Thoughts on our children

I was driving one evening near my apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn when I came to a stop sign. I had, just days before, found out I was pregnant with my first child, and as I came to a rolling stop at the intersection, about to roll right through, I remembered - my child was in here too. It wasn’t just that I needed to be extra careful to protect the being we now know as Baxter. It wasn’t just that I realized my body was no longer my own. It wasn’t just that it was the first time that the heaviness of being responsible for another living thing - for their very life - dawned upon me. It was all of those things but also, perhaps most scarily, the dumbfoundedness of how universal the experience was of not wanting your child to die.

I had wanted to be pregnant and luckily it happened quickly, after maybe two rounds of “trying,” but the lifelong desire for it, the layered fantasies about how it would feel when it happened, and then the ecstatic terrifying moment of realizing it had happened, had made me feel somehow special for being pregnant. Only one of our close friends had crossed over the bridge into parenthood so far, contributing to this feeling of exalted uniqueness. I was soon going to be a MOTHER; how rare, how astonishing, how exceptional.

I felt that way until I came to the stop sign and realized - dear god, every human you’ve ever seen has come from a mother. Yes this pregnancy is big, big, news - the biggest news of your life so far. But it is also the most mundane news in the history of humankind. A woman gets pregnant. Tale as old as, literally, time.

Of course I was well aware - in my own life spent until a few months before trying to not be pregnant, in my work in reproductive rights, in my relationships with women in my life, among who many did not want to have children ever, or even regretted children they had - that not every pregnant woman was filled with instantaneous love and feelings of protection for their unborn child. I also was aware, infinitely more so now a decade later, that for many who struggle to conceive having a child would be the most exceptional and rare thing that could happen.

I knew that the desire to become pregnant wasn’t universal, nor was the ability to, but there was something about this new imperative to not die simply because I didn’t want my child to die that felt like the most common shared experience I had ever had in my life up until that point.

Not wanting my child - and now, children - to die has been the characterization of my time as a mother. When the midwives couldn’t hear Baxter’s heartbeat at the 9 week scan but told me not to worry, I worried. When the ultrasound tech put the cold jelly on my stretched skin and I asked, “does everything look ok?” and she said, “I just do the ultrasound, the doctor will come in and discuss the results,” I worried. I worried that my newborn would die in the carseat on the way home from the hospital. I worried he would die in his crib, from SIDS, which felt like a random visit from the grim reaper that no one could predict or ward off. I worried he would suffocate, choke, die of meningitis that had just presented as a low grade fever.

I worried.

Just like what Tolstoy said about how every happy family is alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own ways, maybe every mother worries about her child in her own ways.

But in the midst of the worry I was also happy, and relaxed enough to still live our lives, including flying on a little puddle jumper from San Juan to Culebra with our 12 week old for a friend’s 30th birthday, and then walking down a steep ragged hill to reach the deserted shore of Flamenco Beach with him strapped to me in a cheap little carrier. Yes, I sobbed the whole way, chastising myself for taking us to a place so remote that if one of the aforementioned crises would have happened there would have been no help for miles and miles.

Nothing happened. He nursed in my arms on the beach, and our friends held him and put his toes in the sand and we still laugh about it nine years later.

But still, I worried.

Two years into my child’s life, Donald Trump became our president. And then I worried in different ways.

I didn’t worry as much about my own child - my own privileged, white male child with a British father who could easily be swooped into another continent if things were truly breaking down. I started worrying about other people’s children, in a way new to me. I started worrying about other people’s children as a mother myself. Not with distant pity, but with an urgent imperative to protect.

When I was pregnant with my second child, babies were being taken from their mothers at the southern border. The situation was becoming increasingly more dire and I was becoming invested in a way that I feared would harm my unborn child. I cried, I cried, I cried. I called congresspeople and cried and screamed on their voicemails. I made it the center of most conversations I had, ruining dinners out and drinks with friends; I started all my emails with “I hope you’re ok, despite what’s happening at the border.” It was so clearly consuming me that when the ProPublica recording of the inside of one of the detention centers was released, a best friend called me and said “Jessica, I’m asking you not to listen to it.” But I did, because how could I not? It felt like it wasn’t someone else’s child but my own that I heard sobbing “Mami! Mami!” It was my child, separated from me, from his stuffed monkey, from his paci, not knowing where his mommy had gone or why she had left him.

Newtown, Parkland, Uvalde. These horrors didn’t make me more scared to send my own children to school, somehow. They just made me grieve with what I imagine to be one hair’s width of the ragged God rage fury of a mother whose child was killed by a boy with a gun. Again, I called congresspeople and screamed through messy tears. How dare you, how dare you, how dare you. A child, my child, our children.

