Double Xanaxed Thoughts on Democracy and Children

Posted on by Sierra

I write to you today double Xanaxed. It’s for the best. Last night I was also double Xanaxed, which meant that I’d wake up in intervals, check the news, accept the grimmest of news with the ability to turn over and go back to sleep.

I was able to zombie my way through the morning, doing Juno’s (admittedly uneven) “mouse ears” in her hair, and feeding both children and packing their lunches. We xanax zombied through Target, because our kids really only have Crocs, and it finally snowed last night.

And then I saw a Bernese Mountain Dog and a Golden Retriever playing in the snow, and it became clear last night’s double Xanax had worn off, as I sobbed audibly about the ignorant happiness these pups were able to enjoy. I sobbed as I got back home, and I did a stint laying prostrate across four or five stairs, weeping into the disgusting carpet we know needs replacing.

Jeremy, knowingly, let me weep there a moment, where he made me a cozy bed to weep upon instead.

Where I precisely took another double Xanax, so I can’t be accused of writing this place from a histrionics. Instead I write to you from a place of grim, reasonable, zombie mode. It will not be my permanent state, Xanax scares me. It is a temporary comping mechanism while I gather the mental wherewithal to decide where we go… from here…

Parenting just got a little bit harder today.

I grew up in a pretty purple area, but still remember learning our simple lessons about the Civil Rights Movement and the dangers of deforestation. Love, acceptance, breaking down barrier, overcoming ignorance, heck! I remember a fourth-grade lesson from my white-ass teacher about the dangers of racial profiling! We seemed collectively invested in a greater, more egalitarian, good — A Harry Potter-level simplicity about the love and sacrifice of a mother being *enough* to conquer evil.

I remember Sunday School lessons about Christian charity, about loving thy neighbor, even if they “don’t look or walk like most people do.” I took these at face values. I imbibed this into my identity. This is still there within me. In New York, I got to practice loving the stinky man sleeping across 8 seats on a crowded subway, instead of just loving the people that gave me promotions and played by my rules. I got to practice loving the panhandlers, and the drag queens, and the crusty uber drives. Practice turned to real love, not abstract love you can only conceptualize when you live in a homogeneous suburb. Without practice, it was too easy to secretly believe Christian love only extended to the people around you playing by “the rules.”

It was a growing, expanding, nuanced sort of the love that has come to comprise my moral and ethical framework: formulated by simple story books, biblical passages, and the school of hard knocks.

But now, today, after a sea of defeat– how do I take my delicate six-year-old in this climate and explain to him, pathetically, that love, kindness, and human decency are still more important than blind power and “strong” leadership. How do I help my six-year-old believe in the power of love, charity, and empathy when those concepts have just lost so dramatically on a national stage? Is it time to teach him chess along-side empathy?

Schools with policed versions of American history, Sunday School lessons with a wildly different interpretation of Christian love? Do we all still believe in term limits? Do we all still believe in VOTING or do we just believe in WINNING? What does Democracy look like? To me, it kind of looks like JK Rowling — looks nice, sounds nice, isn’t nice.

I know I am not the only parent in America wondering against the grain if I can love hard enough, demonstrate and cultivate enough empathy to carry my son and daughter through the Youtube Age, the Information Age. Can I love them hard enough that they don’t stumble across Andrew Tate? Can I demonstrate enough goodness that they’re convinced to fight the good fight against an autocratic regime?

It’s not that liberals are without thorny histories or seedy underbellies, I had an uncomfortable late twenties pulling up all the floorboards of my identity both religious and political.

But with children, you reach for a gentle concoction of truth and high-level overview, with trickle of nuance that will give them foothold in their twenties.

And I thought this race between Kamala Harris- a reasonable prosecutor, strong debater, with intelligence and vision, and her running mate Tim Walz—a good man, father, and teacher, and… Trump — the bombastic, criminally convicted felon and rapist —well I thought it was a pretty clear lesson here for the youngins. Even if I’m already a bit jaded, I thought we could use this to remind them about the power of good. I planned to tackle the nuance in Gaza, the concept of greater good vs. perfect good. I had the curriculum in hand.

I don’t want my kids to see the wave of red around them, and feel like we’re on a floating (sinking) island of blue, all by ourselves.

