Hope in the Dark.
Have you ever had a feeling unlocked for you?
The drudgery of pandemic parenting has been well-documented, and resources for coping abound. I belong to about a dozen newsletters and am pitched all those resources on the daily, some more helpful than others. I use what I can, and remain consistently overwhelmed by the rest. In one of my recent posts, I talked about how I’ve been building up a shell of sorts, something hard surrounding me so I can tough this Twilight Zone of parenting out without completely losing it every day. If I’m honest, I think I started building that shell all the way back in 2001, when 9/11 sent me into a tailspin that I steered my way out of; that was the first time in my life when the unthinkable happened on my doorstep. How could I have known that by 2020 the same number of people who died in 9/11 would die in a single day from the total mismanagement of a global pandemic?
But the events of January 6, 2021 added a new layer of impossibility to pandemic parenting. I sat at my desk the following day, trying to work but feeling raw and distracted, listening to a radio interview with Jeff Orlowski, the director of The Social Dilemma (which is irrelevant for this post, but if you haven’t seen it, you should). Orlowski said “it’s unfair to expect parents to have to police their kids’ social media habits…” or something to that effect. It was his use of the word unfair that unleashed a wave of deeply held emotions from some well of repression inside me as I turned it over and over in my head.
Unfair. Orlowski unlocked me with that word. It’s a word my kids don’t really know yet. The oldest, my son, points out the little injustices of his life which usually amount to his sister getting more sprinkles on her ice cream than he did. He’s still too young to fully comprehend the perfect storm of injustices that enshroud his upbringing right now. Unfair. The word conjures adolescence for me, the time in our lives when we’re sure it’s the world vs. us. Now we use the grown-up versions: Unjust. Inequitable. Discriminatory. F*cked. But we’re still pretty sure it’s the world vs. us; we have no evidence of a societal support system to prove otherwise.
It wasn’t so much the injustice of social media hitting me in that moment as much as it was feeling smacked with the f*ckery of trying to parent two kids through intersecting apocalyptic tragedies: a toxic presidency, a terrifying pandemic, mandatory homeschooling, racial uprisings ignited by the murders of innocent men and women, an economic depression, the destruction of our planet, and now an insurrection in the nation’s capitol (just a few miles from their grandparents) brought on by the resurgence of white nationalism and a madman clinging to power, all while inwardly freaking out that all the screens we’re relying so heavily on are slowly melting our children’s brains. None of these events was on the horizon when I got pregnant (either time) but if any one of them had been I might have given pause to what I thought was the natural progression of my life; I understand now why Gen Z friends have claimed it’s immoral for them to bring kids into the world in the shape that it’s in.
As I said to my colleagues the other day in a moment of slight hysteria in our “processing space” for the Capitol riots, all of this is unfair to so many of us for different reasons, at varying angles. I’m better at feeling empathy for others than I am at feeling compassion for myself, but this is beyond what anyone expects from becoming a parent. This isn’t only unfair, it’s practically insurmountable, and my kids are some of the ones that will most likely make it through this okay - they have all their privilege going for them. While I’m focused on building their resilience, parents down the block are focused on survival. It’s not the same kind of unfair for all parents, but no parent should be expected to shoulder all of this while also in isolation. It’s a recipe for a mass caregiving meltdown and it’s amazing that we’ve held out as long as we have. If there weren’t a vaccine making its way through the world, I’d be very worried about the mental health of all my parent comrades.
The real injustice is the robbing us of hope, not for ourselves but for our kids. Kids are the most hopeful and inspiring little beings in the world, and they deserve to be met with hope from their parents, which is difficult when we are so defeated, at every turn. For most of 2020, hope felt like a luxury, an awkwardly big chandelier in an otherwise ramshackle room.
The antidote to all this defeat is of course tomorrow. Not a figurative tomorrow, I mean literally tomorrow January 20th, when at noon the sociopath who ran our country for four years will be an instant relic, on his way to a sunny retirement in Florida where, if the arc of the world really does bend toward justice, he will get eaten by a rogue alligator. When - even despite more violence that may happen - a new day will begin, and hope will feel a little more real than it has for a very long time.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
