This past week, my sixth grade daughter had her “rising ceremony” at the Waldorf school.

Yes, I know if this was a short story that sentence would give you all sorts of juicy info about this character: she probably bakes bread and cuts her own bangs, invites her daughter to make bouquets from the garden before dinners of zucchini gratin, talks about water as a life force etc etc….

And while I cannot entirely argue with this characterization (though my few attempts at bread have been irrefutably terrible and described by my daughter as “rocky”), I can say that I ended up in the Waldorf school somewhat by accident.

After our family’s foray into homeschooling, I understood school differently: not as simply what one does, an inevitable childhood rite of passage, but as a deeply flawed industrial anachronism limping along in spite of evidence of its failings and absurdities at every turn.

It’s not that I don’t believe in school, per se. It’s just that once you get outside of the paradigm of mainstream school it starts to seem very odd that as a society we’ve decided that being educated means sitting from 8-3 pm every day with twenty-seven other kids of the same age memorizing the same vocabulary from a random text about the Roman Empire and then getting quizzed on it by a computer.

And it’s ironic to me that so many of the people wringing their hands now about the use of AI in education don’t seem to grasp that the reason AI is such a threat is because we’re asking children to behave like computers – if we asked them to be more like humans, the computers wouldn’t be so threatening.

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All of this to say, we returned from a spell of homeschool and travel with a newly skeptical take on school, and we landed at Waldorf. They had a space open and Elena visited and wanted to go.

That first year we were a little wary. Did our child just spend an entire year weaving a felt elephant? Yes, she did. Was she really happy doing so and did it probably fulfill basic human desires to work with her hands and settle her nervous system? Also yes!

We noticed Elena really cared about her work. She wanted to do it well, she wanted to make it beautiful, and she owned it. It wasn’t just some object she turned in for a grade (there are no grades). She felt really connected to the school as a community, not just as school. She enjoyed singing and woodworking and drawing and also making new and different projects for each “block” (astronomy, physics, Greek history). She came home from school with energy and life, versus all the prior years of school – both public and private – when she almost always came home depleted and punchy.

In the fall, we learned about the sixth grade “rising ceremony.” The premise of the rising ceremony is that at the start of the year, an adult at the school – it can be a teacher, a staff member, a janitor, anyone – chooses a student to follow over the course of the year. This “sponsor” tends to be someone who is close to the student and knows them well, but they remain hidden; no one will know their sponsor until the rising ceremony.

The sponsor notes how the student grows throughout the year as a person. This is crucial – as a person. That is, not so much academic achievements or accomplishments (reading competition trophy, cross country win, etc) but the student’s human growth. Then, at the rising ceremony, the sponsor gives a little speech about the student and reveals what they have noticed.

At the beginning of the year, the whole middle school (which, at Waldorf, is 30 kids total) takes a camping trip, and on the last day of the trip, each sixth grader is asked to spend a half an hour of quiet time alone in nature to contemplate who they want to become that year.

As someone who meditates daily; who birthed and raised her child on forty acres of pastures and woods in rural Ohio; and who has a dispositional predilection for Deep Soulful Things, this made me swoon. I envisioned her beside the lake, staring with mystical calm and self-knowing at the still waters. My girl, whose greatest skill set is reading other human beings, took great joy in telling me, “Mom, I filed my nails with a rock and made a clay hand mask.”

Anyway, I think some self-actualization wormed its way into her, nails aside. Waldorf has a way of getting to you even if you think you’re too cool for school and would never tearfully sing in rounds.

All year long Elena chattered about the rising ceremony and I knew it was an important event, but I pictured it somewhat like a graduation: the kid crosses the stage, an adult says a few kind words (Henry was a merit scholar in math, etc etc) everyone claps and then we all eat cheese cubes or whatever.

On the day of the ceremony, we gathered in the auditorium. The violin and flute teachers provided gentle acoustics while my parents, niece and I speculated on the possible symbolic meanings of a yoga mat and pillow in the center of the stage.

A few minutes after six, the kids entered. They were attired in white, black, or red, the boys in dress pants and button-downs, the girls in dresses. They all wore gorgeous handwoven flower crowns they’d made that morning. They looked so young and yet tall and proud and gawky: middle-schoolers, still earnest but heading so quickly towards adolescence.

At the start of the ceremony, they recited an oath they had written collectively and memorized. Each sixth grade class choses an “order” – a color and an animal – and they had chosen purple and butterflies. Purple for freedom, justice, and nobility, and butterflies for growth and transformation. Their oath was as follows:

As members of the Order of the Purple Butterflies

We will

Embrace who we are becoming

Find comfort in who we are and who we have been.

Trust in our own ideas and leave space for others’ perspectives

Stand up for others’ needs while honoring our own.

We will

Learn, grow, and give ourselves grace when trying new things.

Be kind to other people and to all living things.

Ask for help when we need it and help others when they need it.

And

Be proud of the unique qualities that each member of this class brings to the community.

Okay, I know I’m a sentimental sucker. But how lovely to hear eleven and twelve-year-olds embrace these nuances and dualities: wanting to become someone new while honoring our previous selves; standing up for what we believe in without closing ourselves off in righteousness; recognizing our own needs in relationship to others; trusting ourselves while remaining open.

The oath embodied what would come through in the rest of that ceremony: a celebration of the uniqueness of the individual, and not for their achievements, but for their distinct personhood.

This is what I think I have spent much of my adulthood trying (and often failing) to respect – each person, no matter how frustrating, no matter how loathsome, has this core of personhood that is unique to them and good in its own way. The person may not lean into that goodness very often, may let the baser sides of themselves prevail, may not appeal much to me because of hideous politics or a predilection for video games or what have you, but they still have that human core: whatever was there when they were a baby and will be there when they die.

And that’s what the rising ceremony was about. It was about being seen as a human being. Really. That was it.

The teacher read each student’s full name, and the student came and knelt on the pillow set on the yoga mat (aha!) before a backdrop of flowers. First, the teacher introduced the student’s shield, because this is Waldorf and so of course each student had made a beautifully designed and hand-drawn shield – what else would one do to culminate sixth grade?

Each shield was unique. Not in your typical school-art-from-a-template way, in which one is purple and one is yellow. I mean they were all entirely different. One, by the daughter of artists I have no doubt will be an artist someday, was an exquisite sunset entirely in soft pastels that could have been exhibited in a gallery. Another was a rose on a black background. Another a jester face and a series of complicated symbols. Another two cats perched on shelves with tea and plants.

The teacher described the symbolism of each shield, as told to her by the student. (“The eye represents your love of drawing…the masks represent different parts of yourself.”) Then, she noted what the student's peers had said about them: how they brought a lot of energy to the class; how they had learned to listen to others this year even when they disagreed; how they made everyone want to dance.

She described what she’d observed as a teacher - how they had apologized at a tender moment, how they’d stood up for a friend with dignity – and also what the parents had shared: the student’s commitment to their dog, their love for the cello, the way they’d cared for a younger sibling.

And finally, she revealed the sponsor. The art teacher! The music teacher! The 4th grade math teacher! Sometimes there were gasps, sometimes knowing mmmmm-hmmmms rippling through the line of sixth graders.

While the sponsor spoke, revealing what they had witnessed over the past year, each sixth grader knelt on that pillow and let this recognition from the community wash over them, and they blushed and their eyes widened and they smiled and sometimes laughed and held back tears or cried with happiness, in awe at being seen.

I have never witnessed anything like it. Each kid was entirely themself. They were not praised for the exceptional – the award, the 1st place win – nor were they praised for banal vague qualities like kindness or leadership, though many were recognized as being kind and good leaders. Rather, they were seen as themselves: what kind of kind they were, what kind of leader, how they moved through the world in the day to day as a human.

After each kid left the stage, even if you had never spoken with them before, you had a clear sense of who they were – the one unafraid to be weird, with the refined taste in music and movies; the one who loved magic cards; the one who made little drawings every day in her music folder; the one who was always giggling and bright.

When the sponsor had finished sharing, they asked, “Do you remember the oath you took?” and the student answered, “Yes,” and the sponsor asked, “Do you promise to live by it?” and the student answered, “Yes,” and the sponsor said, rise, noble heart.

And each time they rose, in heels or dress shoes, flower garlanded, grinning an unselfconscious grin from earlier in childhood, and their sponsor hung the key around their neck.

When it was Elena’s turn, Jorge started crying as soon as the teacher announced that her shield featured flowers to honor Mexico. It was painted orange to represent the sunset, “which always keeps you calm when you are traveling,” and it showed stars to represent her love of wishing on stars. Elena gaped when it was announced that her sponsor was the kindergarten teacher. She thought for sure it’d be the P.E. teacher, for whom she was the teacher’s pet – but he wasn’t a sponsor this year.

Instead, the kindergarten teacher took the stage and described how all the children in her class counted down the days of the week until Elena’s visit. She told a story about how one day, a little girl was having a really rough time, and Elena sat with her and calmed her down and “turned her day around completely.”

I worked hard to keep it together. In homeschool, Elena had volunteered at a local farm preschool, run by a fierce, scrappy Peruvian single mom who had bought a run-down house in rural PA, renovated it, and turned it into a schoolhouse.

Elena mentioned her love of kids and desire to babysit, and this woman invited her to help out. This is what is possible in homeschool. So Elena visited on Fridays, changing diapers, singing songs, pushing babies on the swings. This work was witnessed by no one but the Peruvian teacher, myself, and the children. Elena loved it. It came to her like the desire to write comes to me at the Salt Fort State Park pool: innate, galvanizing, unconcerned with what anyone else thinks or what glory might follow.

Even at a very young age, Elena could hang with a group of adults, teenagers, senior citizens, you name it. When Jorge had an exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York, we stayed out until nearly 3 a.m., partying and watching soccer at a community garden, and ten-year-old Elena arm-wrestled almost every single person there, dads and college students, kids and grandmas, speakers of multiple languages, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Colombians and Chicagoans. She didn’t want to leave.

This kindergarten teacher saw that. She showed the room who Elena is, and Elena knew it. When she rose my heart was in my throat. I’m not sure I’ve ever been seen in such a way, though I have received awards. I have won races. I have stood on stages.

In high school, the valedictorian cited me in her speech, saying “One day, when Sarah Menkedick is writing for The New York Times…” and I did go on and write for The New York Times, and I have used that as shorthand to explain who I am. A writer, but more importantly, a “real” one, a working one.

I thought I’d spend this year telling people I was working on my third book. The same identity shorthand: Ah, Sarah, this is what she does. But that’s not how it worked out. I thought after the rising ceremony about the answer to that question: Who is Sarah?

It reminded me of a meditation exercise we did on the first day of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, in which we envisioned a box. It could be any box, big or small, wooden or metal, bejeweled or plain. One by one, we were to put our identities in the box. Our work. Our relationships. Our hobbies. The terms we used to define ourselves, imagine ourselves.

When everything was in the box, and we’d lovingly closed it up and set it aside, what was left? Who was there?

Last semester, I received the single best student evaluation of my whole teaching career: “This is the first time I have written an essay without AI,” the student wrote (THE FIRST TIME!). “I really enjoyed writing this semester because I wrote from the heart.”

I banned AI in my classroom, but I also tried to learn who my students were. Even the difficult ones, who sent earnest emails about missing class because of frat parties and who did not engage in any group activities unless I hovered two feet away from them and whose main insight into Naomi Klein was “I don’t get why she thinks so deep about stuff.”

Who are they, because that is what they are writing, and that is what they are figuring out in the writing – the one who was a first generation college student and captured the tension of living out her family’s dream and also wondering what it was all for; the one who grappled with understanding the racism she’d experienced as an immigrant in American high school; the one who wrote over-the-top paragraph-long sentences with eighteen mixed metaphors.

After the rising ceremony the parents and teachers and students mingled and there was a sort of glow in the air, hard to describe, not like accomplishment but like recognition. Like love. An odd, unfamiliar feeling in a school, which should tell us something.

In her groundbreaking book Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, the philosopher Nel Noddings warned, “We are limited in our thinking by too great a deference to what is, and what is today is not very attractive.” (Note: this was in the 1980s, and things have arguably only gotten worse!) '“Our alternative is to change the structure of schools and teaching so that caring can flourish, and the hope is that by doing this we may attain both a higher level of cognitive achievement and a more caring, ethical society.”

This is what I see Waldorf doing, above all. It prioritizes beauty and spirituality and weaving felt elephants, yes, but all of that is part of the care of human beings – because if we’re being honest with ourselves, if we’re doing that strange thing that feels anathema in the scrambled modern world and telling the truth, sitting in ordered rows on screens and filling out identical tables in worksheets does not lead to human thriving.

It especially does not lead to children thriving. There can be some of that in school and life, and some humans might choose a lot of it. But right now in most places in the U.S. it is the bulk of what we consider “education.” And many of us can feel this in our own lives, when we try and detach who we are as people from what we produce, earn, and achieve. From the idea that if we aren’t producing, earning, or achieving what everyone recognizes as worthwhile, we’re nobodies.

So here’s to your sixth grade nobody self: the one kneeling on a cushion on a yoga mat in an auditorium, being told they are good. Being told, we see your energy, your weird, your quirk, your laugh, your love of reading, your intensity, your quiet, and we honor it. Being told rise, noble heart.

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Childbirth Trauma: The Human Rights Issue Nobody Really Cares About. YES, and it’s shocking to me how impossible it is to get people in mainstream media to care. .

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Grieftok.

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Have a lovely week, friends, and don’t forget to send Terms of endearment to a friend. 💚

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I’m at the Salt Fork State Park Lodge pool, reading a poem. It’s an Ellen Bass poem in the latest New Yorker, entitled “While My Daughter Is in Surgery I Think About a Night in a Hotel in Florence,” and it makes me choke up, glancing around and popping a Wheat Thin in the hopes that no one has noticed.

No one has. If you have not been to the Salt Fork State Park Lodge pool in southeastern Ohio, let me enlighten you:

There is a Russian grandma with spiky blonde hair, a toddler in each arm, and a tattoo of a snarling wolf on her back. There is an Amish family of approximately fifteen children, led by two matriarchs, standing on the first step of the shallow end in full Amish garb, bonnets and all. There is a man with every inch of skin, including his face, tattooed.

There are shirtless men in cargo shorts and muddy work boots, drinking Pepsis at plastic tables and observing the fray. Kids everywhere are launching themselves into the water with splayed limbs, smacking each other with noodles, paddling around in yellow Intex tubes. Toddlers smack their gummy fists on the water’s surface, gone a pearly malachite with excessive chlorine. A dad with a jiggling white belly hurls himself in and shakes off shouting “Grrrrrrr!” like a cartoon grizzly.

In the poem, Ellen Bass tells the story of a night in Florence when she and her daughter returned to their hotel to find their room had accidentally been booked, their luggage packed and waiting behind the desk – and not a single hotel room available anywhere in the city. The hotel finally found a bed for them “deep in the heart/of the heart/of the building.” A tiny chamber of absolute darkness, with clean linens. Bass writes,

What are the names of the nights when 

you regret nothing?

When the sorrows that came before and

the sorrows that would come after part

like a stream parts when it bends around

a rock.

Elena and my niece join the fray in the shallow, seizing one of the drifting communal beach balls and starting a two-girl game of volleyball. I hang back, sipping my coffee, holding out as long as possible before being drafted into playing the shark.

I remember when Elena was four and attending preschool at a private school near our house, where we received substantial financial aid. Many of the families jaunted off to some Caribbean idyll for the two-week spring break, but not us. We went to…the Salt Fork State Park Beach. Think: muddy sand, bilious yellow-green water in which various parasitic forms may be nakedly visible on the surface, a lot of geese poop. Elena loved it. We loved it, because it was free, and close, and it had its own Midwestern beauty that I’ve accepted as part of my DNA along with Cheez-its and the expression “jeez.”

When Elena returned to school after the break, several of her classmates swooned about going to the beach. They meant palm-shaded chaises longues before turquoise bays, waterslides followed by virgin piña coladas. “I went to the beach too!” Elena announced. “The diffy beach!” Diffy meaning, of course, “different.” It was so perfect that we still refer to Salt Fork, and many Ohio destinations, as “the diffy beach.”

My niece, who is seven, gets a rubber ducky out of our massive Ikea bag of pool detritus (the wet socks, the Wheat Thins, the soggy grapes) and she and Elena, who is eleven, play with it for a good thirty minutes, inventing great adventures and trials and setbacks for this fluorescent pink plastic waterbird.

At eleven, the veil is thin. Sometimes, Elena still says “Mama” in such a plaintive way that she could be three, chubby and cross and needing a hug. And sometimes, I can almost see the young woman she will be, and it is so painful I have to turn away. I can see her at eighteen, in her college dorm, introducing herself to her roommate. Smiling, “It’s pronounced Eh-len-ah, it’s okay, everyone gets it wrong!” I can’t bear it.

And I think what it might be like after all these years being so busy – trying so hard to figure it all out, desperate for a break in the evening for a beer, lingering at the grocery store because a long bedtime struggle awaits – how much I will miss it.

Why do I seem to learn everything ten years too late? I want to shake my thirty-one-year-old self – so young! – and say, nothing you care about right now matters! Literally nothing!

I spent the morning sitting in the grass with my other niece, the one-year-old, picking dandelions. But not really – that suggests a tidy and discrete activity. Rather, it went more like this: opening and closing the door 7 times; picking 4 dandelions; filling up a discarded plastic container with 17 rocks; wandering up a grassy hill and falling down, crying and getting immediately distracted with the nearest object at hand (a clover); picking 4 more dandelions; opening and closing the gate to the dog run 8 times.

It has been so long since I have operated at that speed, simultaneously frenetic and so, so slow. It is indeed very much like being on psychedelic mushrooms. Everything is fascinating and time doesn’t exist. Someone wagging a daisy in front of your face is enough to bring you out of your deepest despair. Wow!

I remembered how difficult and lovely it is to just bear witness in those years. All you do is watch those eyes widen in surprise at the existence of a shiny rock, at the softness and sturdiness of the cat’s fur. You proffer objects, constantly: a cookie cutter! A chip clip to close chip bags! An empty dog bowl! A random bit of torn paper crushed under someone’s shoe! Wow! None of these objects are put to their intended use. They are stacked, banged together, shoved into other objects, and dropped or thrown from various heights. The whole world is a big wild experiment, unbelievable.

In The Discovery of the Child, Maria Montessori talks about learning to just watch children day in, day out at the school she has founded. In doing so, she develops some of the twentieth century’s most prescient and powerful revelations about childhood, many of which continue to go unheeded today in a society so bent on “productivity,” so obsessed with what is measurable and quantifiable.

In a park in Rome, Montessori observes a boy about 1 1/2 years old, sitting on the ground next to a “superior-looking nurse,” filling a pail with gravel, tiny stone by tiny stone. At some point, the nurse decides it’s time to go, and urges him along, but he refuses to budge from his mission. Finally the nurse simply picks him up, places him in his stroller, and fills the pail herself to the brim with stones, “quite convinced that she had pleased him.” She presents it to him as a gift. But he is furious, crying in an “expression of protest against [this] violence and injustice.” Montessori writes,

“This simple episode forms an illustration of what happens to children all over the world, to the best and most dearly loved of them. They are not understood because the adult judges them by his own standard; he believes that the child is bent upon external projects, and in a friendly way helps him to attain them, whereas the child is dominated unconsciously by the need to develop himself.”

It seems more obvious now than ever that this is not only describing the frustrated ambitions of toddlers, but anyone engaged in a project whose ends and purposes are not established and explicable and direct, for the sheer joy and discovery of it, the thrill of presence – a project much like, say, creating art, or mothering a child.

“Someone who loved him, imagining that his desire was to possess stones, made him unhappy,” Montessori writes. How often we confuse possessing stones with what we really want: to touch the earth and run it through our fingers. To sit in the sunshine under a beloved’s gaze and play.

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On the phone that morning my mom told me she was reading a book about meaning and purpose, and that the right brain is so devalued in our culture because it’s not about logic, analytic, or cognitive reasoning, but rather “the numinous.”

“Isn’t that a cool word?” she asks.

Numinous: Merriam Webster’s defines it like this (the caps are theirs!):

1) SUPERNATURAL, MYSTERIOUS

2) filled with a sense of the presence of divinity : HOLY

3) appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense : SPIRITUAL

My daughter rarely wants to play babies now. When she does, it is as a guilty pleasure, with a meta-awareness of the fact that she, a preteen, is playing babies. She has shed the guilelessness of early childhood.

But with her smaller niece she can happily travel back to that realm and shake the self-awareness, pretending the ducky is sinking until she is rescued by a brave if reckless dolphin (I do observe that her imaginative play has taken on the storylines of YA romances. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had the duck create a fake post to fool the dolphin on Instagram).

Jorge and I had gone running that morning on the bike trail and discovered a marathon taking place. It went through the nearby city of Cambridge, Ohio, and then coursed ten miles up and down the trail. It was nearly 11 am and the volunteers told us there were only two runners left.

“What an insane marathon,” I said, meaning who would run twenty-six miles in middle-of-nowhere Ohio with zero spectators out and back on a bike trail!? A diffy marathon, for sure.

Jorge and I did our usual run, three miles up and three back, and at mile 2.5 there was a lady with a buzz cut in full camo sitting before a table covered with gels. (For those of you who are blissfully unaware, sports gels are a kind of glutinous alien goo in little aluminum packets, with flavors like strawberry banana and campfire s’mores, uniformly revolting, but helpful).

Jorge, feeling unusually bold and suffering a late-morning energy slump, asked if he could have one.

“We’re not running the marathon,” I specified to the lady.

“Take as many as you want!” she chirped. Bless her. We each had a gel and not a second too soon, because the sky revealed a massive storm bearing down. We turned back and within ten minutes felt the black wing of the approaching front darken our heads and continue advancing. I checked my weather app. “Rain starting in fifteen minutes,” I said. That would necessitate at least an 8-minute mile.

We picked up the pace. In the last half-mile I felt particularly inspired and took it down to 7:30, steady, steady, and the whole time I told myself it’ll be over soon and you won’t remember the suffering, only the experience, a lesson learned from races but most memorably from natural childbirth, in which the suffering was extreme but the reward so extraordinary and unbelievable the pain was instantly forgotten. We made it to the car the exact second the sky opened up with a wild spring hailstorm.

And it was true – in the car I was flush with energy, surprised at myself, already missing the adrenaline of that last push along the meadows darkened by storm. Getting older is getting this little bit of perspective, accrued over time, along with the wisdom to appreciate it. This is what it’ll be like when it’s over. This is what it’ll be like on the other side. So you can do the counterintuitive or difficult thing: run when it hurts, spend a little longer picking daffodils, savor what seems like a misfortune as an unexpected gift.

Numinous: the holy in being able to see what is ending, what is beginning, and the space you occupy in between.

Ellen Bass’s poem is about that bantam chamber where she and her daughter spent the night, apart from the world, no “sound of voices, horns, tires” no leaves or stars or moon, no “pebble clattering down the medieval stones.” A space, a breath, between “endless cycles of birth and/death.”

At the pool, a burly dad is trying to convince his toddler son to enter the water. The boy, skinny and shivering, is reluctant. He has no floaties. His little ribs and knobby knees stick out. He clutches himself. The dad, bearded, with glasses, holds out his big dad hands. He keeps them a few inches from his son’s body, splays them wide so his son can see all his fingers.

“I promise I won’t,” he intones, “I promise.”

Then he holds his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender: no funny play here; no jocular splashing; no unwanted, scary goofiness. The boy takes a little step forward. The dad lowers his hands into a chair, a landing place, as if to say, whenever you’re ready.

The boy does not jump or fall so much as glide into them, and the dad gentles him into the pool. He rides the boy around on the surface of the water without any friction, past and through the chaos, and the boy settles his head on his father’s shoulder.

We gather our things, our pink plastic ducky and our damp shorts and towels and emptied coffee, and we shrug on our shoes, and we go, and they are still there, floating, before the after, after the before, safe.

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Revisiting this classic on writing and it is as good as it was the first time around.

“Nonviolence is not only refusing to harm another person. It is refusing to give up on their humanity.” ’s latest newsletter is short and powerful.

At Waldorf, Elena does “handwork,” which is very easy to ridicule because really, you just spent a full year wool-felting a slipper?! But I have seen how calming it is for the students, and it’s reminded me that working with my hands – especially in the garden - really shifts my mood and awareness. Loved ’s latest meditation on what we hold in our hands.

Note: this essay is a collaboration with my husband Jorge, who contributed the photos. If you enjoy it, subscribe!

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I am tired of opinions.

I am tired of spacing essays like this, the bravado of all that white space: hear thee, hear thee, for I have opined something profound.

[realization]

I am tired of LinkedIn. All the creative writing job ads are for training AI. Like gazing into an infinity mirror, endless echoes of one thin human image, diluted and repeated, diluted and repeated.

I am tired of takes. I am tired of the cliché “I am tired, We are so tired,” often a kind of liberal humblebrag.

I am tired of judging the humblebrag or presuming to know what would be better. I am tired of codes, colors, flags, signifiers. I am tired of statistics, experts, research studies, debunking, data, videos of people talking authoritatively into tiny microphones while videos of other people play in the background, they don’t want you to know.

I am tired of the news, tired of the Internet, tired of how the personal essay has been stolen from the province of greasy-haired semi-feral teenage girls telling it bloody and raw and turned into the most hideous Tech Bro LinkedIn Supplement, all white space and canned duh realizations. “When I returned from the corporate retreat in Hawaii I realized it doesn’t have to be this way: Time is a construct.”

No! No thank you! I made my students watch this Ross Gay/Bon Iver collaboration and then I made them write a thank you poem. On a whim, unplanned, I conducted them like an orchestra. The lights were out and it was the second-to-last class of the semester and I went for it.

“Choose a line,” I said, “and when I point to you, read it.” I pointed, one by one, and each read a single thank you. They were thankful for chocolate milk and their dads, for the opportunity to go to college, for ultimate frisbee, for a fat cat named Sancho.

On the very last day of the semester, my Egyptian student gave me a hug. She radiated loneliness. She was getting married and showed me photos of her soon-to-be husband. She bought me a brownie in spite of my insisting no. I think she really needed to be taken care of. I hugged her as tightly as I could and said Take care, the first time I’ve ever hugged a student. Her hijab was silky and fragrant and she hugged me tightly, too.

My students with their cut-off jean shorts and Converse. My students with their Rage Against the Machine beanies. My students with their perpetual lateness, sorry, so sorry! My students with their glazed looks. My students with their glossy, shiny hair. My students reading their final work, their hands trembling. I like them. They are all sharing opinions I have taught them to form because what else can we quantify, what else would we be doing in academic writing, even though I sneak them off to Schenley Park and make them take deep listening workshops with my artist friend, lying on the grass in the dark on the Cathedral lawn, after which they all write not their opinions but their memory of the insistent sibilance of the crickets. I wonder – here it is my friends here we go we are ramping up for the white space get ready set go

If the most advanced, sophisticated thinking has no opinion at all, a candle on a rainy morning on the front porch, a puppy riding on the back of a bike, air swooning with honeysuckle scent, a morning crescent moon. Crunch of red pepper. Birds. I’m sorry. Poetry we almost kind of but don’t quite understand, that oh god deep satisfying itch of mystery. Rain, trees, postcards, bare feet on warm concrete, loving anyway, weariness giving way to calm, the way every time we text Elena’s bus driver he replies okay alright.

I want to talk to you, dear reader, want to ask you how many moments of delight and awe and connection in your last few months came from opinions, but maybe this is having an opinion too, damn it, and I’m so tired of all the old writing, so tired of points, arguments, theses, look at me how smart I am but have you thought of this and then I realized –

It takes a lot of time to care for plants. And if they have opinions, they express them either seemingly all at once (I’m dead) or very, very slowly (this soil, it’s alright). When I care for them I am quiet and I get my hands dirty and time moves differently.

The neighbor down the street passes with her black lab. They shuffle, left right left right, in unison, four paws to two feet. All winter I saw this neighbor struggle with her puppy. He yanked on the leash, lunged, jumped, and she yelled at him. She was so frustrated. I could not blame her because I have been that frustrated, yelling person, on my own street and elsewhere. It was painful to witness. And then on a spring morning they strutted by, in rhythm. Peace. He’s all grown up now, a huge, broad-shouldered, easy-lumbering guy, sniffing the spring air, and she’s in shorts, relaxed. Heartache.

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At my desk, my grandma stares out at me from a giant California redwood. She is dressed in nicely ironed slacks and a blazer and she is carrying a white purse the size of a toddler, in which are likely crackers/rolls/perhaps an entire appetizer from wherever tourist attraction she had lunch. She is not smiling, but I sense she is fulfilled. When I asked her about her travels, about taking a bus with the Sycamore Seniors to Kalamazoo to see the autumn leaves, I was expecting profundity, discoursing, opinions. Instead she laughed, shrugged, found all of it ridiculous.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was pretty?”

I am tired of all the writing. I am tired of everything having a point. Of the end result of our STEM-mad society being the reduction of words to bits, words to realizations that are meant for us to click and follow, click and buy. Everything an arrow pointing to another arrow, and we are all mixed up and empty.

