Standing Still to Move Forward

Robin Hood’s head, vellum feather bobbling, pops up from behind a bush and then out of sight again. I continue raking leaves, wondering whether I am the sheriff doing garden work, or an evil, rich noble, whose plans to subjugate the poor people of the village must be thwarted. I don’t ask, in order not to break character. Soon my raking takes me to the far side of the house and Robin Hood begins practicing archery. Her father has carved her a bow, strung with a red silk ribbon, and together they have whittled a bunch of sticks into blunt arrows. For the next couple hours, she sends a volley of twigs arcing through the air. This is my homeschooling lesson for her today. Not, mind you, a lesson in physics, in geometry, nor even in archery. The lesson is in the importance of purposelessness: the embrace of the non-essential as invaluable to survival.

For her, my nine-year-old, that lesson is enough: spend time wasting time. For me, the lesson lies in the contradiction: what I’ve come to understand in the past couple years is that contradiction is crucial. We need it in order to live honest lives. The past two years have driven this home by revealing to me the many contradictions that are pivotal to my existence. 

I am writing this contradictory note to my former self. If you have issues around over-achievement, insatiable ambition, artistic frustration, there’s a solution: achieve your goals by giving them up. Let your child teach you equanimity. Raise her in the midst of a crisis, be forced to drop most projects in your life except the demands of bare economic survival, and in your quest to ensure her happiness, even as the world seems to be crumbling about you, you will figure out what matters most — and you will have a decent amount of fun along the way. 

Over coffee one day, my friend Cole admonished me, “You’re too much in your head, girl! You need to learn to have fun!” And that has been a lesson I needed to process—to prioritize having fun with my children over my creative work, allowing a couple years more for the completion of my novel, allowing for my output of songs to slow down. Because the act of “having fun” is an end in itself, and an important one. Making play, and the emphasis on its importance, my main job, I have turned my life into all work while being all play. In releasing former goals, I have allowed new ones to be honed as new ideas and understanding take hold. At a time when much of my power has been taken away—as an artist my power resides in my capacity to create, and in the past two years my creative time has been whittled down significantly—I feel more powerful than ever. Quieting my old voice has made my new cords stronger.

Another contradiction: as someone who once subscribed to Ms. magazine and would still call herself a feminist if she hadn’t given up with labels altogether, I can hear the rumblings of those who call out, “but putting aside work to homeschool throws back to traditional structures of family and is a privilege for those who don’t have to worry about income.” I have not quizzed all my fellow homeschooling mothers on their economic backgrounds, but I do know that in appearance they are diverse, and many of us manage to scrape together an income even while being home with the children. As for the feminist aspect, even in twenty-first century America, I know very few mothers who are not the primary parent of their children—the parent managing most of the details of education and health. Much has been written about the residual gender gap that remains regarding childcare and housework, and that crisis has been especially highlighted in the past two years. According to the U.S. Census, even before the pandemic, seven out of ten women living with their own school-age children worked outside the home, as opposed to nine out of ten men. With the pandemic, up to forty- five percent of those women were no longer actively working outside the home, presumably because the care of children automatically defaults to the mother. So, while one would wish that today’s family structures were more equal and balanced, the fact that the mother most often continues to play the biggest role in a child’s upbringing, from gestation to breast-feeding and on into educating the child, does not offend me, even as someone who believes in equality. With my choice to have children, I am willing to give up some of my freedom of movement and time (only at the hands of my children, never at those of any other authority), while expecting equality with my husband in terms of rights, status, and power.

