On Vacation While The World Is Crumbling

My kid got a sunburn and it hurt my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! One tiny click of kindness could be the butterfly effect that saves humanity ….)

When news broke that we’d dropped bombs on Iran, I was in Utah, giving my 5-year-old a bath. A week of triple digit heat, ameliorated only by hours in a punishingly chlorinated pool, had rendered my little boy’s skin somewhere between a leather bag and an open sore. Never let it be said that my child is afraid to express his feelings. His piercing screams as I tried to bathe him in the lukest of lukewarm water, with the gentlest of gentle baby soaps, made me long for the mercy of hearing loss. It was one of those parenting moments when you think to yourself, almost laughingly, I hate this. This is hell, and I put myself here. The tantrum continued as I toweled him off, lathered him with Eucerin, helped him into his Spiderman underpants, and didn’t stop until I said he could have some ice cream. I felt bad for my child, and also bad for myself. Then I went into the living room, where my sisters-in-law were watching the news, and found out we were rebooting the Iraq War. I felt ashamed of my own self-pity. My own hurt feelings hurt my feelings. War is hell. Bath time is not. My son’s eczema is not the world’s problem. But it is still my problem.

Utah in the summer: beautiful but HOT.

When I was a child, I also had very dry skin. I can still summon the misplaced sense of betrayal I felt as my mom rubbed Lubriderm on the red, cracking patches behind my knees and elbows. The person I trusted most to shield me from pain was inflicting it on me! My lived experience is why, even when my son is threatening the sanctity of my ear drums, I can hold onto what it’s like to be on the other end of the lotion bottle. I have never worried that a bomb would be dropped on me. When I was in my 20s, a friend asked me, as a thought experiment, if I’d ever take a job in the newly rebuilt World Trade Center. I said, sure. It’s probably one of the safer places to work, since it’s already been toppled once. Who’s gonna wanna knock it down AGAIN? I share this, not to be glib, but to convey that even acts perpetrated against America literally meant to TERRORIZE us have never actually shaken my foundational sense of safety. Will my sons always be so safe? Despite the pandemic they were born into, the school shooter drills they’ve practiced since preschool, I assume, yes. Maybe that’s naive of me. But it still doesn’t solve how to validate their pain and sorrow — which feels as real to them as the tooth fairy — while also making sure they know that almost everyone else in the world is suffering so much worse.

It took us six and a half hours to drive back to LA from Utah. We did it all in one long stretch. Four hours in, my three-year-old, delirious from boredom and exhaustion, began to lose his mind. He was rambling something about wanting to return to the gift shop of a dinosaur museum we’d visited earlier that morning. How he needed to buy some marbles with bugs in them that he’d considered choosing when we told him he could pick one toy, but decided against in favor of a windup T-Rex. Now he was hurling said T-Rex at his brother, screaming, crying, biting the plastic chest clip of his car seat in utter desperation. For a half an hour, he was inconsolable. During those agonizing, very shrill thirty minutes, I thought about a video I’d seen on Instagram of plain clothed ICE agents harassing customers at a beer garden we take our kids to. How the whole assault on LA’s immigrant population is simultaneously personal and impersonal, meant to punish cities for being liberal by treating communities, human beings, like loot to be pillaged. The federal government dispatches the national guard, saying they need to protect the city from looting, rioting, violence, but they are the ones doing the looting. They’re looting people. And it really is a lot — maybe too much — to ask a three year old to endure a six hour car ride, to insist he pee in a diaper we put on him — even though he’s so proud that he’s finally potty-trained — because we want to beat traffic. Which is why we let him listen to Haunted Cupcake by Parry Gripp on repeat for the next hour. But how do we also convey that in the city our kids call home, in their schools, their summer camps, their daycares, people they know are having family members ripped from them, disappeared. Think of the painful absence of those bug marbles, but it’s your dad, your grandma, your older brother. How can you explain that to a three-year-old? Maybe you can’t.

The marbles were pretty cool.

The world falls apart every day and some of us go on living well. Even in our versions of living poorly — not enough money, not enough sleep, not enough help — we are still living so very well. And you tell yourself, the only way to raise children who are kind and empathetic to the suffering of the world, is for you to model kindness and empathy as they struggle to navigate the smallest, stupidest problems. Who cares if your brother ALMOST licked your popsicle? I ask my five-year-old. I feel cruel when he reminds me, I do. People tell you it’s important work to raise thoughtful, gentle white men. Some days that seems possible. Other days, their privilege seems irreconcilable. It’s hardwired into them, because they came from you. What if you can never make them understand injustice, because you yourself have been so damn lucky, you’ve never truly felt it? It’s like trying to teach them to believe in God, or the opposite.