2. A Beginning

2.

I’ve been parenting for thirty-eight years. My youngest just started high school in a few weeks, and my granddaughter just learned to pull herself up to standing. I watch her eyes scan the room, blinking slowly like she's absorbing the whole world through light and movement. I wonder what she sees now—and more than that, what she will see. What kind of world will unroll in front of her? What will demand her energy, her attention, her resilience?

My body’s older. The tired runs deeper now—not just from age, but from years of showing up for people in crisis. Thirty-six years of holding space for other people’s breaking points. It takes a toll. I used to scoff at that idea. We were trained to suck it up, keep going, push harder. Weakness wasn’t part of the vocabulary. I was raised to play through pain—sent back outside with a sprained wrist, expected to govern myself, expected not to need too much. My brother and I once tore each other off a ride-on firetruck in the driveway. The adults didn’t break it up—they took a photo. That’s how I know it happened.

I don’t scare easy. I don’t collapse. I’ve never been someone who falls apart in the moment. I’m the one who stays calm, who carries the weight, who keeps it steady—until someone comes for people I care about. That might be someone I know, or it might be someone getting crushed by systems I’ve spent a lifetime watching fail—systems designed to fail, to preserve the status quo. I  probably looked, at first glance, like someone who could be easily persuaded—especially in the ways patriarchy prefers. I don’t yell. I dismantle with premeditated precision—measured, by the book, in a way that unsettles without giving anyone room to push back without revealing something unhinged in themselves. 

There was a time when I was out with buckets of wheat paste at two in the morning, plastering protest signs onto construction fences. I followed newspaper vans through the city, slipping flyers into stacks of papers before they hit the stoops. I rode buses to marches, sure—but I also worked the edges, where the messages weren’t always welcome. Back when a quarter got you into the box and technically access to every copy inside. We didn’t steal. We inserted. We reminded people that truth doesn’t always come pre-packaged. The noise is different now, more constant—woven into everything. The spin, the silencing, the systems that smile while they harm.The unsettling contradiction of censorship thriving in a place oversaturated with rapid-fire, “information.”

People talk about how we’ve been here before. That this is history cycling through again. Maybe. But this version is different. No time before this has been so plugged in to the past—its documents, images, testimonies—so instantly and completely. And still, we watch cults dressed up as Christians claim they’re defending a nation they clearly don’t understand. “We’re a Christian country,” they say, fully relying on a lapse of memory so thick it feels practiced. But this country was founded—stolen, really—by colonists escaping the entanglement of church and state. That was the whole point. Or at least, that’s what the mythology said.

Now I look at the baby, and I look at my daughter. I can’t predict the world they’ll grow into. I can’t protect them from it all. But I keep wondering: is this just what it feels like, right before the turn?

This, too, is a beginning.

Chapter 3 at the link below.