As I wrestle with the acceptance of this important contradiction, I think of the other paradoxes that constitute my existence. As a mother, I find myself both a slave to my children and their dictator. While my progressive attitudes toward child-rearing have meant that I adhered to the attachment-parenting philosophy of giving the baby everything she ever asked for—never imposing a schedule but letting her nurse and sleep according to her own needs, I have also been tyrannical in my setting of boundaries once the children were old enough to understand them. And somehow, children seem to appreciate this. Favorite adults, called “fun adults” by my discriminating children, include the ones who will sit and engage in active conversation and laughter with the children and then swat them (figuratively) with a big paw out the door to allow the adults to have child-free time. In my household, sass is forbidden, chores are sacrosanct, and certain rules around sleep and nutrition are inviolable… unless it’s the weekend, or the day just begs for sweets in the morning and sweets in the afternoon. I withhold books I deem too advanced in subject in order to preserve their innocence. But then our dinner conversation includes discussions on the real dangers in our society. There seems to be a constant tracing of limits that we can then trample, if needed.

In the nation state of my family unit, in which I am co-benevolent dictator, I am actually enslaved by my people; most of my economic activity and my daily chores are in service to their well-being. So while I hold incredible power over them—the way they are nourished and educated, their emotional health, their freedom of movement are all under my purview—the ultimate power lies with them. Within the first ten minutes of my first daughter’s birth, along with the elation came a terrible dread: my happiness, from that moment on, depended on the happiness of this tiny creature who fit in my two palms. The source of my happiness could fell me in an instant. And yet, while every loving mother walks around with pieces of herself ambling around outside of her, that frailty is her strength. A mother knows that even in the state of dependency to which she is reduced by having her children become the owners of her happiness, an angry mother defending her children is the strongest and most terrifying being one can encounter. Steer clear. 

The idea of anger brings me to yet another paradox. While I believe in non-violence absolutely, and I berate myself for sometimes giving in to verbal anger, I refuse to give up on anger as a potentially positive force as well. Anger that comes from a sense of inadequacy, anger that springs from personal frustration, becomes a destructive type of anger when directed onto another person or situation. We have all been subjected to this kind of anger when friends turn on us for no apparent reason. But anger that originates from a source outside of us—righteous anger that is the anger of a bear protecting her young, or a person fighting injustice, is a form of anger that is necessary. Without it we are apathetic. Not that the anger need manifest in violence—on the contrary. But the strength of that emotion carries us into action, the dearth of which can be disastrous. I’ve always lamented the fact that my generation, Generation X, is one of the most apathetic, and that apathy has led to the navel-gazing of the following generation and then the dangerous lack of awareness of the newest generation. So while I try to quell my anger and my daughters’ when I feel it is sourced in something other than that to which it is directed, I perversely desire to inspire a bit of anger in my daughters when they are confronted with injustice. 

The key, of course, is defining injustice. I define it as anything that goes against the basic tenets of right and wrong, and while values do and should vary within and across communities, the fundamental ideas, as framed in our Bill of Rights, for example, that uphold the sanctity of life, of equality, and of freedom, are indisputable. Any law that puts the well-being of an individual below the well-being of a group, is indefensible, because it leads to the possibility of totalitarianism. If equality is a fundamental tenet, then the sanctity of every individual life means that the group is protected, through the protection of each individual. This is where the narrative that has become prevalent—that people fighting for certain individual rights are selfish—makes no sense, especially when promoted by people who claim to be fighting for equal rights for those of all colors and classes. If indeed we are all equal, each life equally sacred according to the law, then the more robust an individual’s rights are, the more robust the people’s rights are, when those individuals are multiplied into a plurality. And when I speak of rights, I mean the sacrosanct freedoms of speech, assembly, movement, dissent, security of person (which to me means bodily autonomy as well as the right not to be unlawfully searched), and freedom from servitude. There are no rights that defend one individual’s harming of another, because if we live according to the idea that everyone shares the same rights, no one can legally harm another. But in today’s society, we allow for the state to harm the individual. By conforming to the idea that the state can make certain choices for an individual against that individual’s beliefs, we accept the idea that a collectivist decision supersedes the individual’s rights, and this can lead to horrible abuses. Practices like the death penalty and forced vaccination are violations of bodily autonomy, and incongruent with the idea of a just society. 

