A Day for Grieving The Alternate Worlds
Even when we're safe and warm and mothered and mothering in this one.
My three-year-old has a scooter. It has two wheels in front and one in the back, and he zooms around our dead-end street and the bike path in the woods by our house feeling just pleased as punch with himself. Sometimes he even lifts one leg high into the air behind him as he whizzes by me, while making proud eye contact, like a little figure skater. On his scooter, he is his most confident and powerful self.
He has taken some spills and acquired some boo-boos that needed kissing; he has found himself in some sharing-related tussles with other neighborhood toddlers who covet his scooter (as he, in turn, covets theirs—the forbidden fruit of Someone Else’s Stuff is ripe and juicy and alluring from the very first seasons of being human, it turns out).
The scooter has a fender that you’re supposed to step down on to brake. It’s at the back, and that’s a little awkward when you’re three feet tall and haven’t fully mastered balancing on one foot yet. In lieu of the fender, my baby has figured out a workaround. He simply drags one foot on the ground alongside the scooter until it slows to a stop. A perfect solution. Except. He has now worn holes in three different pairs of shoes by dragging them across pavement, gravel, roots, sidewalks, dirt. We plead with him, please buddy, the brake, use the brake, you won’t be able to wear your purple star rain boots anymore if there’s a hole in the bottom of them. He won’t do it. He doesn’t care. He drags his foot to stop, over and over again, holes forming in the little rubber soles probably sourced and crafted by children just like him, children born by utterly random chance into bodies that we have decided are disposable and for our profit. Little bodies we don’t protect, or put new shoes on, or give scooters to.
When I cry over every pair he wears holes in, it’s not just because we’re broke and stressed about affording more. It’s grief for things I’ll have to explain to him someday, struggling for a tone and a language choice that won’t make him feel like his existence is not worth the suffering wrought by it.
A friend of mine once said to me, about a horrific crisis of violence and oppression unfolding across the globe from where we sat in her backyard: If I work hard enough, I can find the ways in which anything is my fault.
I want my son to know his place in the world; the cost of his comfort (and G*d I hope he does have comfort). But I don’t want him to grieve an alternate universe in which he never exists. I want him to grieve the ones in which he and these other children ride their scooters, dragging their feet and wearing holes in their shoes because we’ve figured out how to repair the shoes over and over. Because there are always tools and resources and grownups to fix those shoes. Because nobody dies harvesting rubber. Because there are always enough shoes for everybody.
Many of my friends have had second babies in the three and a half years my child has been on earth. I haven’t. I had an abortion instead. So.
There is a world in which I have two children right now. In that world there is a person who will never exist in this one, because that particular egg will never live to tell the particular stories that one particular sperm rushed to share with it, all excited, about where its family came from and what color eyes they all have and what diseases to watch out for.
I’m so glad that person doesn’t exist. I’m so sad that I’ll never know who they might have been.
I’m so glad I don’t live in that world, chasing after two scooters and trying in vain to demonstrate the use of two fender brakes. I’m so sad I’ll never get to visit it.
Every time someone else steps through that door, into their own parent-of-two-children world, I hear the echo of my own door closing when it did. A quiet click shut. A light going off forever.
Even if I open a different door some day, into some new world in which I’m healthy and not sick, in which I make enough money, in which I’m somehow mothering multiple children while doing all the other things I need to do, that one door to the world in which that child exists is locked forever, to everyone, no hex key to be found.
There are worlds in which my friends with dead moms had a nice day today.
There are worlds in which my friends with stillborn children and unexplained infertility and missed miscarriages and hysterectomies and failed IVF cycles chased after scooters today, exasperated, yelling The brake, buddy! The brake.
There’s a world in which my own mom was mothered the way she mothers me. A world in which she had a safe and happy childhood. There’s a world that protected her tiny body and gave it a scooter to ride on and some new shoes, and she was allowed to drag her foot, it was ok that she wore holes in the soles on the gravel, she wasn’t in trouble. She wasn’t ever in trouble.
There are worlds in which people are not giving birth in shackles or in prisons, and actually in which those same people, were you to say the word shackles or the word prisons to them, would ask you what those words meant. Would laugh at the strange imaginary things you were describing to them and then go back to playing with their babies on the grass, under the sky they see every day.
There are worlds in which Malak Mattar did not survive four separate Israeli attacks on her family home before the age of 21, and all of her art looks very different than this.
There are worlds in which we are not comparing Israeli prison camps to concentration camps, because we don’t know what either one of those things are.
There are worlds in which I am spending just as much time on my phone, and reading just as much news and theory and opinion, but in these worlds I am not seeing what I see in this one, the blood-soaked diapers and blown-apart faces of babies just like mine.
This is the world in which my dreams have come true, in which my son is exactly who he is and has lived the exact little life he has lived. It is the world he zooms through, grinning, safe and wearing a new helmet I could (almost) afford to buy him.
This world is the only one I can inhabit in this moment. It is one in which I have been showered with wildly abundant good fortune and good people. It is the world in which I have fallen in love and made the art I have wanted to make and have helped to co-create some futures that could never exist in any other. I’m so grateful to be in it. And I am not resigned to it—I know we can destroy what needs to be destroyed. I know we can build something new. I know that borders and walls and governments can be toppled, guns can be melted down, gardens can be planted and abortions can be funded and schools and homes and maternity hospitals can be rebuilt. Revolutions are unfurling in thick, healthy, vines all around us. My color’s green, Ross Gay says. I’m spring.
A very young mom came into my work the other day with an infant; she was kissing the baby’s face and cooing and singing and obviously deeply, freshly, intensely in love. This is my daughter, she told me proudly, and gave me the baby’s name. How old? I asked. Five months.
Stupidly, a reflex and a habit, I said Five months! Oh man. How’s the sleeping?
There was no perceptible shift in her smile, but she looked away. Oh, I don’t have her right now. The state has custody. But I’m about to get her back.
There’s a world in which I’m better at my job and at being a human in general and I didn’t fucking say that stupid thing to her.
There’s another world in which I’m exactly who I am in this one, and make all the same mistakes I make, so I did say it, but she laughed and said the four-month sleep regression was rough, but they’re sleeping better now, her mom is helping her with the night feeds and she’s not waking up to anxiously check the baby monitor as often as she was, when she first brought the baby home.
There is a world in which no cops know this baby’s name.
There is a world in which no cops.
Damn do I grieve all those other worlds on Mother’s Day, the worlds behind the doors that have closed in our faces before we were ready and the worlds behind the doors we’ll never even find, let alone open and step through.
Anyway. I love my kid and I love yours. Let’s build them some new doors. And fix their shoes ourselves.