other mamas who had created amazing zines about parenting such as Hip Mama, Edgy Catin’ Mamas, and East Village Inky. I decided that I would make a zine about radical activism and parenting, the integration of three areas of my life that being a parent had made me see I needed (and wanted) to focus on. I started to take some time away from parenting (my partner would fully take over) so that I could think and write. I started to feel much more creative and I also started to feel much more comfortable with my identity: I was a mama, a writer, and a zine creator. I was actively involved in writing and sharing with others my ideas abut political parenting. Working on the zine helped me to find my former activist self again, driven my political ideas and ideals. Along with it, I found a very creative side of myself that thrived on creative expression.

The first issue of Red Diaper Baby came out in early 2003 and it was very well received. I felt very connected to other radical mamas, especially through participating on the mamaphonic.com discussion boards. I really enjoyed sharing my writing with these radical artist mamas and reading their inspiring words in turn. The second issue of Red Diaper Baby came out in May and focussed heavily on anti-war activism. It was amazing to be able to explore in my zine, through my writings and the writings of some amazing activist mamas, what it means to take our children to anti-war demonstrations and how to create a space for children and parents in the anti-war movement.

Parenting and, more specifically, my child gave me the direction and focus to find parts of myself that I had suppressed, parts of myself that have become integral to my identity and my life. Eli helped me to see my life and myself clearly.

I will continue to put my zine out and it is my hope that it will contribute to a culture of progressive and aware parenting. I hope always to find time to create both as an activist and as a writer. I hope to be able to share my ideas and thoughts through my writing with the other women in the zine world whose words inspire me, as well as with radical-thinking mamas everywhere. Who knew that having a baby would help to spark my creativity and my passion for expressing myself politically in the written word?

As I sit here working on my writing, I hear my child playing in the background and laughing. In motherhood I have found my role: mama writer and zine creator, typing furiously, inspired by every laugh and delightful squeal from my child.

Rebecca Ellis is the creator of Red Diaper Baby, a zine about the integration of radical activism and parenting. She is the mama to an amazing toddler named Eli and a part-time student of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Her writing has previously been published in Canadian Woman Studies, and the compilation zines Mama Sez No War, and Mamaphiles. She lives with her child and partner in London, Ontario, Canada. You can reach her at isismama1@yahoo.com.