You can’t sum it up. A life. This is Ada Limón in “The Hurting Kind,” the titular poem of the book I asked for last Christmas. In this same book, in the poem “The End of Poetry,” she writes,

Enough of the pointing to the world, weary

and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border

enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough

I want to tell you to beat AI we have to go beyond opinions, to save the world we have to go beyond opinions. Can’t you feel it there at the edge of your consciousness? Can’t you feel what it might be like if we didn’t always lead with our intelligence? What other parts of us are limping along, neglected? What are they, where are they?

In The Burning Earth, Sunil Amrith writes about how for most of human history, we had to live within the constraints of nature, deeply aware of our own fragility and mortality. Now, for a wealthy, mostly Western minority of the world, we live with the illusion of mastery. Amrith is using his intellect to describe the problem, of course. But the answer won’t and can’t come only from there. Our intelligence and the premium we place on it, our great superiority – pigs in cages worldwide biting off their own tails, rivers whitened with mercury, trees gone orange from war – has gotten us into this pickle.

In a powerful and precise indictment of our contemporary education system, Santiago Schnell explains that student use of AI is “less a crisis than a clarification.” AI, he writes, “has not created new educational problems; it has made old ones impossible to ignore.”

These include the separation of language from substance; the separation of academic and cognitive “learning” from lived reality and relationship; the replacement of genuine, meaningful inquiry with received knowledge and ideas. In other words, the divorce of school from life. From self. From wonder.

“AI magnifies an older weakness,” Schnell explains. “It tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty — it is substitution.”

We substitute opinions for meaning. My students, with the best of intentions, want only to know what words they can use to get the A. My students write work that they cannot explain when I sit down with them on a bench beside the library, in the spring sunshine, my puppy dozing at our feet. It means nothing to them. It is just work. It is a performance, a cloak. What do you care about, I ask them, and they stare at me as if I’m speaking Russian. What does that have to do with anything?

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Jorge asked me during a conversation late at night this week why I do this. Why I write. So much struggle lately and so little money and “reward.” I said to see and feel and make sense of things, obviously, and also for ambition and meaning and purpose. But I sense something else there, contained in the words but not the words. Because the way I relate to a plant, to my daughter, to a stranger, is different after writing than before. Because like meditation, it shifts the energy in a way I cannot explain or systematize. Like the feel of my Egyptian student’s hijab pressed to my cheek. Like the vertiginous spring scent of the linden. Like wonder loosening a tightly coiled thread of anxiety. Like wonder, maybe. More wonder, fewer opinions. Less certainty, more rivers. Less measuring, more being. Less white space and bold macho declarations and more humble paragraphs seeking and connecting hello reader! This big jumble of messy text full of silk strips and leaf bits, ribbons and petals, you can lie down in it, you can make a nest in it, you can curl up and let go of making sense and dream and dream.

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Recommendations

I finished a 600-page biography of Peter Matthiessen that I am recommending here only for the true fanatics, those of you who can still remember exactly where you were when you first encountered The Snow Leopard (cabin on my family’s farm, early summer, scent of grass and woods).

Another insane story on the global fertility industry! 🤯

I was thrilled to discover on here. I first found her meditations on the 10% Happier app and I loved them. This is a wonderful and helpful guide to focusing, preserving, and healing attention when so much time and money is being spent to “frack” it.

More on attention and how it’s being hijacked much to the detriment of our children and reason number 98,754 for why I will never buy my child a smart phone.

ChatGPT Dads.

You know that feeling of reading a book and getting walloped with gut-level yeses over and over, like finally someone has rendered in exquisite detail this amorphous experience you’ve been living for, well, maybe, forever?

So it went with Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing and the World, by my brilliant friend Julia Cooke. I won't summarize it here, because I’ve written a review for The New Republic that I’d love for you to go read right now.

A taste:

These women’s lives are less movements from A to B to C than revolutions around persistent longings and ways of seeing the world. The tensions—between stability in family relationships; motherhood; career ambition; and the need for movement, for finding meaning outside—never dissipate, nor are they reconciled. Cooke doesn’t overwrite their lives with political or ideological codes, instead asking us to find a kind of relief in their complexity, in the way their relentless seeking took many forms, at turns quiet, interior, loud, fearless, wild, humbled, gentle. They cycled through many identities and often did not recognize their former selves.

Go check it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks for being here, friends.

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This is Part 3 of a three-part travelogue on birding in Costa Rica with my family. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

If you enjoy this series, become a paid subscriber to Terms of Endearment. $30 gets you a year’s worth of essays and funds the time, care, and energy that goes into this newsletter. Each essay requires thoughtful drafting, writing, editing, copy-editing, proofreading, and design, all of which is done by…me! Thank you!

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Monteverde to the Coast

The drive from Monteverde to Carara began breezy and mountain-cool and within fifteen minutes was parched as hell. Costa Rica crams twelve distinct climate zones into a country the size of West Virginia.

We ate fried plantains, this time in the form of gas station chips, and descended a very long, winding hill on a narrow two-lane road. At the bottom, we came to an abrupt standstill. We’d hit the coastal highway, which is currently under construction mainly because, in the most Costa Rican explanation of a travel delay ever, an elaborate glass Crocodile Sky Bridge is being built over the Tarcoles River.

We inched forward, stopped, inched forward, stopped. Elena and I played “spa” in the backseat, which involved us taking turns lying on each other’s laps while we performed “beauty treatments” using an empty box of tic-tacs, a glasses cleaning wipe, and two hair ties.

We finally arrived feral and wide-eyed at the Cerro Lodge in midafternoon. The lodge, which was in a steaming hot middle of nowhere and populated mostly by elder Germans in camo, was run by Italians, and advertised a series of “award-winning” pizzas, one of which was the 35^th best pizza in the world. It involved shaved ham, some sort of special “drizzle,” and several elaborate cheeses, none of which I remember because I had survived on plantains for the past eight hours. It was delicious.

We were wondering if we would be lucky enough to see a scarlet macaw when, midway through the world’s 35^th best pizza, a pair swooped down from the sky and landed about three feet from us on the lodge deck. Turns out scarlet macaws are the robins of this coastal region of Costa Rica. At the ice cream shop, on the packed beach road, in a parking lot, waist-high in the Pacific: look, it’s a scarlet macaw!

Never gets old, though. Their colors boggle the mind: as if God were a four-year-old with a crayon, and I mean that in the best possible way. I think we could all use a little more God-as-four-year-old-with-crayon and a lot less God-as-wrathful-old-white-man.

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The scarlet macaws are fire-engine red, then banana yellow, then greenest green, and finally primary blue. They’re simultaneously cartoonish and majestic creatures, one minute soaring through the sky like some primeval mythical vision and the next squawking and holding out a very intimidating two-inch-long claw to steal a pancake.

We witnessed an epic battle unfold between a scarlet macaw and the resident spider monkeys over the fruit and seeds the lodge set out. The macaw perched tall and regal on the wooden feeder, silhouetted against vast green lowlands, picking up papaya in its talon and munching in delicate little bites like a socialite.

The monkeys absolutely flipped out at such provocation. They shrieked and hissed and looked pleadingly at the guests like, “C’mon, man!” They would come within five feet of the macaw, but had apparently learned from experience that a few bites of banana were not worth having an ear ripped off.

One monkey was so desperate he skittered across the railing, flicked out his little humanoid hand, and shoved a chair as hard as he could toward the macaw so it rattled across the ground. The macaw did not even raise the ornithological equivalent of an eyebrow. The monkey lost it, running in pathetic circles and leaping back and forth between the giant ceiba tree and the railing.

This was a delightful show for guests. My dad is now breakfasting in the crappy iPhone videos of a sundry array of Europeans, and somewhere in Frankfort millennial adult children are being forced to watch grainy nature footage and hear me shout, “Do NOT get bit by a monkey, Dad!”

Carara National Park and Playa Blanca

In Carara National Park we saw: a lizard doing push-ups, keel-billed toucans, a basilisk lizard running on water, a red-legged honeycreeper, a golden-naped woodpecker, a black-crowned tityra, a graceful black-throated trogon, and what Elena falsely interpreted to be a bullet ant, which is known worldwide for scoring the highest on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, delivering 300 minutes of searing pain and outdoing all kinds of wasps, bees, hornets, and other ants.

Being stung by one is apparently, as Elena deduced when she stole my phone and made the very poor decision to watch a bunch of scary YouTube videos, kind of like being shot.

So Elena screamed and freaked out and we sprinted about two miles down the trail in ninety-five degree tropical heat. Jorge, nonplussed, stayed back and took a picture with his phone and deduced it was a carpenter ant. Elena nonetheless swore the ant stood up to do the little dance the bullet ant does before it condemns you to 300 minutes of hell. We’ll never know, thankfully.

Then we went to the beach. Elena had done extensive research on beaches because her one big fear is being eaten by crocodiles, and that fear is kind of legitimate in Costa Rica, and so she made a careful list of Good/Not Good beaches based on the likelihood of encountering a massive hungry reptile in the water. She settled on Playa Blanca as her top option.

One downside of Costa Rica is that everything has been relentlessly, U.S.-style privatized. I recognize this is also an upside, because the natural reserves and refuges are incredibly well maintained and protected, and the major ecotourist incentives the Costa Rican government offers have allowed some of Central America’s last old growth rainforests to survive.

But it has also created a culture in which everyone carves out their little slice of “paradise” (a word I find icky for all sorts of reasons) and slaps a fee on it. Playa Blanca, it turned out, belonged to a hotel that charged $90 for access. Nope, nope, nope, we told Elena.

However, in Costa Rica the law mandates that all beaches must be public and available to all citizens. Therefore, while the hotel colonized the road to the beach, our Argentine friend at the lodge told us that it was possible to hike the length of another beach, Playa Mantas, climb over the rock cliffs dividing the two, and get to Playa Blanca – for free.

This ended up being a great bonding experience with Costa Ricans and random intrepid foreigners of all stripes. Turns out that the Playa Mantas to Playa Blanca pilgrimage is a very popular hack, and so we joined entire Costa Rican families schlepping through the tide pools, carrying huge bags of fruit and beer and soda and chips and portable speakers, all of us hauling ourselves up a steep and narrow cliff, descending via knotted rope, and taking in an absolutely gorgeous beach with water so clear I could see individual grains of sand even standing all the way up to my chest.

I don’t know where Elena got her obsession with water, since Jorge grew up in the mountains of Oaxaca, didn’t learn to swim until his late twenties, and is known for whining incessantly at the beach about sand everywhere this and sand everywhere that, and I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Elena, however, could basically live in the ocean. If we show up at 8 am, she will be in the water until sunset.

Elena and I spent hours bodysurfing; chasing each other; diving; doing handstands; and playing a game called “Mommy’s the baby,” closely related to “play dead at the bottom of the pool” from earlier in the trip, in which I had to be cradled and carried around, then inadvertently dunked and dropped. While this was intensely physical and exhausting, part of me was so glad that at age eleven, Elena still has such a love for imaginative play.

I was this way, too, which I know because one of my grandparents took me to Toys “R” Us for my 11th birthday and commented, feigning complete objectivity but with unmistakeable are-you-weird consternation, “All of your other cousins have stopped playing with toys by now!”

Playing in this crystalline, amniotic water, holding my daughter and being held, I suddenly remembered being pregnant. Specifically, I recalled a moment at Theo’s in Cambridge, Ohio, a restaurant near my parents’ farm that serves Greek food and slices of pie big enough to knock you out for days, when I was seven months pregnant.

I’d lingered for a second in the bathroom looking at my belly in the mirror, and I’d thought, I’m not ready for it to be over. I felt so connected to the mystery.

And here that sense of mystery returned, twelve years later, in the form of this beautiful long-legged creature, black hair spilling over her shoulders in afternoon light, wet brown skin, thick eyebrows, the loudest laugh, strong feet. This girl I made.

Brazilians doing capoeira on Playa Blanca.

We started the hike out near sunset. It turned out on that particular day we’d waited too long, and the tide was so high it came up to waist level on the Playa Mantas side of the rock cliffs. We had to wait on slippery rocks until huge waves receded from the coves between outcroppings, then race across the sand before another wave came to slam us.

At the end of this journey we came face to face with a French guy leading a group of twenty-some students and carrying three extra-large pizzas that blocked him almost entirely from view. “It’s possible?” he asked from around them.

“It’s possible!” we confirmed with the relief of those about to go eat a giant ice cream and sit in the car.

We watched him balance the pizzas on his head and lead his charges bravely forth.

At POPS, the ubiquitous ice cream store in Costa Rica, we met a Costa Rican birding guide. He told us he’d recently led a tour that randomly turned out to be all women.

“And get this,” he added, “the youngest one was 67. The oldest one was 90.”

The 90-year-old had done everything – including ziplining! – except crossing Corcovado National Park, a days-long jungle hike in 95-degree-heat recommended only for experienced trekkers. All the others had rocked that, too.

This story reminded me of my grandma, who began traveling in her sixties, after raising her two boys as a widowed single mother. She taught herself to drive, cook, survive on a secretary’s salary. And then, when her boys were raised and gone, she clipped a bunch of newspaper articles about packing and budgeting and eating abroad from The Cincinnati Enquirer and took off.

She went with a group – The Sycamore Seniors! – but she went. To Switzerland, to Morocco, to Mexico. She, too, saw the Continental Divide, arm in arm with her best friend, Marge, in the windswept Rockies.

She died in 2012, at age 92, before she could have met Elena, but I know she would have admired my daughter’s fierce spirit. She surely would have admired the intensity of our commitment not to spend $90, no matter the dangerous sea crossings and backpacks full of sweaty empanadas. She would have admired even more our commitment not to spend even $4 on parking, by driving over a curb and snugly fitting the rental car into an exact Kia-sized space of dense brush.

An Ending with Owls

On one of our last nights we did an owl tour, and the guide absolutely nailed it. We trekked down an overgrown slope to see a common potoo (IYKYK) from a few feet away.

Then we saw a pair of Pacific Screech owls, whose calls are those beautiful, haunting, hair-raising hoots that signal the moment when dusk becomes night. Then a black-and-white owl on a giant monstera in a family garden.

And finally, a spectacled owl, a huge fuzzy guy who looks like he’s wearing oversized hipster glasses, perched way up in a tree before the nearly-full moon.

We were with the world’s nerdiest, oldest, and gentlest Canadians, which is saying a lot for Canadians. They did not hog the owl scope. They did not make idle chatter. The woman lit our path with her iPhone when we stumbled. They were the only people who mentioned politics on our whole trip. “I hope your situation changes soon,” the man, who wore plaid knee socks with sandals, said to my dad as a friendly, commiserating parting salute. My dad agreed.

Every time we found an owl, we watched it for a while and then the guide asked, “Are you happy now? Happy now?”

“Yes!” We’d chorus. I have thought a lot about this since we returned home, incorporating it into my life as a daily refrain. I channel the guide’s insistence, as if we were crazy not to be happy witnessing the spectacled owl, the sleeping potoo.

Are you happy now?

Now in the rain? Now with your daughter holding you saying, “Mom, play Mommy’s-a-baby!” Now, walking your dog? Now, reading? Now, walking beside the empty pool at purple dusk after your daughter’s swim practice? Now, taking a moment to look at your life?

I’ve made it all the way through this tripartite travelogue without once saying “Pura vida,” but I’m going to bust it out here at the very end. It’s a Costa Rican cliché, but it’s also very real; it’s the way Costa Ricans say okay, great, thanks, sure, bye. It became a joke on our trip: forgot your insect repellent in the room and have to schlep back up in your soaking swimsuit? Pura vida! Found pretzels in the roadside gas station when you were expecting plantains? Pura vida!

Directly translated it means “pure life,” but it implies a kind of simple, natural lifestyle, unadulterated and beautiful. This is a vacation utopian ideal, of course. I find it cheesy as a slogan, but I like it as a send-off. Pure life, my friends. Take it as it comes. Moon, birds, children, friends, sky. Are you happy now? I hope so. Pura vida.

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This is Part 2 of a three-part travelogue on birding in Costa Rica with my family. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

If you enjoy this series, become a paid subscriber to Terms of Endearment. $30 gets you a year’s worth of essays and funds the time, care, and energy that goes into this newsletter. Each essay requires thoughtful drafting, writing, editing, copy-editing, proofreading, and design, all of which is done by…me! Thank you!

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La Selva to Arenal

On our way from La Selva, in the tropical lowlands, to Monteverde, in the mountain highlands, we passed by the Arenal Volcano. The volcano is dense green all the way to its tippy-top, and looms silent and imperial over the undulating land beneath.

On the highway we saw a bunch of people gathered and accurately deduced that the source of spectacle was a sloth. We risked our lives crossing the two lanes of traffic in order to stand in the weeds with a motley international crew and watch this half-obscured creature nap a hundred feet in the air.

At one point, the sloth stretched, and it was cinematic, it was unreal, how slow the motion was: a motion I couldn’t make that slowly if I tried, lowering an arm millimeter by millimeter, as if the sloth were performing its sloth-ness for this enraptured band of onlookers desperately zooming as far as their iPhones would go.

A group of French people arrived and a woman asked me in English, “What is it?” and I said, “A sloth,” and she reported back to her compatriots in French, “Un pareceux!”

We were almost as proud of ourselves for learning the French word for sloth as we were for glimpsing the mythical creature. I told Dad, Jorge, and Elena, who don’t speak French, that now they had a beautiful bridge with which to connect to the French people.

Un pareceux! Of course it sounded infinitely more romantic in French than the flat, lispy American sloth.

We stopped briefly at the Arenal Observatory Lodge for a hike, which like all hikes in Costa Rica was a sensory overload of old growth primary forest, waterfalls, suspension bridges, and remote pasturelands, topped off with a volcano.

We decided to brave a 100-foot observatory tower, which shook at least several inches each time someone took a step or there was a strong wind. About ten feet up I was already overwhelmed by regret and the urge to throw up, but prevailed in order to model cheery, fearless adventure for my child.

It was worth it at the top: panoramic view of forest as far as we could see in any direction, and Lake Arenal gleaming blue far below, and the Arenal Volcano soaring right up beside us as if we could almost reach out and touch it.

Just before we were about to leave Arenal we passed the Observatory Hotel deck, on which a bunch of people were staring at something. Knowing that the #1 rule of Costa Rica travel is to always ask what people are staring at, I sent Jorge and Dad to go check it out and nobly surrendered myself to get the once-again-starving Elena a smoothie.

It turns out that I can now add the ornate harpy eagle to the list of things I have sacrificed at the altar of motherhood. Happy for Dad and Jorge, though.

Monteverde, or Somewhere Over the Rainbow

We got into Monteverde at night and the first thing we found was a scorpion trying to sneak into the AirBnB. Good times! I was stung on the face by a scorpion in the middle of the night in Mexico and my face ballooned to double its size, so I was a wee bit nervous about this development.

It was quite dark and late so we went to the closest soda, and our waiter was about Elena’s age. He was cute and extremely efficient, and Elena blushed to her hairline each time he came around and asked if she needed anything. I gently pointed out that Elena still asks me to tie her shoes and this child was capable of running a small business by himself, to which she shrugged, completely nonplussed like a true American child (what is wrong with our culture?!)

The next morning, we went to the Curi Cancha reserve and saw centuries-old, twenty-foot-wide ceiba trees, and at least five varieties of hummingbird, and a pack of coatimundis – small mammals with long snouts and ringed tails that look like a cross between a racoon and an anteater. They also look uncannily like our dog Pinto. Judge for yourself.

Pinto:

Coatimundi:

Even though I felt I should be a more sophisticated birder, discerning between varieties of hummingbird, I let myself slum it and enjoyed watching some furry mammals scratch their tummies with their little paws.

One coatimundi climbed a giant tree and was dangling by his tail shoving fruits into his mouth with delight, terrifying Elena and me. He did not seem to care at all that he was 75 feet in the air and the only thing between him and death was a single little furry appendage.

Afterwards, ravenous from a long day of hiking, we went to a soda that we knew was authentic because a) it was packed and b) it was playing la nota roja on a giant TV in the corner in true Latin American style. Basically, it had a constant stream of the goriest, most horrific news stories running nonstop: motorcycle crashes, stabbings, you name it!

Elena could not tear her eyeballs away and we had to switch sides of the table to prevent her from staying up all night asking me about human frailty. Food was delicious, though, and after 4+ hours of hiking and staring up into the canopy for birds, two guanabana smoothies and a platter of plantains, plantain fritters, beans, rice, salad, vegetables, and half a jerk chicken was just about right.

The following morning, we woke up to the rainbow to end all rainbows, which apparently is just routine for this particular micro-climate of highland dairy farms, started in the 1940s by pacifist Quakers fleeing the U.S. The Quakers had some kind of magic, because the rainbow spanned the entire valley, and was so shiny and transparent it was like actual fairy dust sprinkled over the landscape.

I’m serious: the earth glimmered through it, and I sort of believed that if I walked down the hill far enough into that luster I might be transported to a land of elves and gold.

That day, we went to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, where we saw the resplendent quetzal, which deserves its own essay. This reserve was entirely old growth rainforest, and the vibe was dark, quiet, and awesome. Imagine a jungle growing into a pine forest and then the two mating and comingling for a couple thousand years deep in the clouds. That’s the level of green and wet and formidable we’re talking here.

The ferns alone were the size of full-grown American trees. Entire ecosystems, like thriving cities, grew on a single tree. The growth was so abundant that trees reached out to one another across streams and intertwined their branches to form natural bridges, like the foliage couldn’t bear to be separated for just a few feet.

We saw the continental divide, which, although it looked like a big bowl of green forest beneath a turbulent gray sky, still felt significant. On one side, all rivers ran to the Atlantic; on the other, the Pacific. It made you want to fling out your arms and shout to the wind. And from this point on, all the rivers will run this way! How humans love a good marker.

That night, we went on a night hike, which everyone in Costa Rica told us was a must. Our guide was a garrulous twenty-four-year old who Jorge, Dad, and I found grating but Elena adored because he asked her, “What are you, fourteen?”

We saw a tarantula and a toucan, but most memorably, we got to run the park’s labyrinth at night. Elena had been obsessed with the labyrinth during the day and memorized it, and she tore through it, shrieking with delight and finishing in 2.5 minutes, while I hit a dead end and then got to experience a thrilling moment of terror about being abandoned in a maze in the jungle at night. Don’t worry, I figured it out.

When Jorge and I came out, Elena said that beloved phrase of all parents: again. We had time because some of our group were in the bathroom, so in we went.

The night, especially the deep, clear forest night like this one, made the labyrinth feel like disappearing into myth, like we were little creatures in a fairy tale. I raced through the narrow passageways, chasing my own breath, my own fear, until I was released back into the wider field, both relieved and a little sad to be free.

We sang Happy Birthday in Spanish to one of our fellow hikers, a twenty-nine-year-old from Florida who blew out the “candle” of her flashlight, and then continued on.

At one point we were walking downhill and Elena and I were arm and arm under the stars, and she whispered to me, “I really like this.”

This declaration made me so happy, and gave me hope that someday she would find, or return, to herself in a space just like this one.

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In the cloud forest, earlier that day, I’d escaped from our little group for a bit to hike back to a trailside bathroom. On that hike, alone in deep forest, I remembered what really made me the person and the writer I am today: hiking alone across Patagonia at 22.

I cannot believe, now, that I did this. I was by myself for months on rugged trails in one of the earth’s wildest and most remote places. That experience of solitude and communion forged me. I remember standing on the summit of a peak in Los Alerces National Park in Argentina and singing. Singing, just for the joy of myself and the earth.

That kind of solitude, outside, in wilderness, just my own footsteps and breath on the trail, wrested me briefly free of my ego. It connected me to a part of myself that was less person, more presence.

It’s also increasingly rare now: I can barely imagine going anywhere, especially the wilderness, without my phone. At that time, in 2006, I had to wait days, sometimes weeks, before encountering an Internet café to write family and friends. In those intervals I was fully in the world and strangely, free of myself.

Advertising ourselves, being connected always to our networks, may be comforting and sometimes necessary, but it tethers us to the smaller and more known parts of who we are.

I hope Elena carries the memory of those stars with her. The crunch of the gravel, the huge sky, the close trees, the edges of herself dissolving in this wild place.

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Stay Tuned!

Next, we head from the mountains to the coast, where we encounter mythical creatures who will not yet be named and who attempt to steal our pancakes. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

If you enjoy Terms of Endearment, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscriptions allow me to devote time and energy to this work, to grow Terms of Endearment, and to continue writing. Thank you!

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Hello friends. I’m trying something new here at Terms of Endearment: an old-school travelogue. I’d love feedback! Leave a comment or send me a message and let me know what you think. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

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Arrival and losing myself

A few days before we left for Costa Rica, I did a journaling exercise from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy, which I’d bought for both myself and my sister from White Whale for Christmas (yes, I wrapped and gave myself a Christmas present, and I regret nothing. Highly recommend).

The prompt was by Pico Iyer, a renowned travel writer, and it was about losing yourself:

“What is the moment–the place, the person, the activity –that has moved you to forget the time, to lose yourself, and to return to what can feel like forgotten depths (or heights)?”

TRAVEL, I wrote. Discovery, discovery, discovery.

I was a pretty Type A high school and college student, someone who perhaps could have gone straight from undergrad to a PhD in history to the tenure-track hustle and not been an artist, sitting at 43 in Target socks on her front porch, surrounded by discarded Ikea packaging…but I was saved by travel.

For those wondering if I had some sort of jet setter trust fund in which to luxuriate in Bali infinity pools, the answer is no. I basically camped and second-classed-bussed it around South America, then took a bunch of teaching jobs around the world.

Even as I’ve “settled down,” travel remains not just an urge, but a craving, a way of seeing I must return to.

But I didn’t want to go on this trip. Or rather, I did, but I was also anxious about being jolted out of a somewhat fragile rhythm. After a rough and disappointing last year, I have been trying to be OK.

And I have been, somewhat, OK, much to my own shock, even as I panic about many basic human essentials (work, money, future!). I was nervous that I’d go on this trip and be absolutely overcome with grief or longing or just discombobulation.

But it didn’t go like that. It felt like sheer, joyous curiosity, which is what the best travel feels like. It felt like shedding my Type A need for control and linearity, and chowing down on rice and beans at 6:30 a.m. It felt like losing myself.

On the plane ride down, the most dreaded phrase for anxious flyers came over the intercom: “Flight attendants, please take your jump seats.”

One of my biggest regrets in parenting is passing my flighty anxiety on to Elena, an error I have been trying to undo. So when her face crumpled in fear, instead of gripping the armrests and moaning Oh God oh God oh God like I wanted to, I said “Look at the beautiful moon!”

It was beautiful, a perfect crescent pinned to the orange creamsicle sunrise, though it was hard to focus on when overwhelmed by the possibility of imminent death. I kept redirecting our energy out the window to the ever-widening strip of crimson and the brightest blue above, that magic of never-ending sunrise one can witness from a plane. The opposite of fear, I have discovered, is awe.

When the flight attendants could finally stand up, I flagged down the young male one and asked his opinion on turbulence, which usually helps calm Elena down. No big deal! he said, and handed Elena a full bag of Haribo gummies. This normally costs about $78 on United. From then on, we were good.

La Selva Biological Station and Sarapiqui

We landed in San José at one and, after an unexpected three-hour purgatory in customs, drove to La Selva Verde Lodge in Sarapiqui.

Imagine “eco lodge in Costa Rica” and you’ve got La Selva. The rooms are raised and set off a series of wooden platforms, surrounded by foliage on tropical steroids. The open-air restaurant offers a deck from which to watch blue-gray tanagers and tropical kingbirds and chestnut-sided warblers gorge themselves on papaya.

On the cement walkways that weave through the jungle, beside the pool, and in pretty much any space accessible to bumbling international guests, bright yellow signs read: “WARNING: VENOMOUS SNAKES SPOTTED IN AREA.”

Costa Rica is home to the fer-de-lance, or “terciopelo” as it’s called in Spanish: an extremely aggressive and enormous snake whose bite can kill you in a matter of hours without antivenom. Good times!

My dad kept calling the fer-de-lance the fleur de lis, the historical symbol of the French monarchy. “Are you worried about the fleur de lis?” he’d ask, and immediately my mental image would flip from viper to Napoleon.

At La Selva we birded, hard. We went to the nearby La Selva Biological Station, an actual research station in the jungle where real scientists from around the world come for months at a time to study, say, ant behavior. (Sort-of-fun-sort-of-scary fact: Costa Rica has over 900 species of ants.)

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We saw rufous-tailed hummingbirds, olive-backed euphonias, and my favorite, the bananaquit, a bouncy yellow-bellied character as cheeky and whimsical as its name. Elena was extremely patient, standing in the pouring rain while one boomer and two millennials stalked around going, “You hear that? Is that the montezuma oropendola?”

Leaving the station, we spotted the extremely rare green macaw on the side of the road. Big, brash, loud, and the shade of green coloring paper, it was eating tropical almonds from the top of a hundred-foot tree and bickering with its female partner (macaws mate for life).

I think part of what makes animals so mesmerizing is how they can be both regal and banal. This magnificent, critically endangered parrot, whose wings appear to have been dipped in electric blue, yanked almonds off the branch with its beak and chucked the shells through the canopy and chit-chatted.

We watched this exotic domestic spectacle for a long time, welcoming another birder/photographer into our midst (an older American lady who whispered to me, “you’ve got warbler neck,” when I had to shake my head and look away for a minute) until poor Elena was so hungry she was in tears. We left and stopped at a soda (the word for a small family restaurant in Costa Rica) to get her two pieces of fried chicken, which she devoured in the car.