Another hard thing about today is that I just physically can’t unsee Trump for what he is. A Narcissist, bombastic, bully. A convicted criminal. I can’t see his virtue. I hate what that makes me think and wonder about Trump-supporters. What AM I MISSING? Women? Tell me what it is about Trump that you want your children to emulate? I wanted Gus’s Dad front and center. I wanted Juno to see a joyful woman with a sharp tongue in charge. Can I confess? I really wanted that.

Barring the usual talking points “America is racist, America is misogynistic,” I wish I could access the part of the average voter that sees good in Donald Trump. As an unfortunately diagnosed empath, I hate feeling like I don’t understand my people.

That lack of understanding makes me feel.. ostracized. Lonely. And as much as I’ve been chided for dramatics, it makes me feel scared. What wave is coming, and when I inevitably don’t ride it, will I be lost at sea without a life raft?

These are simplistic morning-after thoughts.

Losing is lonely, but I’d lose again and again before letting go of these hard-fought feelings.

I just hate the feeling that my children are losing too.

Share if this resonates with you.

Lessons Learned in a Pool

Posted on by Sierra

Last summer, after a swim lesson, Hudson was eager to stay in the pool and show me what he’d accomplished that day. I hadn’t bargained for extra swim time; I’d worn gigantic jeans and hoop earrings because we were just supposed to go to lessons and come home. But he asked with enthusiasm, and he’d done so well at lessons that day, so I hovered close by and decided to let him swim a little on his own.

Heft

Posted on by Sierra

For the last two months, I’ve been carrying my dog up and down the stairs. We have tall stairs, and a lot of them. Maeby has arthritis and an aggressive slipped disc. So about thirty times a day, when I want to go down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, or when I need to follow Juno up the stairs, or when Hudson forgets his shoes, I heft my 30 pound dog up and down, up and down, so her separation anxiety doesn’t compel her to bound up the stairs on her own and slip that disc even more.

Start here.

Posted on by Sierra

Juno, age 1 and a half, has confidence in her convictions.

That’s a euphemism. More plainly, she knows what she wants. Even more specifically, she knows what she doesn’t want.

I suppose we lacked a little foresight giving her a name that literally includes the word “no” in it, because she’s so proficient with it. Like a burgeoning mastermind, she’s experimenting with pitch to see which version of “no” achieves the ideal outcome. When her drawn out, vocal fry, plaintive, “noooooooooo” mostly succeeded at making us laugh, she changed tactics. Right now she’s really vibing with the whole body, staccato, “No! No! No!”s whenever we approach her with a hair brush. She’ll pitch her body —off your lap, off the couch, off a cliff if needs be—if you so much as have a secretive hair elastic between your fingers.

Look Forever

Posted on by Sierra

Juno has the emotional range of an 88-key grand piano. It is large and it is loud except when it is meek, and squeaky. Her emotions strike chords, beautiful ones that you didn’t know existed. Her ‘happy’ is loud and bouncy, staccato and ebullient. She babbles around middle C most of the day, before going full Beethoven when you take away her yogurt (which, yes, it’s crusting her hair into dreadlocks, it’s under her fingernails, it’s clinging to her face for dear life no matter how many passes you do with a baby wipe) too soon.

The 900 Point Turn

Posted on by Sierra

This morning, I found myself locked in a turn so tight, it needed basically 900 points to get myself out of it; and that still didn’t even do the trick. Jeremy’s new car and I are having some growing pains. Its turn radius is different than our handy dandy 2007 CRV, and it has all these fancy features that feel rather restrictive. For instance, it won’t let you back up over your neighbor’s recycling bin that’s got you locked in the 900 point turn from hell, even if you really really want to. Instead, it just halts the car abruptly with a ping that makes you more irate because someone is telling you no while you really just want to say yes, YES IN THIS MOMENT I DO ACTUALLY WANT to plow over my neighbor’s recycling bin, send debris into the collective alleyway, ruin relationships with my neighbors forever, and dent the new effing car. Damn this smart car for denying me this freedom.

Juno Moon

Posted on by Sierra

I put dinosaur decals all over Hudson’s walls at Christmas-time. I actually wondered if they might scare him, and made sure to put only herbivores close to his bed. The ROI has been minimal, particularly since we recently put an offer on a house down the street, and if anything, the decals probably distracted from this home’s showings.

My recent C-section and the immediately subsequent birth of our daughter, Juno, has kept me largely bound to the top floor of the house we just sold, so I was there when Hudson recently announced with utter glee that when you turn the lights off in his room, the “dinos move a little!”