Muffins with Mom and the Mothers We Cannot See By Ashley Stout
On a morning already crowded with lunchboxes, school reminders, homework folders, and the return of after-school schedules, I found myself sitting with my three children at Muffins with Mom. There were blueberry muffins on paper napkins, coffee in small cups, juice boxes lined up in a row, a low hum of conversation, and the familiar choreography of children wanting to sit close, then wanting to find their friends, before the school day began. Like so many parents, I have spent the first weeks of the school year trying to regain the rhythm of remembering who needs which form signed, figuring out the new activity calendar, wondering how we are already back to homework, and trying to hold onto the fleeting ordinary moments in between. That morning was one of them. It was simple, warm, and joyful. Sitting among other mothers and children, I felt lucky to be there. But I also found myself thinking about the mothers who were not in that room. Mothers whose mornings are shaped not by school breakfasts and carpools, but by displacement, illness, insecurity, grief, and the work of keeping children safe when the systems around them are failing.
I thought about a mother newly resettled in Colorado from Afghanistan, beginning again in a place whose school routines, transportation systems, social expectations, and language may all be unfamiliar. For her, “back to school” can mean much more than buying supplies and adjusting to new teachers. It can mean learning how to navigate an entirely new life while carrying the memory of the one left behind. I thought, too, about mothers in communities around the world where access to health care, safe housing, food, and education is uncertain; mothers living with HIV who are still doing the daily work of caring for children; mothers who have lost family members to disease, conflict, or disasters intensified by a changing climate. These stories are not interchangeable, and we should resist turning women’s lives into symbols of suffering. But there is something universal in the hope that our children will be safe, nourished, welcomed, and able to imagine a future. The injustice lies in how unevenly the world distributes the conditions that make that hope possible. A mother’s love does not change across borders. The support available to her too often does.
This is where a school breakfast in Colorado connects to the wider world. Global citizenship is not only something practiced in international meetings or discussed in distant headlines. It is practiced in the ways we welcome families into our schools, make room for newcomers in our neighborhoods, support systems that allow parents to work and children to learn, and refuse to look away from crises that feel far from home. UNA Boulder’s work rests on the idea that international human rights and global challenges are local concerns, too. Concerns expressed through advocacy, education, dialogue, and relationships with people who have arrived here seeking safety and a chance to rebuild. The UNA Boulder chapter has supported an Afghan refugee family with practical needs such as food, clothing, legal navigation, and cultural adjustment, demonstrating that resettlement is not a single moment of arrival but an ongoing process of belonging. When we support refugee-serving organizations, volunteer our time, advocate for humane policies, learn from our new neighbors, or simply extend a genuine invitation to a family finding its footing, we make a broader promise tangible: you and your children belong here.
When Muffins with Mom ended, my children headed to their classrooms and the day gathered speed again. There were emails to answer, work to do, practices to get to, dinner to prepare, and the inevitable question of whether everyone had finished their homework and unpacked their lunch. Nothing about our schedule changed. But I carried the morning differently. Paying attention to the wider world does not mean treating ordinary joy as something to apologize for. It means allowing gratitude to become responsibility. It means recognizing that every child deserves the simple assurance that someone will show up, sit beside them, and help them feel safe and seen. In Colorado, we can help make that assurance more real, not only for our own families, but for families beginning again after displacement, loss, or upheaval. A muffin shared on a school morning cannot solve the world’s crises. But a community that chooses to welcome, include, and stand alongside one another can become part of the answer.