Elena’s reward for waking up at 5 a.m. to stand in the rain and find bananaquits was afternoon swim at the lodge pool. It was small and frigid but beautiful, bordered all around by cecropias and other large trees in which iguanas lounged and panicky howler monkeys bellowed (their howl sounds like a mix between a dog barking and a human screaming, something out of The Heart of Darkness).

At the pool was a French couple, who I am very sorry to report for the sake of cliché were thin, chic, and cosmopolitan, and their two toddler children. They both read dense novels on sun loungers while their toddlers played quietly in the pool.

Yes, my American friends, read that one more time: they read novels in the sun while their children politely and completely ignored them. Meanwhile I was playing dead in a ball at the bottom of the deep end for the 9,847^th time so Elena could “save” me. “Again Mom! Again!” What has gone wrong with our culture?

At La Selva a suspension bridge, one of the icons of Costa Rica (see: gallo pinto, sloths, waterfalls, toucans) swung lightly over the Sarapiqui River. The river is about 100 feet wide, rushing, and brilliant whitish blue. It shone so brightly in the midday sun I could hardly look at it.

I have to admit I was a bit of a pretentious jerk and was skeptical of Costa Rica as being too “touristy,” but its sheer ecological grandeur wiped out that judgement on day one. This wasn’t even a “top” destination as far as Costa Rica is concerned, but just standing on that bridge and staring downriver gave me that wilderness high, the sense of radical communion Muir felt at the top of a tree during a Sierra Nevada thunderstorm.

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Attention Restoration Theory (or, what we all kind of know already, but need science to prove to us)

The morning of our departure, Jorge woke me up at 5 a.m. by activating an instant espresso machine that sounded like a freight train blowing through our room. Miraculously, Elena did not wake up.

While Jorge birded around the lodge, I journaled on the wooden platform outside the room. Hummingbirds came to visit the heliconias and hibiscus. Rain dripped on the roof and slid down the massive sloped leaves of elephant ears. Shafts of sunlight, shimmering with light dew and rain, fell in gentle columns on the warm morning green.

40% of Americans, according to a 2026 Pew research study, say they are “almost always online.” One of the most alarming losses this implies is connection to the natural world: a relationship an abundance of research has shown that our bodies, minds, and even our eyes crave, and that is fundamental to our survival.

Some of the most interesting research is on nature and attention, and how the kind of attention the natural world demands – “softly fascinating,” not dramatic and top-down – nurtures our capacity for attention, whereas the hyper-stimulation of urban modern life (see: the Internet) depletes it.

In their book The Experience of Nature, Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan introduced the concept of Attention Restoration Theory: nature can act as a cognitive and attentional reset, restoring the brain’s capacity for extended focus and difficult intellectual work.

This work was done in the 1980s, but we humans are very set in our ways, so only in August of last year did The New York Times discuss the Kaplan’s research in an article entitled “A Surprising (And Easy!) Way to Boost Your Attention Span.”

Scientists speculated on just why nature can have such a measurable, restorative effect on the human brain: perhaps fractals and the pleasing natural patterns of snowflakes and rocks! Perhaps pheromones emitted by trees! (I do love it when scientists try to suss out the ineffable.)

But the answer is, we just don’t know. Perhaps because the quality that resets us in nature is connected to a more ancient part of ourselves, the kind that doesn’t obsess over coming up with quantitative answers to everything and sharing them in little graphics via electronic devices.

The kind that is so content just to sit listening to droplets, to the flutter of wings. That doesn’t even need another cup of coffee or god forbid, a phone, but just quiet and green.

One little creature among many, watching, wet socks perched on the railing.

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STAY TUNED!

Next, we head into the mountains to stay in a little house on a dairy farm. There will be scorpions. There will be spectacular hiking over the Continental Divide. There will be impromptu roadside gatherings to admire sloths. There will be Quakers in unexpected places.

Read Part 2 and Part 3.

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Recommendations

on the logic of extraction.

on artist intelligence, and a commitment to being human.

on being ordinary.

I really enjoy Oliver Jeffers’ newsletter (and his children’s books were some of my favorites to read to Elena) and I loved this one in particular, with its list of little joys.

I did not know college dance teams were a thing but now Elena and I have gotten a little obsessed.

💚

We are seeking the resplendent quetzal. This is the only bird in the world with “resplendent” in its common name, suggesting that even the most data-hardened ornithologist could not resist the shimmer of those emerald tail feathers, the gleam of that scarlet chest in the misty dark of the cloud forest.

The resplendent quetzal is hard to find. Guides, trailing panting Texans in full-body dry-fit athleisure, trek with single-minded glares through the sun and gloom, stopping occasionally to interrogate the canopy with their binoculars. My dad, Jorge, Elena and I move at a glacial pace, studying the overlapping patterns of greens like a magic eye puzzle, refreshing our memory of the bird’s call on Merlin.

In K’iche (Guatemalan) Mayan, the word for quetzal is the onomatopoeic “q’uq,” and in Yucatecan Mayan it’s k’uk: each sounds in English like “coo, coo” but at the highest octave of soprano, and voiced from the very back of the throat. It’s unmistakable, utterly unlike the polite piano trill of the warbler, or the dove’s sweet morning song. It’s cute and puppyish and also wild, the kind of forest cry that snaps you to your senses.

When we finally hear it, three quarters of the way through our hike in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, we begin stalking. I understand the hunger of Hemingway and big game hunters. All of us creep, alert. Even Elena, who is at peak middle school coolness and thus has an innate allergy to people whispering things like, “Could that be the tody motmot’s mating call?”

Elena has dubbed the quetzal “the pretzel,” an homage to my dad’s obsession with pretzels. This obsession is an ongoing joke in our family ever since Dad first came to Mexico many years ago and uttered the phrase, “What do you mean, they don’t have pretzels in Mexico?” (Update for the curious: Mexico has, in the intervening fifteen years, gotten pretzels. You can get them at Wal-Mart, which unlike in the U.S. is a very fancy place where people go in heels and skin-tight blazer-tank-top sets, and Pringles cost $10). Dad is a big believer in pretzels as a basic global necessity, and they are essential in his book for any real game of cards. Somewhere in the hunt for his mini-Snyders of choice Elena confounded the quetzal with the pretzel and the two merged into a mythical gringo quest.

“Off to find the pretzel!” she’d singsong in the mornings as we prepared for the day’s hike, or, “Did you see the pretzel?” or “Look, there’s a pretzel!” to mess with us. But she understood, beneath the joking, the sacredness of the pretzel-quetzal. The motmots and the trogons and even the toucanets she admired for a moment and then turned from in her preteen reveries, but the pretzel was on another level.

One travels for this: for the eleven-year-old to feel in her veins that a bird contains magic, and that if we find it, that magic will touch us.

The quetzal became real like some dreams do: very suddenly. One minute it seems you’ll never find it and you’ll be haunted by its elusiveness forever, and the next you hear it, that otherworldly coo coo: part puppy, part baby, part siren goddess.

Jorge held up a finger meaning, there! Silence! We tiptoed. We squinted and scanned from trunk to treetop. Then we rounded a corner and there it was, perched on a branch like an apparition, a psilocybin hallucination. Its colors were the most luxurious and unbelievable in the Pantone lexicon: beryl, aquamarine, carmine, viridian. Its tail was over a foot long, drifting in the breeze like a jellyfish in mild waters; its head was fuzzy; its eyes shone deep and dreamy and black. It echoed the palette of the cloud forest and elevated it with an aquatic-metallic sheen: it glowed.

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We were silent. There was no one else on the trail. All around us, cloud forest. Epiphytes dangling from branches like fuzzy green confetti in the mist; ferns the size of maple trees unfurling their soft tendrils and fanning their palms; whole ecosystems growing from twenty-foot-wide ficus trees –mosses and flowering bromeliads and leafy green plants and smaller trees; and above, a criss-crossing canopy of greens that made the sky seem remote.

A cool, intimate world unto itself, and in the middle of it, this gem.

Wow, we kept saying, wow wow wow. More prayer than word. It was like we’d entered a portal to some ancient time, some ancient part of ourselves. The part that worshipped a plumed serpent, cherished a feather more than gold, punished the capture and slaughter of this creature with death. The part so connected to the forest that a bird became divine.

Into this portal entered a hip young Australian couple in cheeky shorts and fanny packs. Hers had a pin featuring Jesus, his arms spread wide from a cartoon cloud, a caption beneath reading, “You are all disappointments.”

They sensed the energy immediately. “Quetzal,” I whispered, and I don’t know if they even knew what it was, but they followed my instructions – up the tree, through the fork, to the right, see? They gasped and stared with the naked eye since they didn’t have binoculars.

Then came three Germans. They were young girls in hiking gear and tank tops and Euro sneakers, their skin dewy and fresh and free of makeup. Their leader – a little taller and bolder than the rest – whispered, “What do you see?”

I guided the Germans through the maze of tree limbs and layers to the turquoise shock of the quetzal, and the leader gushed, “It’s so beautiful. Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.” She covered her mouth.

The German girls had no binoculars, had not been looking for the quetzal, had no particular sense of the quetzal’s significance as a rare or important bird, but stayed there gazing at it for over two hours. I lent them my binoculars a couple of times and they passed them back and forth, teaching each other how to locate the bird from that unfamiliar perspective, drawing a sharp breath each time they found it, its foot-long tail soft as silk and drifting cerulean in the breeze, its eyes wet opal pools. They traced its body with the binos, each lingering as long as she could before relinquishing the gaze to her companion.

What followed was like a song, a refrain that repeats with slight variations in kind and number: The Ants Go Marching On; The 12 days of Christmas. Two Australians, one with mustache and one with Jesus pin; three young German girls; an American couple with a boy about Elena’s age; a Spanish-speaking gay couple who clutched each other as they stared as if on a rollercoaster; two elderly Australians who tiptoed under all the cameras; four young people from somewhere in Latin America with Ciencia Latina stickers on their backpacks and mushroom ornaments dangling from their zippers; two older Swiss couples with elaborate hiking poles and complex backpacks and dour expressions; thin elegant Frenchies with toddlers, always the Frenchies in the middle of the wilderness with toddlers. And on, and on. Every five minutes or so, a new kind of tourist rounded the bend, and each entered the reverie.

In a moment of distressing human disconnect and AI obsession, it gives me faith that everyone who came along that trail understood immediately that they’d entered a kind of cathedral. They needed no signs, no warnings, no hushing or shushing. They just knew when they rounded the bend. And some would whisper for guidance and some would hover and wait for the mystery to reveal itself, but all sensed the sacred. Not a single person spoke out loud, or laughed, or chitchatted, or violated that space. Not even the littlest toddlers. We stared together, silent, as if remembering something so lost we’ve forgotten we grieve it.

The Germans took on the role of ambassadors, mastering the art of locating the quetzal with descriptions that varied depending on age and nationality. Each time, a gasp, a silence when the seeker finally realized what they were seeking. And then a lingering, watching. Most people had no binoculars and the quetzal was a good fifty feet away. But they didn’t care. Its resplendence was right there, palpable and powerful. When it flew off for a stretch, the little American boy planted his feet and said, defiant, “It’ll be back.” My heart leapt for a kid willing to just stand and wait in the chill of this ancient forest for what he knew was something serious and important and real.

My kid, meanwhile, stared for a long while at the pretzel, and then made her way quietly up and down the growing line of observers, enjoying the human spectacle as much as the ornithological, glimpsing the bird from up and down, close and far, with her binos and her eyes, and extricating Haribo Twin Snakes from Jorge’s backpack as if performing an incredibly delicate surgery, so as not to make a single plasticky crinkle. It reminded me of when I’d go to the movies with my mom as a kid, and right at the fragile beginning someone would rip open a bag of Reese’s Pieces and a collective wave of outrage and condemnation would ripple down the soiled aisles of the AMC. So it was with the quetzal. Not one wanted to offend with so much as a single crunch.

It was like the theater when the lights go down and everyone holds their breath. It was like church. It was like the feeling of the Cathedral in Oaxaca with its heavy wooden pews and incense air and subtle echoes, a space where people bow their heads and wait, pray, exit the dull human parameters of their lives. It was like this with the quetzal.

Its feathers are mesmeric, a spectacle of glimmer that makes the human head swim. It felt impossible that this exists and that we go about our days in spite of it, sending emails and buying dog food. Getting mad and eating chips. We stand in a line, us humans with our water bottles and backpacks, our Gore-Tex shoes and little hats and fancy technical versions of sticks and handheld digital devices that expand and retract, and we experience awe. We, who believe we are this supreme animal who can create coal-fired power plants and electric cars and massive data centers to write essays for us, stand still and ogle the mere existence of this magnificent bird.

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In his lecture for Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures, the historian and writer Sunil Amrith conducted a thought experiment with the crowd.

“If I asked you if human well-being was dependent on clean water, clean air, healthy land, you would probably say yes, right?” A murmur of ascension.

And yet, he continued, we have built our entire civilization in the last five hundred years on the opposite premise. On the notion that our progress and flourishing is actually dependent on the exploitation of nature. We have inhabited a posture of human exceptionalism that would make no sense to any premodern society, and that makes no sense to ours if one takes a moment to think about it.

Amrith opened his lecture by recounting how he endured catastrophic flooding in Bangkok in 2012, and how scientists predicted that this city of nearly 12 million people will be mostly underwater by 2050. The day after the flooding, everyone was back to business as if nothing had happened.

“The risk,” he said, “had become invisible.” Just like birds, like the names of plants, like our need for nature have become invisible.

Howard Zahniser, an early conservationist and executive director of the Wilderness Society, wrote, “We have a profound, a fundamental need for areas of wilderness–a need that is not only recreational but spiritual, educational, scientific, essential to our true understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own natures, and our place in all nature.”

We watch the light play on the quetzal’s sapphire feathers. We watch its stillness and its subtlest movements, its liquid eye take in what we can’t see. We watch and we can’t stop watching. We photograph, we film, and then we just witness. And the witnessing feels like being in a way we haven’t been in a long time, but have craved. Mesmerized, humbled, connected, sacred. We glance sideways at each other from time to time, smile, move out of each other’s way a step or two. Hours go by like this. The sun and clouds come and go.

And then the quetzal leaves. Like that, it’s gone, a mortal creature after all, in search of buttery baby avocados like all the rest of us. The energy that has held the air so crisp and tight for the long spell of afternoon dissolves, and everyone smiles and sighs and shrugs and unpeels their last granola bar and begins the trek out.

A guide shows up a few minutes after it’s left. “It’s March,” he says angrily. “It’s not supposed to breed yet. It’s too early. It’s supposed to be March.”

Researchers have found that common bird migration routes have fifteen percent fewer birds than they did in 1987 – an average of 309 birds less. The quetzal has survived largely because of collaborations between U.S. nonprofits and funders and indigenous and local communities across Central America. The U.S. Department of State, which supplies funding for the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica via USAID and makes conservation and research possible, withdrew its funding in 2024.

The cloud forest is crucial to the quetzal, providing it the specific species of avocado tree that serves as its main source of food, and the quetzal is crucial to the cloud forest, regurgitating the avocado seeds to plant new trees. Deforestation from industry and agriculture are constant threats to these old growth forests, but ecotourism has helped to keep them alive.

“Resplendent Quetzals,” wrote Cornell ornithologist Alan F. Poole, “have become the ‘flagship species’ for cloud forest conservation in Central America because of something more ineffable than money. It’s what they do to us.”

The laconic Swiss group comes up in the parking lot after the hike and asks to see Jorge’s photos, and for taciturn Germanic folk wearing utterly practical rainproof button-downs they offer a veritable outpouring of emotion. We have seen hardly an upturn of the mouth in the three times we’ve encountered them on hikes, but now they grin and give Jorge the thumbs-up and one even gently pats him on the shoulder and says well done. For an American this is the cultural equivalent of weeping and screaming “Holy shit!” In the shuttle back to the main visitor center, which is packed to the gills with sweaty tired humans, the three German girls end up right in front of us. We nod at each other like we share a secret, like we’ll go home dreaming of this shared vision.

Later I’ll have what my little brother, a fellow artist and deep thinker, calls a Nasty Realization, though I recognize most mildly perceptive humans have probably had it before me. The rainforest has been destroyed in large part because it can’t be commodified, I tell Jorge. It is, by its nature, local and small scale and incredibly intricate, something that must be known at the level of the leaf. You can’t farm it, market it, turn it into a chain or a corporation, replicate it. It defies, by its very diversity, human greed. And so it is burnt, cut, exploited – converted to cows, oil, and cash.

But that longing for what the rainforest represents– that intimacy and connection with the natural world, that authentic abundance – is still in us as a subterranean longing. The quetzal summons it and casts a spell. The feeling lingers, over fried plantains and gallo pinto (always fried plantains and gallo pinto), and through the remaining hikes and days in Costa Rica, and even on the plane ride back home where a nice guy named Bryan who works as an industrial plant supervisor in Arkansas shares pretzels with Elena. We saw the resplendent quetzal.

Jonathan Maslow, the author of Bird of Life, Bird of Death, a 1986 National Book Award finalist about the quetzal in Guatemala, wrote that the bird “has been a symbol of liberty for several thousand years – not the shrill, defiant liberty of the eagle, but the serene and innocent liberty of the child at play.”

Play is being lost in our society. Girls are tearing their ACLs in sports at record rates, and one theory is that they aren’t playing enough – they aren’t climbing trees and scaling fences, roughhousing in the woods, learning to move their bodies in natural and agile ways that protect the knees. They’re just going straight to intensive sport. We are becoming more and more of a monoculture: all of us fed the algorithms of our preferred tribe, dedicating ourselves to a single intensive activity, receiving AI suggestions to read and write our emails, offered ever more of what we don’t want or need: stimulation, entertainment, distraction, waste.

We need the rainforest. We desperately need, for our planet and souls, its diversity and health. But we also need its ethos. A wild space not exploited for human “progress” but existing for its own splendor: our little blue-green planet in this vast universe, conjuring the resplendent quetzal out of oxygen and carbon and the miracle of an avocado tree. Producing not one, not two, but six different kinds of motmots. Not one, not two, but six varieties of toucan. Three poison frogs, one that Elena dubs the “fashion frog” because it looks like it’s wearing a skin-tight red top and blue jeans.

We need play without competition or purpose. We need awe and wonder. We need community that emerges naturally out of a shared sense of humility before that which is so much greater than us. We need what we cannot control. We need the quetzal.

That is why so many of us stood there in silence. That is why, binoculars or not, scientific knowledge or not, tired legs or not, young or old or Australian or Mexican, we lingered so long.

“Hope,” Jane Hirshfield wrote, “is the hardest thing we carry.” It is a rainforest thing: intricate and exquisite and painful and demanding and complex, and suddenly so resplendent we can’t stand it, we pull aside each newcomer and say, do you see it? Do you see it? There.

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Recommendations

My friend Julia has published an absolutely brilliant book that has gotten rave reviews and that you should 1000% read no matter what, but especially if you are a) a woman b) a writer/artist c) a traveler or other roving-type soul d) have ever described yourself as “hell on wheels.”

This New Yorker story on surrogacy is absolutely bonkers.

I am listening to this audiobook on Johnson & Johnson and wow, it is dark. Really makes you reconsider everything you’ve been told about the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA (and it’s by a fairly staid NYT reporter, not a crazy conspiracy theorist!) Hard to stomach but very informative.

Check out Jorge’s absolutely stunning photos of birds from Costa Rica.

Sunil Amrith’s book, which I bought at his lecture this week but haven’t read yet.

An is-it-spring-yet mood.

In 2018, I received a call from a friend in Pittsburgh who runs a nonprofit that provides interpretation services. There had been an ICE raid at a factory in Salem, Ohio. Dozens of migrants had been detained, and my friend was trying to gather Spanish speakers to interpret so that the impacted families could communicate with lawyers. We drove to Columbiana County, Ohio, a flat expanse of empty fields and decaying farms that went 70% for Trump in 2016. The town’s houses were textbook Appalachian poverty: half-collapsed porches, rusting cars on front lawns, tiny American flags waving before taped-together windows and plywood fences.

The town had been recently revitalized by the arrival of Guatemalans, almost all indigenous and from the same set of villages. Many of them barely spoke Spanish; their native language was K’iche’. They’d come for the promise of work – grueling work, hours processing meat to make the pepperoni that goes on Dominos pizza, operating dangerous machines and getting up to one’s shoulders in blood – but work paid in dollars. No Americans were doing this work. I mean, none. The entire factory was Guatemalans. I can’t confirm it, but I would not doubt that the company sent flyers, advertisements, and perhaps even buses, as other meat processors like Tyson have done, to the border to draw in this cheap labor. Many of the workers, especially those who worked the overnight shift, were teenagers.

We arrived at a church basement where women in heavy traditional wrap skirts, many clutching infants to their chests, waited in a line to ask for help. I interpreted for the team of lawyers: “They came in and everyone started yelling. I ran away but my son is detained somewhere. I don’t know where he is.” Panicky, crying. “We came here for work. In Guatemala, sometimes, we ate grass.”

I can’t remember the exact questions, now, but this was the essence. I accompanied one woman to her house, carrying a huge box of diapers. She and her two young children had taken buses across Mexico and then walked over the border, a journey of several days through the brutal Arizona desert, with no food and very little water. I asked about their journey and she answered my questions matter-of-factly, as if this were simply what one did. It was that, or watch her children slowly wither from malnutrition. Her husband had been detained and she had no idea where he was. I don’t know if she saw him again.

A large Dominos pizza is $7.99. A family pack of Tyson chicken, slaughtered and processed almost exclusively by Mexican and Central American immigrants, is between one and two dollars a pound. Let’s say that again: between one and two dollars a pound. By contrast, local farmer’s market organic chicken costs a minimum of $7, and up to $14, per pound. I’m going to venture here that if I looked in the refrigerator of the average middle-class American family, I’d find a shopping cart’s worth of items provided, at great savings, almost exclusively by immigrant labor: grapes picked by women like the one I met in Houston, Texas, as we both waited for our flight to Oaxaca, who explained how hard it was to retain workers because the grape harvest takes place in cold weather, and one can’t wear gloves, and the fingers freeze (she’d been working in the industry for thirty years, since she was a teenager – her fingers were hardened nubs); blueberries handpicked in Maine, row after row of brown hands exercising extra caution not to bruise the tender fruit; beef slaughtered and processed in Nebraska and Greeley, Colorado, in some of the most dangerous jobs in the United States; Hormel pork.

These meat plants, particularly those run by the massive international conglomerate JBS, stayed open during the peak of the Covid pandemic when most of the U.S. was in quarantine. Kristi Noem forced the Smithfield plant in her state of South Dakota to remain open even as 1,300 workers became sick; she then blamed the sickness on the workers’ living in small apartments. Meanwhile, a nice white suburban family could maintain an uninterrupted supply of meat and produce thanks to the round-the-clock work of “illegal aliens” (and often people with asylum and temporary protected status as well).

When Trump started talking about “mass deportation” in 2016, I really wished it would happen, instantaneously. Even though I knew it would cause mass suffering to immigrants, I wished that all of a sudden they would all disappear. And then, the angry white suburban Republicans who have built their riches over the past thirty years on the backbreaking labor of immigrants might actually see, clearly, who is buoying them up. Who is paving their roads, cleaning their hotel rooms and houses, harvesting and slaughtering most of their food, caring for their elderly.

I am not necessarily against curtailing immigration. I can see how “illegal immigration” is yet another step in American capitalism’s voracious and uncontrolled lust for maximum profit: how much more money can we make while paying even less to workers, having even less accountability to animals and the environment, using even cheaper and more adulterated ingredients? Capitalism is always ruthlessly in pursuit of the most desperate bidder: the Bangladeshi willing to work in the sweatshop for pennies a day so that Americans can buy another T-shirt; the Guatemalan teenager sweeping blood down the drain at 3 a.m. so Americans can save a little more on an Extra Extra Large Pepperoni Pizza.

But the conversation we are having now is not about how to create a more sustainable and humane economy that doesn’t rely on absolutely crushing those at the bottom, and on people buying as much junk as possible. The conversation we are having now is not about how this consumer economy has been supported by the people willing to work brutal jobs in inhumane conditions without complaint or unions, for very little pay, for years on end, therefore enriching massive corporations even further and lowering prices for Americans.

The conversation, as it often does, turns only around “the rules” – who is breaking “the rules,” and how the “good,” “rule-following” Americans are being somehow deprived or cheated by rule-breakers. The irony of upper-middle-class educated white people who are so ignorant they have no clue where their food comes from, nor any notion how they might actually kill and prepare a chicken, nor the faintest idea where grapes grow or what pesticides they’re treated with or how to harvest them, throwing fits about how disadvantaged they’ve been by “illegals” pains my soul. It causes me a physical ache of disgust.

Rules are always relative and contextual. According to the rules a few decades ago in the United States, I was not legally allowed to marry Jorge. Go back just a decade or so further and black people weren’t allowed to drink out of the same water fountain as white people. Women weren’t allowed to have credit cards. It’s important to ask who and what rules serve, and the answer is often the existing hierarchy, the status quo, and whoever is holding the power and making the money.

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To immigrate legally to the United States is an incredibly lengthy, expensive, and difficult process. I should know, because my husband did it – not because he wanted to live or work here, but because I got into graduate school and we needed to move. This process would be absolutely impossible for the average Guatemalan trying to come get a job at the Tyson plant – and what most Americans miss is that this is the point.

The illegality is the point: that’s why you can make someone work with chlorine gas, which is banned in Europe because of safety concerns, and know they’ll never sue you, or unionize. That’s why if their arm is chopped off by a machine, you won’t have to pay a cent. That’s how you can charge $2 per pound for chicken. It’s not an accident. It’s on purpose.

And the purpose is, of course, profit. Ask the roofers who are employing teenagers on dirty and dangerous roofing jobs if they’d rather be paying and insuring American workers. Ask General Mills if they’d rather pay a living wage to a unionized American worker than spare change to fifteen-year-old Carolina from Guatemala. Ask yourself if you’re willing to pay $15 instead of $6 for a jumbo-sized box of Cheerios. And if you are, excellent – then let’s talk about rules. Perhaps we might ask if corporations are following them: if they are forced to provide safe and ethical working conditions and pay, if they are forbidden from illegally inflating prices, if they are required to allow their workers to form unions, if they must provide paid maternity and sick leave and vacation to all of their employees.

Who gets to break the rules (not pay taxes, not obey labor laws, employ children, engage in safety violations, endanger workers) and who must follow them? Who is punished? We could ask this about the Epstein files: who, among all the men, including our President (mentioned 38,000 times in 5,300 files; accused of the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl and of engaging in orgies with fourteen-year-olds) has been punished? Who has been shot ten times in the street for “breaking the rules”? None of the men complicit in photos that include a child dressed in a Snow White costume; a child, perhaps eight, kneeling in a sailor suit; a child’s tiny foot on which lines from Lolita have been written in pen.

When I saw the video of Alex Pretti being assassinated by ICE agents in the middle of the day on a U.S. city street, I started sobbing. I wanted to throw up. I felt this overwhelming grief for my country. That this is what we’ve come to. I’ve lived in places where one could be thrown in jail merely for whispering the wrong phrase, or including it in an email; where citizens are surveilled by a whole quiet army of censors just waiting to pounce. I’ve also lived in places where people can be shot on the street in broad daylight and no one will be held accountable, and where the government can snatch citizens off the sidewalk and disappear them.

Jorge set me straight, as he always does: “Americans don’t know their country,” he shrugged. Because this is the U.S. he has always known. It is the U.S. that many marginalized people know: a hypocritical and mercurial tyrant who promises you riches for labor one day, then hunts you down and tortures you in a cell the next. A profoundly unequal society that is only part “first world,” for a few, and is maintained by a third world shadow economy and life that most middle and upper-class white Americans have no idea exists, would rather not learn about, and see as somehow the choice or the fault of the people caught up within it, even as they build their wealth upon it.

A Spanish friend of mine who works for the UN once told me, “We all know the U.S. isn’t the first world. It’s basically like living in Nairobi: if you have money, you can live a great life, with all the first world luxuries. If you don’t, you’re basically living in a slum, with nothing.”

Many Americans don’t know this. When they say they support law enforcement, they don’t know that when Jorge calls the cops for help because someone hit our car, they ask him for his documents and begin to interrogate him; or that when a white person in the neighborhood where I grew up calls the cops because they see Jorge at a party and don’t want him there, the cops don’t ask the white person for more information but instead interrogate Jorge.

They don’t know that when Jorge is taking photos of a wedding at a park in the suburbs, a white couple will call the cops on him for simply existing in that space. Jorge, ever patient, will explain that he is a photographer photographing what anyone can see is a bride and groom, and will calm down the bride’s mother when she gets outraged and starts fuming at the police. The family is made up entirely of doctors. This is the first time this has happened to them. Welcome to the club. We call the township police later to file a complaint, and they say they’ll “look into it.” We never hear anything back.

They don’t know that when our van broke down fifteen years ago in rural Indiana, the cop we called for help didn’t provide any help to either of us but did order Jorge to stay in the car while he took me to his car and interrogated me about what I was doing with this man and whether I’d been kidnapped. Again, it might be worth pointing out here that our current President and leaders and royals around the world cavorted with a sex trafficker and convicted pedophile and likely engaged in pedophilia themselves, but it is Jorge who is questioned by the cops. To whom are the rules applied? For whom do they exist?

