Thursday 7 November 2024

Sleight of Hand, Hands Full

Holding my baby last night, nursing him, I let myself retreat into the lavishness of that embrace, the peace and beauty of our quiet moment together, a safe space insulated from an outside world growing more chaotic and dangerous. 

And it was beautiful, though it also instantly and viscerally brought me back to doing that with my first baby, seven years ago. How it felt to keep him safe through instability, the heavy lift of making a happy universe of our own at home in the midst of the betrayal inflicted by the adult world. It felt like I wrapped myself bodily around my baby to protect him from a car crash that rolled on for four years.


At the end of those years, my body was aged from chronic stress. I had to sit back, rehabilitate myself, breathe deep and heal. I will forever be grateful to Joe Biden for providing the years of relative normality that gave me space to catch my breath and show up for my child less burdened than I had been in his earliest moments.


Now, it starts again, with my rights severely eroded, with a new babe in arms. I think the state of the country will be significantly worse, and I am braced for impact. I feel it, bodily. I have told these stories before, I know, but we keep staying stuck living through it, so I have to keep talking about it.


I have to say, I do truly hate Trump and his supporters for stealing so much joy from my parenting years. I don't see myself working on that feeling anytime soon. I doubt I'll have the space to do so, with the constant assaults to come. The nightmares of their creation have robbed me of bandwidth I would have otherwise devoted to more imaginative games with my babies. It’s hard to fully play when I’m so exhausted. They have kept me fighting, and have released such ugliness into the world that I have had to devote even more work to counter at home. I’m trying so hard to cultivate love and hope here, and they continue to exist as evil black holes, warping the gravity of our society as my children try to find their balance in life. 


I have to explain all of this as a mother, contextualizing the cruelty in age-appropriate ways, and it is tiresome, painful, and draining. It is also easiest with the babies, because I can be their world. As my eldest gets bigger, however, he sees this rot himself. It hits different when he needs an explanation for this lack of justice, these moral failures, this racism, sexism, and abuse. He is expected to cooperate, be kind, and respect others, even as none of that is modeled by the most visible figure in our country, who evades accountability at every turn, habitually defrauding and harming others in plain view. I can't hide this from my child; I can only continue to explain the pathology of it, and hope he embeds deeply a sense that this is not right.


The beautiful microcosm I’m building at home is sustained in a force field of my own creation, not impervious but impressively strong. The nucleus is portable; I can uproot us and plant the seed again somewhere else if I need to. I hold that strength in my heart, ready to expand for my children whenever needed.


But I deeply, deeply resent that so many of these tender moments have been tinged with the contamination of their larger context. I wish I could have spent more days with both arms wrapped around my children, instead of using one to hold the crushing forces of the world at bay.

Tuesday 29 October 2024

The Horrors Persist, But So Do I

I keep wanting to write about this election, and it's hard to even know where to begin. 

It's horrifying that it's close. There's only one way that we tip the scales, and that is to vote, and to talk to each other about these issues as we march to the polls. If you are eligible to vote, you need to vote, wherever you are. 

The other day, I had a conversation with a politically conservative loved one, in which we discussed abortion bans and their impact on women's lives in the United States right now. He sighed heavily, and let me know that he saw the horrors. I asked him directly to vote for Kamala Harris, because the other guy is a  danger to me and other people he loves. 

I have a backup plan if this all goes wrong, but most of my nearest and dearest don't. I'm not living through another four years of the United States eating itself while I'm trying to raise small children. I can get them out of here, but not everyone. 

So I'm going to vote like I don't have another option. I'm going to use my vote to help buoy Harris to the presidency so we can continue to have tough conversations. I've happily voted for Kamala before, and it's honestly an honor to do so again in a historically consequential way, but this is about more than that. 

We are already hearing the orange oaf truthfully state that he wants to turn the military on our citizens for protesting. His own advisors have called him a fascist and explained how he admires dictators.  His closing arguments on the campaign trail have been promises of violence, racism and misogyny. He used his previous presidential term to erode our international standing, make the rich richer, and endanger women; to demonize difference, degrade our environment, and elevate christofascism to our highest offices. 

2020 wrung me out. My first child was born in 2017, and together we attended so many protests, made so many phone calls, knocked doors, spoke up. January 6th, 2021 started with joy about Georgia's contributions to the Senate, and within two hours of that celebration I was watching, horrified, as congresspeople I follow were live-tweeting a coup. 

By the time Biden was safely inaugurated, I needed a break to nestle in with my family and rebuild. After so much national instability, I bet you needed some normal, too. 

But the side effect of needing that normality is that we seem to have forgotten the big lessons we needed to take forward. As someone else wonderfully put it, the only excuse for voting for Donald Trump now is having just woken up from an 8-year coma. 

Kamala Harris is a brilliant, thoughtful politician, a joyful warrior who is presenting policies to make having a family safer, to make buying a house easier, and to stop the horror of rising maternal and infant mortality, among so many things. Her lived experience has brought her through so many angles on our nations toughest problems. She is deeply experienced, and has a record of accomplishment that proves her brilliance and commitment. I am excited about her presidency, and I also don't agree with her on everything. I look forward to continuing the work that her administration will make possible, even without perfect agreement. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump stands there, old and visibly losing his mind, exhausted but viciously going mad, a poor person's idea of a rich person trying to outrun a lifetime of fraud and abuse of working people. He has had so, so, so many decades of throwing those who stand with him under the bus at the first opportunity. He is a convicted felon who has thrown in his lot with our enemies, so long as they flatter his brittle ego. He is a coward, a draft-dodger, a serially bankrupt loser who arguably only ran for president in the first place to keep himself out of jail, and I suspect that's much of his motivation still. 

