Previously, my monthly newsletter had a section called "Your Monthly Baby" where I showcased a picture of my growing son. Now that he is not a baby, I write something about parenting instead. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.
I was recently in New York City for NYCC (thanks to everyone who came to see me!) and I took my son to see the show "Worlds Beyond Earth" at the Hayden Planetarium in the Natural History Museum. He was very excited, since he currently aspires to be a space ranger, and obviously we pretended we were the ones flying the ship into space over the course of the film. At the end of the show, he shouted "We did it!" with irresistible triumph, and also said "Thanks for going to the moon with me!" to everyone else in the audience. It was, I'm sure you can grasp, almost otherworldly levels of cute.
The film was also very interesting to me, because Lupita Nyong'o narrates something memorable about Earth and its position in the universe: that unlike all the other planets, Earth alone is not too hot and not too cold. It's a very simple way of expressing that conditions for life on Earth are random and mysterious and the product of astronomical accident, and thus they are not guaranteed. There is, according to Lupita (and presumably some scientists), proof that Mars was once capable of water and therefore life, but given its distance from the sun, it did not remain that way for long. So, the possibility exists that the beautiful thing we have on this planet is not just a rare and profound blessing--it could also be a finite one. This could all realistically, maybe not in our lifetimes but in someone's, come to an end.
The thing that parenting really brought back to me is how much I like being alive. Statistically, 50% of people diagnosed with my mental illness attempt suicide at least once in their lives, so it is no small thing for me to say that. I enjoy being alive, and it matters to me, this life and what I do with it. These little moments I get to have, where my son congratulates an iMax theater and thanks them for going on this ride with him, remind me that life, as much of it as possible, is something to protect.
I recently read a book by the chemist who isolated LSD where he begins by defining what a mystical experience is. He specifically describes a moment from his childhood walking in the woods with the sun breaking through the trees. I would hazard a guess that many of us have comparable memories from childhood. I think I read somewhere once that childhood often feels this way to us, because as we get older we literally don't see colors as brightly. I don't really mean to suggest anything by mentioning that, except to say that having a child kind of brings the magic rushing back.
Motherhood radicalized me more than anything else in my life ever has. I've always been driven toward social work—I studied public policy, I was previously a law clerk for the Cook County Public Defender's Office, and I worked on prison reform for a non-profit after that--but I care more deeply and specifically now than I can ever remember about what I believe people indiscriminately deserve. Access to reliable shelter, healthy food, clean water. To be able to walk through this world with dignity. Which is not even to mention the things I feel more regionally and generationally angry about, like how it shouldn't be so difficult for the average person to have a home. It simply should not cost anyone so much just to live. They say getting older makes you more conservative, but I couldn't disagree more with that assessment. Loving my own child made me capable of loving more broadly. I don't just want to protect what I have—I want other people to have it too.
I bring this up because, as we head into another U.S. presidential election, I want to remind my fellow eligible voters who may be unsure whether or not to vote that some things are realistically on the ballot while some are not. Climate change, yes. We are reaching irreversible climate benchmarks and we're seeing just how devastating those effects can be on vulnerable (and even not-so-vulnerable) populations. Social services that are desperately needed by marginalized people across this country, yes. Reproductive rights, yes. Everything that is currently protected by the Supreme Court and the justice system, yes. Trans rights, yes. I want a candidate who aligns with me on more than this—I want staunch condemnation of state-sponsored genocide and a lasting commitment to decolonization. But I still feel it is my responsibility as a citizen to be able to hold two complex concepts in my mind, like the imperfection of a party and the institution to which it belongs alongside the belief that I owe a duty of care to as many people as possible. That I should try to mitigate as much harm as I can.
If I felt there was a means by which to fully reconstruct this system, I might choose it. What I know right now is that countless people's lives would be at risk under an administration that makes no secret about not seeing them as fully human. Abstaining from the system with no meaningful effort to dismantle it is not activism. It is nothing at all.
Voting is not the end of the democratic process, it is the beginning. Vote to protect who you can and fight to hold that government accountable for the ones you can't. The fight is never really over, but on Tuesday, there is at least one meaningful step you can take.