I have been so full of rage I haven’t been able to write. I know what kind of evil is happening inside of ICE detention centers. I have heard it firsthand, from the Central American women who stayed at our house after they were separated from their children and then released from detention with the support of a New York-based nonprofit. They were forced to drink from dog bowls, kicked, sprayed with freezing water from hoses. They were told they’d never see their children again. A sick pregnant woman screamed all night that she thought she was going to die, that she was so cold, I’m going to die my baby’s going to die, she screamed, and the guards did nothing.

What the women did was pray: the woman who stayed at our house was deeply religious, and she formed a circle and the women held hands and they prayed to God. But not the God the white Republican Christians evoke. That one that likes country, faith, and family, but only if they’re rich and white. Only if they’re “American,” the kind that doesn’t speak Spanish and has blue eyes and dyed blonde hair. Maybe these immigrant women’s God won out, because they were rescued by this nonprofit, and that woman cried so hard in my arms that the feeling of shame and horror and guilt at my country embedded in my soul, like the “lifelong concussion” the journalist Martha Gellhorn declared she’d live with after witnessing Dachau. You don’t forget it when someone stays awake all night, sobbing, in your child’s bedroom with the lights on. You don’t forget her face, the look of horror still fresh days later.

I tried and failed to write this essay many times. I didn’t want it to be all rage. And I didn’t know what to do with the rage I feel at the people who are supporting choices and policies that endanger my family; that make it possible that at any time we could be pulled over and my husband could be illegally detained and sent anywhere across the country to one of the many for-profit detention centers, where he could be, as American citizen Aliya Rahman detailed in her testimony before Congress after she was illegally detained, one of many “black and brown bodies, shackled, chained together, being marched by agents outdoors”; or where his skull could be fractured in eight places like the Mexican roofer with no criminal record delivered to a Minneapolis emergency room by ICE, who lied about him “running into the wall,” a claim the nurses called “laughable,” and who was left with significant memory loss and impairment; or where he could be killed.

In Oakmont, a suburb a few miles from us, a Salvadoran father with a pending asylum application who is legally working in the U.S. and has no criminal record was detained while buckling his daughter into her car seat. The daughter later was shaking and sobbing at school: “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.” He is still being held in West Virginia.

The borough of Oakmont, to its credit, responded with an emergency city council meeting which was flooded with residents. The borough issued a statement declaring “We believe that it is our duty to demand justification for this action that traumatized an eight-year-old and her family, residents of our Community.” They immediately passed a resolution preventing local police from cooperating with ICE.

In my rage, I attended a meditation session on Monday night, through the same program where I did my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course several years ago. The session consisted of about ten minutes of silent meditation, followed by twenty minutes of loving kindness.

In loving kindness, you begin with someone you love – someone “easy.” Then you move on to someone neutral, like your mail carrier, your barista, the guy at Artist and Craftsman who pets your dog. Then, someone difficult. A person you have conflict with, or, if you really want to flex some muscle, someone you actively dislike. Then, yourself. Then, all beings.

May all beings be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings be free from suffering.

At the end of the session, the instructor read a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

I take my rage to the river.
A heron flies into the wind.
I let myself be opened
by the great gray wings
and the great gray sky
and the great gray largeness of water,
not to rid myself of rage
but to become a clearer channel
to meet the chest-scouring,
scab-clawing, cell-screaming,
throat-burning fury of rage
and remind my heart I can
know all this rage, can be
feral with rage and still
keep on loving the world.

The teacher paused, then invited us to share. I’ve attended a lot of these sessions now, and I almost always keep my camera off and stay silent. But that day I turned it on and I raised my little digital hand. When she called on me, I said, “I’m so scared. I am scared for my family.”

And I realized I was furious as I was saying it. “And I’m full of rage and just…shame for my country.” I explained that my husband was a U.S. citizen, and also brown. And that if we were pulled over or ICE came after him in any way, I would film, I would scream, I would protest, I would do all the things that would get me teargassed or perhaps shot in the face – because he has done nothing but follow the rules but the rules have never actually been about rules, they’ve been about power.

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I said that I had meditated for long enough now – five years – that I could feel my rage and also know that simply acting on it, shouting, “raging” at people, was likely futile. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do with my rage. I wanted it to be useful. Meditation had taught me enough to pause. But then, what?

And the teacher did what meditation teachers are so brilliant at doing: she thanked me, and she allowed me my rage without offering any simple advice or solution. It’s very difficult right now, she said. These are very difficult times. I could sense everyone on the call – nearly a hundred people – grappling with the same question.

In the chat, a person said, “I’m praying for your family, Sarah,” and then many other people hearted it. A woman spoke up and said her husband was also a U.S. citizen from Latin America, and they’d had to have a conversation about what they’d do if he were deported. It was crazy. It was unbelievable. It was infuriating. But she went to church and she drove food to families too scared to leave their homes, and her daughter, a mother to four young children, drove to visit families held in a nearby immigrant detention center.

A man raised his hand and said, “You know what I see here? Courage.” And he meant the courage to seek loving-kindness and goodness when we are also feeling so much rage. I had not thought of courage this way before: as the strength to love people who do not seem to recognize your humanity. But that’s what the civil rights movement was, in essence: the most radical practice of loving kindess. John Lewis described it this way:

“It was love at its best. It’s one of the highest forms of love. That you beat me, you arrest me, you take me to jail, you almost kill me, but in spite of that, I’m going to still love you. I know Dr. King used to joke sometime and say things like, ‘Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love ’em.’”

It’s crucial to note here that love did not equal passivity. It did not equal acceptance. The love made the movement stronger: it gave the people the willpower and the heart to believe that the reality they were fighting for mattered enough to risk their lives.

If you love someone, you don’t let them get away with bullshit. You are clear in what you value because what you value comes from the strength of that love. It is purpose. It is intention. It is lucidity. It erases any weak desire to just stick with what’s easy or status quo. That real love is tremendously fearless and vibrant.

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Love is also not about winning or losing, which is so often how our politics and our social media present every single question. It’s about everyone living in a world that calms and fortifies the soul, and minimizes greed and suffering. A world where we don’t carry the subconscious moral taint of consuming food produced through pain and exploitation, of terrorizing the labor that enriches us, of pretending we don’t see a hidden underclass of struggle as we order our coffee and drop our kids off at school.

One thing I learned from Undivided, a one-of-its-kind course on race relations I took at a Cincinnati megachurch many years ago on assignment for Pacific Standard, is that racism doesn’t only affect people of color. The white people who were taking the course – some of whom had never in their six or seven decades of life spoken with a black person – were often overcome with grief at being so disconnected from their neighbors, at carrying with them their whole lives both this alienation and the sense that the alienation was deeply wrong. At the hate they’d witnessed in their families and communities, but stayed silent about.

Even if you benefit from it, even if you tell yourself all sorts of lies about it (“rules”), even if you don’t think it has anything to do with you, that hate corrodes your soul. It’s the queasiness gnawing at the edge of your day, the tightness in your stomach, the way your body pulls back. We are all, as the Buddhists know, one being.

Right now, a group of Buddhist monks and their dog, Aloka, are walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of inner peace in the United States and the world. Recently, on their Facebook page, they shared a video of a little boy offering them fruit. The boy is wearing a snug blue snow hat with ear flaps. He is almost as big as the basket he holds. One by one, the monks each take a piece of fruit. Some gently pat his head, or give a friendly squeeze to his cheek. One hangs a string of wooden beads around his neck.

Meanwhile, as I write this, as I watch this video, ICE has begun ramping up operations in Pittsburgh, and Casa San José has issued a warning about forthcoming raids. “Tell Jorge to carry his passport,” my family urges. They tell us to come stay with them, so that my husband, a United States citizen, is not detained, sent to a for-profit prison, beaten, harmed, or otherwise brutalized in front of our daughter, and so that if I protest, if I insist on my rights or intervene with what is dangerous and wrong and illegal, I am not killed.

We debate about whether it is safe for Elena to go to school with her bus driver, who is an immigrant, because what if he is stopped? What if Elena is teargassed like the children in Minnesota, whose family was driving by a protest when an ICE officer threw a tear gas canister underneath their car, filling it with toxic black smoke and almost killing their baby, whose mother frantically performed mouth-to-mouth, and who instead of receiving empathy from the administration, found themselves lied about and slandered? Should we drive her, we ask ourselves? Or rather, should I drive her?

In the Walk for Peace video, the mother is filming. As the video goes on, you can hear her crying. A monk hands her little girl flowers, and then offers her some, and she says, “Thank you,” in a trembling voice. She is crying not from sadness, but because with peace comes absolution.

Because we are all seeking it, whether we know it or not, because we are all suffering beings and when we wound each other, we all feel and carry it, and when we finally witness this love – the men in their robes, gently kneeling one after the other; the boy in his blue hat holding the basket so strongly even when it dips – we remember.

We remember.

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DOMINGO! (Some joy!)

My year started off with wild fervor and ambition, as full of potential as a twenty-six-year old who’s just landed a bomb internship, and it ended with sixty-six freshman composition essays; an excessively trained Australian Shepherd puppy; and a promise to myself to anticipate absolutely nothing.

It’s been a ride. In January, I signed up for a Portuguese class, fairly confident that I’d win the significant fellowship I’d applied for. I spent the spring semester learning Portuguese, writing and researching for a major project, ferrying ten-deep stacks of books home on the 61C. I was all go go go; all future, baby.

In May, Elena and I went to Spain for a month – an adventure I’d signed up for after a writer friend of mine decided to start a radical community there for women and children. It was a transformative experience, the first time I'd lived in such intimacy with other women and traveled solo for an extended period with Elena. It seemed like the perfect launching pad for the next phase of my life. It was all happening!

And then things crumbled quite swiftly. I was on a terrace in Oaxaca sobbing so hard I was almost throwing up. Life did its thing of reminding me it’s not a story, it’s life. We drove to the beach, the wild Oaxacan beach, baby turtles and puffer fish, lanky long-haired surfers and crocodile inlets and roseate spoonbills shining pink in green lagoons. A place where grief gets absorbed by the sky, becomes weather. A place where the body is small, precious, insignificant.

I finally understood years ago during Covid, also a time of grief, why the beach attracts so many lost souls – sun-crisped gringos selling magic brownies in sheds, beautiful girls with shaved heads sculpting mandalas with bare feet. The beach is vast enough to hold whatever feels like too much, wild enough that one’s human suffering is just another wave, another salt-lapped boulder.

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We retuned to Pittsburgh and I took on a lot of work. A friend, the kind who understands everything, asked me if I was writing, and I said no, and she said, you don’t even want to go there, and I said no.

And I didn’t. I read. I accumulated big stacks of books on the coffee table and I remembered, in a time when writing felt like sharp, accusatory grief, how much I loved words. I started reading poetry again: Joy Harjo, Ada Limón, Wendell Berry. I read novels that had nothing to do with anything, no clear purpose for my own work, just stories. Of trees and people. Of human consciousness and beauty and struggle.

I stood in front of the 5th floor copier at 6 pm waiting for the 48th copy of “The Banking Model of Education” to print, drinking the cheapest drip coffee from the student coffee shop. I trained my dog to stand like a meerkat. I picked my daughter up from school and took her to the coffee shop to read through the winter dusk.

I surprised myself by not falling apart completely. I surprised myself with grace. Strange how, in these dark periods that crash down all of a sudden, something can emerge that feels like it’s almost not me – a resilience tucked deep within, a sort of cosmic residue of endurance. Life persisting, life insisting.

It emerges regardless of my own flailing, my own insistence on my unique suffering. It simplifies things to the scale of a human life, the meaning of a meal, a single sky, a walk sipping tea.

The most important lesson of meditation is to recognize when you’ve been caught in a story, a thought, a desire, when you’ve been yanked out of your life into the future or the past, and to return to the breath. To recover, grounding again in the present, the air rising warm through your nose. Each time you recover, you learn a little more: about your own mind, about the nature of the mind, about grace and humility.

It seems like the meaning of things is in the doing. In one’s greatest feats. But recovery is also an awesome feat. Messing up, then redoing, returning. The older I get, the more I respect recovery and the people it softens, who build stories and habits that heal.

On Christmas Eve I made Jorge and Elena read poems aloud from Joy Harjo. Did my child roll her eyes and find this extremely cringe? You betcha. But she agreed to flip through the pages of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light until I said “stop.” She landed on “Prepare,” which she read beautifully. It felt divine that her finger had wound up there.

“Let go that which burdens you

let go any acts of unkindness or brutality

From or against you

Let go that which has burdened your family

Your community, your nation

Or disturbed your soul

Let go one breath into another."

That cosmic residue stirred. A smudge of something starry, something tough, there in spite of the part of me that wants to wail and wallow.

In the first half of the year, I went through a little spell of watching horoscope videos from prestige astrologers on Instagram. I watched one and then the algorithm hurled them at me nonstop. They all promised grand things, great things, huge shifts in May and then June and then August. None of these things, as I imagined them, materialized, and now whenever I get served up one of these videos I throw a little tantrum and bitch at the screen oh yeah, oh yeah January is gonna be a HUGE month, right, for what? Mediocre student essays on Wendell Berry?? Baking sweet potatoes?!? Folding socks and playing Settlers of Catan??

I surprised myself this year by being able to find this just a little bit funny in spite of my self pity. When my sister told me I absolutely crushed Christmas, I texted back, “Hahahaha all it took was for all my other dreams to die!”

Every December, I answer ’s end-of-year reflection questions. One of the 2025 questions was, “What surprised you the most this year about yourself?” I answered, I did okay. Is the bar for me right now winning the National Book Award? Nope. The bar is functioning with grace. Lighting candles in the morning and writing in my journal and taking my students on nature walks and not freaking out when they say professor I totally didn’t realize the final draft had to be different from the original? and hiking in the rain with my girl and playing “Find Elena!” with Little Fuzzy Man (what we’ve come to call the dog) and cooking and meditating and shedding another layer of the ego. The light returns. The sun returns. The year turns.

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In An American Childhood, one of my favorite books of all time, Annie Dillard writes, “When everything else has gone from my brain, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

It is uncanny that I fell in love with this book in high school, that Dillard single-handedly made me want to be a writer, that I read and worshipped her in Oaxaca and China and on rickety buses around the world and I ended up becoming a writer in…Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Dillard grew up and where An American Childhood is based.

I applied to six MFA programs all around the U.S., where I didn’t live and didn’t particularly want to return, and told myself I’d only go if I got funding. I was rejected from five of the programs, one by one. The last one, at the University of Pittsburgh, offered me full funding and a teaching assistantship. I now live right next to the park Dillard roamed as a child, that inspired her lifelong love of nature. I hike in it daily.

“What does it feel like to be alive?” Dillard asks in An American Childhood. “Living, you stand under a waterfall…It is time pounding at you, time.”

So I open my mouth. I drink.

Hello, friends! If you’ve enjoyed Terms of endearment this year, consider a paid subscription for 2026. For $30, you get a year’s worth of thoughtful, carefully crafted essays about culture, art, motherhood, travel, and life’s big questions. Support art, support perspectives and styles outside of mainstream media. Thank you so much!

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My deeply nostalgic and romantic writer self loves nothing more than a good end-of-year reflection. I invite you to share a moment, experience, and/or insight that stands out to you from 2025. I’d love to hear from you.

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This past weekend, the Guardian published a damning, longform piece of investigative journalism about the Free Birth Society.

The Free Birth Society is an organization dedicated to the practice of free birth, or birth without any medical assistance.

It’s crucial to distinguish free birth from home birth; the latter is attended by medical professionals, usually Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) or Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNMs), whereas in the former, a woman is either alone, with her partner and/or family, or with other women.

Free Birth Society was founded in 2017 by Emilee Saldaya, a high school dropout, former doula, and, as it turns out, extremely savvy entrepreneur. It began as a podcast, on which women told their stories of free birth, and then evolved into a series of guides, courses, and eventually a “midwifery school,” which was entirely online, involved no medical training whatsoever, and cost $12,000.

I discovered Free Birth Society in 2021. At the time, Jorge, Elena and I were down in Oaxaca for a month, taking advantage of virtual “school.” Covid fears and restrictions were omnipresent. One had to wipe one’s feet on a “sanitary mat” – a square of rubber smothered in about an inch of hospital-grade disinfectant – before entering any building. The Mexican authorities had decided that Covid traveled mostly on the soles of shoes, and mandated every business place one of these virus-busting mats in the doorway.

Travel to villages was forbidden. Everyone masked, even people walking alone on the mountainside. In Mexico, many children spent years attending “tele-escuela”: virtual school.

A friend told me a story of another friend of hers who’d had a free birth in a remote part of Mexico. The story hit extra hard at a time of such intense fear, when a person’s risk tolerance was so visible and palpable. We were extremely cautious: we’d spent the vast majority of our trip at the beach, outside without a soul in sight. Back in the city, I refused to go to restaurants or cafes, until finally Jorge convinced me on our last night to have dinner at our favorite restaurant.

This is stupid, I argued, this is NOT worth it, and then we had our first real meal outside of our increasingly suffocating home in a year and a half. Oaxacan mole, grilled watermelon salad, caldo tlalpeño served piping hot from a teensy kettle. I saw how easy it is to let one’s world shrink and shrink and shrink because no risk seems worth taking – because one is trying to do all the right things all the time. How in an effort to be completely and totally safe, one’s life slowly grays out, becomes rigid and shrill. And yet at the same time, how we were lucky – we didn’t get sick.

When my friend introduced me to free birth via this story, I was initially horrified. It sounded insane. Reckless. How does someone do this? I asked her. How does someone get to this point?

“Ask your doctor”

When we returned to the U.S., I started reading everything I could about free birth.

I read books on homebirth and midwifery and birth culture; I read studies in anthropology and sociology and bioethics on obstetric violence and female autonomy in medical systems; I read scientific research about electronic fetal monitoring and c-sections and episiotomies and induction and common hospital practices.

And I binged the Free Birth Society podcast. I listened to hundreds upon hundreds of hours of women talking about how they’d shed their social conditioning and given birth on their bathroom floor, alone and ecstatic; or off the grid in a cabin in Montana, with a fire burning and a shag rug and a psychedelic spiral deep into the portal; or in Copenhagen or Paris, tucked up in an apartment where normcore passerby in the street below had no idea a woman in their midst was howling her way through a primal rite of passage.

I started out mocking and incredulous and became, over the course of my immersion, indignant and transfixed.

Indignant because my research revealed what I’d skirted the surface of in my second book: outrageous levels of birth trauma and obstetric violence around the world; dangerous and damaging hospital practices still being peddled as “evidence-based medicine” in spite of any actual evidence.

Transfixed because the women’s stories were so raw, so mesmerizing. Transfixed because in the face of intense shame and judgment and against every social norm, these women did what they believed was best for themselves and their children. When most women – myself 100 percent included - are scared of deviating from the status quo even when they feel in their guts that it is harming their children and degrading their lives, these women did not give a f*ck. They owned their experience, completely – they were, in their words, “sovereign.”

On the one hand, according to everything our culture teaches, this was nuts. Nothing should be undertaken anymore without expert guidance, and nothing related to babies should ever involve any risk, ever (even though our government does very little to regulate consumer goods, cosmetics, supplements, air and water quality, pesticides, the tech industry, and so on, and we allow countless problematic chemicals banned elsewhere in the developed world).

On the other hand, this was basic. The most basic act: giving birth to one’s child. And this was how Free Birth Society portrayed it, as the simplest, most natural behavior, overcomplicated and co-opted by a voracious medical system more interested in control and domination than assistance.

The podcast became a refuge. In the intensely polarized Covid and post-Covid days, the left seemed to fall into an almost fetishistic relationship with science and the medical system.

“Ask your doctor,” goes the refrain, in advertisements and New York Times articles, in any discussion of health and illness. Amy Schumer made a skit on the theme for Comedy Central. “Ask your doctor if birth control is right for you,” the skit begins, “Ask your boss. Ask your boss to ask his priest. Find a boy scout and see what he thinks. Tap a mailman on the shoulder…then, ask him if birth control is right for you! Ask an old black man and an Asian boy playing chess in the park…Ask your mom’s new boyfriend…ask the Supreme Court.”

Ask your doctor. Some doctors are lovely, sensitive, empathic, intuitive, brilliant. Some doctors are arrogant, ignorant, presumptuous, dogmatic, dangerous. Some doctors are highly attuned to the nuances of individuals and to the dangers of overtreatment or universal treatment; some are affronted by any questioning of their “expertise.” Some value consent, even when it makes them uncomfortable; some cannot countenance that a patient could have a belief, need, or opinion that might override their decision.

And doctors are often wrong. Sometimes out of innocence and good intentions – the science shifted, the studies are now showing the opposite, this treatment is now known to cause harm. But sometimes out of arrogance, not listening (to women and people of color in particular), not exercising enough diligence or care, not paying close enough attention, or simply being entrenched in their own fixed beliefs and assumptions.

The same goes with science: science can be a force for social good and human flourishing, eradicating illnesses and excavating the roots of persistent problems and offering deep and illuminating revelations about our world.

But science can also be corrupt, flawed, weak, biased, uncertain, subject to misinterpretation, and straight-up wrong. Science can be liberating and apolitical and revelatory, and science can be bought and partisan and compromised.

“Believe science,” the popular liberal bumper sticker and invocation, is intended as a well-meaning plea to trust the unvarnished truth of data, but can also inadvertently read as a kind of mystical, religious incantation: believe, believe. Follow your Gods. If we all believed all the science, there would be no science.

Too much credulity is dangerous; this is easy to understand in the context of influencers, but rarely considered in the context of mainstream medicine. Women follow their doctor’s advice, often against their instincts and will; they “do what’s best for the baby,” and they end up with unnecessary inductions, hideous labors, traumatic surgeries, separated from their babies and riddled with guilt and doubt.

Then, they’re gaslit: “If you wouldn’t have gone to the hospital, you would have died.” Sometimes, this is true. Oftentimes, women realize that what harmed them was precisely going to the hospital, and if they’d been left alone (or with midwives) they would’ve been better off.

This is where we get into the conundrum of the Free Birth Society. They represent this particularly sinister era of American capitalism: they have identified a real problem with the mainstream medical system and the way it fails and sometimes outright abuses patients – but their solution has then been to use the potency of their insights to straight-up scam and lie to women in order to make as much money as possible.

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Just say no

I loved the Free Birth Society podcast. I could not get enough. I couldn’t stand Emilee (even her name is like dry sand in a bra) but the stories were, well, medicine. That’s what she called them, and that’s what they were – for me, and for many women.

Pregnancy and motherhood in U.S. medical culture can be an intense experience of subjugation and belittlement. Some of my most empowering moments as a mother have come from rejecting this culture: smiling and lying to the pediatrician when she asked if I co-slept, and proceeding to co-sleep for three years, saving myself the misery of trying to put my distressed and wailing baby in a crib while I pretended to rest.

Me, a fortysomething woman, just beginning to really claim what is mine. I started saying “no” a lot more often to doctors and dentists – no, I don’t want X-rays every six months, especially when no other developed country on earth has this practice – and discovered exactly what the Free Birth Society had warned: consent is often an illusion in the medical context.

I was coerced and threatened almost every time I said no, and these were low-pressure situations. Sometimes I was told by a nurse or PA that she’d “have to check if that was alright,” as if the doctor needed to authorize my own choice about what medicine to take or procedure to undergo.

Saying no during birth is nearly impossible: at best, a woman is fearmongered (doctors play what medical anthropologists and ethicists have called the “dead baby card”) and at worst, she could be punished with legal consequences.

I discovered that a lot of folks on the left are very uncomfortable with any questioning of the medical system. Even people who’ve had less-than-optimal experiences, especially with regards to women’s health, and who can recall multiple doctors who ignored them or put their health at risk, remain reluctant to question the “ask your doctor” paradigm, perhaps largely for fear of how red-coded that has become, how it can instantly flag you as someone trying to cure cancer with celery juice.

Instead, many on the left paint medicine as a tidy, linear evolution towards ever greater human progress, with doctors engaged in an ongoing noble war against unscientific grifters.

In an op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Why the Free Birth Movement’s Popularity Threatens Public Health,” Jessica Grose explains, “the basis for so much of what we’re seeing today started in the 19th century, when medicine began to professionalize and the American Medical Association started to create universal standards.” According to Grose, this “professionalization” of medicine both threatened and emboldened “alternative” quacks, of whom the free birthers are descendants.

This neat good-guys-versus-bad-guys history of medicine ignores the fact that obstetrics in particular was a death trap for women throughout the 19th century because of puerperal (“childbirth”) fever: infection caused by a physician sticking his hand around in a cadaver and then putting that same, unwashed hand into a laboring woman.

Though doctors in the early 19th century speculated about why male physicians had much poorer outcomes than female midwives (spoiler alert: midwives washed their hands and/or did not insert them in women!), the medical establishment refused to acknowledge the causes of puerperal fever until germ theory was finally widely accepted at the turn of the 20th century. Puerperal fever, an entirely iatrogenic illness, was the second leading cause of death for young women in the 19th century, behind only tuberculosis.

The rise of obstetrics was also an often deeply racist attempt to gain a little more ground in a territory not yet ceded to the medical establishment. Ordinary Insanity details the story of how obstetricians slandered “granny” and immigrant midwives (almost exclusively women of color) at the turn of the twentieth century, labeling them filthy and “unscientific” in the aim of fear-mongering women into hospitals, despite the fact that these had much higher maternal and infant mortality rates than midwife-attended home births (only in the second half of the twentieth century, after granny midwives had been thoroughly driven out of business, would these statistics begin to shift).

Hospitals were particularly dangerous for infants, with infant morbidity and mortality due to excessive obstetric intervention rising by 40-50% from 1915 to 1930, as more women were pushed into hospital births. Obstetricians distinguished themselves from midwives by enthusiastically employing technologies like vacuums and forceps, often to the detriment of the baby.

And then there’s everything that comes in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s: women forced to have their genitals shaved to give birth; forced to birth in stirrups; forced into “twilight sleep” or general anesthesia (like my grandmother) because it was considered uncouth for them to be present (and why would they want to be anyway?); fathers forbidden in delivery rooms; babies yanked out and held upside down or smacked vigorously at birth (one hideous current ad in Oaxaca City for an ob-gyn clinic features the OB, fully clad in scrubs, holding a screaming infant upside down by one hand). Or we could get into the story of thalidomide. (If you want an absolutely haunting book of fiction about thalidomide and the medicalization of childbirth, here you go.)

Those who, like Grose, mock or dismiss the natural childbirth movement as a hippie-dippie anti-science fantasy forget the brutal, dehumanizing, and blatantly misogynistic conditions from which it emerged.

The misinformation playbook

In the comments section on Grose’s piece, a man named Howard writes, “It’s simple…Don’t get your 10 minutes on the free birth internet site mixed up with my 4 years of medical school, 4 years of obstetrics and gynecology training in a major busy university medical center and 3 years of high risk maternal fetal medicine fellowship training at a major university hospital.”

Don’t get confused, sweetheart. Don’t get mixed up, little lady. You just hush right on up and do what I tell you.

A woman named “Carrie” writes back, “Howard, your attitude reminds me a lot of the doctor who insisted that we start pitocin when I asked if we could wait, since my induction was only because I was 40 years old, and not for any real medical reason. My 8-year-old is coping well with the brain injury she received as a result, and with physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy, she is making great strides. But I can’t help thinking all of that could have been avoided if the doctor had just listened to me for a minute 8 years ago.”

The concept of “doing your own research” is roundly mocked, with nice liberal families making little cardboard gravestones on their lawns for Halloween that read “Did her own research.” Never mind the mass medication of children with stimulants despite evidence that their effects disappear after three years, and that they significantly affect growth and, potentially, mood as well. Never mind the millions of women prescribed exotic cocktails of psychiatric drugs that have proven so hellish to taper off that whole industries have cropped up online offering support. Never mind the opioid epidemic, in which millions of doctors, some well-meaning, some not so much, handed out incredibly powerful drugs like candy and destroyed people’s lives. Never mind the persistent lies of the pharmaceutical industry about said drugs, and the mere slap on the wrist they received for killing millions of Americans. (When Jorge and I moved to the U.S. in 2010, two different doctors insisted on giving him oxycontin prescriptions: one for tooth pain, one for a headache. He had an instinct and didn’t take it.)

Emily Oster, who became a bugbear of the left when she voiced her opinion that closing schools during Covid was a mistake, recently wrote what I found to be a very helpful and surprising piece on this “do your own research” conundrum for the New York Times.

Oster gives the example of fluoride, which was long taken to be a universal win for public health. Strong data have shown that high fluoride levels have a neurological impact on kids, and one compelling study from this year showed correlations even with lower levels of fluoride. This is pretty troubling when one considers that water across the U.S. is fluoridated (again, the U.S. deviates here from standard practice across Europe and in other developed countries) and most kids use fluoridated toothpaste.

Oster does not browbeat parents who may be skeptical of fluoride as victims of “misinformation” or as hapless souls who just don’t understand science. She suggests that doctors discuss this topic with nuance, honoring parents’ concerns as legitimate, framing them in terms of what different studies show.

This is a radical deviation from the playbook much of the media and its go-to experts seem to have relied on from Covid onwards: deny that there is any risk at all or pooh-pooh it as so minimal as to be ridiculous, suggest that people who worry about said risk have been tragically misinformed and led astray, ignore or delegitimize any science/evidence that complicates this simple equation, and create a straightforward narrative so people aren’t “confused.”