A few weeks ago, I came across a video on Instagram of a woman on her knees, cradling an infant wrapped in a white sheet.

Keep scrolling, Jessica. You already know. You don’t need to see this to have empathy; you don’t need to see this to trust what’s happening.

But again, how could I turn away. How could I turn away from her when my own children were safe in their stuffy filled beds, sleeping with sound machines on just feet away from me. It felt like a denial of my connection to her, to her as a mother. To her as me. To our universal shared desire to keep our kids alive.

I watched the video. A woman wearing a hijab kneeling, holding in her arms a small body, wrapped in a white sheet. Rocking back and forth. Not sobbing, not screaming. But singing, and stroking the cloaked head of her dead child. The same motion, the same rhythm that I’ve used to soothe my sick babies, to ease them into sleep. As she had too, when the child in her arms was once breathing.

What do we do when we realize that all children are our own? What’s the productive way forward from that, how do we live and exist and keep moving when we know not only that this pain is possible but that - in the cases of babies in cages, men shooting kids, bombs being dropped - it is also preventable?

I think about what caused it.

I think about an Audre Lorde quote I use all the time — the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

I think about the tools, and the men who are responsible for the violence. The manufacturing of the weapons and the cages and the bombs, the profiting off the weapons and the the cages and the bombs, the lies shoved down our throats about why the weapons and the cages and the bombs keep us safe.

The master is ok with my child dying, and yours, and even therefore his own.

The only way to dismantle his house is to not be ok with anyone’s kid dying. Including the master’s.

When I was young I was ridiculed for being such a “bra burning liberal,” growing up in Birmingham, Alabama driving a yellow Beetle adorned with “Pro Choice” and “Start a Revolution” stickers. It made sense that I left for college in California; amongst the “radicals and hippies” was where I and everyone thought I belonged.

I’ve been told it’s all a young person’s stance, this belief that war isn’t necessary, that people can be free from violence, that there’s something better and safer than capitalism. That love actually matters, even in the realm of politics. That the master’s tools aren’t the only tools. I’ve been quoted the thing about how any man under 30 who isn’t liberal has no heart and any man over 30 who isn’t conservative has no brains.

Well, I’m forty now. And as I’ve grown and had my own children and read and watched and seen the spoils of this rigged and destructive game that we’re forced into playing, my views are more “liberal” than they’ve ever been before.

And by liberal I mean I do not want anyone’s child to die. I mean that there will never, ever, as long as I am alive, be a reason justifiable to me for killing someone’s child.

I mean - and here’s the really insane part that shows just how radical I’ve gotten - when I say child I mean even the grown ones. Even the ones who have done unspeakable things in desperation to belong, in desperation to survive, in desperation to be free from pain. Not even those children.

One of the tools the masters use to convince us that killing children can be justifiable is trying to get us to believe that since we don’t have pat and readymade answers for geopolitical crises, we don’t know enough to say that we don’t want kids to die. We’re naive and simpleminded. It’s too complicated for us to understand.

I reject that, and I hope you will too.

Your desire for children to live and thrive and be happy is a policy perspective. It is an honorable and appropriate and righteous answer in and of itself. It is the voicemail for the congressperson - period, full stop. There are legislative positions that elected officials and world leaders can adopt to help stop the killing of children and people - banning assault weapons, reforming the prison industrial complex, denying aid to countries that are killing children. But you do not have to know the intricacies of how to solve a problem to have the right to say this - here is what I believe, and what I will always believe, and what I demand that you as my elected official respond to.

The strongest tool in the master’s box is the prepackaged idea that if our child were to be killed we would seek revenge on another’s child. That we can’t know how it would feel until it happened to us. That their actions are just in the service of fairness, and of protecting our children. That our children are different from the ones they are killing.

And this is the tool we have - the one, I’ve come to think maybe the only one, that can ever dismantle the master’s rotting house:

Our prayer to God, to G-d, to Allah, to the goddesses - if my child were to be killed, save my heart from becoming so poisoned with grief, so infested, so corrupted, that I could wish it upon someone else.

If my child were to be killed, I reserve the right to do whatever I wish with my own life. The goddesses know that, we have come to terms with it.

But hear this prayer, from within whatever sacred source was born within me when I birthed my children - if the worst thing happens to me, may I not harden into the master himself.

Hear our prayer. And may those of us praying it trust that it’s the only tool we need.