So All the Children Can Live to See It
There’s a recurring conversation in our house about breaking cycles, which usually begins something like this:
“I’m not gonna share with her because she didn’t share with me yesterday.”
“I won’t apologize because last week she hurt me and never apologized.”
Sharing and apologizing are never forced in our house. Our girls have agency to make their decisions, and we often sit together and talk through those decisions. Sometimes I encourage them to consider where they are in the cycle of things, that while they cannot even identify the cycle’s true origin they nonetheless yield enormous power to end it. At some point, I tell them, someone will have to make the choice to do things differently simply because they believe it’s the right thing to do, and maybe they can find the bravery to do that right thing.
I’ve never felt certainty in parenting, and the best we can hope for is that we’re playing the long game and all shall be well in the end. Most days that feels like enough.
And then there are days like today, where I see the hands of world leaders white-knuckled around cycles of violence and death, keeping them in nauseating, horrifying motion, and I don’t think there’s a container ample enough to hold my rage. How can I ask a four-year-old to find her courage and take what she thinks is the most loving next step when grown men reaffirm every day that retribution is their preferred energy source to keep the planet in motion? Hell, why do I invest so much energy and so many resources in my own internal healing, breaking cycles that are unloving towards myself or others, just to hear one more person with power champion a vision of “total victory” that demands the deaths of 10,000 children?
It feels like an absurdity to nurture life in a world of death. And with all of my rage and grief and fury and despair, I say damn that world. I want every choice I make to say “yes” to different one, yes to a world where we find our courage and refuse to buy the age-old lie that eyes taken for eyes will do anything other than leave us all blind.
You’ve heard it said that your parenting work—at home with littles, or perhaps re-parenting a little you—is small and inconsequential, but I say to you that every act of love and care is an act of rebellion, a refusal of what is and a building of what will be.
Don’t lose heart, I say to my four-year-old.
Don’t lose heart, I say to myself.
Don’t lose heart, I say to you.
Keep building the world you want to see, so all the children can live to see it.