Christine Michel Carter presents No Country for Mothers: A Maryland Community Screening & Conversati

During National Family Caregivers Month, join journalist, author, and advocate Christine Michel Carter for a free Maryland screening of Moms First’s documentary No Country for Mothers, followed by a public conversation about what it actually takes to raise and care for a family in Maryland today.

So much of what makes caregiving difficult gets treated as part of the deal. Childcare falls through, leave runs out, a child gets sick, an aging parent needs help, and work keeps moving as if none of it happened.

Families adjust. Mothers rearrange. Somehow, somebody makes it work.
But “making it work” can hide how much women are being asked to absorb.

No Country for Mothers looks at the systems behind those experiences, but it also asks why mothers have spent so much time fighting over one another’s choices.

Working mom or stay-at-home mom. Career or family. Tradwife or girlboss. Mothers are constantly asked to pick a side and defend how they are doing motherhood, while many are dealing with the same underlying problems: childcare they can’t afford or find, inadequate leave, workplaces that were not designed around caregiving, financial pressure, and too little support.

This night is not about deciding who is mothering the “right” way.
And you do not have to agree politically with every woman in the room.
Motherhood and caregiving cross those lines. Women can have different families, different careers, different politics, and different ideas about how they want to live while still recognizing something in one another’s experience.

After the film, we’ll bring that conversation home to Maryland.
Mothers and caregivers will share what is happening in their own lives alongside civic leaders, advocates, employers, community organizations, and public leaders. We’ll talk about what families have accepted as normal, where they are being asked to solve larger problems on their own, and where there may be common ground for making family life work better.

We’ll ask:
What have we gotten too used to calling “normal”?
What are mothers and caregivers absorbing that shouldn’t fall entirely on families?
Where are families falling through the gaps?
Where can people who may disagree politically still find common ground?
What would meaningful progress look like for Maryland families?
And then comes the question that matters after the conversation ends:
What do I want to do with what I heard?

For one woman, that may mean asking her employer to reconsider a policy that doesn’t work in practice. Another may call an elected official, learn more about an issue affecting her family, share her story, join other mothers around something she cares about, or bring this same conversation into her own community.

For someone else, the first step may simply be sitting in a room with other women and realizing that something she has been struggling to manage quietly is happening in families all around her.

You do not need to arrive as an advocate.

Come because you’re tired of figuring everything out by yourself. Come because you want to say some of this out loud. Come because you want to hear what other women are carrying. Come because you may disagree about plenty of things and still wonder whether motherhood has to be this hard.

The goal is not to leave with every problem solved or everyone in agreement. It is to leave seeing your own experience more clearly, understanding how it connects to something larger, and knowing that your voice belongs in the conversations where decisions about families are made.

We spend a lot of time asking mothers how they’re going to make it work. On this night, we’re asking what needs to work better for them.

Free and open to the public. Registration required.

@cmichelcarter @momsfirstus and #nocountryformothers