I know that there are some who will try to claim that one individual not vaccinating herself endangers the health of another individual and therefore violates their rights. This argument has always been nonsensical to me. Since vaccination allegedly protects an individual from disease, in a society in which some are not vaccinated, it is those unvaccinated who are “threatened,” not those who have received the vaccines. Without even addressing the gene-based experimental products promoted to fight Covid-19, if one individual is effectively vaccinated against childhood illnesses, the security of her own person against viruses is assured. If another individual refuses vaccines, her person is not secured by vaccines, but she is practicing her right to the security of her person against unwanted interventions, as well as her freedom of religion. As for those who would want to be vaccinated but couldn’t be for medical reasons, and who are therefore “unprotected,”, we have to weigh the cost of abrogating bodily autonomy for the hypothetical protection of a few. We also have to do a deep search into public health records and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and ascertain whether the number of people harmed by viruses transmitted by unvaccinated people outpaces the number of people harmed by vaccines. We also have to consider, among many other examples, epidemics of polio started in Africa by vaccinated people, the fact that flu rates have not been affected at all by the flu vaccine, and also the fact that in the United States, in the last twenty years, more children were harmed by the MMR vaccine than died of measles. We also have to delve into the role nutrition and lifestyle play in health and immunity. A detailed study of all these issues would have to be carried out in order to entertain the idea of the danger posed by the unvaxxed. The whole vilification of “anti-vaxxers” has never made a whit of rational sense to me, as someone who is fully vaccinated herself.  

In a society prone to scapegoating based on beliefs as easily as on race or ethnicity, what to do when confronted with injustice? This is another problematic situation for the benevolent-authoritarian parent intent on teaching children how to live safely within a society. When confronted with injustice, you break unjust rules. Any normal child knows that in a game—whether we’re dealing with sports or board games or imaginary play—rules are important. It is essential to play by the established rules in order to have fun. When players violate the rules, the game falls apart and no fun is had by anyone. But the agreement to follow rules depends on a fair structure: the rules must be logical and directed toward a positive end—the goal of having fun. When rules are arbitrary, or worse, when they are set up to benefit some and not others, in violation of the tenet of equality, those rules are meant to be broken. We have had active lessons in this in the last two years. I have had to discuss with my daughters every new rule that has come down from above, explain if and how it is unfair, and then warn how I might break it if necessary. 

Thinking of laws and rules, a friend and I were discussing ideal forms of government and economy. We couldn’t come up with anything satisfactory. Capitalism that gives free rein to corporations leads to abuses by the latter—of the environment, of workers. But as we are seeing now, too much authority granted to the state means undue power over the people, to the detriment of bodily autonomy and other essential freedoms. But no one wants to live in an anarchy where there are no traffic rules, no sanitation pick-up. Yet few would welcome a dictatorship. It seems that the only way for society to survive its own governance and economic structure is for there to be a constant tension between the people and the governing body. Perhaps a few years ago it would have been trite to say that democracy depends on free speech, on the right to resist, on constant questioning. The last couple of years, however, have made plain that many in our society have forgotten the sanctity of free speech, and that obedience to the state’s authority—over our health, over our education, over our right to controversial speech, over our money—has become terrifyingly accepted and even expected. But a democracy needs unruly “extremists” to question the narrative in order to keep those who govern humble, and to keep the citizenry in a constant state of questioning. Questioning authority is a form of power. Indeed, it is one of the only ways for the people to retain power. Peaceful society depends on the people often working non-violently as adversaries to their government. Peace is sustained by conflict. 

I always said that the two values I would concentrate most on instilling in my daughters would be kindness and critical thinking. I’ve always felt that the rest would easily flow from those two. Both need to be taught. I do believe that we are born good, but babies and toddlers think they rule the earth, and through love they need to be shown, in turn, how to care for those around them. Critical thinking can only be nurtured when the child is made to be secure in her person and is allowed to ask every question imaginable. When natural curiosity is encouraged and allowed to expand, when it is nourished with answers but also with silence where answers are not possible, the child can move through the world knowing that she has and needs her own tools to figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t. Indeed, she should brandish her clumsy bow, and aim badly whittled sticks at nothing until she figures out how to make the arrows straighter, how to string and draw the bow, and whether or not her Robin Hood has a just cause to pursue. That much she must figure out on her own. She must know that she is capable of figuring it out herself, without someone else telling her what her cause is. And somehow, as a parent, as an educator, I must get her to a place of independent thought, even while I know the inordinate power I wield over her. I want her to develop values similar to mine—simply because I believe in them myself—and yet I must raise her to be able to step back up and reassess them for herself.