In a recent NYT piece about how the FDA has decided to place warnings on fluoride supplements based on significant evidence of harm from fluoride at high levels, the experts interviewed (in this case, dentists) lamented that patients now have some hesitancy about fluoride – that they come in asking questions, that they are nervous. “It’s unnecessary,” one dentist said, clearly frustrated. “And frankly, based on misinformation.”

Oster’s argument is that if doctors and experts do not concede complexity in areas like fluoride, where there is legitimate uncertainty about where the safe dose ends and the danger begins, then they will ultimately lose the trust of people who will go on to become skeptical of even the most basic and life-saving interventions, like the MMR vaccine.

If anything that challenges the status quo as established by “experts” is tarred with the accusation of “misinformation,” ignored, and denied, then guess what starts to look like misinformation?

Last year, I pitched a story to one of the big, old guard, legacy media magazines. It was about birth influencers on Instagram: not Free Birth Society, but women of color sounding the alarm about routine, toxic, and dangerous practices harming women (especially women of color) at hospitals across the U.S. The editor interested in the pitch was lovely, and we had a lengthy phone conversation about it. I wrote it up per our plans and sent it to her. A little while later, I received a response: the other editors were worried that I was promoting “misinformation” by privileging influencers over “doctors and experts.”

I sent the editor citations for multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies showing the danger of practices like electronic fetal monitoring (the New York Times published a feature just last month finally highlighting the risks of EFM and the lack of evidence for its routine use, calling it “the worst test in medicine.”).

These are the kinds of issues these women are highlighting, I explained. They’re referring to the studies. They’re using research. They aren’t lying or encouraging women never to seek medical help or take outlandish measures, like FBS. They’re informing them of risks and contexts that their doctors are not mentioning at all or dismissing out of hand.

The way birth is done in the U.S. is actually not evidence-based, I argued, and the experts we keep returning to for guidance can actually be quite extreme and dogmatic in their ideas about what is safe and what is risky.

Yet the only way the piece would work, I was told, was if I used “experts” to frame and explain the conversation, clarifying what was “misinformation” and what was not. But what, I countered, if an “influencer” (who was also a birth professional) was actually as much of an expert as, say, a labor and delivery nurse? What if the nurse, like the nurse who attended my unmedicated birth, has never actually seen a labor without interventions, while the influencer has attended dozens? Many obstetricians have never witnessed a birth outside of the hospital, not hurried or interrupted or monitored or altered, so how are they the authorities on home birth?

Many are also, just like random average women and influencers, swayed by belief: belief that the body is dangerous, that it cannot be trusted. Many see frightening outcomes but rarely connect these outcomes to their own manipulations and mistrust, or to the particular setting in which they work.

The story was intended to be in part about the way we frame expertise, and the power dynamics involved, and how if women don’t trust experts because experts have failed them, bringing in yet more experts to explain why experts are indeed correct is unlikely to be convincing.

Instead, it could have the opposite effect: women will become so disenchanted by being browbeaten and condescended to by experts that they’ll turn not just to the moderate, reasoned influencer citing scientific studies, but to the one telling them never to trust any medical professional at all.

But this questioning got a hard pass from the editors. The story died. The only type of story that is acceptable, it seems, is the one about the women with the dead babies, who were radicalized by their avoidance of experts. Who did their own research, poor dears.

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The canary

I deeply admire the women who make the choice to free birth. I met one by chance for the first time in real life this past spring in Spain; a young immigrant mother who birthed all her children alone in her house in the Santa Cruz mountains. She was one of the most relaxed, sweet, comfortable, confident mothers I’ve ever met. Her kids were wild, happy, brave, free. Without ever being combative or rude, she did not care what anyone thought of her.

These are the stories we do not hear in the mainstream media about free birth: the women whose lives and experience of motherhood are profoundly impacted for the better. The women who come into motherhood not as many of us do – in anxiety, trepidation, and people-pleasing – but sure of who they are and what they want, need, and believe, and how to care for their children.

This is not to say it’s necessary to free birth to achieve such an outcome! But rather, that the way most of us do end up birthing is often pretty antithetical to choice, ease, confidence, and empowerment. Often, women emerge from this crucible not competent and capable but weak, vulnerable, and humbled into perpetual submission.

I was wary of how the Guardian would approach free birth, but the writers seem to have taken great care to get to know this community and to really listen to free-birthing women about their choices, and to acknowledge the difference between free birth as a practice and the dogma and rhetoric of the Free Birth Society.

They do interview experts, but all are midwives, a choice that feels thoughtful and intentional. They also are careful to point out that free birth is generally low risk, and that what Free Birth Society advocates is a particularly extreme and dangerous version of the practice, in which women are encouraged never to have contact with medical providers even in very troubling situations, like after ten days of obstructed labor.

The writers do put the phrase “obstetric violence” in scare quotes, which seems at best misguided and at worst condescending, seeing as even the WHO has highlighted an epidemic of obstetric violence around the world. The studies I’ve read about obstetric violence are truly horrifying: women given episiotomies without consent, held down or forced into denigrating positions by doctors and nurses, obligated to get epidurals or inductions despite repeated refusals, and in the worst cases, sterilized against their will. A 2019 study in the journal Health and Human Rights on obstetric violence in Latin America by a Harvard anthropologist declared, “Scenes of violence against women in labor are the norm, not the exception.”

Despite this slipup, the article’s overall nuance has generated a thoughtful conversation about what drives women to such extremes. One NHS midwife wrote in an editorial response to the article, “The loss of access to and respect for autonomous midwifery, its descent into obstetric nursing, is a raging western misogynist tragedy, resulting in both heinous obstetric violence and the Russian roulette of free birthing.”

I have long been attracted to these big, hard questions of risk and safety and purpose. We live in a society that is obsessed with research and data and numbers on pages, with experts and professionals and academics, all of whom define for us what is safe and what is dangerous and how to live a good life.

But how to live a good life is rarely a question merely of safety. It isn’t something that can be calculated, measured, itemized, optimized, systematized, broken down into pragmatic bits and checklists.

In my project about free birth, the central questions are: what do we lose when a certain kind of “safety” is our only focus and obsession, even at the cost of our intuition and autonomy and sense of deep meaning? How much is worth risking for freedom from a culture that often seems dedicated not to women’s liberation, but to their submission?

Cults become cults because they speak to a deep and unmet longing, to an unvoiced social ill. In this case, it is the way motherhood is often treated as a purely medical/scientific/technological problem with purely medical/scientific/technological solutions, and not as a profound ritual and transformation a woman might want to treat as, dare I say, sacred, or at least as emotionally and psychologically significant.

In fact, we tend to treat most aspects of our lives in the contemporary United States this way: as technical problems with technical solutions. There’s an app for that. A prescription for that. Is it research-backed? Science-based? Did you ask your doctor?

Many of us are very detached from our bodies, distrustful even of them, and reliant on experts and outsiders to tell us if we’re okay: making the right choices, obeying the right rules.

What FBS offered was the promise of reclamation: you can do it yourself. You must, in fact, do it yourself. You don’t need anyone to tell you you’re okay, to tell you you’re safe, to tell you what to do and how to do it. You instead do the deep, dark, incredibly difficult work of believing in yourself.

Where they lied was in avowing that this is always, only, the way; that there is never a time for fear or help.

It’s this contentious and rich middle ground our culture seems to have largely abandoned. My own birth was wonderful: unmedicated, in a hospital but with a home birth midwife, largely undisturbed. Under the influence of FBS I went through a brief phase when I started to doubt whether or not it was actually as good as I thought, but I shook myself clear of that.

Had I known what I know now, I would’ve declined the electronic fetal monitoring that left me confined to the bed late in labor. I would’ve declined the eye ointment that is not routinely used on all newborns in any country except the U.S., and which exposes the newborn to powerful antibiotics within hours of birth. Both of these refusals would have likely led to combat and resentment – perhaps even to threats – and made my experience far less pleasant.

But overall, my birth was an experience of autonomy, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty. The midwife didn’t fearmonger when I had meconium in my amniotic fluid, she helped me change positions to speed up my labor, my baby was born bright red and screaming, and I was ecstatic. I had wanted a home birth, but we were living in a tiny cabin in middle-of-nowhere Ohio at the time, and I thought it too risky.

Several women I’ve met since then have called this a “unicorn birth.” I find this incredibly tragic. How is having a birth in which my choices (and not even all of them!) were honored and I was given time, space, quiet, and respect, rare as a unicorn? How have we resigned ourselves to this? How can we fight so hard in other spheres and surrender our autonomy so easily in this one?

The anthropologist Robbie Floyd-Davis has called birth a “technocratic rite of passage.” It’s when we’re initiated into trusting and submitting to medical and technological systems, often at our own expense, no matter what. For most of us, it’s how we’ll live the rest of our lives.

I wonder if I had found FBS back then, I would have chosen to stay in the cabin instead of going to the hospital. I wonder if I would’ve birthed by myself in that clawfooted tub in the wild riot of country summer and said no then and there to all the pressure and all the fear and all the browbeating and all the selling of nonsense and learned what instead it’s taken me a decade to learn. I also wonder if something terrible would have happened. I can’t know.

But I do know where I’ve landed – in a lonesome space in which I recognize the lies and false promises of the influencers as well as those of the medical system, and I fear a rising polarization that suffocates any nuance.

There will be another FBS, and another, each crazier than the last with its promises and its “offerings,” because the more dissent feels dangerous, the more ideologically rigid we grow, the more the supposedly pragmatic is elevated above all else, the more susceptible people will become to what feels, finally, like truth. The more people will crave what has been marked as taboo.

We should understand FBS not as an aberration, a freakish creation of the Internet, but as the proverbial canary: singing us a haunting song about what we long for, fear, give up, and ultimately choose not to see.

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Recommendations

I am a bit late with this recommendation but it is still 100 percent worth it to subscribe to ’ beautiful newsletter and get access to her advent calendar. I did this last year and loved it, and it has the resonance of tradition this year. Anna does such a thoughtful job curating it, and it really lends shape and direction to these dark, formless days.

Anna also has a lovely piece on art, money, and the holiday season.

In case you wonder whether you should ever let your child on social media and whether or not the tech industry has a moral compass, this story on ’s “After Babel” will confirm a hard no and nope. It includes many fun details from recent court filings, including the fact that Meta and Facebook specifically targeted schools in an effort to compete with TikTok (the companies developed “new technical capabilities to determine when teen users were at school, to infer which school they attended, and to target push notifications to students at specific schools in what it called ‘school blasts’”); paid off Scholastic and the national PTA to get its products into the hands of parents and educators; refused to make teen accounts private by default even when its own surveys showed that 13% of its 13-15-year-old users had received unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days; and, most spectacularly, employed a seventeenth-strike-you’re-out policy for accounts accused of human trafficking. Yep, you read that right: former Instagram Head of Safety and Wellbeing Vaishnavi Jayakumar has testified that an account could receive 17 citations for prostitution and sexual solicitation before being banned. Do not let your children on these platforms!

In keeping with my date night tradition of celebrating the 2.5 seconds Jorge and I get to spend alone together with an incredibly depressing documentary that will haunt us for weeks, we watched this film. It was one of the most disturbing movies I have ever seen. You should watch it, for as hard as that is.

The pelvic floor.

And Yo-Yo Ma.

Have a lovely week, everyone. Please do reach out and say hi.

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The other night the dog was restless.

Elena had a friend over and they were playing Barbies. Vigorous, exuberant sixth grade Barbies: a very different rendition from second or first grade Barbies, when the goal was sincerity, somber re-enactment. Sixth grade Barbies involves both Barbies and an elaborate show to prove that one no longer takes Barbies seriously: chopping their hair, adorning them with grotesque painted-on crop tops, chucking them across the room.

The dog finds this too exciting. At first the girls let him in and he puts a whole Barbie head in his mouth and flees, ecstatic. The girls, screeching, clamber down the stairs after him and make a big game of cornering him, scoring the Barbie and fleeing in retreat to their room. This goes on two or three times until the girls tire of it but the dog does not, and sits outside their door, whining.

I have 66 student essays to grade.

I put the dog in his kennel but he won’t stop whining. I try saying “shush” as a command, and giving him a treat, but there are two shrieking preteen girls in the next room and a whole lot of interesting hard plastic objects scattered across the floor and the tiny bit of freeze-dried turkey I’m offering is met with contempt.

The sun is setting; russet alpenglow illumes the canopy of Schenley Park. I am trying to concentrate and failing. The girls go to the trampoline and I can hear them giggling, the dog can hear them giggling. He groans like an old man, in exaggerated despair. “SHUSH!” I yell. His fuzzy little ears flatten all the way back, the way they do when a train passes. I’m sorry, I say. He is quiet.

I finish my essays. The girls say goodbye. The alpenglow fades to starry blue, evening now at 6 o’clock. I make dinner and think about the goal of meditation: a quarter second between stimulus and response. A quarter second before the reaction.

I think about how I could have left the room to avoid being triggered by the whining, but then I also could have just taken him out of his kennel, gone outside, sat on the back steps, and watched the alpenglow and the girls bouncing in their sixth grade joy.

I think about how pretty much the only thing of meaning I have learned in the past eleven years is that the act of care is always the act of making the more difficult and uncomfortable choice, now, for the gradual and challenging but ultimately profound purpose of relationship.

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Whatever immediate desire I have, productivity or relief or satisfaction, will pale in comparison to that commitment to another being, and the slow burn of meaning behind it. Will pale in comparison to that commitment to myself, to supersede my impatient reaction for real presence, whose rewards are both invisible and essential.

Elena and I went to a party at a Chilean’s extremely hip loft in the Hill District: a space with tattered wooden doors covered with old Latin American newspaper ads, and a wood-burning stove next to wall-length windows looking out on abandoned lots, and exposed brick, and hand-built wooden staircases winding to bedrooms like treehouses, and a Day of the Dead altar covered in black-and-white photos and sugar skulls and flowers and candles. The place filled up with artists who were way cooler than us with much better haircuts and glasses.

I started a conversation with one, an older man who let it be known in posture and attitude that he was distinguished. That who was I. In the past, I would’ve made a subtle but steady effort to show just who I was, throwing in little accomplishments here and there, building my resume. Now, I just asked him about photographing for National Geographic. About the cold in the Sahara. Not flattering, not indulging, just listening as something to do at dusk on a Saturday in November. We parted ways amicably and he circulated and I went and sat with my dog by the fire.

For a while, I felt bad for myself. I have worked hard, as a writer, and some of it has “paid off” and a lot of it hasn’t, though of course it all depends on how we define those terms: money? Renown? Audience? If I define them by purely personal standards, there have been big triumphs and big failures. More, lately, of the latter.

I am no one, I thought by the fire with the Pittsburgh evening going rose and then umber. Here I am, at 43, and I have little to add to these conversations of prestige and accomplishment: the old ones whose trajectory has wound down and the hot young ones whose trajectory is shooting up gesturing brightly at one another with little clay cups of wine. I am just sitting on the couch with my dog by the fire.

Of course, this is ridiculous. We are all no one. 99.9 percent of the human population has no idea who D.H. Lawrence was. Only a self-important twenty-two-year old could sigh with such pomposity at the travesty of her squandered potential when maybe, if she was lucky, she would’ve written one line that someone a hundred years from now would remember. But I’m still that self-important twenty-two-year old. She still screams and writhes within me, puts the dog in his kennel, gnashes her teeth.

These, however, are the humble years. I have been struggling to find a term for them, this time between forty and forty-five, with kids getting a bit older, with life a bit more settled and plants to tend to and oatmeal in Ikea storage tubs, when that first desperate and hungry early surge of career, in which it seemed everything was possible, has flattened into midlife uncertainty, and suddenly the possibility appears on the horizon that a whole life could pass and – gasp, wait for it – one could actually not do anything great.

Later into the night at the party, I found myself seated at a small table next to the distinguished old man. He’d had several glasses of red wine by then, and we talked about China. He still did not ask me anything about what I did, and I still did not care. Apropos of nothing, he said, “You have a great kid and a great dog.” He signaled at Elena, who’d been entertaining herself all evening painting sugar skulls, lounging on the couch with Latin American artists, and eating an entire bowl of meringues despite my appalled admonishments about potluck etiquette. The dog was asleep under the table.

Ha, I thought, I may not have that success I dreamed about every morning running, every long drive through the countryside, every time I finished an excruciating section of a chapter, that thing I’ve worked for and worked for, and instead I’ll have a great kid and a great dog. And what irony, universe, for you to show me that I’ve envisioned this as the consolation prize.

Thank God, I think, for humility. For these humble years. Because maybe I would have gone two, three more decades riding high on success before I realized that I had a great kid and a great dog. Before I let the little fuzzy man, as I call him, out of his crate to catch that crimson radiance on the hills, to watch my daughter’s leaping body in the blink of an eye between childhood and adolescence.

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The humble years. What does one short span of human years on earth add up to? Should we even be adding, or simply taking notes? What if I just stopped asking for a little while, was here, right now, making pumpkin pancakes, reading poetry, lacing up soccer cleats, catching the hay-and-navy morning light from the bus stop, greeting the sycamores, listening to Hot Cross Buns on the flute for the 1700^th time, lighting candles for the dead, eating Halloween candy, washing the pillowcases, feeding the chickens, long runs, Sunday hikes, porch beers, boba tea, 66 essays, Barbies?

“Staring at the tree for a long time now,” Ada Limón writes of encountering a half-burned madrone in the Mayacama mountains,

“I am reminded

of the righteousness I had before the scorch

of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were

before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky,

half-dead already.”

I ask my students to read Ada Limón and one of them says, “I actually really enjoyed this.” The humble years: that’ll do, for freshman composition.

The humble years. Limón writes,

“Language, I love it, but it is of the air, and we are of the earth.”

Of the earth. Earthly things. Lying in bed by lamplight, reading, Elena’s body next to mine, still seeking the comfort of proximity. The night outside cold and sharp already with winter frost. The dog curled up on the giant squishmellow chipmunk he’s adopted as his bed. I ask Elena if she wants to hear a poem and she lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Is this a cringey mom thing? She agrees, reluctantly, and I read her Ada Limón’s “Sea Turtle,”

“I kept

My distance and laughed

And pointed and was full

Of surprise and the best part?

Every sound I made

Disappeared in the waves.”

I look at her and wait for her sixth-grade sass. She is contemplative. The humble years.

“Mom,” she says, “I thought that was going to be boring, but it was actually really pretty.”

Recommendations

Startlement.

This audiobook if you want something very aristocratic and old school to enjoy on long drives.

Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter.

Only a few chapters in and this book is insane!!!

“Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you

I speak for the snail.”

What are you reading lately, my friends? Watching? Listening to? Share and say hello below.

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We got a dog.

I’ve been avoiding writing about getting a dog. I was scared that we wouldn’t want to keep him. That it would be too hard, that we would fail. I was scared of writing something glorious that would turn out not to be true.

But all writing is, in a sense, false. I am listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River and am astounded that this person I have loved for so long and who has written books I have worshipped was struggling the entire time with a rampant and devastating sex and love addiction.

Her previous work was, as all writing is, true and untrue. It was true at the time and it was also searching its way out of a deeper and unspoken truth, from the pain and anxiety she was feeling towards the highest version of herself. That writing inspired and changed so many people’s lives, and perhaps Gilbert’s herself, but it also hid the truth of her struggle.

My writing is the highest version of myself. It is the self I aspire to become, the life I aspire to live. And mostly, I fall short of it. But, as Toni Morrison put it, “We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”

The dog’s name is Pinto. He’s a miniature Australian shepherd. He has fuzzy ears and blue eyes and one paw dipped in white. His tail has a cream tip. He has freckles. He gets the zoomies and pins his ears to his head and tucks his butt and flies around in circles like a ten-pound dervish. At a certain angle he looks just like the coatimundis that roam the beaches of Oaxaca looking for discarded Doritos, so Jorge has taken to calling him “coatis.” He is a shithead who steals socks and yanks threads out of the wool rug and loves to cock his head in mock confusion if you dare ask him to sit without a treat in your hand. He sleeps by curling himself into a tight little ball and he gets so excited when he sees Elena he does multiple exuberant belly flops. He loves face kisses and also trying to fit your whole arm into his mouth.

I got him in part to cope with an epic sense of failure. I had planned on traveling this fall on a Fulbright grant that was cancelled as part of our current administration’s “DEI review,” and the project I have been working on has stalled in the most frustrating of ways, and I have been teetering on the edge of this abyss. I can sense that if I slip into it, it will be very hard to get out. It has been one of those seasons where suddenly I cry for three days, and then I make some soup and crawl out of it and journal again in the mornings because what else can I do? What else makes sense to me. I don’t know.

But the dog gets me into the woods. The dog demands training. The dog is there with his little fuzzy ears saying, earthly things! Treats! The leaves, the fog, the candles, the rain, the fresh raspberries in the refrigerator. The dog leads me to Wendell Berry:

“To the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins: that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck;

have listened to too much noise;

have been inattentive to wonders;

have lusted after praise.”

The dog is an earthly thing and I need an earthly thing right now. Writing is not an earthly thing. Though it is made of all the stuff of everyday life, leashes and treats and fur and bones, it is ultimately an aspirational thing. Writing is the way life would be if it were a story, but it’s not a story. It’s a messy, hard, back-and-forth energy storm in which the only truth is that everything changes.

Lately it’s been failure and failure and failure. And still, here I am, writing. On the heels of one of those failures, after a full day of crying in the rain in a very beautiful place with a massive, ancient tree whose wisdom I could have been absorbing, I went for a beer with Jorge.

He asked me what I’d done that day, and I said cried, and then wrote. Wrote!? he asked. Yeah, I said, I had to tweak this particular section. What?! He was appalled. I was working on this thing that was failing, seemed to be endlessly failing.

“I love it,” I said, meaning the work. It was such a dumb, helpless little sentence, the kind of thing one would say about a crazy dog who poops all over the house and shreds your shoes and salivates beastily against the leash on every walk. It was ridiculous. But it was also true. And it was kind of liberating. I do love it. And that is redemption and it is also an exquisite pain that won’t go away.

I was asked to speak at a class in my former MFA program this spring, and the students asked for advice, and I said, “If you can do anything else with your life, do it. Only do this if you absolutely have to, if there is really nothing else you can do.”

It was a little dark, and they looked a little startled – a real downer, this one! – and this was before I had even hit my string of failures. I wanted to say, sorry, my young friends! But if you can be happy being a park ranger or a horse masseuse or literally anything else spare yourself this artist’s life! Because once you’re deep enough in it, it’s also really hard to get out.

Then came the failures and I fantasized about success bursting unexpectedly through them like the proverbial sunbeam through the rainy forest canopy and me talking on NPR with Terry Gross about how I’d had all these failures before that brilliant, career-and-life transforming success and wasn’t that funny, and wasn’t that a lesson in resilience and doggedness and having faith in the vision, Terry?

This would be a beautiful story if it were just that. But it’s not. It’s life. And in life, it’s all well and good to love something but if it doesn’t make you money, if it keeps failing and failing you in the most brutal of ways, well…you get a dog. And you cut some marigolds. And you make some chicken curry. And you take on three classes instead of one. And you ground in earthly things and you just don’t know.

In All the Way to the River, which I loved even harder and with even more heartache than any of Elizabeth Gilbert’s previous books, Gilbert writes,

“If the universe can be said to want anything from us, it is that we position ourselves to exist in harmony with reality–to sway in accordance with destiny, without excessive argument and struggle.”

Boy, does this suck. Okay, universe. I’ll just be over here teaching my dog to stay. I’ll just be over here grading another paper, watching the sparrows hop between bushes, awaiting orders.

My sister and I saw in person this week as part of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures series, and she was flipping amazing. She was, hands down, the most phenomenal speaker I have ever seen, with Richard Powers a close second. I’ve made the point that writing can never be the complete truth, the writer is never the same on the page as she is in person, but Liz Gilbert comes about as close to merging the two as anyone. She is incredibly charismatic, generous, and wise, and the second she came on stage I wanted to burst into tears.

I wanted to burst into tears because I felt the acute pain and grief of all this failure I’ve been carrying around, and the ambiguity and stress of it, and also I felt how much I love this, writing and writers, books and words and the powerful purpose and beauty and connection they generate.

Because I don’t know how to exist in any other medium. Because Liz Gilbert was so magnetic and reassuring in her presence that she reminded me my fears and failures and attitudes about writing don’t really matter much – writing will be there, existing, thank God, whether or not I squirm around in it, find propulsive success or just keep shelving Word doc after Word doc on this grimy laptop.

There were so many searing moments in Gilbert’s talk – delivered with humor and grace and zero pretension – that I was desperately trying to remember them all in the notes app on my phone on the bus. I glanced up in front of me and another woman, a fellow millennial, was doing the exact same thing with a note titled “Liz Gilbert.”

Gilbert talked about how restless she becomes in between creative projects, but how she has learned to wait, like an impeccably trained British butler, with her crisp black suit and white gloves, until she receives her commands from the universe. She was asked what she thought was the single most important takeaway from her book and book tour, and she said, “You are innocent. You are innocent.”

And you could feel the whole room draw its breath, like after all this time, on a Pittsburgh Monday night in a pause between gulped-down dinner and putting the kids to bed, she’d absolved us.

On my walk home I kept returning to something she’d said about creativity, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: you’re entitled to the labor, but not to the fruits of the labor.

Gilbert had explained it in terms of not being able to control what impact her books would have on the world; she could do the creative work, but she wasn’t entitled to how it was interpreted or received.

But I wondered whether this maxim could mean that you’re entitled to do the work, but not necessarily to be paid for it, to receive conventional or commercial success from it. That seemed dark. It seemed, dare I say, unfair. But was it true.

As an artist, as someone who practices creativity on the daily as a way of living, what am I entitled to? Am I entitled to nothing? That’s a valid answer. I’ll buy it. Am I entitled to a small pittance, enough to live on? Also legitimate. Defensible. Or maybe I’m entitled to “success,” to renown? Less likely, but I suppose possible, if I work hard and long enough, which I’d argue I have. I have tasted all of these – nothing, enough, and a bit of renown. I have cycled through them, and feel as if I am back at the first.

I contemplated the question of entitlement for a while on my walk home from the bus stop before I realized that it wasn’t the right question. It wasn’t even a very interesting question. The real question was, what does it mean to love something so complex and so difficult? What does it mean to love something like art when art is rarely valued, promises nothing, guarantees nothing? What does it mean to love something like life, which is always going to be hard, and is always going to wound as much as it delights? What does it mean to love something like God, who can be a force of such destruction and pain, as well as mystery and beauty and love?

I don’t have the answers. But even in the failure, the uncertainty, the heartbreak, I am ever thankful to writing, I realized under the half-moon, to the sound of those late September crickets, for letting me live the questions.

At home, the dog was so happy to see me his full body wiggled, making wild snake undulations, and I picked him up and felt his heart beating rapidly, and he steadied his little mismatched paws on my shoulders and gave me a kiss.

Pinto Bean.

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Tell me about your failures, if you dare. Your negotiations with them. Your coping strategies (pets?!). Your ongoing relationship with writing. Or just anything, a nice new plant or poem you discovered this week.

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I love ’ newsletter so so much and it makes me want to immediately seek out cold water and never get on the Internet again. This post is for all the forty-something women out there.

I appreciated ’s recent post about alternate lives and selves.

I started the novel North Woods and am absolutely captivated.

Always, always, Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

"As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection."

One of my students, a lovely young woman who’s a little bit older than the others and has a different, more thoughtful vibe, confessed in class the other day that she hadn’t done the reading. I had called on her at random, as I’d told students I would do, and she’d said, “I’m just going to be honest.”

The student trusted me enough to share this, and still make a meaningful contribution to the class; she showed up as her full self. Maybe she’ll do the next reading, maybe she won’t, but I understand now that like most students, she’s doing the best she can, and punishing or threatening or haranguing her does very little other than create an environment of dread and resentment.

Last semester, I took a Portuguese class. I took it for the utilitarian purpose of learning Portuguese for a big grant that was ultimately revoked by the current administration, a loss I’m still reeling from. But the universe, slick little trickster, has revealed that this class was actually not so much about Portuguese as it was about teaching and learning.

I was a student for the first time in ten years in that class. My teacher was a brilliant, charismatic young Brazilian with a nose ring who gave us all – scruffy Russian who already spoke three languages, brilliant PhD student, under-slept wild Gen Zs – the benefit of the doubt, and liked us for who we were. Sometimes, I didn’t do the homework because I forgot or because I was so overwhelmed I left it until the last minute and then was trying to fill in the blanks while walking up three flights of stairs at 10:57 a.m. in the Cathedral of Learning.

It didn’t matter. The teacher adapted. She never scolded or sent threatening emails or warned me I wasn’t taking the class seriously, because I was. I loved that class. I looked forward to it every day. Her threatening or scolding me wouldn’t have helped; I would have felt ashamed, pressured, I might have done my assignment on Cabo Verde a little bit earlier, but I wouldn’t have loved the class as much, wouldn’t have learned as much. I didn’t take advantage of her not scolding and do less, because why would I? I wanted to do as much as I could, and I did. The motivation came from my own desire to learn another language, to be in community, to grow as a human being. It didn’t come from fear of this teacher being angry at me.

