Maybe I am a mess. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I’m out of my mind. But God help me I will keep these lights up until the day I die if I think there’s a chance that Will is still out there. Now get out! Get out!!
— Joyce Byers, Stranger Things
If I were going to a Halloween party this year, I’d go as Joyce Byers, from Stranger Things. Because I am her. The mother who looks hysterical, unhinged — the one who says her child is alive and nobody believes her. Not the cops. Not the doctors. Not even the family. They hand you a tidy story: a body, a funeral, a place to stop hurting. Joyce refuses their lies. She strings lights across the wall and waits until the bulbs answer back.
We all know those scenes: lights blinking a secret language, the phone line full of breath that only she recognizes, the way she pounds on her chest and swears, I know he is alive! Television tales, yeah, and a solid mirror of the reality of the intelligence of wild mothers that our doctors, cops and policy makers never learned to read. Mothers have senses that institutions mistake for madness: we feel our kid’s distress, hear their breath, know their desire to live even when they are trapped in the Upside Down.
The monster has teeth; chemical and bureaucratic. Overprescribing “safe pain relief,” spilling out on the street. Synthetic fentanyl made by engineered predators. The Demogorgon in our world is written on prescription pads, distributed by pharmacists, driven by profit-minded warfare devouring neighborhoods and leaving mothers with emergency care.
When my daughter told me she was using, the village offered its tidy 12-step memes instead of real support: “They have to want to get better.” “Let her hit bottom.” “You’re enabling.” Platitudes as shields protecting everyone who doesn’t want to get involved. Who doesn’t want to see how the system has failed. The same system that handed out those little white pills now turns away when thousands are dying. Clinics close early; detox beds have waiting lists that outlast a life. Doctors draw lines over who deserves bridging meds. Insurance companies tally costs. Meanwhile the chemical predator moves silently amongst the dead.
So mothers do three things at once: we become shamans, monsters, outlaws.
The shaman is the mother who listens across thresholds. Joyce hears Will’s breath in the static; she knows his life essence when everyone else calls it denial. I learned to listen the same way — to the thinness of a voice, to the way a silence stretched too long. Shamanic work in this world has no incense or crystal grid; it has car keys at 2 a.m., a fast-fingers text thread, an uncanny sense of where the danger is building. It’s tender, fierce attention honed into instinct.
Then the projection happens: you become the monster. Once you act on that kind of sight, the village runs a story about you. The same phone calls that are rescue plans are called hysteria. The drives to clinics and alleys become evidence against you. People would rather believe tidy moralistic tales than the messy truths: that systems created the beast and then refused to own it. So they look for a scapegoat. Mothers fit the role perfectly.
And then, out of necessity, you become an outlaw. Joyce smashes into labs, trespasses where she must, and refuses the narratives handed to her. I bought drugs to stave off seizures while we waited months for a detox bed. I knocked on doors that should not have been closed. I negotiated with doctors who objected on principle. I rearranged legal requirements the way you rearrange furniture to make room for a life. This is not a righteous rebellion for spectacle, it’s a brutal improvisation of survival.
Joyce’s scene with the lights is not just a pledge of love. It’s a model of refusal. She teaches us how to keep signal-bearing objects alive — the bulbs, the phone — so the signal doesn’t die. The ritual is the repetition: keep doing the small, stubborn things even when the world laughs. Keep stringing lights until your hands ache. Keep calling. Keep driving. Keep showing up in places they tell you not to go.
You will feel ashamed. You will feel judged. Sometimes you will regret the lines you crossed. Regret is a luxury when someone is dying. Mostly you keep going and do the ethics later. The alternative is silence, and silence kills with a terrible efficiency.
We have to change what we call knowledge. We must stop treating maternal certainty as pathology and start building systems that listen. Keep clinics open 24/7. Insurance that covers successful treatments for everyone. Harm-reduction that meets people where they are, without moral theater. Access to bridging medications to keep bodies alive long enough for real treatment. And for wild mothers sake! Continue demanding accountability from those who profit from the normalization of pills and who let lethal synthetics proliferate.
Until we get there, we mothers will keep showing up like Joyce. We will string the lights. We will pound our hearts and insist. We will wield keys, axes, and bus passes. We will be called monsters until someone finally opens the door and sees what we always knew: That we are not monsters and our kids deserve to live.
Rock on, Wild Mothers. Keep your hands on the bulbs, and your eyes on the dark.
Yeah — and I do wield an axe. Just ask my kids.