The swimming pool at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, cerulean and shaped somewhat like a poodle, was not an obvious place for a baptism. Yet on Saturday morning, before the workshops on health and Bible basics, before the D.J. started spinning Disney tracks, a smattering of the women of Momcon put on bathing suits and went outside to be symbolically purified.
By 9 a.m., they had changed back into dry clothes and filled a hotel ballroom with 3,000 others, many sporting T-shirts that distilled their maternal creeds into brassy slogans like “I have OCD: Obsessive Coffee Disorder,” or “I have it all together, I just don’t know where I put it.” This was the annual convention of the MomCo, a Christian-focused nonprofit for mothers with 3,500 chapters in the United States and 150,000 American members, many of whom pay a $37 annual subscription and then about $227 to attend the convention, which has been going for more than 30 years.
“I heard someone at the hotel describe this as a church-lady gathering,” said Shannon Locke, a 34-year-old mother of three with another on the way, adding that she overheard the stranger’s friend reply: “At least the bar will be empty.”
As a national discourse stokes uncertainty over parenting tactics — to vaccinate or not to vaccinate, to allow screen time or ban those pesky phones — America’s mothers have found themselves under a newly brightened spotlight. In the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, moms turned health influencers are advising Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as he advances a campaign to question childhood vaccines, censure food dyes and sow doubt about Tylenol use in pregnancy. In the “pronatalism” movement, the most public-facing voices have been men, but the role of mothers is obvious and essential: to have more children and reverse declining birth rates.
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