How Do I Protect My Son From the ‘Real World’? Maybe I Don’t
In these uncertain times, it’s difficult to know where to place my worries.
When I got pregnant in early 2016, which already feels like a lifetime ago, I daydreamed about my kid’s future. I had rosy images of raising a feminist son with two moms and a female president and endless possibilities for a bright future filled with hope and success.
When my little guy was still just a gamete, though, the world turned upside-down, or so it felt.
The sea levels are rising, we may be eating the equivalent of one plastic credit card per week, and there have been more mass shootings than days in the year. No biggie.
It’s easy for even the most level-headed of people to worry about an impending apocalypse, and even easier for people like me who learn towards worrying on a good day (hey, I’m a New Yorker; it’s what we do) before the doom clouds start rolling in.
As a parent, that fear is exponentially higher.
Every day, it seems we hear stories that feel straight out of a dystopian television show. Children are being held behind bars at the border; in some states, women stand to lose the ability to make decisions about their bodies; our most vulnerable communities have had their rights scaled back; and hate crimes are on the rise.
How does one carry that weight and sing “The Wheels on the Bus” with a happy face on?
I have trouble keeping a smile on for my kid sometimes, even though I fully recognize my own privilege as someone who has the luxury — for now — of deciding whether or not to worry about my own family’s safety.
But as a person raised with the Holocaust as a backdrop (“It could always happen again,” my father drilled into my brother and me at a young age, shoving books about its atrocities into our tiny hands); and as a lesbian denied equal rights in multiple arenas with a mounting threat of more being taken away, I can’t help but feel moments of incredible panic that my family might be next on the chopping block.
I try to temper my anxiety with a focus on the importance of being in the moment and enjoying being a mom to an amazing kid who is learning new things every day and who fills my heart with genuine joy.
I don’t choose what to worry about and when so much as I work to acknowledge when the existential dread is creeping up on me and try to mitigate it so it doesn’t overwhelm those precious few hours a day I get to spend with my son.
I may be reading an article about the crisis du jour and getting ready to sign a petition, donate to an advocacy organization, or write to my elected official, and my son beckons me to come build a Lego tower with him. My attention gets side-tracked, and with it, temporarily, my concerns.
It’s not a balance so much as a back-and-forth ping-pong game; one moment I’m ready to topple the patriarchy, and the next I’m dancing to “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”
My wife and son and I were on a road trip recently and I realized that for two of the two-and-a half hours in the car we were talking about the sordid state of affairs.
I looked to the backseat and our toddler seemed to be completely absorbed in his car videos, “red!” “yellow!” he yelled out as he identified the colors they were teaching in the video. I couldn’t help but worry, though, about what he had heard his parents worrying about. If he didn’t understand all of the words or the context, he surely could pick up on our tone, our anxiety.
How to explain to a toddler what is happening? How to reassure him? (Should we reassure him?)
How much should we actually be worried about others and ourselves, and what can we do to help?
I tend to think that sweeping the headlines and the concerns under the rug, for the sake of living our everyday lives in peace and protecting our son, who is too young to know what is going on, does a huge disservice to everyone. Throughout history heinous acts have been carried out in part because the majority of people chose to live in fear and ignorance.
I have made active choices to leave the news on while my son is within earshot. I worry about him seeing visions of police tape and guns and the harrowed expressions of newscasters as they report on the day’s latest travesties, but I don’t want to keep my child sheltered or disillusioned.
I make sure the books he reads talk about all different kinds of people living all different kinds of lives, and I speak up on behalf of others and call out bigotry when we’re out in public — giving a meal or money to a homeless person, correcting a man who tells his affectionate son, “boys don’t kiss boys;” helping an older woman carry her groceries — and refraining from intervening directly in ways I might have pre-child when safety might be a concern.
As my son gets older, I plan to be direct with him about the realities around us and answer questions honestly. I don’t think shielding him will be helpful to his understanding of the world, nor do I think it would empower him to be a force for good to help others less privileged.
Of course, I want to protect my son both from any harm that might come his way, and from some of the fear and anxiety I’ve been carrying. But I also want to make sure that I am wide awake, doing all I can do to help others in their times of greatest need, and monitoring the rising tides for my own family’s safety.
It is that mentality, I hope and pray, that will help swing the moral arc in the direction towards justice, and enable my son to grow into the type of standup adult that will help make the world a better place.