Most of us were raised under the scarcity paradigm that says if kids aren’t punished, if there aren’t consequences, they won’t work. They won’t want anything. They won’t know what to do or how to be. They’ll collapse into limp little commies who will fart around all day consuming resources without producing anything.

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Most of my students, raised in middle class white suburbia in excellent public and private schools, have achieved what they’ve achieved almost entirely via coercion; not a single one of them raises a hand when asked if they could pick what or how they studied in school.

Most also have no idea what they want. They may have a vague notion of a career or a life with a family, a job, a house. But much of what they want, they want because they’ve been groomed to want it – because they have to pick something, and most of them pick the safest, most obvious and mainstream option. I like sports, so I guess I want to be a physical therapist? My dad said I should go into business? My parents would never let me major in studio art. Not because they know who they are and what they care about.

I asked my students to keep track of their AI usage in a handwritten journal for the first week of class. I promised them zero judgement, and encouraged them to be honest. Nearly all of them said they use AI on a daily basis, and turn to Chat GPT the minute they have any difficulty with classwork. “I just don’t have time,” many wrote, or “I’m too stressed out.”

Learning for them is often purely transactional: they have to turn in arbitrary, abstract “work” for a grade, and they are paying for that grade, and they need that grade to advance to the next level of their lives, as in a video game. So of course they use whatever means necessary to advance – doing anything else in such a transactional exchange would be ludicrous. It’s not about the learning – that’s incidental. It’s about the transaction.

This semester, I haven’t been doing anything other than teaching. I have been wounded by the earlier failures of the spring, the massive disappointment not to be traveling this fall, and the odd result (gift?) of such a feeling of carefully restrained despair is that I am putting my energies fully into my classes.

The universe has responded, as it did with Portuguese, by teaching me something I didn’t know I needed to learn. In focusing my energy on teaching, I find I care both more and less about it. I want the classes to be meaningful. I want them to be fun. I want students to walk away energized, passionate.

And I also don’t care if they don’t do the reading, if they show up late or miss a class because they had to drive their boyfriend to a dentist appointment (best excuse of the week, brava!). This doesn’t mean they won’t receive lower grades for not doing assignments or showing up, or that I’m making excuses for them or bending over backwards to help them, just that I’m not taking it personally. I’m assuming they’re doing the best they can. And for me, doing the best I can is showing up in good faith.

In the summer, when I was in the thicker, soupier stage of despair, I finally read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers. I’ve heard this book referenced in many contexts for many years, but have perhaps been (okay, have been) too much of an arrogant or otherwise busy asshole to really take the time to read it, because I don’t have time to read texts on writing and they sound boring and I can teach it just fine!

Ha. The universe is so patient! The universe must love souls like myself, so full of themselves until suddenly they aren’t, and they finally read the damn text and say oh. I should’ve read this twenty years ago.

Guess what Peter Elbow said?

Well, he said a lot of things. He said – shocker! – you can’t teach writing as a skill independent of life, context, personhood. He said in order to write, you have to have something meaningful to think about, you have to think about it, and you have to care. He said students often conceive of writing as something that emerges fully intact from their brains, a sort of dictated scroll of perfectly organized thought. Their aim is to get this dictation exactly right, first tidying their thoughts into paragraphs and then neatly transcribing those into the five-paragraph essay. The advice they’ve been given is: “first try to figure out what you want to say; don’t start writing until you do; make a plan; use an outline; begin writing only afterward.”

This is backwards, he declared. First, it never works: everything comes out all warped and twisted and confusing, and students try to torture the writing back into submission, and it gets more warped and twisted, and they give up. I’m bad at writing, they say.

Or, it does work, and they are “good at writing,” and their writing is a sterile, utterly dead SAT essay with a mind-numbing thesis and exactly three supporting arguments, and you’ll pass out from boredom a paragraph into it.

Instead, Elbow wrote, “Writing is a way to end up thinking something you couldn’t have started out thinking. Writing is, in fact, a transaction with words whereby you free yourself from what you presently think, feel, and perceive.”

Elbow landed in teaching because he hated writing so much. Like many overachievers, he froze up during the writing process. He couldn’t get it just right, and he agonized over it until he couldn’t write anything at all, and then he panicked, and this caused him so much stress he was kicked out of a Harvard PhD program after two semesters.

Somehow, he ended up getting a gig teaching writing at MIT (no shade cast at Elbow here, but I guess this was the definition of “failure” for a privileged white dude in the 1970s?!) and there, after having given up on the standard system, feeling the outcast, he played. He experimented with totally new and unconventional gen ed courses; he “rehabilitated” his love of books. Like many of us in the throes of achievement culture and traditional school, he had to separate his genuine love of words and ideas from the accolades he got for relentlessly analyzing them.

Elbow came to define the way we talk and think about writing – and, one could extend this out to school in general - in terms of playing either “the believing game or the doubting game.” We can choose which to play, but “the doubting game has gained a monopoly in our culture.”

The doubting game involves questioning, criticizing, analyzing and “trying to extricate oneself from any personal involvement with ideas through using logic.” The believing game involves listening, affirming, entering in, trying to experience more fully, and restating – understanding ideas from the inside.”

The believing game comes in for a great deal of criticism for a supposed lack of rigor and intellectualism; for being all affirmative and fuzzy and bullshitty. But, Elbow argues, the believing game is actually far more effective at generating new ideas and truly original thinking. The doubting game, Elbow explains, “often leaves us trapped in the mental frame of reference of what we are trying to doubt.”

The believing game, however, asks us to play with ideas that may seem odd or threatening, and to explore the strengths of many competing wild ideas instead of simply delineating the flaws of a few familiar ones.

Elbow declares that when “loyalists to the intellectual status quo” decry the believing game, they are in effect “stay[ing] insulated against any experience of alternative thinking.” Then he takes the radical leap of stating that when he “could no longer function as an intellectual,” the believing game saved him.

“If we had a fuller and more accurate picture of what good thinking looks like,” he wrote, “we would see that the intelligence of intelligent people is not just acuteness of critical thinking.”

If we play the believing game, we are forced to articulate why in fact what a writer is saying might be true. We are forced to examine it, Elbow explains, like a mirage on the horizon: could it be a dog? A horse? If we doubt it, we deny it is either, and therefore lose the opportunity to figure out what it actually is. If we believe in it, “we get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of or ‘through’ it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood.”

The believing game doesn’t accept shitty writing as good. But unlike doubting, the process it engenders not only reveals that the writing is shitty (after examining it for a while the writer is often forced to discover she doesn’t actually know why she stated marriage is good for society or what that means or whether she thinks it’s true), it asks the writer to take her words seriously – to realize that they land in the mind of a reader and create a world there; that using words on the page isn’t simply an empty formal gesture or a direct transcription of one’s thinking but an act of creation, shared between people.

The doubting game is often dominated by status. Whoever has the greater rhetorical abilities and makes more money and holds the levers of power ultimately wins. What art is declared great. What ideas are valuable. What writing is good. What is possible, desirable, achievable, laudable.

The believing game is a long game. If you have an “itch for closure,” Elbow writes, you won’t be able to play it well. Because you’ll want your answers soon. Now. Yesterday. And the doubting game is great for that. But if you play the believing game, you’ll have to ask yourself, “How soon do you want your truth?”

The answer comes from a “reorientation of thinking or perception.” If you only have an hour, Elbow advises, spend the first fifty minutes not looking for answers. Feeling, questioning, exploring, perceiving, wondering.

The doubting game is an exercise in “learning to be sharper, finer, more piercing, harder, tougher,” and the believing game is one of learning to be “larger, more encompassing, softer, more absorbent.”

Elbow recognizes and argues for value in both, but our culture does not. Our culture does not value believing. Does not trust it. What kind of intelligence might we recognize and honor if we played the believing game more?

“Good teachers,” Elbow wrote, “get a kick out of mere possibility — and they encourage it. When I manage to do this, I teach well.”

Elbow insisted that we cannot give feedback on student writing and make it better if we don’t like our students. What a concept! No wonder he was roundly mocked by the establishment. This is another kind of believing game: believing in a person, even if that person has not correctly used the word “literally.”

In his most radical argument of all, Elbow claimed that students don’t actually need teachers, but teachers, in order to teach, need students. When you try to wrap your mind around this – try to believe it – it’s pretty daggon paradigm shifting. (Side note: I grew up saying and hearing “daggon” as an adjective all the time, and just googled it and saw it defined as a “redneck slang word.”)

It’s tempting to think that I, the teacher, am coming in with my superior knowledge and rhetorical skills and doing a great service to the world by explaining to Grayson and Madelyn why a sentence like “AI is very important in the world today” is the literary equivalent of a plate of boiled carrots, but actually, Grayson and Madelyn, if they really wanted to, could learn this themselves by paying very close attention to their writing and working with a group of peers to witness the actual experience of it, and also, my explaining it to them only does so much to a) show them how to change it and b) convince them that changing it matters. They have to want to change it, they have to care about changing it, and they have to believe that changing it matters.

But this generally isn’t how school works. Instead, the students have learned that I, the teacher, will teach them how and why what they are doing is wrong, and then how to do it the right way, and they will do it this way (or, as is much more likely nowadays, ask ChatGPT!) and they will produce the artifact that guarantees they did it the right way and then receive the appropriate grade, and mostly nothing particularly interesting or truthful or novel or meaningful will be produced along the way.

Believe you me (another bit of redneck slang?! The older I get, the more my working class Cincinnati roots show?) my dear reader, I am under no impression that my Seminar in Composition students are walking out of the classroom on December 5th having created some earth-shattering philosophical masterwork or even anything they won't toss right into the nearest recycling bin.

I’m only aiming for them to see writing as something that actually matters. That means something. That is an exercise in careful, purposeful thinking; ongoing self-discovery; and care. Care for the world and the reader. That involves playing the believing game with a whole heart: believing that these words will actually come alive in the mind of another human being and ignite something there. Some vision, some kinship. Some hope.

In the introduction to Writing Without Teachers, Elbow makes the traditional academic move of thanking and crediting scholars who’ve influenced him. And then he thanks group therapy, which he says taught him that “important progress can result from a kind of unstructured process of people sharing what is happening to them, interacting, and responding to each other.”

The most meaningful time of my life was when I was pregnant, broke, and living in a cabin in Ohio. I spent most of my days on the front porch, just waiting, just listening to birdsong, working very slowly on essays that I had no plan for and that, ironically, became my first book. The teacher was, I am sorry to say for those of you who hate sentimentality and grandiosity, the universe. The teacher said, listen. Believe. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

It’s a game I still struggle to play. Believe! I grit my teeth. I thrash and flail. Okay. And then one day, a student tells me the truth. I find myself liking a little more than judging in the classroom. In spite of all the despair and uncertainty, a little tenderness makes its way in. A student stays after class and asks me my favorite shape. A diamond? I guess, because I can’t think of anything else. Respectable, he says. It is an exchange that could seem pointless. I think this class is going to be okay, he says.

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We go to Oaxaca for a baptism.

Before we leave, ICE raids a Mexican restaurant in a Republican suburb of Pittsburgh. Someone comments on Facebook, “Great restaurant! Hope they’re here legally!” Another: “Leave our good Mexican restaurants alone!” (The bad, on the other hand, one wants to ask?) Another: “Adios, amigo!” Fourteen “illegal aliens,” including parents of small children, are arrested and scheduled for deportation.

The baptism takes place in an airy wooden church on a hill, on the outskirts of a lower-middle class neighborhood. The mountains of the Sierra Norte are visible through the wide, open doors. A morning breeze drifts over the tightly clutched shawls of the old ladies. The sisters who will today be saved from purgatory wear bright, impeccable white. The baby’s dress trails double the length of her tiny body. The four-year-old’s finery crinkles and holds its shape as she spins in her little white flats.

In Michigan, ICE raids a farm and detains the parents of two teenagers who attend a high school where a Mexican friend of ours teaches. The teenagers are orphaned when their parents are abruptly deported. They must now cook, clean, and care for themselves. The school starts a GoFundMe for them.

The mass begins, soft morning sunlight falling on the wooden pews and the shoulders of those of us in the back. The priest announces that the baby and her sister will be officially welcomed into the church today. A great kiskadee chirps from a mesquite tree: kiss-ka-dee. Kiss-ka-dee. The morning breeze smells like dried grasses, old rock. The priest seems traditional, very Oaxacan: a grave and authoritative man whom I am very glad cannot glimpse Elena’s (mild) crop top in the last pew.

But the murals on the wall, I realize as my attention drifts, are radical. Indigenous campesinos in traditional dress – shawls and brightly colored skirts for the women, sombreros and linen pants and huaraches for the men – sitting in a circle, sharing a pot of beans and a stack of fresh tortillas. Above them a brown Jesus lies dying in the hands of a brown God. On a stone beneath them is inscribed a quote from Pope Francis: “There have been many and grave sins committed against the original pueblos of America in the name of God.”

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In Cincinnati, Ohio, where I grew up, the chaplain of Children’s Hospital was arrested by ICE at a routine court check-in. He was granted asylum in 2018, but his asylum status has now been terminated. “I didn’t come to America seeking a better life,” he told the local news. “I was escaping death.” If deported, he will be sent back to Egypt, where he was almost tortured to death. On Facebook, comments varied. One was a meme of a founding father, with his long white wig and powdered white face, saying, “BYE!” Another read, “He prayed over my dying grandson.”

My close friend in Oaxaca tells me she has cancelled a trip to meet her newborn nephew. She does not want to risk her husband, who is Mexican and dark-skinned like my husband, ending up in a for-profit jail or worse, El Salvador or Venezuela. She knows that if this happens she will have no power or legal recourse, no due process.

“Is it really that scary?” she asks me. “Because I’m terrified.” She is not someone easily terrified. She casually evicts scorpions from her house on a regular basis, posts lighthearted tales about her flight making an emergency landing at a tiny coastal airport. But she will not return to the United States. “It is actually that scary,” I tell her. I warn her not to come. I tell her about Jorge getting followed by a broken-down truck in the suburbs and flipped off by angry white people. I can’t believe how normally I recount this. I am embarrassed for us, that this is how we live. That this is what we tolerate. We are walking on a beautiful road behind her house with our Mexican American children. A huge, full July moon rises above the valley. Pale white moon over lavender valley at dusk.

The congregation rises and follows the priest into a small alcove, where the holy water waits in a marble bowl. The bowl rests on a wooden stand, at the base of which are carved clay figures: an iguana sticking out its ropy tongue; a gaping pig. This is not your nice white Catholic church. I imagine a furtive group of liberation theology idealists infusing the church with indigenous symbolism and belief, and then remember that of course, this has been happening in Mexico ever since the conquistadores brought the idea of Jesus Christ to Mesoamerica six hundred years ago. Syncretism: the merging of belief systems.

On the far wall of the church is a dramatic mural. One one side, the Virgin Mary, in a glowing red dress and turquoise veil, shields the village from the arrival of the conquistadores. In full armor, on horses, they thrust their shields at her neck. They have set fire to the pyramids of the local Zapotecs, which burn in the background. Atop one pyramid is a large wooden cross, on which are painted brown faces contorted in agony. On the other side, everyday people gravitate towards a brown prophet wearing simple linen clothes. They are carrying backpacks and walking sticks and are trailed by thin dogs. They are mothers, children, families. They carry flowers and bags of goods.

On a stone among them is inscribed,

“The Virgin Maria: a mother without a roof who knew how to transform an animal’s cave into the house of Jesus with a few diapers and a mountain of tenderness. Maria is a sign of hope for the pueblos who suffer birthing pains until finally justice is born.”

I read about a farm raid in California in which one migrant is so panicked he leaps from a greenhouse and breaks his skull and spine, later dying from his injuries in a hospital bed. What pueblo did he come from? What house was he building there? What fruit, what vegetable did he pick, and what American is lifting it to her mouth right now, biting into its succulent flesh?

The baby does not cry. The water drips crystalline down her tiny face. Everyone leans in, awed, 2026 years after the birth of Christ, at this simplest ritual. Sunlight, marble, water, faith. So much we want and crave and kill each other for, and still we find awe in the most basic elements. After, the priest lectures and the small group of plainly dressed local adolescents sing, and then comes my favorite part: we turn to one another and say, “Paz, paz.” Peace, peace. Handshake, peace. Your human face. Your human face. Baby, grandpa, dying, just born. Outside the mountains, the great kiskadee. Because it is Mexico we sometimes kiss one another’s cheeks as well. Peace, peace.

Jorge does not travel to LA as planned because all of the basketball tournaments are cancelled. There will be no joy or celebration. People are too afraid to go outside. They still go to work, of course. The country still runs and will run on immigrant labor. No righteous white Americans are eagerly lining up to milk the cows, to pick the strawberries, to inhale the chlorine in the chicken slaughterhouses, and no one seems too eager to advocate for better working conditions in these places. Bailey Fischer of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, interviewed in the Penn-Capital Star about ICE raids on PA farms, explains, “Trust me, we have tried every possible solution you could think of, but the domestic workforce is just not there in the Ag industry. A lot of Americans, they prefer the office job over getting up at 4 a.m. to go milk a dairy cow or be out there in the hot summer heat, picking lettuce, harvesting lettuce, or fruit, etc.”

The U.S. Representative for the district, Republican Glenn Thompson, a close supporter of the President, whined to the Star, “Don’t disrupt the food supply train!” The administration backs off raids on meatpacking plants and farms, many of which heavily recruit in Mexico and bus their workers northward from the border. The “rules” apply apparently only when they will provide a nice show for, but have zero impact on, white Americans profiting from immigrant labor. ICE then raids elementary school graduations. Home Depot. Street corners where vendors are selling shaved ice to children. Restaurants. Churches.

The mass is still going on. The Mexicans do not cut any corners with their masses. Jorge enjoys watching me mouth how much longer every few minutes. He grins, shrugs. Finally it is time for communion. People line up and accept a wafer on the tongue from the priest. “What is that?” Elena asks, and I whisper to her that it’s the body of Jesus Christ, and they eat it, and it represents how they are one with Jesus Christ. She looks pale. For a while, she is silent, and I wonder if she is having profound thoughts about the oneness of all beings, about how we are all flesh disintegrating into the earth to feed beetles and trees. Then she speaks. “I’ll never look at a wafer the same way again,” she says.

It is ironic that the Americans so intent on persecuting immigrants actually have far more in common culturally with them than with many of their fellow Americans. The Mexican immigrants in that church, baptizing their children, work eighty-hour weeks. They sweat and toil harder for their families than any middle-class American I’ve ever met. They work nights disposing of hazardous chemicals, twelve-hour shifts at long-term care facilities, six days in a row in hospital cafeterias. One, who was “illegal” until Reagan’s widespread amnesty in 1986, slept in a tent for months, working in tomato fields in New Jersey. The mosquitos were brutal. They believe in God. They are anti-abortion. They are socially conservative. They stand here in this church with their babies clad in white, and they offer prayers for their children to be humble, patient, and kind. The priest asks the infant for her thoughts on the baptism. She leans forward, then tries to eat the microphone.

On a mural on the wall of the church, a woman prepares a massive pot of stew underneath a mesquite tree. Next to her is a stone on which is written this inscription:

“Let’s declare, together, from the heart:

No family without a home.

No peasant without land.

No worker without rights.

No village without sovereignty.

No person without dignity.

No child without a childhood.

No youth without possibilities.

No old person without a venerable old age.

– Pope Francis.”

Afterwards, at the party – because of course, there’s a party, with a pot of food big enough to feed a village, and esquites and chelas and refrescos and cupcakes and music and piñatas – Don Manuel, aged 94, takes a photo of his four granddaughters. Three live in the United States. The youngest has been changed out of her white lace into cotton pants and a matching shirt bordered in ruffles. The flash shines bright on her, in the center, little fist in her mouth, newly saved.

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Archbishop Alberto Rojas declared the ICE raids in California a violation of due process and of “the dignity of the children of God.” After ICE entered a church and dragged people out of the congregation, Bishop Rojas made a statement: “We join you in carrying this very difficult cross.” The Jesuit Friar Brendon Busse described arriving on the scene after ICE had rammed a car in Los Angeles, violently removing the driver and leaving his wife and screaming children in the backseat. “There’s these masked men just going around kidnapping people,” he said. Michael Pham, a Vietnamese refugee and head of the San Diego diocese, accompanied immigrants to their asylum hearings and encouraged other faith leaders to do the same. On the day they were present, no one was arrested, and ICE agents quietly left. “I think our presence there made people examine their conscience,” the spokesperson for the diocese said. A Nashville church saw its congregation diminish by half because of the raids; the Tennessee Catholic diocese put out an official statement declaring that no Catholic had to attend mass if it threatened their safety. The executive director of the Tennessee Catholic Conference told the National Catholic Reporter, “There is an unusually heavy police presence around our parishes.” The Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix put out an official statement. “Today, as the Church of Phoenix,” it reads, “we raise our collective voice and hearts in prayerful solidarity with our immigrant brothers and sisters…These men, women and children–many of whom have fled economic hardship, violence, and political instability–come to our land seeking refuge and hope. They are not statistics; they are our neighbors. They are members of our parishes, our schools, and our communities. They are members of the Body of Christ.”

The wafer dissolving in the mouth. A steak, cut and cleaned and packaged by the swift brown hands of a hungry and tireless teenager. A sweet strawberry smeared with the blood of someone hunted like an animal. Sweat in the asphalt of a newly paved highway, driven by people who talk primly about rules. Fear pheromones in your fajitas. The bedsheets at the hotel loose at one corner, because someone ran, for her kids, for her life, before she could finish. Her perfume still in the room, on your skin, now, as you lay down to rest. This is our American communion.

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Lately I have been watching the Netflix series “America’s Sweethearts,” about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, with my eleven-year-old daughter. The show is a can’t-look-away hybrid of reality TV and documentary film. I consented to it out of simmering guilt because I will not, under any circumstances, let my kid do “cheer.” I am too much of an obnoxious urban liberal who listens to alarming NYT Magazine podcasts about the head injury rates and corporate monopoly, and who breaks into hives at the thought of ever fastening a massive bow to a ponytail.

But my child, who is perceptive and lives in the present-day United States of America, has absorbed the ubiquitous culture of cheer and become obsessed with it. I thought this would be a nice compromise. A little cultural experience for us both.

Instead, I discovered a veritable geyser of red-hot questions about female agency, power, complicity, and responsibility. What, the show asks – in its sumptuous close-ups of these gorgeous, heavily makeup-ed women; these women whose entire lives are devoted to performing (for almost zero dollars) for men; these women who are so good at what they do and whose work is incredibly skilled and physical and challenging in its own right, and also based almost entirely on their appearance – makes a woman powerful? Is it her looks? Is it the money she makes? Is it her talent? Is it her ambition? Is it her intellect? Is it her “success,” and if so, as recognized by whom, and measured by what?

Is it feminist to abhor the cheerleaders for their docile “Yes ma’ams” and their meticulous attention to their waistlines and their adherence to virtually every toxic female norm ever perpetuated? Or is it feminist to respect their choice to do what they love, to shed sweat and blood and tears for it, even if it is a highly traditional choice in line with expectations, a choice that seems to set a bar for “femininity” that many women cannot and do not ever want to reach? Can it be both?

What I do know is that within the course of several episodes I was banned from watching the show by my preteen daughter. Our cuddly cultural experience had devolved into a long series of tirades in which I paused the iPad and said, “Okay, Elena, you have to understand that this is diet culture, and it’s so oppressive, and it leads to…” or “Okay, Elena, this is INSANE because football players make millions of dollars but they…” until Elena – this bold and fearless feminist I have raised! – shouted, “YOU ARE BANNED FROM EVER WATCHING DALLAS COWBOYS CHEERLEADERS WITH ME AGAIN!”

There are several things that you, dear reader, need to understand here. One is that Elena, as mentioned above, is a preteen girl, so boys, sex, attraction, beauty, etc, have all recently come online for her in a major, hormone-addled way. Another is that she is an athlete: a swimmer who has swum hard four nights a week for the past five years, and who delights in physical challenges and has always been interested in the body. And the last is that she is fascinated by beauty.

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This is one of those fascinations that I can see going way back. When she was three, she had a preschool teacher who looked a lot like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader (Preschool Edition). This teacher wore pencil skirts and neatly pressed button-downs, not butt shorts and cowboy boots, but her beauty was that kind of classic, girl-next-door, French manicure-and-perfect-white-smile type.

Elena was obsessed with her. When the class did some sort of Dr. Suess-inspired project in which they had to choose something they wanted 100 of, Elena chose “100 long nails like Mrs. S.” (Keep in mind that I have gotten a manicure exactly once in my life, for my sister’s wedding, so Elena’s fascination was NOT coming from the home front.) Some time that year a person who did not have children made the tragic beginner’s mistake of asking Elena if she thought I was beautiful (perhaps assuming children have the built-in politeness of adults; spoiler alert, they do not) and Elena shrugged and said, “Not like Mrs. S.” Of course she was right. No way in hell I was beautiful like Mrs. S. Someone one asked me to describe my aesthetic and I said, “Camping?” Mrs. S curled her hair and did a full face of makeup every morning.

It is important to note here that Elena is beautiful. Noting this makes me uncomfortable. It feels inappropriate. It feels gross. It feels like being the waiter in Mexico – there is one, every time – who asks in a voice like one you might use with a teensy dog, “Y que quiere la princesita preciosa?” And what does the precious little princess want? Ick, heeby-jeebies. But why does that feel so gross? Is it because I have such a knee-jerk reaction to beauty, a kind of violent ethical resistance to it as an aspirational good, something to admire and strive for? Because I hold strong to the righteous notion that focusing on it signifies vapidity?

But beauty is also part of who my child is. She is a choose-your-ethnicity child. In Sweden, the Filipina and Vietnamese ladies at the naked bathhouse told her she was so beautiful, she had to be Asian. She could be, with her skin that darkens almost to coffee when she tans and lightens to a pale gingerbread in winter. She could be from anywhere in North or South America. She is a true mix of my European mutt blood and Jorge’s indigenous, Zapotec ancestors.

She knows she is beautiful. This also feels very weird to write. A secret we’re not supposed to admit. Something we’re not supposed to see or acknowledge if we’re educated the right way. But she does know it, because how could a kid with any remote sensitivity to body language and human interaction and social norms and the cultural ether not know it? And especially a kid who is so social, like mine, and especially one who regularly goes to Mexico, where it is still 100% socially acceptable to say things like, “You’re gorgeous! You’re fat! What happened to your hair?”

So she knows. But she isn’t sure yet what to do with that knowledge. It’s something she’s holding. Figuring out. And you see, I never had to figure this out. I was a cute kid, nearly white-blonde with bright blue eyes, always sporty and tan, but prone to wearing the same sweatshirt with a picture of a coonhound and the caption COONHOUND. In college, I had a friend who was truly beautiful, who later went on to become an actress in Paris (hi, beautiful friend!). One time in Madison when we were out for a walk, a guy approached and told us he was a talent scout. He said to her, “You are absolutely gorgeous.” And then, realizing I was there and likely someone whose opinion would carry weight in whether or not she would give her number to this random dude on the street, he improvised: “And you have a really cute freckled thing going on.”

I have absorbed many of these kinds of remarks. At my grandpa’s funeral, a cousin (remember friends, kids will say the quiet part out loud!) introduced me and my sister by saying, “Mary’s the pretty one, and Sarah’s the smart one.” This was devastating for my sister and me both, a testimony to the power of kids to really crush it observationally. Of course, I internalized this narrative. I had no illusions (okay, maybe I had some illusions?) of being stunningly beautiful, but I decided that it was superior to be smart and that beauty was superfluous and dumb, and in this I found commiseration in feminism.

Why would I want to aim for being attractive to men when instead I could absolutely slay at a graduate seminar in philosophy of science? (To me, this was an obvious question). My friend Rachel and I used to mock the “one-string” sorority girls who wore halter tops suspended by a single string in zero-degree Wisconsin winters, and prided ourselves on being able to beat boys at racquetball and sustain a stimulating intellectual conversation after 47 Bud Lights.

Later, in Oaxaca, after I’d met Jorge, I raged about the Mexican male artists who treated women as if they were simply beautiful objects to be photographed: “las musas,” I called them, existing only to pose in exquisite costumes on the arms of their decorated males, discarded when they aged out.

It is clear that the woman who relies on her beauty for her power is playing a game she will lose. She knows this, she has to know this, but perhaps the rush of power smothers that denial. I have known women who suddenly find themselves replaced by younger models just as they replaced the aging woman before them, each one confident that their story would be different – that somehow, their hair wouldn’t thin, their skin wouldn’t wrinkle, their man would lose his appetite for the wide-eyed ingenue. Some of these women have spiraled into despair. What is left to them? What is theirs? Their power is entirely conditional. At a certain point, clinging to it becomes tragic.

One Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders episode focuses on an alumni reunion. The women, most of them at least fifty or older, still have full faces of makeup and Barbie hair and knee-high white boots, along with the subtle and not-so-subtle markers of plastic surgery. The identity that fits the young women so seamlessly reveals itself a decade later as a costume. One shot zooms in on the back of a woman’s knees, where panty hose have bunched up at the top of the ubiquitous cowboy boots. It’s a funny shot, a cruel shot, a brief two-second glimpse of the stakes: the misogyny that craves beauty waiting with contempt when it collapses.

