"For this we live a thousand years; For this we love, and we live because we love..."

 Eli was not quite 4 months old during the first mass shooting of his life. It was an unseasonably warm December day and I had taken him to the Queens Zoo for the first time. He wore a blue hat with stegosaurus scales poking up at the top and teeny yellow socks with no shoes. 

When we got home, I plopped him in his jumperoo as the news from Sandy Hook unfurled, and I remember looking over at him and being struck, as if for the first time, by the realization that I was this boy's mother — that I had this baby bouncing in front of me when 20 babies in Connecticut would never do anything again.

Sandy Hook was unfathomable to me, but somehow it wasn't yet unbearable because it was inconceivable. It was impossible to grasp the scope of it, the cruelty, the pointlessness, the abruptness with which my entire conception of reality could pivot to something terrifying. I read and reread the news articles, the tributes, the analyses, as if knowledge was a kind of talisman, as if absorbing every gutting detail would protect me from living it myself.

I think about those children every December. When Eli turned 7, when he turned 8, I thought about how devastated I'd been that day in 2012, looking at my baby, and I thought about how little I'd really understood back then about how much life really is contained within a 7-year-old, how many funny dance moves and wiggly teeth and ice cream mustaches you would miss. He's outlived them, I thought. All that life, those pajama parties and birthday cupcakes and T-ball games and light-up sneakers, and somehow Eli had surpassed them all. It didn't seem fair. (It wasn't fair.)

When Eli was little and he was upset with himself over something he'd done wrong — or upset with me because he thought I was upset with him — I had this little mantra I'd say for soothing both of us. "I love you all the time," I'd say. "I love you even when you're mad, I love you even when you're sad, I love you all the time."

That mantra came back to me this week when I was watching Amerie Jo Garza's father on CNN talk to Anderson Cooper in Uvalde. Someone had printed and framed a photo of his daughter, a photo that had just been taken that morning at the school honor roll ceremony, and he was hugging it to his chest in place of his daughter, in a way that hurts to look at because you can tell his arms ache for his daughter, his daughter he calls "my baby" even though she was a whole decade away from being a baby, a whole decade of tie-dye T-shirts and peace signs and a jar in which she was saving up her allowance for Disney World. Not just a decade but a lifetime. Not just a child but the entirety of a life.

I thought about what it means to say "I love you all the time" — Eli, what it would mean to love you after you're gone, to love you and long for you, to love you and hurt desperately, to love you and keep loving you.

I've never thought of myself as brave. I don't stand up to bullies and I don't free-climb rock faces and whenever there's a needle in the vicinity, I close my eyes and look away. Eli, just a few weeks ago I told you that when I need to feel brave — like when I went to the allergist and felt anxious about all the patches on my back — I think of you because you're the bravest person I know, all nerve and heart and loud mouth. 

But to love you all the time, Eli, in this world — that feels to me like the bravest thing I can do right now, the only thing I know how to do. My therapist told me this morning that we make most of our decisions out of either fear or love. It would be unlike me to say "I choose love," to say something neat and precious that one could produce on a Cricut and sell on Etsy. 

But I do. I do, Eli. I love you all the time — all your fencing sabres and Roblox hacks and soft cheeks and the freckle between your toes. I love you even when it's unbearable to imagine life without you, even when my heart breaks for Amerie Jo Garza's dad and every other parent in Uvalde and Sandy Hook and every other place that is pulsing with loss. I love you because I choose to be brave. I love you because all I want for you is for your lifetime to be as big and bold as brave as you imagine. The life the children in Sandy Hook and Uvalde won't get to live. I love you because all I want for you is your life. 

Sleepaway we go

 A few days before Eli left for sleepaway camp for the first time, we speculated at length about what we might do without each other.

"Maybe Daddy and I will walk around the house cursing really loud," I said. "Or we'll go to really boring, quiet museums."

