Parenting In Times Of War
The following is a new chapter from a memoir in progress. These monthly installments are only available to full members. For access, please consider upgrading your subscription. 5% of my earnings for Q1 went to to Out of the Cold Centre County, a low-barrier shelter and resource center in my local community. In Q2, the same amount will go to Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four).
Parenting In Times Of War
Last week, while shuttling kids to and from summer camps and squeezing fitness and work into the slivers of time left, I had a strange vision. Two of my kids spent their days at Shaver’s Creek, an environmental education center, and the drive over the mountain, down the shady back roads deep into the woods, brought back all the day trips we took to parks during the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 made the world stand still.
Cicadas roared as I walked the gravel path with my daughter and son each morning to meet their camp teams. The pulsing drone threw me into a trance. The place was packed, parents and kids and camp counselors everywhere, but I imagined the grounds deserted. It was a peculiar feeling of presence and absence, equal parts gratitude for belonging to this multitude and solemnity at the recognition that, in the blink of an eye, it could all be wiped away.
The clinical term for that feeling is dissociation. In some cases, it’s a trauma response. In others, it’s a more pervasive sense that nothing is real, that your own reflection is the face of a stranger. Both can be forms of escape, avoiding reality, but for me it was the opposite: trying to be present to too much at once. Maybe overssociation strikes closer to the mark.
I knew that at the very moment I was kissing my children goodbye, telling them to have a great day, other families were being torn apart at border facilities. A chorus of tree frogs serenaded me as I walked back to the car, while others heard hissing missiles, blasts, and sirens mingling with screams. It was exactly the sense I had of parallel realities during the pandemic, that people were dying all around me even as my family remained untouched, bodies dropping noiselessly just out of sight.
It is hard to bear witness to such things. Even harder to be a writer, who is, as Henry James put it, “one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” There is no lens wide-angled enough to capture these dissonant realities.