The Mother Mind of Jodie Patterson
By Faith Cummings
Photography by Michael Mundy
Beauty Angie Parker
In her next act, Jodie Patterson is spending more time closer to Mother Nature and plotting how to help everyone understand mothering is the way forward.
Jodie Patterson is proof of how full a life can be. In her fifty-three expansive years, she’s mothered five children, been an acrobat in the Big Apple Circus, directed public relations for a major fashion brand, got married twice, owned a beauty business, wrote a memoir, and the list can quite literally go on and on. She’s always creating and forever ideating, but when we finally connect, she’s in both a mellow zone because of the incessant rain New York City is getting and concerned about the state of the world in this current moment. “I feel really sad and frustrated about what’s happening because the conversation is so charged and layered that it’s hard to speak freely without upsetting people,” Patterson says. “Many of us are so angry because we’re intersectional with so many identities. It all screams a lack of humanity. Processing war and all the death is really hard.”
But more than virtually anyone, Patterson is equipped to help her community and the world at large navigate this devastating and overwhelming time. She is a master of having crucial conversations — a skill born from the confidence her mother instilled in her and her sister growing up and her journey of self-examination throughout her son’s transition.
These conversations are not just ones she’s having around the globe as she lectures in different board rooms, communities, and hospitals, but discussions she’s also having at home with her children. For Patterson, it’s all about the dose and environment when approaching challenging subjects. “When I give hard-hitting facts or open up a conversation that’s really difficult, I make sure the environment is right. The dinner table is always good because it’s loving, inclusive — we’re getting fed, and we’re close to each other,” she says.
Family and community are lifelines for Patterson, so she’s steadfastly built hers out of curiosity and a need for an even deeper and more all-embracing understanding of humanity. She’s unabashedly in love with people and says as such because they’ve been her gateways to new worlds. “I always ask them what they know that I don’t know and for them to take me there,” she says. “My curiosity gets the best of me. Once I found out my daughter was actually my son, I thought, what else in the world don’t I know?”
Paterson used that unknowing in taking on writing her memoir, The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation. At first, it seemed like a self-indulgent journey that she wasn’t compelled to go on. But after realizing she had come to some clarity in her life around unlearning and relearning gender with the help and support of her son, she felt it was important for her to write that down and share it.
Aside from the actual living and learning required to gather the contents of such an endeavor over decades, Patterson also wanted consent from her family before talking in-depth about her life and their roles. “For many years, they said no,” she says. “So when they started saying yes, I began to share in a very conscious way, only sharing the things we were all okay with. The anonymity that my family needs, I give them. There’s so much to talk about in this world of pro-equality, and I can use the experience from my family and share it as universal truths.”
“My curiosity gets the best of me. Once I found out my daughter was actually my son, I thought, what else in the world don’t I know?”
Upstate New York is just the latest location where Patterson’s community is expanding, after growing up on the Upper West Side and living for years in NYC’s coveted neighborhoods and now Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. After a period away from the region, she was called back to Sullivan County during the pandemic, when she realized congested cities away from nature weren’t where she wanted to spend most of her time. So, she started to dream about the ideal environment for herself and her kids and how she could be there more often. And like everything she set her mind to, she brought it to fruition.
“When you start looking for things, you’ll find them,” Patterson says. “I’m in Forestburgh, and the actual land is perfect. I’ve got a body of water, blueberry bushes, and five acres. I’ve now developed and somewhat created an environment of queer, Black people in a neighborhood that wasn’t that. It was a little bit of timing with the pandemic and a little bit of nature and the universe doing its thing to support me.”
The importance of Patterson owning land as a Black woman and carving out her own space in the world is not lost on her, as it’s an unattainable goal for many. “I had never owned anything until now, and it took a lot to get there,” she says. “I used my last bit of book money, which took a lot of creativity — and that to me was important, that I could do it on my own.”