"And I'll be walking around camp saying, 'Ha ha, I'm walking around without my parents!'" Eli concluded gleefully. (Despite my best efforts to remind him that "no parents" wasn't equivalent to "no rules," I don't think it really sunk in.)

When we got our first opportunity to speak to Eli on the phone a week into camp, he sounded hoarse ("because I've been talking to all the counselors, and all the campers," he explained) and a little overwhelmed.

"I really miss you guys," he said, sounding bewildered to hear himself admit it. "Once, during rest time, I even started crying because I missed you so much."

"Really?" I said, while my heart cracked into a thousand teeny pieces. "But then what happened?"

"Well," he said philosophically as my heart knit itself back together again, "I told myself, 'Time flies when you're having fun.'"

When we hung up, I realized that Phil and I had created the perfect amalgam of ourselves: I would have cried from homesickness too (if I had ever been brave enough to go to sleepaway camp in the first place), but that pragmatic pep talk Eli gave himself? That was all Phil. 

For much of the pandemic, while the four of us (I'm counting the dog, because you always have to count the dog) shared an apartment that was never meant to serve simultaneously as an office, a gym, a living space and an entertainment center all at once, all I ever wanted was to be alone. Once, at the end of a long day at the end of a longer week, I literally fled the apartment and sat morosely on a step in front of our building, at which point a nonthreatening but nonetheless weird man walked by, did a double take and said, "Don't look so sad. If you don't have anyone to love you, I'll love you," at which point I was reminded that even during the height of a pandemic you are never alone in New York City.

But even though Phil and I are pointedly living it up in Eli's absence (if gleeful day drinking, kayaking and binge-watching "My Unorthodox Life" on Netflix counts as living it up), I miss Eli more than I thought I would — certainly more than I ever thought I would circa, say, June 2020, when I was forcibly separating him from his true love the iPad for the 700th time.

"I feel like my parental muscles are atrophying," I told a friend. "Like when Eli comes home and I have to do boring parental tasks like make him take a bath and go to bed on time, that's going to be a bummer." 

The next time we spoke to Eli on the phone, almost two weeks later, he was ebullient. 

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod I have so much to tell you!" he said breathlessly into the phone. 

He told us he had been flipped into the lake on a boat ride. He told us that he was wearing his white button-down shirt for Shabbat and that he had borrowed gel from a friend to "style his hair." He told us that he had climbed the whole vertical climbing structure, that the BMX bikes were "so fun," that he had signed up to try water skiing. He told us that his friends had given him gifts because he wouldn't be at camp on his birthday in August. He told us he was "so sorry I haven't written more letters, but I really like to use my time to play cards with my friends." He told us the lake was his favorite activity and Outdoor Adventure was his second favorite. (As someone who was very much an indoor kid, who hated Long Island day camp and who once nearly fainted after slicing her finger during archery, I practically lit up from the inside when I heard this.)

Then he told us, "Only eight more days until I see you guys! I can't believe the time went so fast!"

This time when we hung up, I was bursting with a peculiar kind of pride. I eventually identified it as the rarest kind of feeling I have as a parent: the unusual sensation of having made a decision that felt right. I wanted Eli to go to sleepaway camp to detox from screens and try new things without his pesky parents breathing down his neck. I wanted Eli to go to this particular sleepaway camp because it has an  awesome lakefront, and in the imagination of a girl from Queens who never went to sleepaway camp in her life, that's what sleepaway camp should look like. And I had told everyone who asked, "What if he wants to stay longer?" that I didn't think he would — that he had budgeted four weeks of camp into his mind and that he would be ready to come home.

And for once in my parenting life, my master plan had worked! We had given him an experience we could feel good about. He loved the lake! And he was nevertheless looking forward to coming home! 

Eli in his camp happy place

See, for most of Eli's life I've been marveling at how different he is from me — and maybe even, to be brutally honest, from the kind of kid I thought I might have. He's brash where I'm cautious, assertive where I'm meek, confident where I'm uncertain. 

