Introduction

My name is Jessica Burstrem, and I am a second-year PhD student in the UMBC Language, Literacy & Culture program. I am interested in successful social movements. My dissertation will discuss the history of the 50-year Native American movement to get the Washington football team (now the Commanders) to change their name, with particular focus on the activists' final tactic of activist investing and the context of that moment when the team finally agreed. I hope to gather oral histories from participants in that movement. In return, I plan to ask potential narrators what they would like me to do with those stories so that I can serve their interests in addition to my own as I seek my degree.

I expect that this definition will change this semester, but right now I would define a community as a group with something in common and a shared space of some kind in which to interact. (It is possible that the shared space could be all that members of a community have in common.)

As I mentioned in class, I rely on some online communities for support. Two of those are social media groups: one formed for primarily the GenX women of American Mensa, and the other a group of fulltime stepmoms.

The photo here is of my family: my husband Eric, my older son Alex (age 20), my younger son DJ (age 10), and one of my cats, Georgie (age 4). Alex is my biological son, and Eric is his stepdad. DJ is officially my stepson, and Eric is his adoptive father; DJ lives with us over 85% of the time. Prior to August 2021, it was nearly 95% of the time, and DJ's legal mother had never had more of a presence in his life than that. Since Eric and I got married in 2018 and throughout the pandemic so far, I have been DJ's primary caregiver. I am his first permanent residential mother, and it has long been true that there is no woman he has spent more time with than me.

But most people don't even recognize me as a mother to him. Further, most people, in my experience, are unsympathetic to mothers in general. I can go to my women's group for a lot of things -- advice, encouragement, accountability, a sounding board, a listening ear -- but not for most issues related to parenting, and what parenting groups I did have were not sufficient once Eric and I got married.

Therefore, a couple of years ago, in desperate need for a supportive group that I wouldn't have to educate in order to get a little commiseration and understanding, I sought out a fulltime stepmoms group on social media. I have never met any of these moms in person, although I did interview a few of them for a research project this summer.

While I have yet to find a community that can sympathize with my particular situation -- as a fulltime stepmom to an internationally adopted child of a different race and ethnicity from my own -- and that can therefore understand the particularities of those aspects of our situation, this community of women often fulfills some previously unmet needs for me. That's what we all do for each other.