Blowing Stuff Up, Blowing Stuff Open

The Flaggy Shore of Ireland

Driving with my daughter the other day, she said: "I really don't want to become a grown-up."

And in my mind, I answered her: Ahhh, daughter.  I hear you. This pandemic. The tragedy everywhere around us. Trump at his Trumpiest. The appalling behavior of other grown-ups and especially those in power. The shooting in Nova Scotia. The stories you hear on the news and in your parents' discussions about the state of the world.  It's all just too much, isn't it?

My heart clenched when she said those words, as my mind unspooled in a stream of second-guessing.  Maybe we shouldn't watch Rachel every night and bring that daily dose of downer and despair into our home.  And we definitely need to be checking in with the kids more and seeing how they are processing the news about the coronavirus and everything else going wrong around the world.  What kind of support does this child need? What do they all need?  What have I missed, what have I not noticed, while I've been in one Zoom meeting after another?  How can I make it up to her?

And then she went on:

"I mean, you have to remember so much stuff as an adult!  I don't think I can do that!  For example, I learned in science class that if you just mix a bunch of chemicals together, you could blow everything up!  What if I don't remember that?  I mean, YOU remember that, because we've never blown anything up, but what if I forget and then the whole house explodes?  I'm never going to remember that.  I'll never remember all the things I'm supposed to remember! How do you do it?"

And once again, I am reminded that a child's perspective on the world is endlessly interesting and often hilarious.  The rest of the car ride was a rather enjoyable romp through imagining all the possibilities of things blowing up.

She's not wrong.  Being a grown-up means remembering, among other things:

• to lock the doors at night;
• where the batteries are;
• when you last gave a child #1 medicine;
• what child #2 asked for from the store;
• not to blow stuff up;
• that YOU are the adult, meaning it's not advisable to have a tantrum in the kitchen with the entire family watching;
• when to change the oil;
• to take the chicken out to thaw;
• to make follow up appointments.  Also?  To go to follow up appointments;
• to pay the bills;
• birthdays;
• to switch the laundry;
• that the garbage cans have to go out on Sunday nights and be brought back in on Monday morning;
• that kids are not always pains in the ass;
• that kids are not yet fully human and therefore require otherwordly amounts of patience and compassion;
• where you put your patience and compassion -- check under laundry pile;
• that the best way to raise a kid is to be good to your spouse (if you are lucky enough to have one);
• to eat your vegetables;
• to exercise so that when you're 80 you can still move;
• to drink water.  Lots and lots of water.  More water than beer.  Or bourbon.  For some reason, this one is hard for me;
• who is allergic to what;
• to wear sunscreen and make everyone under your roof do so as well;
• to pack the sunscreen;
• to get the CUBED pineapple at the store and not the crushed.  Your teriyaki skewers will thank you, and your people will not be disappointed;
• to always put your keys in the same place;
• not to scream every time you want to.

And so much more.  Apparently, it also means never assuming you know what a kid is talking about until you listen just a little longer.  I went from heading down a rabbit hole of worry to giggling with Tallulah about stuff blowing up in a few short seconds.  It's not the first time I've experienced the whiplash of parenthood; it won't be the last.

Later, as I was weeding in the garden, I thought about how much there is we want our kids to know about life and growing up. There's no getting around the intense impulse to teach them things, so many things, ALL the things. We are, as the saying goes, their first teachers. As Rick and I get ready to send our third child off to college this Fall (hopefully: who knows what tricks corona's got up its sleeve), I know I'll once again feel that familiar urgency to make sure she knows how to cook rice, be smart at parties, navigate bureaucracy, iron things, stand up for herself, talk to professors, and the list goes on.

But the list is not what matters. The What You Need To Know Before You Go To College list is not the measure of successful parenting, any more than the Things Grown-Ups Remember list is the measure of successful adulting.

The longer I am a parent, the more I suspect that all of my lists -- things to do, things to teach, things to manage, for my family, for myself -- while important, are not the be-all and end-all. Teaching my children things pales in comparison to what I hope I do better than anything else in life: loving them. And enjoying them. Celebrating them. Crying with them. Talking to them. Listening to them. Laughing with them. Cooking with them. Listening to music with them. Being with them, always.  I suppose that's a list of sorts, but one you never cross things off of. You get to get up every day and do all of those things again and again and again, in endless variety, in constant relationship.

Teaching them stuff will only take them so far. Giving them a soft place to land, a hard surface to bounce things off of, a net that will always catch them, and arms that will never let go, no matter how far they travel, will take them everywhere.

It turns out, parenting is the Flaggy Shore of family life:

Useless to think you'll park or capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

-- Seamus Heaney, Postscript

* * *

If We Were Siblings

Based on the news, my Twitter feed, and the depressing New Yorker articles I've been reading lately, I have come to the conclusion that life in the time of corona is marked by fear and mistrust.

Americans do not trust each other, and without that trust, we will not stand.  We will be a house divided.  If we could fight like siblings, we would stand a chance, but we fight instead like strangers who cut each other off in traffic and give each other the finger as we blaze past with furious indignation oozing from the glares we leave behind.

I wish we could fight like siblings.  Sure, we’d probably still flip each other the bird and we would definitely get just as enraged at perceived injustices and stupidity.  But maybe sometimes we would stick around to thrash it out too.