It's been a long road. Take a deep breath, and make your plan to vote. Move democracy forward. Get it done.

Thursday 28 March 2024

Not Tired of London, Not Tired of Life

This time last year, we had a trip to London felt like a weeklong date with the city, and was also one of the first moments I noticed that I had a big kid, and that we could simply take off for a day of sightseeing with minimal prep or gear. It felt light and lovely, and I loved it! 

Dash and I spent a few of those days mostly on our own, as James had some work to do, and we did things like spend an entire day in the Science Museum. We had fun together, and it wasn't a struggle. 


I have to admit, I have some very big feelings about sacrificing that ease to embrace another baby. The wallop of exiting toddlerhood with Dash into a pandemic and having to work so goddamned hard for years to hold things steady for so many lives really took it out of me. From Summer 2022 to Summer 2023, it finally felt like there was room for a fully-fledged version of life for me to emerge again. 


My paradigm for this postpartum and beyond is not to say to myself, "This part passes quickly"--because, for me it did not--but rather to establish a new rhythm where love and joy and fun are back in the equation as fully and quickly as possible. I'm not interested in straddling mom guilt and being subsumed into some version of early childhood where help is a treat. I cannot wait another five years for life to feel good again. I am not interested in narratives of maternal sacrifice. 


So, I look back on this trip a little wistfully, and resolve to pour that yearning for a life that finally feels like it has balance back into the efforts at hand. Honestly, I imagine picking up Muffin like a quarterback and hauling that baby into a life I want for me, and being extremely low empathy about interference and attempts to intercept my plays at my own self-actualization. (The latter is aimed at the adults in my life; honestly, Dash was never the problem.)


With Dash, at this point in pregnancy, I stood prepared for a paradigm shift (as much as that’s possible), ready to give up what was necessary to clear the path for this great leap into the unknown. Now, it's different: I've tasted the sweetness of life where there's more teamwork and competence under my roof, and I'm not going back.




Tuesday 19 March 2024

Baby Island and Big Kid Town

There is something really magical that happens with getting settled into a school community, and this is a gift that I'm reminded of from a conversation with another parent today. 


For years, Dash was kind of the only kid around, unless we were hanging out with folks from our birth classes or preschool friends. We were really blessed to have a small preschool through COVID, which was a de facto pod and never had any outbreaks while we were there, thanks to the watchful eyes of the teachers and the care the three or so families involved were taking with regard to each other. However, small it was, and during that lockdown time our whole world was, too. 


But now, I find that we're spending more of our time with so many parents of Dash's school-age peers, and there's just this understanding. Sometimes, kids are not at their best. We can't actually control them, only guide them and get them out of situations that are clearly not working. And everyone is working on stuff, whether they are 6 or 45. 


It's just such a different vibe than being bold enough to take a kid into a mostly-adult setting, where there's more of a presumption that I can perfectly anticipate a little person's behavior at all times, or say the magic words to rein him in when he's not perfectly on track. There's a degree of relaxation that comes into things for both me as a parent and Dash as a kid, where his natural exploration of the world around him as well as the world within of social development happen with less pressure. 


This is different than any of the mommy-and-me groups, or other (very important and useful!) early socialization experiences. We have friends in the neighborhood in a way that we never have before, and many of them! There are accidental play dates that turn into dinners together, bumping into pals at weekend breakfasts out, getting the kiddos into other fun classes and simultaneously bemoaning the chaos we're unleashing on teachers by enrolling them along with buddies. 


Now, I am pregnant again. I had a lot of fear about getting marooned on Baby Island with the new little one, especially now that I’m enjoying having a bigger kid in school. So many moms get stuck with help only as a treat, and mostly doing the work of raising infants in daytime hours (and beyond) alone, and the days are often long and exhausting. That certainly was my first two years with Dash. I felt a visceral resistance to doing it again, and heartbreak at the loneliness to come. 


While I still don't know how the picture will look once we've got a fresh baby in tow, a lot of these families of Dash's peers are already stepping up in ways that make this journey feel different. They are already showing up to have him over when we have appointments, or standing ready with practical support as we need it, or even just expressing excitement about having a baby around again. 


This is just how it's supposed to be--we were never meant to raise our babies one-on-one, boxed away in houses and trying to fit babyhood in around the margins of an individualistic idea of adult life mostly in a workplace. We're social animals, and our kids in a pack teach each other so much, allowing more space for the adults to hear each other and work in tandem, too. For the moms still in the trenches with babies, toddlers, and even preschoolers--it truly can get better. Your world can grow along with your child. There is this magic that gets unlocked when we are suddenly spending more time in spaces that are built with regard to children, instead of merely accommodating them. 


Somehow, we have established a modern world that makes just existing with kids in public a constant gauntlet of ill-fitting environments that seem to assume we were all born adult. Thankfully, some of that falls away when we find ourselves working in community with folks that have similar needs and fresh ideas about where we can all go to enjoy the time we have with these small humans.