(Case in point: This gem from the camp Instagram:)

But when we hung up the phone that day I thought, I know you, kid. Or at least I'm beginning to figure you out. 

When I was a teacher, the highest compliment I ever got from a parent was "You're describing my kid exactly the way I see him." This year, I had a lot of occasions to think about how I see Eli, how others see him and how he sees himself. A few weeks before camp, we met a bunch of the boys in his bunk. They seemed to bond over a shared love of baseball — Eli's contribution to the game, by contrast, was to take his friend's glove and yeet it over the fence — and it sent me into a tailspin of doubt. I worried that he wouldn't want to play with everyone else, that he wouldn't bond with his bunkmates, that he'd spend his days sitting in the grass longing for the air conditioned comfort of a movie on our couch.

Then I realized something I've been realizing over and over for the better part of nine years: Eli wasn't worried. 

"If there's a choice between playing baseball and going to the lake, and everyone in the whole entire camp chooses baseball, then cool, I'll be in the lake all by myself," he told me.

"You know, Eli," I said, "one thing I admire about you is that you don't care what anyone else thinks. You go your own way. When I was a kid, I was always really worried about fitting in with everyone else. You don't feel like that. I think that's really cool."

He looked pleased. After all, 99% of the time it must feel like I'm nagging him to do things differently (turn off the iPad, lower your voice, redo this writing assignment, throw out these wrappers) and here I was giving him a genuine compliment. 

Later that day, we walked to the playground and ran into someone who asked if he was excited for camp. He nudged me.

"Mama, tell them what you admire about me," he said in a stage whisper. And I realized that what he wanted was for me to prove that I know him, that I see him for exactly who he is.

I can't wait to see Eli when he comes home. (He has already requested that he be allowed to stay up until 11 p.m. "or at least 10" because he has so much to tell us.) I can't wait to hear more about camp. And I know I'll make a million more wrong decisions in the course of my parenting life, probably beginning as early as Sunday afternoon when he gets off that camp bus. So I'm giving myself this victory lap.

I know you, kid.

An ode to working from home

Dear Working From Home,

I’ll admit that our relationship got off to a rocky start. I’d just been unceremoniously dumped by Office — and they kept my fancy high-heeled shoes, my ergonomic desk chair, my double monitor, even that foul free coffee.

Suddenly, you and I were sharing space with my child, my dog and my actual husband (how awkward!),  in a small NYC apartment that was never meant to serve as an office, a classroom, a gym, an entertainment studio and a playground all at the same time.

It was a scary, stressful time. But I’ll admit it, you seduced me.

First it was with the pile of laundry lounging alluringly in my bedroom in the middle of the workday. “Do it now,” you whispered — and I did. Because why not? I could!

Then it was the 2+ hours a day you generously saved me by cutting my commute time to zero. “Do you know what you can do with two extra hours in your day?” you said slyly. Oh, did I. I exercised. I made smoothies. I read books. I cleaned (…well, sometimes). I went for walks with my family and my dog.

When I sat down at my computer to work in the morning, it wasn’t with the seething rage of someone who has just spent an hour on the noisy, teeming NYC subway. It was with the cheerful disposition of someone who has just finished a great workout and a delicious smoothie, ready to tackle the day.

And when I signed off for the night, it wasn’t with the frantic desperation of a working mother who is trying to make it home to her kid before bedtime. It was with the casual relaxation of an employee who thinks, “Hey, I’m already here…I can work for 5 more minutes to wrap this up.”

Because have I mentioned how much work you and I accomplished together, WFH? My team held a face-to-face meeting nearly every workday of the pandemic — something we’d never done before. Because of videoconferencing, I saw the faces of co-workers I’d spoken to on the phone for seven years but never met in person because they work in a different borough. I kept a running Google Document of my daily work log so I could file a report each evening listing the work I’d done that day, and that document is now 54 pages long. 

