Crime is a Mother

a soft reflection on motherhood and surviving publicly

i used to hate this mugshot. but i don’t know. now i think it’s just a photo like all my others. A real one in a real moment in time.

yeah im a little tired. scared. swollen with grief and postpartum survival. but still looking directly at the camera. still, there. and still here.

there was a time i thought this image marked the end of my life. maybe not so much an end but now i understand it as part of the beginning of a new kind of archive. part of the testimony. part of the woman i had to become to write my way back to myself.

i wanted to share my newest essay. i wrote “Crime Is a Mother” with the After Violence Project during a period of my life where i was trying to understand motherhood, criminalization, memory, and what it means to survive publicly as a woman.

this essay hurt to write. it asked me to return to places i once wanted to disappear from. but i’m grateful now for spaces that allow us to sit with our histories slowly and honestly.

“crime follows women home. it sleeps beside us. it mothers us too.”

if this piece resonates with you, i hope you’ll spend some time with it, share it, or send it to someone thinking deeply about motherhood, justice, survival, archives, or what happens to women after harm.

with love,
starr

https://afterviolenceproject.org/crime-is-a-mother/