This paper illuminates the border-crossing and border-contesting work of undocumented mothers seeking opportunities for their children. Mothers navigate dual threats of deportability and poverty-induced mobility, preparing children for, and utilizing schools to stave off, these possibilities. Examining border crossing as parent involvement, I introduce "bordermothering" to elucidate the paradoxical ways in which mothers defy gendered norms of embodied parenting to provide for their children and invoke these norms to contest the conditions that compel their defiance.