When Office and I were together, I’d have to take half a day off to bring my kid to the dentist or meet with his teacher. With you, I could accomplish errands before my co-workers even knew I was gone from my desk.

While the world was falling apart — and sometimes while my kid was falling apart, too — you and I and my team churned out thousands of emails, graphics, social media posts, newspaper articles, website pages, FAQs, text messages, forms, interviews, phone calls, meetings and files. Office and I may have been on a break, but they got more work out of me than they ever have.

My favorite WFH co-worker.

Once you and I fell into a groove, I was determined to improve the quality of our experience. I invested in WFH infrastructure with my own money: a desk, a chair cushion, an Ethernet cable that stretches from my living room to my bedroom that I gleefully roll up on Friday afternoons.

Office never compensated me for those things; I did it because I’m a conscientious, responsible employee and I wanted to do the best job I could under difficult circumstances.

But I also did it because I was falling for you, WFH. Because you know our dirty little secret, don’t you? The truth is that you and I have always had a thing on the side (and Office knows it, too). I’ve been with you on snow days, when schools were closed and my attention was divided between you and a rambunctious toddler. You and I have had dalliances late at night, early in the morning and even on weekends with my family (how scandalous). After all, "digital" is literally in our job title — we've always known we could see ourselves together seriously.

This year, as I finally got comfortable with you, I started to imagine that you and I could finally be more than a fling. My Microsoft Teams virtual background was literally a picture of my actual office, so convincing that many of my co-workers had no idea I wasn't actually there. I fantasized that the three of us could have a polyamorous relationship — you, me and Office — out in the open. If our relationship were a set of Taylor Swift lyrics, Office would be "mirrorball," and you'd be "cardigan," WFH. (Look it up.)

Now that I know it’s not possible — now that Office wants me back full time — I’m grieving for what you and I had, WFH. I wish I had treasured more the small, mundane joys of walking to the post office on my lunch break and picking my kid up from school. But most of all I wish I had never allowed myself to imagine that our relationship could be possible, because I should have known you were always going to break my heart.

XOXO and love always,

Rachel

P.S. I'll text you from a burner phone the next time the school nurse calls me to do the working mom's walk of shame to retrieve my kid from school early. I have a feeling Office will look the other way.

This is the burden, this is the promise

One of my mother's favorite stories about my childhood involves an answer I gave to our neighbors during the holiday season when they asked what Santa Claus would be bringing me. According to my mom, I smiled brightly and said proudly, "Santa doesn't come to my house!"

Each year, I believe I made a compelling case to my classmates about why Hanukkah was superior to Christmas. Instead of one day of presents, we got eight crazy nights (this was my argument before it was Adam Sandler's, thanks). Hanukkah involved games, like dreidel, during which if you were fortunate you could win a whole pot of coins from the stash my parents kept in a jar in the closet. And Chanukah food, like fried latkes and jelly donuts and chocolate coins, seemed to me to be tastier than Christmas food, in part because my mother raised me to believe that Christmas meals consisted of a single giant ham.

Phil won this platter at our temple for making the best latkes.

By now, most people about the backlash to Hanukkah: that it's really only a minor Jewish holiday, that we've elevated it to outsize status to compete with Christmas as a winter holiday; that the rabbis embellished the alleged miracle of the oil several centuries after the Maccabees actually rededicated the Temple; that maybe it's in poor form to celebrate the fundamentalism of the victorious Maccabees.

Just days ago, the New York Times deigned to publish this embarrassing op-ed, "Saying Goodbye to Hanukkah," in which the author describes how her family celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah as a kid, a tradition she won't continue with her own children because "I am not Jewish and it doesn't feel authentic to celebrate a Jewish holiday religiously." 

How groundbreaking of the New York Times, in the week before Hanukkah begins, to choose to elevate the voice of a non-Jew who admits that the words of the candlelighting prayers are "empty" to her family. Her children, she writes, "need love and connection — no menorah required."

