feelings & links & links to our feelings

clawing my way out from under, eventually.

Well. The horrors sure do persist, don’t they? And I know the refrain is “So do we,” but persisting feels extra super difficult today, and this past weekend. And this past year. And since June of 2022. And since 2020. And since 2016. And since 1987. And since 1948. And since 1933. And since…

But in some of those years I didn’t have to persist yet. And in some of those years I was cuter and fresher and had more energy for said persistence. So here are some links and some feelings for you, if you too are not feeling especially persist-y today.

1. 

   by Liberal Jane x Partners in Abortion Care

   My clinic is selling this unbelievably gorgeous merch to fund our patients’ care—travel mugs, notebooks, sweatshirts, tees, baby & toddler & kids’ clothing (which has made some crusty old white men BIG mad on the internet). You should buy some, or share the link with other people who understand what’s beautiful and important in this world.

2. My heart, oh, Palestine by Fariha Róisín taught me a lot yesterday. I do not have a mind for history, for dates and timelines and details. So as I open the door to the horrors of the present moment again and again, calling my senators & congresspeople to demand a ceasefire (or at least for them to perform humanity, if they can’t muster integrity) and a halt to our military aid of Israel, as I post and post and post on Instagram, as I give little bits of money and cry over videos of physicians who have chosen to stay and die with infants on ventilators as their hospitals are bombed…I frequently need to open the map of How We Got Here.

3. Talia Lavin wrote this, and it’s incredibly sharp and warm and powerful and full of heart. Lavin is one of my favorite writers, and says so much with so little, here. An imaginary shopping list, whose first item is the undoing of a war.

4. The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Give it if you’ve got it. And tell me where else you’re giving, please.

5. In what both is and is not a diversion/distraction/escape from all of this, Evie Ebert wrote about her kid’s asthma attack—and, because this is what she does, made it both extremely funny and extremely beautiful. If you’ve ever smelled the warm-lizard-skin smell of a depressing strip-mall pet store, this one is for you.

6. I spoke about abortion and memoir and the labor of crafting my book on a panel at the Boston Book Festival, which was very crowded and very wonderful. I brought up the 37,000 pregnant Palestinians whom the Israeli government has decided should give birth (or die trying) without water, electricity, or medical care. Not everyone liked that very much, though I mentioned pregnant Israelis and the children of settlers as well, born into a life of violently maintaining borders they didn’t create. My brilliant literary agent, Jade Wong-Baxter, came to the talk, and we went to lunch afterward and talked about books— specifically my second book, which does not exist yet. Like a second child, a second book is something I have always assumed would come into being, while conveniently forgetting that I am actually the one who needs to actually bring it to earth. And the making feels so impossible, until something is made, right? At least for me.

1. I don’t know how I’m going to try to create another book or another child when it feels so impossible to do my own silly little one-book one-child tasks, and show up to my day job and my patients and doula clients with the presence and preparation they all deserve, and to feed and water myself. I don’t know how to stop opening Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. I don’t know how to keep house while drowning, much as I’ve tried to learn. I am buried under a pile of laundry and dishes and unanswered emails and texts and grief right now. A pile that is omnipresent but currently taking up most of the space I inhabit. It’s dark under here.

2. But I am calling the senators’ offices and talking to their hopeful young staffers. I am giving the sad little dollar amounts. I am reading Palestinian poetry, and Jewish anti-Zionist calls to prayer and action, and Black feminist texts on Palestinian liberation and on the linking of arms and causes. I am writing in a Google Doc called Book Proposal. I am holding someone’s hair back as they puke in the same clinic bathroom I once puked in. I am driving to Boston and driving home and emptying the dishwasher and dumping the hamper of clean laundry on the bed with the intent to fold it and then shoving it back into the hamper unfolded when my body gives out for the day. I am watching myself do these things, from somewhere above the pile. I am praying for an unspeakable number of “murdered babies” and “dead babies” just like anti-abortion zealots always claim to be doing and are, in fact, not doing. I am kissing the chubby little fist of my own baby, as parents in these photographs kiss the hands of their babies trapped or crushed under rubble, kiss the faces of their babies in overflowing morgues and ice cream trucks that now serve as holding storage for bodies. I am kissing my baby like I will do for as long as I live and as long as he lets me. I believe that children in Palestine will be kissed while they’re alive, and that they can be allowed to live. I believe another world is possible and I can see it from beneath the dishes and laundry and emails.

3. I am making plans to claw my way out.

Wadea Al-Fayoume, 6 years old, you can give to his family here.