Patterson started with the basic structure of a barn, which made sense both economically and visually. She had already decided she wanted to spend money bringing nature inside, so she created a double-height wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Her kitchen is full-on industrial, akin to those used in restaurants since she cooks a lot for her family.
“A lot of the design is based on how I operate in life, and what I want and need as a woman is nature,” she says. “I’m never going to overspend just because I like something, so a lot of the decisions were based on economics and where my values are.”
As a creative, upstate is also a refuge where Patterson can think quietly without music, the pings of social media alerts, and traffic outside her door. “It’s a huge haven for me to do nothing, and in that nothingness, I could end up writing another book or coming up with a concept as a thinker,” she says of her Forestburgh home. “The time I do nothing up there is the pre-work and quiet work for all the heavy lifting I do as a mom, activist, and writer. It’s a good reminder every day to behave in sync with nature. We have to be immersed in it, or else we create an artificial existence.”
No matter where she is, though, Patterson is committed to taking care of herself so she can continue to fight and show up as her best self. She runs two miles almost every day outside in the streets of whatever place she’s in, followed by an equal amount of stretching.
“I had never owned anything until now, and it took a lot to get there. I used my last bit of book money, which took a lot of creativity — and that to me was important, that I could do it on my own”
Style is also a powerful practice Patterson spends a reasonable amount of time on, which is dictated by her mindset and mood. Her hairstyle may drastically change from a pixie haircut to a straight bob to long, bohemian box braids. And her fashion choices may range from a menswear-inspired plaid shirt and corduroys to a glamorous gown for a gala. “How I want to perform and present to the world needs something to get it going,” Patterson says. “I use my style to get me ready for the fight I’m a part of.”
Then, Patterson leans into her care rituals that involve others, including how much alone time she has and how that harmonizes with caring for her children. She and her ex-husband share that caretaking in thirty-day increments, which allows Patterson to think, travel, write, and take meetings at different times. “I used to think I had to be with my kids all the time as a mom,” she says. “And now I know that untethering from my kids and social norms around what women are supposed to do is one of the biggest forms of self-care and drivers of my success.”
And the future is bright for Patterson as she gears up for one of her biggest and most visible projects yet—developing her memoir into a television series with HBO called Starfish. Nicole Ari Parker has already signed on to play Patterson in a story centered around a devoted mother and wife who realizes so many needs to change in her world after one of her children tells her, ‘I’m not a girl. I’m a boy.’ “It’s in line with all the classic family stories, but it’s not nice,” Patterson says. “It’s combustible and complicated with a Black single woman at the head of this queer family and the journey she takes her family on. It’s set in New York City and goes into gender, race, and identity. I’m telling it only from the perspective I know.”
Patterson believes there’s so much space on both the big and small screen to tell new and unique stories about single women and those about queer families that aren’t steeped in sadness. She wants to create art showing adults listening to the younger generation and genuinely believing collaboration is the way forward. Patterson sees many women tapping into the power of sharing their journey, and she considers this feminine approach to creativity, imagination, and leadership as the new form of influence.
She calls it “genderless mothering,” and she’s already teaching in her keynotes around the country and abroad to different communities and organizations. Patterson is seeing just how much her perspective as a mother adds value to every room she’s in, and she knows hers is part of a long and compassionate lineage of mothering in the Black and queer communities and all their intersections. “Mothering is the way forward, and I’ve seen some of the best mothering done in the queer community by brothers, by non-biological mothers, and even in the boardroom at the Human Rights Campaign,” she says. “Anyone can learn the skill sets of Black women and the queer community, and they can bring it into their communities. Anyone can raise a community and raise a person against the odds, even with the current state of affairs of the world.”
Patterson is using her energy in this next stage to mother others, mother concepts, and mother her communities, whether in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Forestburgh, or worldwide. She isn’t exactly sure where this path will take her, but with all the other roads she’s traversed, she’s unafraid to take the challenge head-on. With the people she loves around her and nature close by so she can recharge, think, and create, Patterson is sure to unearth something new and unknown and share it with all of us for our betterment once she’s grasped it.