I mean, weird flex, but OK? My child also needs love and connection, and by connection I mean an Internet connection so he can play more dumb video games. 

Here's the thing, though: I like Hanukkah. I like latkes and donuts and fried food, sure, and I like singing "Light One Candle" and reading "Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins."

But this year, especially this year, I want — I need — to celebrate a holiday that quite literally honors the idea of flickering lights in the darkness. I want to celebrate a holiday that acknowledges the spirit of perseverence and sticking together, of rededication and rebuilding. I want to celebrate a holiday of miracles.

This afternoon we turned on the TV and the reporters on NY1 were discussing the rollout of the COVID vaccine. Eli's eyes got wide and his mouth fell open. "Mom!" he said. "Mom, look at me. Look at me. There's going to be a cure. For COVID. By my birthday." He paused for maximal impact. "COVID-free birthday! High five!"

Every time I think about all the work, all the brilliant shining minds of scientists and doctors and epidemiologists all over the world who raced to make this happen, I'm overcome by this sense of humanity: that all this time, as I've been shut up in my apartment staring at screens and fighting with my family, scores of people were nevertheless doing their damndest to save our miserable lives.

On the first night of Hanukkah we say the Shecheyanu: "Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, for giving us life, sustaining us and enabling us to reach this season."

We say the Shecheyanu nearly every time we celebrate something for the first time during a year, and I usually feel that I've managed quite capably to reach the season on my own, thank you, not much enabling required. Never before have I felt so deeply the churning of one season into another; the sense that all the years of my life are like interlocking puzzle pieces and 2020 is a blank space.

So this December, when it's cold and dark, I'll light my candles. I will remember that Jews at Theresienstadt in 1942 stole a block of wood from the Nazis and carved it into a menorah. I'll think about the 91-year-old British grandpa who got one of the first vaccines in the world and then told a reporter he intended to hug his granddaughters for Christmas because "there's no point in dying now when I've lived this long."

I'll think about the people who I want to hug, even though they feel far away. I'll say my thanks to everything that's enabled me to reach this season: this season of darkness, but also — I hope — this season of miracles.

Happy Hanukkah.

Going with our guts

If you are a parent in any kind of Facebook parenting group, at some point between your child's birth and the present you have been exhorted to "go with your gut."

Should I protect my child from deadly diseases by vaccinating him? Go with your gut. My child's projectile poop is purple, should I call the doctor? Go with your gut. I'm considering using breastmilk to treat my child's fungal rash; should I be concerned about the open sores? Go with your gut, Mama!

When my child was an infant, the advice I hated more than anything was being told to go with my gut. Because my gut was telling me that I had no idea what I was doing, I had no business being a mother, I was going to kill my baby with every foolish decision I made. My gut, in fact, was telling me that if the hospital had a baby return slot, the best thing I could do with my baby was drop him right into it and walk away.

Once, when I was a teacher, I didn't have enough chaperones for a field trip to the Hall of Science and I made Phil come with me. At the end of the day, exhausted, he introduced me to the concept of "decision fatigue": the more decisions you have to make, the worse you get at making decisions. He said teachers get asked so many questions and have to make so many decisions in a day that it's no wonder teaching is so tiring.

I've been thinking about decision fatigue a lot lately as it relates to pandemic parenting. We're making so many new decisions — so many radically different decisions — that it's exhausting. And if you tell me to gut check my 2020 pandemic decisions, I may punch you in your own gut.

Should I have wiped down this playground swing before Eli sat on it? Is Eli close enough to that other swinging kid that I should tell him to put his mask on? How about now? Should we even be at this playground? Are the other parents at this playground judging us for being at the playground even though they are also at the playground? 

