Mary Bowman

My name is Mary Bowman. And I use pronouns, they, them and theirs. I'm trans. And I have one child named Silas, who turned two about a week ago.

How am I doing? I mean, it's a complicated question. So I signed up for this because, me and my partner are activists and we've been activists for a very long time and I was really excited about the upcoming production. And we became parents two years ago, which has also been a pretty amazing journey because we are adoptive parents. And so I just thought that we kind of had maybe a different perspective than maybe some of the other people who are Lyric members, I don't know. Maybe I'm unfair in my estimation of who is a Lyric member. So yeah, I thought it would be cool to talk about all of it.

How am I doing? So I'm a nurse and we are activists. So going through a national public health crisis, as a person who works in healthcare has been very difficult. And then going through a national uprising, as an anti-racist activist has been... Difficult is not the right word. I mean, it's been intense. The first couple of weeks of the uprising, we went to protest and took our kid to protest every single day. We hadn't been hanging out with our people, our community because of the pandemic. And then all of a sudden, we were with our people in our community at protests every day, sometimes multiple times a day. And so my kid Silas went from not having any humans other than me and my partner, Brian, to being in crowds of 20,000 people. So that was an interesting way to introduce him to the movement.

It actually... Those weren't his first protest. His first protest was the victory protest, when Van Dyke got convicted for the murder of Laquan McDonald. He was... Let's see, I think that was October maybe, I think that was October. So he was two or three months old, when we took him to that protest. And part of the rationale for bringing him to it was, we don't have a lot of victory protests in our movement. So it was like, "Wow, well, we got to get out there because we're excited." But also feel the joy of the community having won something, like this is the result of decades of fight backs. So yeah. These weren't his first protest, but his first ones that he could remember. And after those, every day he asked if we could go to protest, he chants to himself as he's falling asleep, "No justice, no peace." It's pretty funny.

So yeah. I mean, we've always known that he would be... I mean, we're revolutionaries. So we knew that he would be around revolutionary movements, since day one. But we didn't know that there would be a national uprising and that police stations would get burned down and that we would start winning, what we won. So the uprising has been both... It's heartbreaking because we've been fighting for this so long. Our ancestors fought for it too. And it's just been such a slog, there so many years of not winning, right? And so many years of having to say new names, at protests and see parents grieve their children and children grieve their parents. One of the most profound videos from the most recent uprising I think, was seeing George Floyd's daughter talk about... She's like eight or something I think, but that beautiful video of her saying, "My daddy changed the world."

And so I think that, it's an intergenerational movement which is super important. And so yeah. In the midst of feeling incredibly depressed and terrified, and nervous and overwhelmed at our country's non-action on trying to reduce the spread of COVID-19, in terms of not providing adequate PPE, not locking down early enough, not testing people, not tracing contacts, not doing any of the things that would have prevented the 150,000 people who've died. So in the midst of just this craziness, and we have 18 clinics in the State of Illinois. And we closed 12 of them in March, and just kind of consolidated, because most of our workers at our health centers are Black and Brown, single mothers. And so when the school shut down, it was like, "Well, I can't go to work." And so luckily my organization had a really supportive response to the folks who were like, "I can't, I got to stay home with my kids." And so we didn't go through any layoffs until July and none of those layoffs were of our health centers workers. So yeah, I went from driving around the city of Chicago to different clinics all the time and working in lots of different communities, to working out of my house doing telemedicine, and seeing patients from all over the state who for lots of reasons, had poor access to health care anyway. And then all of a sudden, the clinic that they used to go to, which was an hour and a half from them closed because of COVID, and now they can only access care online, which is good that they could access care online. But yeah. it's just... Or basic tons and tons of new patients that I saw in the three months that I was just working in telemedicine, who had newly lost their health insurance because they lost their jobs.

So just interacting with the social repercussions of the pandemic through the work that I do, which is always true, right? Regardless of a pandemic, like working in sexual reproductive health, working in community health, I always interface with the social problems of our country and the fall out of the injustices of our country by caring for people, right? There's a reason why this person has a new HIV diagnosis. And it's not because they made the wrong decisions, right? Almost always it's because they had inferior education, inferior housing, and feel there are social reasons for disease. So just interfacing with the pandemic's fall out in a new way, because I work in healthcare and luckily I had, being able to work from home for three months kept me and my family safer. So I'm super grateful for that. And I don't work with COVID positive patients as a community health provider within this very specific specialty. So as a healthcare provider, I've been very fortunate compared to many people that I know who work in hospitals and things like that. So that's kind of the context of my life right now.

So the weekend when the uprising became the national uprising and kind of rippled out from Minneapolis, the Monday after that, so the day after the curfew was imposed, I called into work because I'm a street medic. And so I went down to jail support, at Wentworth to help do jail support until folks got released, who had been held since basically Saturday night. And so we were down there for a while and Brian brought Silas after he woke up from a nap. And then on our way home, we found out like, oh... And we live on the Far North Side in Rogers Park. So on our way home, we found out that there was a really massive protest in uptown. And so we thought we'd swing by it. And so that was the first big protest Silas had ever been to. And we just threw him on our shoulders and we're walking through the crowd and Brian snapped this incredible photo because there were probably, I don't know, at least 5,000 people there, probably more than that. And everyone was seated in the street and there were people speaking from the front, like Black folks speaking from the front about their experience of racism in our country and in our city. And so I put Silas on my shoulders and we're walking through, and you would think he's a super extrovert and he loves people. And so you would think this 18 month old kid, walking through thousands of people after being totally alone for weeks and not going to the park or the playground, would sort of be excited by it, but he was extremely solemn. And this photo kind of captures this. He took it very seriously, which he's like a goofball. It was just... So the picture kind of captures it. I'll send it to you. But he responds to the energy of the protest very much. And so the energy of that was people were seated and listening and quiet. And he responded to that.

When we've gone to protests that have been more lively, or people are chanting, or singing, or dancing, or playing music, he responds to that. I mean, he's a two-year-old, so he loves trucks and vehicles and stuff. So we've had to have interesting conversations about police cars because he gets amped when he sees a tow truck, he gets amped when he sees a fire engine and we're like, "Oh, police cars are different." Fire trucks and ambulances help people, police cars can hurt people. And so he's like, "Okay." And so every time he sees a cop car, now he goes, “Cop car.” and we're like, "Yeah, that's a special car." We got to be careful with that one. Yeah. And then he chants all the time. He just says no cops all the time. So I mean, I think he's young enough that we didn't feel it's appropriate yet to talk to him about people killing other people. You know what I mean? I think that, that's like a little bit beyond his pay grade right now. But like, he's learning. You have a kid. So you go through this developmental stage of like, he hits me sometimes when he's mad. And so he was going through this developmental stage where we're like, "Don't hit people, it hurts us." Don't hurt other people. That's not good.

So that's kind of how we've contextualized. The reason for the protest is like, oh, this group of people is hurting this other group of people. And it's prefaced on this lie that White people are better than other people. And that's a lie and that's not true, right? And so we're trying not to get too conceptual out of what he's developmentally able to understand, but he understands what it means to hurt somebody and he understands that, that's wrong. And so I think he gets that much. And again, we're revolutionaries and we've been out in the streets for a long ass time. So he's going to have a lot of opportunities to talk more about it and interface with different movements and ask more questions. And so right now I think he just kind of accepts it like, "Oh, okay. This is why we're out here." We're out here so that we can tell people that we think it's wrong, that they're hurting people.