----

Everywhere I look, I see the ways in which we don't trust each other.  It's in the protestors who want to open the country back up, facing down the health care workers who want us to stay at home.  It's in the vicious twitterstorms we consume in great, endless scrolls.  It's in the way we talk about virtually every issue we face as a country.

Take health care: Low-income Alabamians are opposed to the Affordable Care Act because they don't want "aliens and welfare queens" to take advantage of taxpayers' hard-earned money.  Have they asked for proof that this actually happens, or are they believing their so-called leaders -- leaders who very well could have ulterior motives for wanting to pit poor and oppressed people against each other?

You can blame the New Yorker, and Eyal Press specifically, for this rant.  His piece A Preventable Cancer is on the Rise in Alabama got my brain and blood both boiling.

Why do the "have nots" give their solidarity and loyalty to the "haves," who show no capacity for generosity or justice or simple decency?

To the question of people gaming the system: how many welfare queens would be acceptable if it means poor people could get the health care they need so they don’t die from easily preventable disease?  If 100 deserving citizens get covered through the ACA, while two or three welfare queens pull a fast one, sneaking themselves and their 10-12 children on to the rolls, even though they’re lazy, good-for-nothings who waste their time and our dime, would that be worth it?  Or 7-8 of them?  What about 20?

And what exactly is a welfare queen? Should we take a look at what life on welfare actually looks like and root out the people who are living like royalty? Does that even happen?  Should we find out who is actually being prosecuted for fraud?  Does anyone besides me suspect that it might be mostly white people?  Not necessarily because they're worse people but because there are more of them?

And don't get me started on the 10-12 babies thing.

As if people have babies to make their lives easier...
As if big families deserve less of a safety net than smaller ones...
As if the people complaining about 10-12 babies from welfare queens aren't the same ones saying All Lives Are Precious, meaning, apparently, only the unborn ones because once you draw breath, suddenly you're a drain on honest taxpayers -- at least you are if you're born into a family that doesn't fit American mythology.

Swerving from that New Yorker article, with its wider implications for health care during a pandemic, to the coverage of Trump doing his trumpiest and protestors with rifles demanding the right to go out for burger, I can’t help but wonder if people on opposite sides of the most important issue we face can ever come together.

The divide feels too deep to cross.

Even siblings have to fight like hell to bridge their divides, to remind themselves to be compassionate, to put themselves in each others' shoes.

It seems that Americans take for granted the things we say we stand for.  We behave as if slogans are true without effort, that flags and symbols are enough all on their own, that we don't need vigilance and struggle and conversations and challenge and compromise.  Maybe that's why human beings keep fighting wars: because being on the righteous side of a fight does in fact unite us, perhaps like nothing else, and because so often, we need to be brought together again.  Being united against a common enemy lays bare the secondary importance of daily grievances and even policy differences, by stripping away what does not matter.  What's left is truly, only, what is worth dying for.

So what do we do when we can't even agree on what is worth dying for?

We've got front line workers who show us, every day, that other people are worth dying for. And we've got other people, some of them elected leaders, who seem to believe that the economy is worth dying for -- MORE worth it than saving the lives of a whole lot other people.

If we take this second group at their word, they are willing to have Americans die from COVID19 so that the economy survives.  Don't they see that the vast majority of those who will do the dying are those for whom the economy wasn't working in the first place?  Their policy ideas belie their blindness to how millions upon millions of Americans actually live.  When they say "the solution can't be worse than the problem," they belie their privilege and their inability to truly see what is happening around them.

And what do we do as a country when one solution will minimize how many of us must die while damaging the fortunes of corporations and the other solution will minimize the economic damage while increasing the number of people -- likely poor -- who will die?

If we were siblings and had to choose for our great big family, wouldn't we choose life over dollars?  Call it a choice between two bad outcomes: in perfect world we wouldn't have to choose.

But the fact that the choice exists is not evidence of moral failure. The problem we have does not mean that libtards suck or that MAGAs are a bunch of deplorable #BranchCovidians.  The reality we are facing does not require us to lay blame at each others' feet.  The problem is that we are battling a global pandemic that is big, nasty, overwhelming, terrible, and that touches everything from the personal to the political, the systemic to the idiosyncratic.  The problem is, basically, a war -- a battle that should be uniting us to come together and save lives.

When we don't do that -- when we can't be brothers and sisters and agree on the enemy -- when that happens, no flag can help us.  If we want that flag, our country, to save us, then shouldn't we put some energy, time, and goodwill into the fight, with our questions, our actions, our kindness?  Shouldn't we each give the best of ourselves to each other, instead of our vitriol and venom?

So many of us are making masks, and hosting neighborhood "distance happy hours," and showing solidarity with the Class of 2020, and finding ways to help, soothe, comfort.  We are coming together in those important ways and places.

But in perhaps the toughest places of all -- the places where we disagree -- nothing feels farther from the truth than "we're all in this together."  We're too busy shouting at each other for that to be true.

And so, a plea: If you disagree with me, please don't flip the bird at me and rush past in disgust.  Engage me. Ask me what I care about and why. Tell me those things about yourself.  Tell me what you are afraid of.  Push, with love, on the most urgent questions we are facing together.

I want to do the same.  I want to be your sister.