Should I be preparing to form a private homeschool co-op with other families because school buildings will only reopen partially in the fall? Should I be hiring a private teacher? Should I be moving out of New York? Renting a second home? Why in the world did I order that box of school supplies? If Eli only gets to go to school once a week, as mounting evidence is suggesting he might, what are we going to do?

What are we going to do? 

Back when I used to put on a nice dress, fill up my thermos with iced coffee, walk Eli to school and leave him there.

If you are like most working parents, the first thing you are taught to do is pretend that your children will never interfere with your productivity at work — even though the whole framework of having children in the first place is that, for better or worse, from eating a meal to using the bathroom, they interfere with everything you do. You are taught that you should be at all your child's school events and performances, but also at all your office meetings. You are taught that you should volunteer for class trips and bake sales, but also that you should volunteer to stay late at work. You should share cute anecdotes about your child, but not his needs as a human being who requires child care. 

So the work of that child care becomes invisible (and expensive). You pay someone else to care for your child so you can earn money to pay for that care. And then, somewhere between your child's birth and the present, there is a pandemic and it all comes crashing down.

In one Facebook group I'm in, a bewildered working mom shared that her employer had sent around a memo reminding everyone that even though they're all working remotely due to the pandemic, they should make arrangements for child care. (record scratch noise) There is a pandemic. There is no child care!

Last week, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer released a 25-page report outlining his plan for reopening New York City public school buildings. Child care gets six paragraphs — six vague paragraphs in which Stringer notes that "there can be no broad-based return to work unless families, especially those with young children, have access to child care" and then goes on to acknowledge that the "challenge of ensuring that there is an adequate supply of safe and affordable options for these families cannot be overstated."

Where will this hypothetical child care facility be located? Who will be staffing it? How will my child participate in this promised remote learning if he is not in a school or at home with me but in a hypothetical child care facility? If I am sending my child to a separate child care facility on the days when he is not in school — a child care facility in which he is mingling with an entirely separate cohort of children and adults and in which he is not being taught the same curriculum he would be in school — does that not defeat the purpose of not having him in the school building? And is this hypothetical child care service that you are running out of some hypothetically empty office building with hypothetical federal funds from the CARES Act one you want me to pay for?

Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio sat in front of a screen and crooned that sweet, sweet promise that I, a working mother, had been longing to hear for months: "Schools will be reopening in September." He even went so far as to use the phrase "full steam ahead," which, outside of the context of "Thomas the Tank Engine" and inclusive of the context of reopening schools, was pretty bold.

Too bold, as it turned out. In a dance familiar to anyone who follows New York State politics, Governor Andrew Cuomo quickly put his foot down to remind us that the authority to reopen school buildings rests with him, not the mayor, and also that he is more powerful than de Blasio will ever be and maybe de Blasio should just go home to Park Slope and cry about it (perhaps he didn't say that last part out loud). 

Then UFT President Michael Mulgrew piled on to call de Blasio's pronouncement "premature," and all parties agreed that the decision should be made "collectively," namely by the governor, the mayor, the Department of Education, the UFT and the CSA (the principals' union).

And the more I thought about Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is a man, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is a man, and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, who is a man, and CSA President Mark Cannizzaro, who is a man, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew, who is — have you guessed it yet? — a man, the more I thought about these men squabbling over this looming decision while we inch closer to September and the burden of their judgment will fall primarily on women and working mothers, the more I felt my insides begin to heat with rage.

Women are 70% of New York City's teaching force. Women are the ones who will be expected to return to the classroom and homeschool their children — some women will be expected to do this simultaneously! Women are the ones who will be invalidated or outright punished at work, the ones who will feel forced to quit their jobs, the ones who will feel the crushing guilt of knowing they're managing to fail at being both mothers and employees (I'm not the only working mother who has felt this every day for the past four months, am I?). 