But other sources of power change, too. Everything, as the maddening Buddhist maxim goes, changes. Careers change, talents change, personalities change. Beauty is only the most obvious, outward example of this change – it would be a mistake to assume that what’s “deeper,” beneath the surface, is that much more solid and permanent. How many of us feel and think mostly the same ways we did twenty years ago? Perhaps because beauty is a quality mostly associated with women, it comes in for more ridicule; a once-beautiful woman whose power may have been resented, feared, or judged finally fades from glory and her haters rub their hands in delight. But really all of us are only clinging to temporary forms of power, illusions not so different from the high slash of a cheekbone, the perfect circle of a hip.

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“It’s what’s inside that counts!” I tell my daughter, but just like she reads the subtlest signals of race and class, she knows this isn’t entirely true. It’s a quaint adult aspiration, just like the golden rule. We all notice beauty, and we’re all influenced by it to some degree, no matter our beliefs about its nature and importance. I warn my daughter not to associate it with virtue; if anything, I preach, the pretty boys are the most dangerous. Do not be fooled by appearances. Do not let yourself be charmed out of your dignity and your depth.

And by the same token, I tell her, do not ever believe you’re superior to anyone else because you look good. Do not believe that being thin or having voluptuous hair gives you the right to lord yourself above anyone, bestows on you any immediate worth. You are no better than the girl in the Coonhound sweatshirt and the hideous, inch-long, smiling Dalmatian earrings (aka, 6^th grade me).

We’ve had these conversations so frequently that Elena once remarked, “Mom, do you WANT me to be ugly?! Jeez!” And the remark made me wonder. Of course, I don’t. Right? But like all children who have some quality or talent their parents never possessed and don’t understand, I am mystified and a little scared by beauty. I don’t want her to form her identity around this fragile, and frankly, superficial thing. I disdain it. And yet inevitably, she will. Because she can’t avoid it any more than she can avoid the fact that she is Latina or a woman.

And I wonder, too, if I am so wary of beauty in part because I haven’t figured out how to integrate it into a more complete model of feminism. Because I still believe that it’s better, more laudable, morally upstanding to not care about that: to be funny, brilliant, critical, wise, anything but beautiful.

Beauty, as I imagine it, is unearned. It is weak. It is fake. It is temporary. It is surface. All of these things are to a certain extent true. But what is also true is that as a woman, I resent having to be beautiful. I resent the assumption that this is my duty, that this is ultimately how I will be measured. I resent having to play what I see as a dumb, trivial role: the pursed lips, the hair flip, the caked mask over my actual face. I resent my worth being calculated by the length of my eyelashes or the size of my belly. I don’t want to play the game. I hate that the game exists. But I also wonder if it’s possible to value beauty through a feminist lens: to see it not as a threat or a maxim for all women, but as simply one more possibility. An expression of creativity, even fierceness.

Of course, beauty is inextricably intertwined with patriarchy: women starving themselves to reach a certain size, injecting poison into their faces, lightening their skin and hair with bleach and toxins. Women trying to look exactly the same – like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, who always has a teensy waist, a pound of makeup, and shiny, bouncing $500 hair. I want Elena to know it doesn’t have to be that way.

But I suppose I also want her to know that if she ever does desire to be a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, there is a different (feminist?) way to go about it. That if she ever wants to be beautiful for a living, she must demand her worth. The irony is that even the most mainstream, classic American culture (football!), which fetishizes female beauty, doesn’t actually value it at all by that most American of metrics: dollars.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders earn about $15 an hour. Many have three or four jobs to sustain themselves. Of course, the Dallas Cowboys football players are multimillionaires! But “the girls” do it for fun! Because it’s a privilege! Because they like it! As if they simply stood on the field and smiled for a few hours.

These women spend thirty to forty hours a week on physical training alone. They put their bodies through grueling workouts to effortlessly perform their core routine, “Thunderstruck,” which as Vogue describes it, “involves both a 50-yard sprint in under eight seconds (in cowboy boots!) and chorus-line jump splits.” Most men, I dare say, would not be able to muster the stamina required to be America’s Sweetheart. The cheerleaders have to memorize dozens of dance routines and perform them with millisecond precision in a stadium of tens of thousands of screaming people.

When they come on stage, they suck up all the electricity in that stadium for six minutes. All eyes on them. Even watching on our crappy little iPad, we cannot look away. They are so good at what they do. They are little bolts of lightning that snap our eyes to their high kicks, their impossibly wide smiles, their flung-back manes slicked with the slightest drips of sweat.

This is work. But of course, because they’re women, it is not treated as such. It is an honor to perform. “I just love to dance,” shrugs one sweet cheerleader who one wants to reach through the screen and throttle. Smile and be grateful, sweetie, because there are 100 more girls where you came from. “Yes ma’am!” It is the yes ma’am that gives the show that mesmerizing train-wreck quality for the millennial feminist – are women still freaking doing this in 2025?

But it’s also what makes this season so rewarding. Finally, two women on the team advocated for a raise. I negotiated hard with Elena to be able to watch with her again: she got Cheez-its and lemonade and I promised to suppress all of my cultural, social, and political education. But I did shout for joy when one cheerleader suggested to the others over breakfast, “Maybe we should refuse to sign our contracts.” Now that is power, baby! “Be that person!” I told Elena. “Be the one who is not afraid to speak up! Be the one who knows what she’s worth and demands it! Be the one who will fight for everyone!”

“Mom,” Elena said. But if beauty is a choice, so is docility and submission. They don’t have to go hand in hand. If you can kick high enough that your knee touches your face, you can get paid a million dollars just like any football player, and you can damn well demand it, yes ma’am.

I have tried to hide beauty from my daughter. I do not let her go to Sephora and will not, ever, on my watch. I do not talk about people’s looks or bodies and I tell her that if anyone she meets does this – some girls at camp last summer, for example, were calling other girls fat – she needs to speak up or keep her distance. But I have also learned that one of the really fun paradoxes of parenting is that the more you try and cordon something off, mark it as a big bold NO, the more attractive that thing becomes. So I try and keep little pathways open for beauty, for bringing it out into the open and discussing it.

“Look at their hair,” my daughter coos, “and how many makeup brushes they have…” as the camera does a lusty pan over a cheerleader’s dressing table. It kills my soul a little, friends. But who am I to say, you’ll be so much happier working towards a PhD in English? You’ll be a better person without an inch of foundation?

I don’t want her to dedicate her life to pleasing a man (or a stadium full of them). I don’t want her to appease a misogynist society that doesn’t want to compensate her for her work, that sees her only as a dispensable object. I don’t want her to be superficial, empty, basic. I want her to be a complex deep person who reads books and engages in passionate debates about the origins of the universe and is not afraid of picking up worms and getting her shoes filthy! But why do I see this as diametrically opposed to the work of being beautiful?

Is it also possible that she, like some of these cheerleaders claim, simply loves the physical activity – and my daughter, a born athlete, absolutely does – and that she loves being beautiful? That she loves the softness of her own black hair with its natural sun-bleached tips as it sways across her back, that she loves her big smile brightened with coral gloss, that she loves feeling the sashay of her body and its electricity? What will she make of that? How will she navigate it? She’ll have to answer for herself.

“You’re nobody’s sweetheart,” I tell her, and she winks.

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Hello friends!

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I’m about three-quarters of the way through this book, by the writer , and it’s as lovely as promised. Her newsletter is also always full of excellent recommendations.

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Have a lovely weekend, everyone, and please say hello below with any thoughts, reflections, and/or recommendations!

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I just spent a month in Spain with 10 mothers and 19 children.

I say that not really believing it. Not really believing I did it.

I committed to this experience in January because I was craving connection with other women – mothers, in particular – and I longed to experience a unique, women-only space. I also wanted to travel with Elena, just me and her. I didn’t know exactly why I wanted these things and I wasn’t entirely sure what a “co-living” “worldschooling” project entailed. I just leapt.

The trip started with a nationwide blackout in Spain. My first message with my roommate, a Canadian woman with a twelve-year-old daughter, was about her being stuck in Portugal and sleeping on the airport floor; a fate slightly crappier than Elena’s and mine of being trapped in Atlanta for 26 hours and sleeping at a Ramada Inn where a plate of egg beaters cost $15.

It took Elena and I a full day and a half longer than planned to arrive in the small town in southern Spain, at which point I promptly realized that I’d signed up for an entire freaking month of living with people I had never met, and I was sending Elena off for half the day to sit on a beach and do who knows what, and what if it was horrible, and what was I thinking??

My nervous system had done a really efficient job of insulating me from the magnitude of this commitment, but successive flight delays and surviving on a single box of Cheez-Its had degraded its defenses. There we were in this tiny town of walled, shaded streets and soaring pines, empty still in the off season, the long lonely beach fortified by red Andalusian cliffs – jet lagged, vulnerable, and possibly insane. I had a panic attack on night one.

To compound matters, over the intervening semester between choosing to do this and actually arriving, our national political nightmare unfolded at breakneck pace and every week I received an email from the university reading something like, “Don’t panic, but we’re no longer hiring anyone or funding any more graduate programs and we will cut the writing curriculum in half! Have a great day and Hail to Pitt!” My job was on the line. My fellowship was on the line. Everything I held dear – the arts, the university, intellectual life – was being decimated in the name of “efficiency.” Would I even have anything in place when I returned?

On that second day, I went over to the house next door and gulped and confided to one of the women, with whom I’d connected instantly the night before, “Maybe I have made a very big mistake?”

“Hold on,” she said. She settled her toddler. She got us glasses of water. She led me to the couch outside. She listened to me as I gushed out all my worries, financial to existential. And she told me, “You’re building a muscle.” Simple as that. By this she meant, the muscle of travel. The muscle of uncertainty. The muscle that flexes when one leaps. It was the perfect thing to say. It was why I had wanted women so badly.

Over the following month, I did many things. I surfed in the freezing Atlantic. I watched Elena surf in the freezing Atlantic. I ate a lot of $1 convenience store prosciutto and $3 convenience store Spanish omelettes. I helped a toddler purchase a can of green olives from a vending machine. I helped my daughter purchase a Brazilian capybara dressed like a baby from a vending machine. I debated the history of Spanish colonialism in Latin America. I danced on a clifftop. I discovered very red, wrinkled, septuagenarian European men lying buck naked as I was seeking shade in a rocky cove. I rubbed Palo Santo all over myself under the light of the full moon. I ate weird, puffy Spanish snacks that were part Cheeto, part Cheerio, and disconcertingly dissolved on the tongue. I ran on the frigid morning beach. I worked while toddlers had sword fights in my front yard.

But of all the things I did, perhaps the most radical, memorable, and transformative was this:

I hung out.

A lot. With women. With kids.

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I wandered barefoot over to someone’s patio at 11 am to talk about the education system, or simply how impossible it was to find a decent Spanish snack that wasn’t bizarrely sweet and spongey and also corn-flavored. Sometimes the hanging out evolved into epic, deep conversation, and sometimes it was light, easy, what we used to do when we were teenagers before everything had to have such a clear justification and purpose. What we used to do when we put our feet on the wall and twirled the phone cord around our fingers and talked and talked. (Hi, fellow millennials!)

All of the hanging out felt like being held.

“I keep trying to explain to my husband why my kids are so happy here,” one of the women told me. She’s an American who’d grown up on a farm in Iowa and hadn’t traveled until her twenties. She was bringing her four kids abroad for the first time on this trip.

“I try to explain to him that it’s the community,” she said. “That they feel like they’re a part of something.”

“Like they’re held,” I said.

There were the beautiful things, the pines and the beach and all that, but really what it came down to was that sense of holding. I saw so many older kids holding toddlers: really cradling them close to their bodies, discovering and cherishing that warmth of a small, dependent creature.

I came across women crying together over Fuze Tea at 5 pm on their terraces, laughing as I peeked my head in. Kids wandered outside after a nap or a snack or a shower and joined the wild, half-naked band of fort builders. I boiled my ravioli in someone else’s kitchen. Elena cuddled on the couch with five other kids to watch Minions. Women showed up on my patio in their socks, holding a cup of coffee, and we chatted about horses.

When I have a problem and I worry and think too much I do one of two things: spiral on my own, or turn to my husband. Both get old quickly, for both of us. But in this month I did something different: I got out of my own head by hanging out.

One of the most obvious immediate responses to anxiety is simply distraction. Many of us seek this in our phones or alcohol. But the best distraction is connection. With another person in front of us, we have to be in the world, right now. Not in our heads, our, fears, our stories. In presence.

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On the last day, I remarked to the group, “I don’t think I realize how much time I spend alone in the U.S.” Part of this is by virtue of being a writer. I have no colleagues, no office, no collaborators. But part of it is by the design of our modern lives: in most western countries, we are all stuck in our productivity siloes, working and then tending to our nuclear families and perhaps carving out one little segment of time during the week for socialization.

In Spain, the community was everything. That came first. I worked – I had to work. But the community was there, waiting, and I dipped in as much as I possibly could. I got out of myself. I had conversations I never would have had online, or over drinks with a few close friends. I mothered in community for the first time.

One mother, on the last night, told me how much she admired how the older kids took the toddlers for ice cream. Elena and the two twelve-year-old girls had on multiple occasions walked the five or so blocks to the main road pushing several strollers; purchased ice creams for 2-4 rowdy kiddos; supervised the eating of said ice creams while keeping drama and hijinks somewhat in check (or at least, so we were told…) and walked home.

“It wasn’t my letting go to do,” the other mother told me – her children were still young – “but I witnessed it.” What power in witnessing.

I witnessed other mothers care for their children, carrying them gently and with tenderness as they flailed and screamed. I witnessed them praise, correct, redirect, listen. I witnessed them insist and I witnessed them give in. I witnessed their kids’ little chins nestled on their shoulders: that early, intense love it’s easy to forget when kids grow up.

I also witnessed women say no when they didn’t want to participate in an activity, when I would have assented so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. I witnessed women asking difficult questions, or disappearing for a bit for themselves. I witnessed much of what I grapple with alone in real time: the range of possibilities available to women, which can be so invisible when one is just getting through the everyday, making the dinners and running the baths.

I felt our immense power and also, our loveliness. A woman preparing a women’s circle with flowers and herbs and a pitcher of tea and white cards with a dash of sparkly gold glitter. A woman showing up with perfectly spiced, delicious tofu, proffering a spoon. A woman making mushroom tea when we ran out of coffee. And women traveling alone, without partners, with two or three young kids, inventing their lives. Not fearless – just devoted enough to their curiosity and growth to leap.

One woman, a hyper-competent professional who’d been struck with immense fear for the first time in her life after the birth of her child, confided in me as we were leaving, now I know I can do this.

Becoming a mother sometimes seems to me to inspire the most fear in women who haven’t had any of it up until then. In my twenties, I was hitchhiking alone across South Africa, summiting 20,000-foot peaks with ice axes at 4 am, driving to Ecuador with people I’d met the previous night at the bar. Zero fear. And then my daughter was born and I was scared of lotion. Microplastics. Air. I felt massively incompetent, unmoored. One wrong step and I would ruin everything.

It took me years to learn that I really needed women. Their stories, their intimacy, their strength. During one car ride to a dance workshop in Spain, we talked about birth, and one woman described feeling like a “piece of meat,” her body slapped down on a table, pumped full of medicine, manipulated. There was no true consent, no reciprocity, no sanctity in the experience. It was like much of our modern lives: bereft of spirituality and obsessed with functionality, productivity, efficiency.

At that workshop, we all gave each other massages. The facilitator, a contemporary dancer, asked me what the word for “masa” was in English, and I said, “dough.” She heard it as “dell” and kept telling us to “work with the skin like dell.” I loved this little shift. The definition of dell is “a small valley, usually among trees.” It had so much more intimacy than dough. I worked my thumbs into another woman’s scapula. I rubbed her cheekbones. I dug my knuckles into the tough muscles of her thigh. She wasn’t a piece of meat. She was me. We were each other.

At the end of each massage, we were to toss our partner’s arm in the air until it was so loose she’d let it drop freely, trusting we would catch it. We did. Again and again until we laughed at the letting go, at how tightly we’d held on.

The dell, the valley of women.

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Now I know I can do this. I can take my kid on the ferry. I can take my kid on the train. To the beach. To meet a brand new pack of international kids. I can take her to witness women “haciendo brujería,” as we joked – practicing witchcraft. If we define witchcraft as refusing to accept that our lives must fit within certain parameters. If we define witchcraft as sharing olives, stories, lives, kids.

On our last day, Elena and I took the train from southern Spain to Seville, changed into shorts while sweating profusely in the luggage storage center, crammed our massive suitcase into the tiny locker, raced into town for ramen, roamed the streets for exactly 2 hours before catching the packed 32 bus to the train station, fetched our luggage and hauled it in the 100-degree heat up to the airport bus stop, caught the airport bus, and checked in for our flight to Copenhagen. After we’d boarded, I overheard the flight attendant say, “I’ve never felt as scared in my life as I did on that landing.” Despite wanting to actually vomit with terror upon hearing the one thing you never ever want to hear a flight attendant say, I kept it together. It was just me, after all – no one else to rely on or keep Elena safe. But also, I had the women there. I had that whole month of holding behind me. The flight ended up being fine. The flight attendant felt so bad about me overhearing that conversation (I later asked her with what must have been naked, tearful horror about turbulence) she gave me a free beer.

The first weekend we were in Spain, my roommate drove her daughter, me, Elena, and another woman and her toddler to a nearby town. Elena and her daughter (who is 12) spent almost the entire ride trying to master the verses to Coldplay’s “Fix You.” I had no idea that was the song at the time; I just knew I was enduring an hour of two preteen girls and a three-year-old earnestly crooning, “When you try so hard but you don’t succeed…when you get what you want but not what you need…” Thank God for the Spanish acceptance of one (or several) glasses of wine at midday.

This song became an ongoing refrain and joke the entire rest of the trip. The girls sang it so often that my roommate and I took to shouting a knee-jerk, “No! No!” as if we were being attacked by ants. I’d hear the refrain from far away in another corner of the garden and shudder. The three-year-old would greet his older friends with a soulful rendition. “Stop sending me this message, universe!” I joked, only half-joking.

Then, during the final “talent show” the kids put together, the two twelve-year-old girls sang the full song. I’d only ever heard the chorus and really, only those two lines of it, sung endlessly with a child’s infinite tolerance for mind-crushing repetition. But then I heard:

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you…

if you never try, you'll never know
Just what you're worth

I realize this newsletter is right now earnestly quoting Coldplay and I apologize for that and also I have to say to you, dear reader, that once you’ve heard a song 7 million 947 times, in cars, in kitchens, outside, inside, at 8 am and midnight, it becomes an anthem. I had assumed the whole song was about loss and failure. When you try so hard…But no. It was about repair. And in the context of our little co-living, to me, the repair that comes from other women.

When I left, I sought out my friend, the one who’d comforted me the first week. I looked at her packing her suitcase and burst into tears. “You saved me,” I said, and I meant it. Of course, I will fail and fuck up and struggle and have fear and all the things over and over again, but I will always remember that moment of presence with her, when she told me, “You’re building a muscle.” When she showed me what a woman can do for another woman.

During a full moon gathering – brujería! – we all wrote ideas or stories or beliefs we wanted to burn on little slips of paper, put them in a bowl, and set them on fire. The small flames were extremely satisfying and we all cheered and ahhhhed. Then we needed some epic, conclusive way to scatter the ashes. So two women volunteered to walk them down to the beach, releasing them as if we’d had a bonfire.

By that point, it was nearly midnight. The rest of us wrapped up and returned to our houses and prepared for bed, and then the women sent a text of themselves – women from different countries, races, and backgrounds, who had met just weeks before – holding hands on the beach. Just two women, the moon, and the ocean. They had taken our fears, our pain, our old tired stories about ourselves and our weaknesses – and thrown them to the wind.

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This past weekend, I went with six moms and ten children to Morocco.

We were: a Siberian (yes, she grew up in Siberia!) mother of three who now lives in California with her Chinese husband, whom she met in an ESL class (the American story); a Japanese-Cuban mother from LA; a Canadian mom – recently retired from the navy – and her daughter; a British mom and her two kids; and a fellow Midwesterner, an Iowa farm girl turned traveler. The kids were a wild bunch ranging from 2 to 14.

The vibe landing in Tangier was much like that crossing into Tijuana from San Diego – though the surrounding geography is essentially the same, you are instantly and completely in another world. Tidy, sleepy streets and overpriced cafes whirl into a labyrinth of cars, people, street vendors, fierce sun, packed shops full of bright oddities, taxi drivers hustling for a buck, and the lurkers, migrants, and lost souls found everywhere on the world’s charged borders.

Our first task was to walk from the ferry terminal to the hotel – my idea, obviously, because it would save us approximately $7. This involved immediately crossing a massive roundabout and three major boulevards. I shouted “GO!” hanging onto a kid with each arm, and we all charged ahead until I shouted “STOP!”, and we all hovered on the precipice of the careening turquoise taxis until I shouted “GO!”, until finally we washed up heaving beneath the ancient brick walls of a fortress.

Later, the British mom would tell me that her daughter – who’d wanted to walk up front and whose hand I’d clutched throughout the crossing – started calling me her “adventure friend.” "As in, “Where’s my adventure friend, mummy?” I could not love this any harder.

Then we wound our way up, up, up through the medina, past the tea shops where men hunched in their chairs and sipped their thé de menthe; past the cats, the endless cats, calico and white, spindly and tabby, sleeping and sauntering and dashing into shadowy doorways; past the fake Birkenstock and the fake Rolex and the fake Hermes shops; the carpet shops; the postcard and knickknack shops; the countless perfumeries with colored heaps of musk in tubs; past the roundabouts with fountains; past the 1930s French cinemas, to the hotel.

And so it began, a weekend of intense travel. On Friday night, dinner elbow to elbow at a restaurant in the street, meat skewers and mango juices, elder bohemian Frenchies smoking as they ate their olives and judged the living daylights out of us.

On Saturday a trip two-and-a-half hours through the Rif mountains to the blue city of Chefchaouen, a tourist trap but also a real place where people live in tiny apartments tucked into the mountainsides, where women in traditional wool head scarves wash clothes in basins before fields of poppies.

Elena and I wandered the labyrinthine medina searching for a cafe recommended by a friend, and at one point we came across an impossibly well-dressed man who looked as if he’d emerged from a turn-of-the-century French film: pointed shoes, little pantaloon tweed pants, mustard-colored sweater over collared shirt, tweed vest, newsboy cap, perfectly crisp mustache. I asked him for directions in French, and he responded with a gentleman’s manners, making elegant gestures with manicured hands, bowing slightly before and after he spoke.

“He was like a guy out of a fairytale,” Elena exclaimed, and we made up a story about how he’d emerged from an apartment full of velvety fabrics and books and teacups and old watches and now he would go do fanciful things in the city, like dance or write fortunes.

We finally found the cafe and ate lunch – more smoking Frenchies! – and then hiked up a mountainside where hordes of schoolchildren jostled and raced and local tourists photographed themselves in traditional Moroccan dress and boys sold orange juice in front of beautiful, desolate mountains: “Jus d’orange?”

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At the top was a mosque and a view. Elena criticized the city for not being entirely blue and we had a lively debate about what it meant to cover one’s hair; Elena had much stronger opinions about it than I’d expected, and I had to let the battle go for now, hoping some aspect of cultural difference sunk in.

Then we got lost in the souk on the way back and were almost late to the bus and straggled in just in time so hot and dehydrated and tired, and we drove 2 hours back to Tangier that turned into 3 hours because of traffic, and our bus navigated literally down the middle of the highway lanes in a mildly stressful violation of all fundamental rules of the road, and we straggled out at twilight hungry and disoriented before trekking up and down hills to an Italian restaurant where I drank an illicit Aperol Spritz, a rare alcoholic treat in Morocco.

The next morning, I had a rigid plan to walk around the medina in Tangier, but it was foiled by desperate kid begging to play in the pool, which turned into hours. When Elena and I finally left it was midday, and we immediately got lost in the medina, turning corner after hidden corner, coming across kids playing soccer, and pocket-sized shops full of dangly gold lamps, and racing motorbikes, and cats and kittens, and hanging laundry, and an insane market of herbs and spices and fish and rabbits with their fur still on hanging from hooks, and men squatting on stools drinking tea, and pink geraniums in the slanted sun.

When we finally emerged it was already time to race back to the hotel for our luggage, which we dragged down through the twisting streets to the ferry terminal, where we waited for customs and waited to board and waited to depart and waited again for customs, then climbed on our bus through the windmills and haciendas and olives, then emerged under a big, bright moon.

I had no food in the house where we’re staying, so I went next door to another mother’s, and we drank wine and cooked the 3 euro Spanish omelettes from the convenience store and talked about the weekend.

My neighbor told me, “I have so much to learn from the other mothers here.” She didn’t mean languages, or business skills, or how to get from one country to another. She meant being. She meant the subtle things, like not caring if an arrogant Frenchie huffs at your kid while they dangle like a sloth from the ferry railing, or the way you handle yourself in traffic or chaos or fatigue, or how you say no simply and elegantly so you can sit in the corner by yourself for fifteen minutes.

I haven’t traveled that intensely for a long time. I forgot – purposefully, intentionally – the feeling of that chaos, of grasping for control and not getting it, and also that sensation of wild discovery, unmoored and revelatory: rounding a corner and the boy with the angelic golden face perched on the bicycle cart asking, “Just d’orange?”

Such travel exists outside of time, as do the relationships between mothers. They aren’t about sitting down to have a coffee or a glass of wine, though there’s that, too. They’re about being in the thick of it, together. They’re about being someone’s adventure friend. Watching someone else’s kid in the pool. Seeing how a mother crouches down and speaks softly, or cradles the back of a crying child’s head in her palm, or does not panic when one might panic. Seeing how women exist in the world – how smart we are, how fearless, how loving, how bold and brave and just damn capable. How much we have to learn from each other, just by being together. How graceful and silly, how strong and solid, even as all of us are carrying our own deep wounds. How simply being in each other’s presence can offer the deepest kind of healing.

I think of what the British mother said when the two older girls, Elena and her twelve-year-old friend, were watching the younger kids in the pool: “Those girls are just cream, aren’t they?”

But it’s us – we’re the cream. The ones who made this happen, got our kids on the ferry, figured out we missed the passport stamp and had to return, waited eight million hours for each other’s kids to use the bathroom, wound together through the tiny streets, sang together on the bus.

And not just the ones who went on this whirlwind trip to Morocco – the ones every day figuring it out, over and over, the tears and the heartbreaks and the sandwiches and the friendships and the questions and the scrapes and the relentless needs. This trip, all mothers, only mothers, mothering and traveling full time, made it so clear to me: we are the cream. There is a reason the world so often seems to conspire to keep us isolated, apart, anxious: because when we come together our power is undeniable, so absolutely creative.

The best mother’s day gift: this holding of other women. This grace in being together, the beauty and messiness and perpetual revelation of witnessing. We have so much to learn from each other, and the best lessons come without control: not the strict order of a playdate or a dinner party, but shared, overlapping lives, adventures, conversations, showing up at the sliding door with half a bottle of wine and the 1 euro convenience store pasta sauce, “And have you seen the moon?”

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I gave one of my students this semester a mushroom sticker.

This student always sat in the front row and participated in every class. She made brilliant connections and she wasn’t scared to be straight-up searing smart. She wasn’t annoying and show-offy – she just really paid attention and thought and voiced her thoughts. She was never on her phone.

She told me where she got Thai iced tea, and she gave a presentation on fungus that eats radiation, and for her final project she made gorgeous, intricate paintings of microbes, to highlight the invisible life damaged by Chernobyl. She rocked.

I gave her the sticker because I found it at the library and it reminded me of her – she’s a biology major and has a beetle sticker I’d complimented on her water bottle.

“I think it’s an amanita?” I said with the hesitation of someone who knows exactly two species of mushrooms.

She said “Oh my God!” and immediately unpeeled and stuck it on her computer. Slav 1860 will live forever (or at least a few years??) on her laptop! I was honored.

In the past, I haven’t had this kind of closeness with my students. They are The Students and I am The Teacher and they have Assignments Due and I Grade Said Assignments. I am friendly with them, will get coffee with them if they ask, but the relationship is wary – we are clearly on distinct sides of a power dynamic. My job is to keep them in line, and their job is to perform.

But this semester, I stumbled onto a weird and unexpected paradox. I stopped caring what my students did, and discovered I cared about them. Really liked them as people. Of course, I liked them before, but from behind a podium. Trying constantly to get them to turn off their freaking phones. Trying constantly to assess whether they did the reading (nope!). I felt responsible for them.

This semester, I agreed to teach a history class in the Slavic Department about Chernobyl, dissecting surreal obscure Russian documentaries, analyzing punk rock and poetry about the world’s largest nuclear catastrophe, reading unbelievably depressing oral histories, and showing PowerPoint slides of Chernobyl snow globes ($38 on Amazon) alongside questions like, “How could this be healing?”

It was absurd. It was great. It was hard. I was so focused on not messing it up – that is, not seeming like someone who has never actually been to any Eastern European or Slavic country and speaks none of these languages and up until January 5th had zero experience in this area – that I stopped caring about what my students did.

I mean, clearly I cared if none of them spoke or seemed engaged or understood the material or did the assignments. But this wasn’t the case. They’d chosen to take this rather esoteric class and from the get-go most were on board.

