Erasing Motherhood
How the lie of two dads harms kids
At Them Before Us, we talk a lot about what children need. Stability. Safety. Love. But culture at large has redefined every word to accommodate their desires and behavior instead of describing a child’s reality. To her child, a mother isn’t interchangeable with any other loving adult who shows up consistently. She’s not a role that can be split across a village or duplicated by a second father. The research is detailed, the children are clear, and honestly, we already know it: a mother’s presence shapes a child in ways nothing else can replicate. Her voice is the first one a child knows, in utero, before the world begins. Her body is the child’s first home.
Many English idioms reflect the understanding of what a mother offers her children:
“A mother’s love knows no bounds.”
The fearless defense of her children like “a mama bear.”
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
“Mother knows best.”
The oxytocin wiring her brain for attachment isn’t a sentimental detail. It’s biology doing what it was designed to do. When we treat that as optional, children carry the weight of that decision for the rest of their lives.
Girls learn what womanhood looks like by watching their mother move through the world. Boys learn how to treat women by watching how their father treats her, but first, they have to see their mother there. A child needs one parent of each sex not because of rigid gender roles, but because half of humanity is female, and children deserve to grow up knowing what that looks like up close. No number of loving men can replace that. No amount of good intentions changes what’s actually missing. The rule isn’t complicated: men cannot mother, and women cannot father, and children require both.
Samantha Wiessing knows this not as a theory but as a lived reality. She spent the first years of her life raised by her father and his partner, loved, cared for, and needs met. And still, watching The Land Before Time as a kindergartener, she was wrecked by the realization that she didn’t have a mother. That hole didn’t disappear because her home was stable. It didn’t go away because the men in her life were good. She spent years unconsciously gravitating toward every woman she encountered, craving something she couldn’t even name yet.
“I needed a mother’s love specifically and I could not reconcile my own identity without that…There was a definite hole where a woman should be…For all intents and purposes, my needs were met and yet for some reason the nagging feeling that I was missing something would not go away.”
She recently sat down with Greater Than to share her story in her own words, what it felt like to grow up mother-hungry, how she eventually found her biological mother as an adult, and what she would say today to a child in the same situation. It’s one of the most honest accounts of mother-loss we’ve come across. Watch it, share it. Because this is what it costs when we decide mothers are optional.
Katy Faust said this as we launched our Mother’s and Father’s Day campaigns:
We’re dedicating a week to celebrate Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and then will plan a variety of ways to highlight the 11th anniversary of Obergefell. We want to help our countrymen understand that children need their mother and father, but gay marriage requires children to lose those parents in the name of adult “equality.”
When ordinary Americans understand that they can either support gay marriage or protect children, we are confident they will side with the kids.
Do you agree that every child deserves the mother and father they came from? Here’s how you can get involved:
Follow Greater Than on our social media across the web and like, comment, and share our content, promoting the importance of mothers. (Facebook, X, Instagram)
Share the website (featuring the Mother’s Day takeover) with a friend or family member who would benefit from learning how important a mother is to her child AND how Obergefell threatens a child’s natural rights.
Forward this e-mail to someone who might be interested in seeing more.
Donate in your mother’s honor and help create a world where culture, technology, faith communities, and the law unite to protect the rights of children.
Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.
We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.
Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.
In fact research shows that the mother-child bond is deeper, more primeval and important in the life of the child than we had ever imagined. Dr Katie Hind's astonishing research results show that mothers lactation responds dynamically to her child, responding to age, sex, infections on salivary signals with different composition and ingredients, an evolved 300 million year old chemical conversation. That's before we get into the sugars purposefully sent not to the baby's gut but to the microflora there. The notion that mothers are some kind of Axotl Tank, a biological irrelevance is not just pagan & barbaric but stupidly, irrationally unscientific.
Children ought not to be the subject of a vast, badly designed social experiment with nothing but bad outcomes likely to gratify the whims of adults.
I am so grateful for Katy Faust and all those from Them Before Us who are shining a light on how today’s culture, which prioritizes selfish adult desires, is causing suffering and sometimes irreparable harm to children. Two men, or by the same token, two women, raising a child or children is not in the best interests of the child. We need to say it loud and clear and keep pounding it into society.