 So now, in the absence of any reassuring plan from anyone in a position of authority or power, we're all turning to each other for advice. Conversations in my Facebook newsfeed are getting ugly, pitting teachers and working parents against each other. I have seen teachers claim that we want to send them back into school buildings to die (I think this is a bit hysterical) and I have seen parents claim that teachers who express any reservations about going back into school buildings to die should just do it already and decrease the surplus population (actually, that was Ebeneezer Scrooge who said that, but close enough). There are parents planning to pull their children out of school and homeschool them, or parents who are moving out of state to a state they feel will be fully in-person in the fall, or parents who have already smugly formed their homeschool co-op pod.

In other words, everyone is going with their gut. And as usual, my gut is screaming at me (this is only half figurative, because anxiety stomachaces are real!) that I have no idea what I am doing, I have no business being a mother and I'm going to kill my baby with every foolish decision I make.

What are we going to do?

What we talk about when we talk about race

Fifteen years ago, I was a student teacher in a 1st-grade classroom in a predominantly white suburb of Boston. One day, the school librarian showed my class a movie about Ruby Bridges, the first Black student to desegregate an all-white school in Louisiana when she was 6 years old. 

The students in my class were outraged. It wasn't fair that Black and white children weren't allowed to learn together, they said. Didn't they understand that all people were equal?

There was a single Black student in our class, a shy and quiet girl with braids named Vanessa. My students pointed their fingers at her, clamoring, "We would let Vanessa come to our school!" 

I was brand-new to teaching and I was in way over my head, but I knew the librarian's lesson had gone terribly wrong. At 6 and 7 years old, my students had already internalized that they weren't equal at all: They were the ones with the power. They would wield their power benevolently, of course: They would "let" Vanessa come to "their" school. They were already comfortable in the assumption that they were and always would be the ones in charge.

I think about that lesson a lot, especially now that I am raising my own white male child (my husband would argue that he isn't white, because we're Jewish, and we have been persecuted, and a Nazi sympathizer would just as soon target us, but I would argue that what happened to George Floyd would never happen to us and so it isn't the same thing, and in fact this is an argument we have been having a lot lately). 

If you are raising a white middle-class child in America, your child probably thinks racism is a very unfortunate, archaic facet of American history that we solved in the '60s by listening to the words of Martin Luther King Jr, sending Ruby Bridges to school and putting Rosa Parks at the front of the bus. Every January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and every February during Black History Month your child gets to congratulate themselves for not being the kind of person who would make a tired Black lady sit at the back of the bus because obviously all men were created equal, and then they get to move on with their lives until they grow up to be liberal white adults who are so scared by the sight of a Black man emerging from the bushes in Central Park that they phone 911 during a pandemic and carefully describe the man as "African-American" several times. 

I know this because I have bungled the job of discussing race with my own white child. And I know that because on Saturday night, when we watched America burn on CNN and carefully explained why the protesters were out and what happened to George Floyd, my child said, "If I had been there, I would have gotten between him and the police officer, and then the officer would get in a lot of trouble for shooting me because I'm white."

My child isn't a racist. But he's internalized the structure of racism. He understands instinctively that there's an innate power dynamic that grants more value to his life than a Black life. And he thinks that in order to be a hero all he has to do is put his own white body in front of a Black body. 

In his fantasy, he generously bestows the gift of his protection on that Black body, because he isn't a racist, of course. He just knows that he is inherently powerful in his white body. He moves through the world free and unencumbered and unafraid. He challenges authority because he doesn't have to live in fear of what might be done to him if he doesn't.

Even in his fantasy, where he nobly challenges injustice, the structure of the power dynamic remains intact. It's so easy to teach our white children that we're all equal on the inside. It's so much harder to point out all the ways we're not equal on the outside, especially when we're not doing the real, visible work of dismantling that system: I may be raising my white child in the most diverse city in the world, but I'm also raising him in the most segregated school system in the country. I am complicit.

Eli has this fun book called "So You Want to be President?" It correctly points out that all of our presidents have been white men. I've told him how this means that when we learn about things that happened in history, we mostly learn about it from the perspective of white men, and so we need to pay attention to whose voices we get to hear and whose voices we don't. 

