It all started with a homemade button with “Free Mom Hugs” written on it in black Sharpie. Sara Cunningham, a mom of two from Oklahoma, wore it to a Pride festival in 2015, offering hugs to anyone who needed one. “With anyone who made eye contact with me, I would say, ‘Could I offer you a hug or a high five?’” she tells Yahoo Life.
“The first girl I offered a hug to said it’s been four years since she had a hug from her mother because she’s a lesbian,” Cunningham says. That ignited a spark in her to do more, leading her to found the nonprofit Free Mom Hugs. What started as just a few moms in Oklahoma City has turned into a national movement with more than 40,000 registered volunteers.
Cunningham didn’t start out as a fierce advocate, however. When her son came out to her years ago, she felt devastated and alone, something she wrote about in her book, How We Sleep at Night: A Mother’s Memoir. “I thought I was the only mother in the world, or at least Oklahoma anyway, with a gay kid,” she says. Cunningham wrestled with her conservative Christian faith and admits she didn’t treat her son well, “believing that [he] was condemned for eternity and that if I accepted him or even tolerated him, that made me a sinner too,” she says. “I was frozen in that fear.”
Over time, Cunningham educated herself and met other moms like her. “It was a journey from the church to the Pride parade without losing my faith or my son,” she says…