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.
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