But then the history of Black lives becomes one in which they have always been silent, in which they have always needed white voices to speak up for them. If I am a well-meaning white parent who has tried to teach my child that we need to stand up for marginalized communities, I also need to become a white parent who celebrates those communities not only because they allow us to feel like benefactors, but because their narrative is powerful in its own right.

Here's a summary that spoke to me from Nicole Byer, the esteemed host of "Nailed It," a show Eli and I thoroughly enjoy together:

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Hi hello I’m Nicole. I host a tv show called @nailedit a lot of kids watch the show. In an Instagram comment someone said they would “keep their head down and just let their kids watch nailed it.” (I turned off the comments so ya can’t find it and attack that person also dunno their ethnicity or anything about them) That made me boo hoo hoo. That you will allow your kid to watch me but not stand up for me. So I’ll do the work I’ll write you a conversation to have with your white child A good way to explain to kids #blacklivesmatter : “you like this black lady right? She’s silly? She makes you tee hee hee?You would be sad if a police officer hurt her right? Well this is the current country we live in where someone you like can be hurt by the color of their skin and people in charge aren’t doing a fucking (you can replace that with dang if ya kids are soft) thing about it. So they are protesting, and the looters... well some of it is staged as a distraction some are opportunistic and some are people who’ve been oppressed for so long it bursts. And nice cops? There are no nice cops because if a cop was nice they wouldn’t watch and participate in violence against black and brown people. If cops were really nice they would have spoken out about police brutality years ago and maybe walked out on their precincts to send a message that they are against this. Instead they dress up like your GI Joe doll and are very mean. The curfews the helicopters the police in riot gear is all because black people have asked to not be killed... that’s it. There’s literally nothing else to it. Now once a week let’s read about shit (stuff for the soft kids) that happens to black people that doesn’t get covered in schools like Juneteenth, black Wall Street, how black people have influenced most of pop culture today and aren’t credited or it’s just co-oped... and if you do this post about. Post about the black history you teach your white kid to maybe inspire another white parent to do the same thing. There I did it you can read it verbatim to your kids. Also I’m open to any additions. Raise kids who give a fuck and you gotta give a fuck #blacklivesmatter

A post shared by Nicole Byer (@nicolebyer) on Jun 2, 2020 at 2:15pm PDT

If you need a friend, I'm sailing right behind

New York on pause, end of Week 5:

This Friday evening, closing in on the end of another long day of remote working and learning and squabbling, Eli sat on the couch next to me tinkering with some Legos. For no good reason, I set my laptop aside and laid my head in his lap. After a moment he put his Legos down and started to stroke my head, just like I did when he was a baby.

When Eli was small, old enough to understand that he was growing bigger but not quite sure how it all worked, he thought that as he grew older, I was growing younger. He thought that one day we would meet at the same age and then we would switch places. He would say things like, "When I'm a grown-up and you're a baby..." and "When I take care of you..."

Just because I'm ostensibly the adult in this crisis doesn't mean I know how to handle it any better than Eli does. After all, both of us have lived through exactly one unprecedented public health crisis in our lifetimes.

Every night at 7 p.m., we open up our windows to clap and clang our pots and pans. It's really less of a gesture of appreciation for our essential workers than a fleeting moment of connection with our neighbors and fellow New Yorkers. Are you out there? We are in here. I think it makes us all feel a little less alone.

For the past few weeks, someone across the street has been blasting Sinatra's "New York, New York" out their window during the clap. Tonight, when it was over, I returned to my laptop in the living room with a glass of wine when I heard softer music wafting across Queens Boulevard. I got up and returned to the kitchen window, straining to hear the encore.

It was Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water":

When evening falls so hard,
I will comfort you
I'll take your part
When darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

This is hard. It may be the hardest thing I've ever lived through. I hope that it is.