They of course did all the typical maddening stuff students do: they turned in their discussion boards late, or asked “Oh wait professor, there was a reading?” or tried to multitask working on their math homework during class.

Before, I would’ve issued corrections for these things. I would’ve tried to keep everyone “on task.” I would’ve controlled and organized “for their own sake.”

But this semester I just hung on as best I could for the wild ride of super-dark Belarussian horror flicks paired with Foucault and let them do what they needed to do. I didn’t want them to dislike or judge me and also, I didn’t feel I had nearly as much power as I do in a composition class, which I’ve taught many times and where I feel like an “expert.”

And this changed power dynamic – truly learning with and alongside them, with humility – dramatically altered the classroom. Yes, it’s annoying when they are on their phones or they haven’t read. But chastising them, or forcing them into presence, doesn’t actually work. The begrudging compliance generated by these acts of control doesn’t, as I’d long believed, facilitate a better experience or deeper learning. It just makes me feel less paranoid that I’m doing a shitty job, being ignored, not being taken seriously.

It also helped that I was a student this semester. I took an intermediate Portuguese class, and I was that student on a snowy Saturday morning emailing, “I am so sorry, I completely forgot Project 4 was due yesterday!!” I realized that the more I felt hyper-monitored and controlled and judged in class, the less eager and joyful I felt.

My Portuguese professor was twenty-seven years old and had a tattoo of a dachshund in a hot dog bun and was Brazilian and essentially just chill as fuck. She told me when I was apologizing profusely for a late assignment, “It’s okay. I really believe everyone is doing the best they can.”

So simple. But I carried it with me all semester. Everyone is doing the best they can. You can nudge them towards better with good course design – closed laptops whenever possible! Printed readings, what an antiquated concept! Moving chairs around! Interesting questions!– but really, they’re going to bring what they’re willing and able to bring.

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Some of them are just plain old not going to care or try as hard as they can to “get away with” doing as little as possible or find the material dull or beneath them. You can’t muscle them into learning.

This doesn’t mean ignoring or shunning them – it just means letting them do their thing. I had two such students in the Chernobyl class. One stayed pretty checked out all semester, but the other seemed to wake up a month or two in, and suddenly started participating. I didn’t goad or force him. I just tried to create a space where, when he was ready, he could jump in.

So a few students will be like that - just overwhelmed, or uninterested, or too busy. Then many others will be up for it, but maybe a little bit hit and miss in the readings they do, or their participation. If you just keep showing up with faith in them, many will respond in kind. And a few will really blow your mind.

A few – five or six or seven even – will think hard in real time so you can feel their minds working, connections being made like little chisp-chisp-chisps of a spark catching, and their ideas will be so genuinely cool and funny and interesting they’ll make you think, and around and around you’ll go in the glory of the humanities.

“Learning together” sounds like such a hokey bullshitty concept, and I’ve been quite skeptical of it in the past. Really, you can’t use a semicolon and we’re “learning together”? But it’s all in the design.

You teach down, or you teach out. Often, you have to do a bit of both, but the trick is to know very clearly when you’re teaching down, and when you’re teaching out, and not trying to pretend you’re doing the latter when you’re actually doing the former. I have been very guilty of this. I pretend we’re all having a big open-ended “learning together” discussion about Foucault but actually no, Damon, I want you to understand that Foucault is talking about a massive disciplinary apparatus that keeps us all quivering in conformity even when we think we’re free, okay?

Now, I would teach Damon this directly – teaching down – and then we would move on to have a hopefully interesting and genuine conversation about how the university functions as a Panopticon and whether this is “good for us” or not – teaching out. Moving between these modes is freeing; it clearly airs out the roles and expectations.

One of the most useful techniques I learned in mindfulness is recognizing what’s here. Pretty basic stuff, again, but something most of us actively spend a lot of our time not doing. How many dynamics and classrooms and conversations and situations have we endured in which we try to pretend that whatever is happening is not happening or is actually something else? Try to bury our expectations, feelings, reactions, etc, and just somehow be neutral blobs?

In the classroom, recognizing what’s here feels to me like acknowledging when I am in charge, “teaching” something directly, telling them what I want them to know, and when we are doing the collective work of figuring out an idea together. When we’re all looking at the snow globe on the PowerPoint and asking, is this gross? Cute? Weird? Helpful? When we’re then googling snow globes of other catastrophes and discovering this is really a thing, and asking ourselves who would collect this, and realizing the Amazon snow globe is using the Ukranian spelling of Chernobyl. We are asking, why does one desire a souvenir of an event that produced four times the radioactive fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and annihilated a piece of the earth that won’t recover for hundreds of thousands of years? We ended that discussion asking if it was okay to dance at Ground Zero. Vive les sciences humaines!!

I showed up eager to do my work, which was to teach. And I let them figure out how they wanted to student. I didn’t take it personally. If they didn’t do a discussion board or a reading, that was up to them. I gave them the requisite points, or not, and moved on. No drama, no shame. If they asked for an extension, I gave it. Everyone is doing the best they can. When I gave them more space and trust, they often gave me good faith in return.

On the last day of class, I told my students, “This has been an intense time for me, with everything that’s going on in the world, and you all have been a real bright spot. Thank you for being so smart and so capable.” I almost cried; I really meant it.

Several students stayed after that last class just to chat; I told them to keep in touch and they said they would. It gave me faith, in what has been a period of great uncertainty for me and many others in the arts and academia, that people are still deeply committed to the exhilaration of ideas and intellectual life and culture and justice and truth and the Big Questions.

And it reaffirmed for me, when the overwhelming tendency in our society right now is towards punishment and pettiness and blame and hatred and judgment, towards the (ironic) violent policing of speech and intense dystopian control of the state, that care works, and in the long run, it wins every time.

When you trust and listen to people instead of trying to control and punish them, you create so much more joy. So much more goodwill. For them, and also for yourself, because controlling and punishing and hating and judging suck up pretty much all the meaning of being alive.

The other night after I’d spent a long time in despair about the very real ways this administration is impacting my life, I jumped on a loving-kindness meditation through the center where I did my MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) course a few years ago. We breathed and sent wishes for peace, health, safety and happiness to ourselves, and our loved ones, and then to living beings everywhere.

At the end of the meditation, we were invited to unmute and share thoughts. There were maybe thirty people on the call. Several people unmuted and said they’d been feeling despair, or rage, and they didn’t want to get stuck in that feeling. So they’d tried to find ways to move towards loving-kindness. Not to annihilate very real and grave horror at what’s happening, or mute their desire for action, but to fight back from a place of care. Of calm.

Thirty people showed up on a Wednesday night, each with their own hurt and doubt, just to send loving-kindness into the world. There’s that, my friends. Take that with you. It extends to you, too.

The semester is almost over. Spring has come on like it does: gradually, painstakingly, in teasing and brutal bits, and then in a burst of glory. The trails in the park are suddenly voluptuous with shade. My pansies bob their little pug faces in the morning sun. My Portuguese exam was today and I don’t think I studied enough, I didn’t recall if it was são or estão for stating time, but I was really just grateful to be there. To be in that space, to be able to hold a functional conversation now about travel and my favorite foods and the present-tense behaviors of approximately ten varieties of animals, and to participate in the delightful endeavor of entering a new symbolic universe.

For that I have my teacher to thank. I gave her eggs from my chickens, and she gave me a space to look forward to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, even unprepared, even tired, even overwhelmed.

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Obrigada, Luiza, you with your tattoos and your wisdom. I hope you remember sledding for the first time. I hope you remember Portuguese 103 and the multiple occasions on which I announced “I’m excited” without remembering the unique connotations of that expression in Brazilian Portuguese. I hope you leave with fond memories of what the United States and Americans can be, even as we have spent much time discussing military dictatorship and what happened in Brazil and what’s happening here. I hope you remember the magnolia trees and dogwoods the Argentine-American student and I urged you to find at the start of spring. I wish you well. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering.

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On a rainy September morning, I drove a group of children from my daughter’s school to a nearby park for their gym class. Three of them squished into the backseat of my Honda Civic, shrieking as thunder boomed over Pittsburgh’s gray hills. I implored Elena, my daughter, to use her rain pants: an efficient but sartorially awkward piece of clothing.

“No,” Elena said. “ I don’t want to.” I insisted. Her pants would be soaked all day. She insisted in return. She’d be practicing long jump in rain pants? I gave in, warning her again about the unpleasantness of drenched leggings but letting her make the call.

The other students in the car were shocked.

“You should ground her!” One girl argued loudly. “If I ever talked back to my mom like that, I’d be grounded!”

“Yeah,” a tow-headed boy who’d requested I play “Hotel California, by the Eagles” chimed in. “I’d probably lose all my screen time.”

I turned up “Hotel California” and disengaged from this spontaneous roundtable of parenting advice, but it stuck with me. Was it really that radical to “give in” to my kid? Was she “talking back” when she said no? Was it a sign of parental weakness to honor her request not to long jump in rain pants?

Should I have “held the boundary,” as the parenting gurus say, threatening to deny her the pumpkin ice cream sandwich she would eat after school, or her play date with her friend Vera? Should I have demanded compliance?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. For me, in some situations, my daughter’s desires and input are largely beside the point. I don’t, for example, let her use any social media or have any screen time during the week. In the U.S., this is fairly radical. I’m adamant on these rules and there is no negotiation.

But in other areas, where years ago I might have insisted my-way-or-the-highway, I’m-the-parent and so on, demanding respect and obedience, I listen a little more carefully. I try and see things from her point of view. I try to imagine how I would feel if someone forced me to wear rain pants on my morning run, threatening not to let me have my coffee afterwards or meet my friend for lunch if I didn’t comply. I’d be outraged. I’d likely hate them at least a little bit, even if they professed they were doing it “for me.”

Once, I invited Elena to give me a consequence if I said a curse word. (I was trying to curb a bad habit, and failed.) When I slipped up within minutes, she said, “You can’t have any coffee tonight. And no beer.” Even though the challenge had been a joke, I was offended. And a little angry.

I felt in my body how infuriating it would be to be controlled, and to have things taken from or given to me completely at others’ whims. So I used my adult power and gave myself back the coffee, and the beer.

This new awareness, at times a blessing and often a great challenge, comes largely via the work of the writer and children’s rights advocate . Rickman’s latest book, It’s Not Fair: Why It’s Time for a Grown-Up Conversation about How Adults Treat Children, is a heartfelt, carefully researched, and clearly argued cri de couer for children’s liberation. The book makes the case that “collectively, children are the most discriminated against group in our society.”

Rickman defines “adultism” as “the structural discrimination and oppression children face from adults, and society’s bias towards adults.”

She delineates many ways in which adultism functions. Children are the only people who can legally be hit. They are much more likely than adults to live in poverty and to experience and witness violence. They are completely dependent on adults for legal representation and access to services and healthcare.

They lack property rights and cannot vote, in spite of the fact that they are the citizens most likely to be impacted by political decision-making (or lack thereof) on issues like climate change. They are often systematically denied bodily autonomy: forced to wear, eat, sleep, move, or do things against their will. They are frequently coerced, via shame, rewards, or punishment, into compliance with adults’ wishes, regardless of their own needs and desires.

They often have little or no say in where, how, or with whom they pass their time. Many are forced to spend the majority of their waking hours in institutions where they have almost no freedom of movement; must demand permission to eat, speak, or go to the bathroom; must dress and wear their hair a certain way; and must engage in countless menial tasks over which they have no control and which often have little relevance to their lives.

Rickman cites German sociologist Manfred Liebel, who in the 1980s defined four categories of discrimination faced by children worldwide:

1) punishment of “undesired attitudes” that are seen as normal in adults (such as refusing to do what one is told, or speaking one’s mind)

2) age limits that exclude children from “specific practices and areas of social life”

3) limited access to rights, goods, institutions, and services

4) the failure to consider the social group of children in political decision-making.

Rickman then asks her reader to consider all the privileges adults enjoy (with the caveat that of course, not every adult enjoys all of these privileges to the same extent):

• no one can tell an adult what to do in their own home

• adults can speak in public forums and be treated respectfully

• adults, simply by virtue of being adults, can demand their children comply with their wishes, insist their children speak in certain ways or not speak at all, and forbid their children from questioning their decision-making

• adults are presumed to be mentally fit and trusted to make decisions for themselves

• no laws demand that adults remain in certain spaces under the supervision of authorities they must obey for the majority of their lives

• adults’ access to food and shelter doesn’t rely on pleasing others

• no one can restrict where adults go, who they talk to, how they spend their time or their access to the outside world

• they can vote

• they can do with their bodies as they see fit (within legal limits)

• most media represents them and their experiences

• afflicting physical pain on them is assault

Seen through this lens, childhood can seem not a timeless elysian reprieve from life’s harsh realities, but rather a quasi-carceral state, marked as much by a sense of powerlessness, frustration, and futility as by tenderness and wonder.

“Children are repressed at every waking minute. Childhood as hell,” Shulamith Firestone notoriously wrote.

But how are children supposed to make decisions for themselves, the skeptical reader demands? Of course children are dependent on adults: wouldn’t they be stuffing themselves with Doritos until three in the morning, running wild in the streets without oversight, without school?

“We have this assumption that children can’t make sensible decisions,” Rickman told me. “Won’t they just spend it all on ice cream and pool parties?”

This assumption is born out an innate distrust of children, an idea that they are naturally lazy, sinful, indulgent, defiant – although many of those traits in children end up being reactions to a society in which they are constantly coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, for reasons that are not their own. Young children, as the writer and homeschooling advocate John Holt has pointed out, are incredibly motivated to learn, work, and connect with the adults around them – many only begin to lose that desire once they are in school.

Rickman cites one of the biggest surveys of children about what they wanted in a school, which eventually became a book by Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor entitled The School I’d Like. The responses were heartbreakingly intuitive and human. A fifteen-year-old named Angela described how depressing it was to spend her days in a “giant Magnolia prison,” and declared, “I want to be filled with inspiration by a place that I can call my home away from home.”

Children wanted gardens with flowers, ponds with animals in them, playgrounds, comfortable chairs, “just like home.” They wanted better food and enough time to eat it. They wanted to do more art, they wanted to be in nature, they wanted “children and teachers…to think of each other as equals.” One fifteen-year-old named Miriam wrote that in her ideal school, “We will no longer be treated as herds of an identical animal waiting to be civilized before we are let loose on the world…it is our world too.”

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One of Rickman’s most compelling arguments is that we envision children more as human becomings than human beings. We describe them as blank slates, works in progress, forged by the diligent, constant tending of scrupulous adults.

And yet anyone who has a child can likely recognize the way in which that child has been fully themself from the day they were born. My daughter has the same wacky sense of humor at ten as she did at one; the same physical intensity; the same fierce desire to socialize with anyone and everyone; the same love for animals that once led her to get punched in the face at school for rescuing a pill bug from a group of boys set on smashing it.

For that matter, as far back as I can remember, I have been myself: passionate, verbal, sarcastic, skeptical, a lover of the outdoors and books and dogs. I was no more “becoming” in fifth grade than I was at twenty-two or now, at forty-two. I was changing all the time, yes, and also fully myself.

But children are seen as unfinished products, an idea that both gives adults great leeway in trying to shape their lives – you will play violin! You will love football! You will be brilliant at math! – and that tends to erase their unique needs and desires. It also creates such an intense future-oriented lens that it can be all too easy to ignore children’s need for happiness, joy, love, and stability right now.

And in fact, ignore is exactly what many societies do. At a recent lecture I attended by Matthew Desmond about his book Poverty, By America, Desmond declared that we could eliminate poverty in the U.S. with a wealth tax on the top 1% of earners. We could simply eliminate it, right now. It would cost billionaires a teensy tiny fraction of their bloated fortunes. This would dramatically impact the lives of children, for whom poverty is the single greatest factor in health, educational and financial outcomes, and overall well-being. But there is no political will to do so.

The political scapegoating of children – manifested in many ways in the U.S., such as denying children school lunch because their parents haven’t paid the cafeteria bill – demonstrates the assumption that children are less than full humans, and are the private property of their families, just as women were once considered the private property of their husbands.

It is easy for liberals to point the finger at conservative policies for causing harm to children, especially in the U.S., where the same outspoken politicians demanding abortion bans refuse to impose any restrictions on the #1 cause of death for American children: guns. And yet the left, too, can fall into rhetoric and policy that is antithetical to children’s rights, particularly when it comes to the issue of school.

One white parent in our liberal urban school district in Pittsburgh told me she was sending her kids to public school so they could experience “the real world.” I asked what she meant by this, and she explained that in life we will inevitably deal with challenging people, and be bored, and have to do things we don’t feel like doing. But, I argued, would any adult insist they should be miserable and bored and surrounded by difficult people now so the they could learn this was what life offered?

Another white parent told me she passionately believed in public school and thus sent her kid there, even though she knew the experience wasn’t great. I empathize with this argument, and with its shadow argument that fleeing public school means privileged, detached complicity with the relentless privatization and brutal inequality of our society. I too believe that school should be free and community-based and of excellent quality for all students.

But too often this conversation, like so many of our conversations about our institutions today, turns only around abstractions: how adults should or shouldn’t behave in accordance with a particular ideology (this = good, that = evil). It ignores complex, on-the-ground realities.

First of all, the public school experience in most urban centers in the U.S. is incredibly racialized. The curriculum and reception a child receives in these schools will be based on the color of their skin. In our local public school, the vast majority of the teachers are white and live in the suburbs. More than half the school is composed of students of color.

I have heard the white children of acquaintances who send their kids to this school say things like, “they always do this,” or “they don’t get to go on the bus to the field trip.” Once I asked: “Who are they?”

“The black kids,” was the answer.

Jorge put his foot down: there was no way we were sending our kid into this system. “How do you think she’ll be seen?” he asked me. He meant, she will not read as white. And the way she would be read would determine everything.

This ended up being true when we sent her to what we thought was a slightly better option: a public charter school that advertised its commitment to diversity and equity. In her first three weeks there (after doing preschool and preK at a private school near us, where she’d had a teacher of color and never had any disciplinary or behavior issues), we received three stern emails home from her (white, suburban) teacher about “behavior infractions” like “tickling another student.”

It only went downhill from there: over the next two years we were told over and over she couldn’t have access to “enrichment” in math because she “wasn’t ready”; she couldn’t join her (entirely white) group of friends in the advanced reading group because she “wasn’t ready.” I pointed out that at home she could read Harry Potter in Spanish. No matter.

“Her reading level is an ‘L,’” the teacher told me confidently. I looked this up and realized it meant that she should be reading picture books with a single line of text like, “Chicken went to the store.”

Beyond this, she was miserable at this school. It was a dysfunctional environment for many children, with kids frequently exploding into violence, teachers who refused children lunch or recess when they misbehaved, and hours of mindless “work” on screens.

I wrote the administration about the violence, again and again. I met with Elena’s teacher multiple times to explain what I saw at home and what she was capable of. I met with the “gifted program” administration. I emailed again. I organized other parents to email collectively. Nothing ever changed. This is a story I hear again and again from parents trying so hard to alter the culture at their local school: nothing happens.

So the question becomes: how is it helpful, or just, to force a child to endure a dysfunctional and miserable system? Even if that child’s endurance did ultimately change that system into a beautiful, thriving one (which, at least in the case of Pittsburgh, it has not done in the past thirty years – adults who went to our local elementary school in the 1980s recall racial divides and teacher behavior identical to what I hear about today), is it fair to ask children to sacrifice their well-being for years for such a principle?

Progressive adults passionately disagree with grotesque wealth inequality and low wages and inhumane working conditions – but most of these adults opt to work day-to-day in jobs and places they enjoy. They prioritize their own well-being and from there, agitate for change.

Often, Rickman told me, parents will pat themselves on the back, saying, “I’ve done my good deed, I’ve done something good and socially just” when they send their child to a public school – but “[they’re] not paying the consequences of that.”

I’ve seen friends and acquaintances on social media declare in one breath how essential it is to leave toxic work environments and burnout situations and have healthy boundaries and self-care, and then in the next insist on sending children to public schools no matter what. There is no contradiction here only if we fail to recognize children as full humans who also deserve to be happy, comfortable, and heard – not in the future, but right now.

I recognize the tension here – I recognize that many children do not have the choice to attend public school or not. I recognize that simply abandoning these children and reinforcing the vastly unequal system we have is unjust and terrible. And yet at the same time – and this is the kind of complexity that we as a society seem increasingly unwilling to countenance – forcing children into situations that cause them stress and harm in the name of a belief system or a future transformation (that has not manifested in most places) is also unjust.

Nowhere is this tension between the modern education system and children’s rights more pronounced than in the impact of COVID-19 on schools. I am not here to argue for or against school closures, though the evidence is overwhelming that extended closures had devastating effects on children’s learning and well-being. What is most salient about those decisions is that children were completely excluded from them.

No effort was made on the part of governmental, health, or policy-making organizations to speak to children about what they needed and wanted and to work with them on how to achieve it. Children’s needs were in fact almost entirely ignored: it was left, as usual, to parents – and let’s be honest, mostly to mothers – to figure out how to navigate nearly impossible situations on their own.

The solutions many came up with – learning pods, micro-schools, outdoor school, learning hubs – could have been applied on a much broader level, to many more children, but the political will and collective imagination was not there. There was more effort put into figuring out outdoor dining than outdoor schooling.

In the U.S., many children’s entire lives were shut down and transferred to Zoom, ignoring not only their distinct physical and mental needs – and the safety of those children at risk for abuse and neglect – but also the realities of working mothers. Millions of mothers were forced out of the labor force as we entered into the collective delusion that “remote learning” was actually a real thing, and not our society’s abnegation of care for children.

Is there any other social group, Rickman asks about children, whose voices are so collectively ignored in decisions directly related to their everyday lives and well-being?

Our experience of homeschooling radically altered my understanding of my daughter’s rights. Why did she have only fifteen minutes for lunch at school? Why was it okay for school administrators to force children to eat in silence? Why did only the “gifted” students get to do projects like put on Shakespeare plays, while everyone else slogged through worksheets? Why was my child coming home saying other students had threatened to poison the teacher, other students had gotten into a fistfight, other students had told her to spread her legs, and yet when I pulled her out of school, I was warned over and over that school was where kids “develop social skills”? Why did I feel I had to establish a strict curriculum for her – why didn’t I trust her to tell me what she loved?

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Together, we read James Herriot’s books and she adored them. We did the enrichment curriculum in math on our own. She fell in love with French on Duolingo. She spent Fridays at a local farm feeding pigs and taking care of toddlers at an in-home preschool. Of course, this had a financial and personal cost: I had to squeeze my work into early mornings, swim practices, late evenings. I put my career aside.

Yet what I learned was that so many of us – me included – go along on autopilot with school situations that are not only less than optimal, but actually antithetical to our children’s joy and thriving. We see the same problems persist in stubborn, dysfunctional bureaucracies, with resources frequently being squandered and little to no imagination or appetite for change.

In an interview with Rickman, I asked her about these tensions between children’s liberation and our current education systems. Rickman home educates her child and has supported many families transitioning to home education, and she told me she has seen so much trauma; a word, she said, that she doesn’t use lightly. The children she encounters are often neurodivergent and have been scarred by bullying, mistreatment from teachers, and racial aggressions. Still, Rickman is very community and social justice-minded and wants to support public schools.

“What we need is a brilliant state-funded education sector which really takes children’s needs and views into account,” she told me.

But children, and especially poor children of color most likely to be harmed by school, are rarely asked what they want, care about, and need, and the lack of interest and trust in them manifests itself in many aspects of their schooling.

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The conversation about children’s rights can become even more contentious in the context of feminism, where assertions of children’s needs can seem to directly confront women’s freedom to work outside the home.

“Women have fought for lots of different things over the past few decades,” Rickman told me, “and one thing we have not been very good at is bringing children’s struggle for liberation alongside women’s struggle for liberation.”

And yet the two are so deeply, inherently connected. I have seen from my writing about birth and motherhood how often women are treated like children: silly, innocent, naïve, incapable of complex decision-making, not to be trusted. I have seen how birth and motherhood are rendered childlike with pastels and the iconography of babyhood and gentle demeaning language that presumes incompetence, when in fact these processes can be incredibly powerful, gritty, fierce, intense, and wild.

Children’s liberation activists often draw parallels with women’s liberation: many of the arguments against giving children the vote, for example – they are emotional and not rational; they will simply do what their parents tell them; they can’t handle the responsibility – echo earlier arguments against giving women the vote.

Many of the defenses of “parental rights” sound eerily like rhetoric about why husbands should have the right to treat their wives as they wish. Until recently, marital rape was legal in many places. Many people still see domestic violence as a largely private affair.

And yet in a capitalist society haunted by a zero-sum, scarcity paradigm, children’s needs can seem like a threat to mothers. When the government provides no support for caretaking, and care work is constantly disparaged, undervalued and underpaid, it is all too tempting to dismiss these intensive needs.

A friend of mine, a Vietnamese mother of two who moved to the U.S. in her late twenties, told me a story about posting in a local online forum for new mothers that she didn’t think it was good for babies to “cry it out” at night.

“Oh no,” I said. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, oh yes. She had no idea what she was in for. She was swamped by hateful responses and then, after intense advocacy from a few people, permanently barred from the forum.

I understand there is nuance to the “sleep training” conversation, and am not here to declare whether or not parents should use this method. Many families could not function without it. But the fact that such painful hostility exploded from even bringing up the possibility that this practice might harm children signals something off: a society in which there is a powerful urge to dismiss talk of what is best for children because it is simply too uncomfortable or impossible to accommodate, too threatening to women’s freedom, which still feels incredibly fragile.

Similarly, there is a strong pattern in the U.S. and the U.K. of depicting the care of children as mindless, tedious, and undesirable, so much less valuable than white collar work for pay. Why would one ever “give up” a socially lauded, high-achieving career for something as brainless as caring for a child?

Rickman writes, “I often come across language used to describe mothers who choose to look after their children themselves as though this is a tragedy: ‘lost skills,’ ‘economically inactive,’ ‘wasted education.’”

In her recent book Liars, Sarah Manguso writes, “The trouble with spending the day with a small child is that at the end of it you’re physically exhausted, mentally emptied, and you have nothing to show for it but a filthy house, filthy clothes, raw and peeling hands, and the inability to see beyond babyhood.” Nothing to show for it – the child’s happiness, the relationship between mother and child, is not mentioned here at all.

This is not to suggest that women should stay home with their children, or that children’s happiness depends on constant access to their mothers. But it is undeniable that young children need an incredibly high level of care, and diminishing care work does no favors to either mothers or children. So many mothers know the stress of seeking high-quality care, not finding or not being able to afford it, and not being able to provide it themselves.

It is not enough to have “universal PreK” or “affordable daycare”: a significant and high-quality longitudinal study recently demonstrated that Pre-K actually led to a notable decrease in children’s well-being, behavior, and academic outcomes later in life. The data is by no means conclusive on whether PreK is actually beneficial for children or not – at least the way we have currently structured many PreK programs, as heavily regimented environments in which children begin early training on “academics” and follow rigid behavioral rules. Similarly, “affordable daycare” does not mean quality daycare.

Children’s needs must be the center of these policy discussions, not adult convenience and affordability. Children need love. They need close attention and deep relationship. They need play and the outdoors. This is not utopic or radical. It is reality. It is fundamental.

“[Children’s] lives,” Rickman argues, “are profoundly political.” I found this idea confronting, and asked Rickman about it. “Any relationship where there is an inequality of power is a political relationship,” she told me.

In some areas of the adult-child relationship, this is subtle. In others, it is incredibly overt. It is illegal to categorically bar most groups of people from spaces and events; one cannot, for example, deny Latino people or disabled people entry into a restaurant. But it’s perfectly acceptable, and increasingly common, to ban children. I have been invited to three “child-free” weddings in the past five years.

I have seen cultural figures who are otherwise outspoken about injustice proclaiming on Twitter how much they dislike children or don’t want to see children in their favorite coffee shops or bars. I have gone to cafes in my city and overheard the baristas discussing whether or not they found kids tolerable. It’s considered socially acceptable to “debate” whether babies should be allowed on planes.

Where it’s taken as a given in progressive communities that our society should support the thriving of all marginalized groups, that sometimes doesn’t seem to include children.

Trusting my daughter, I have found, is incredibly difficult. It is a humbling process. The more I trust her, the more I have to realize how little I trust myself: how much my worth has been tied to what I achieve, to how others see me, to whether or not I am liked and earning approval.

When I trust her, I trust the process of becoming: hers, and mine. I trust that I can’t control life, and that actually, trying to control it leads to fear and perpetual disappointment.

I asked Rickman about the joy she found in this work, which can seem so hard for parents. She told me, “I actually think that once you start treating the children in your life as people who are worthy of respect, I’m not going to say it removes all obstacles – it doesn’t, we’re humans, we live messy lives – there is something really beautiful about being in that relationship with your child. It’s quite exhausting to be the one who always holds the power and makes the decisions and organizes everything.”

“Parents are already overly victimized and need liberation in their own right,” writes Richard Evans Farson, one of the early children’s liberationists. “[They] need to be freed from the burden of guilt that comes from believing that they are solely responsible for what their children become.”

Holding all the power is exhausting, brittle, and unnatural. It makes us rigid. It inhibits real change.

What would it feel like if we gave it up, even just a little of it? Handed it over to those small hands, to those high little voices, and listened? What would they say?

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