Through my older daughter, I already know the dangerous uncertainty of sending a full-fledged human into the world to experience other ways of thinking and come back to me with differing opinions and values. It is nerve-wracking and also liberating. This tall human devoid of baby fat has at times confirmed my values and at others pushed me to rethink them; once I’ve regained my balance, I’ve been able to feel grateful for the arrows shot at me.

I embrace the contradictions that lead me to dig further into my own beliefs. I embrace the contradictions that mean I am a human struggling with varied emotions and needs which I am actively sorting out. I embrace the contradiction that fostering healthy relationships and living in a peaceful society require not avoiding conflict but welcoming it and working through it. 

These contradictions are not nonsensical. They are as fundamental to our world as the death of life in autumn is essential to the birth of life in spring. But when we are fed contradictions that are indeed nonsensical, that inspire cognitive dissonance, we have the duty to reject them. I do not think there is a fine line between useful oppositions and contradictions that harm us. I think the line between them is a glaring, fluorescent band. Upholding the contradictions I’ve mentioned above supports the complexity of our human condition. Allowing ourselves to submit to contradictions that defy logic is dehumanizing. In French, the word is abruti. I find myself treated like a brute by the new normal that seeks to make us accept illogical contradictions. In the past two years, the amount of cognitive dissonance that we have been expected to imbibe is beyond comprehension.

The respiratory virus that everyone fears only propagates among people in standing position. This is why in a restaurant, one must wear a mask to walk to the table but can remove it once one has plopped into a chair. To save yourself from respiratory illness and optimize your health, you must wear, daily, a face-covering that limits your oxygen and keeps dangerous chemicals related to Teflon in close proximity to your face for hours on end. To be a good citizen of our planet, you must wear a disposable face covering that contributes exponentially to the plastic pollution of our lands and oceans. To be healthy, you must do your exercise, eat your veggies, avoid GMO’s, and get yourself injected with a genetically-engineered (and possibly genetically engineering) experimental product. In order to diagnose an infection with a virus, you must use a test, Polymerase Chain Reaction, not designed to diagnose infection. Furthermore, in order to perform at a concert, for example, in a new-normal-compliant institution, you must be tested 72 hours before the concert to prove that you are Covid-free, but in those 72 hours, you are free to travel in crowded spaces, eat in a crowded restaurant. To practice good science, you must reject a drug, Ivermectin, that won the Nobel prize for saving millions of lives in the developing world and is considered safer than aspirin, but you must embrace a novel technology that has not fulfilled its testing phase. Though the CDC admits that the injection does not prevent infection nor transmission, you must shoot up your five-year-old to protect Grandma… because a long-lived life is much more precious than the short few years of a young human who has not yet made much of a mark on the world. 

And here I will stop. Because two young people close to me were injured by the shots, and at least five of my daughter’s teenage friends started having menstrual problems in 2021. Sarcasm has a place in resistance, (indeed it is essential for keeping one’s sanity in the face of the absurd). But I am choked by anger every time I think of the fact that my friend’s six-year-old was hauled to the ER with severe chest pain and accelerated heart rate the day after his second shot—which his mother had him receive only because she felt compelled to by the mandates in New York City.

The anger that fills me when I write the above is—yes, contradiction—spurred by love. I thank my little Robin Hood (and her oversized sister) for showing me the clear arc of it over the past two years. Sharpened with reason, shaped by love, my anger takes aim at the cognitive dissonance in this world that would allow for putting children in the way of harm. How I wish that I could see only beautiful, pointless play in the continual curves with which my daughter cuts the air. But instead I see a forward movement, both in the arrow and in the shooter running after it. And I cannot stand still.