We’re the Adults Here

My brother and his wife just had a new baby. Because their family lives 1200 miles away, I’ve only seen him virtually, but by photograph you can still swear he’s already smiling. Content, protected, much anticipated and much loved. You can see his tiny little fingers with their even tinier fingernails curled up against his cheek as he’s sleeping, and you can imagine that he’s dreaming sweet dreams. Since I can’t nuzzle his soft, downy baby head and breathe in his baby smell, I can anticipate the winter slipping by quickly, so that we can meet in person.

Having a new baby, especially the first, brings out so much hope for the world, and so much fear. In one tiny baby is the story of every baby. It’s amazing, and it’s magical, and it’s scary as hell. The world becomes smaller, knit with that common bond of parents everywhere. But it becomes bigger, and you realize that when your parents let you travel through it, on your own, as a teenager, they were the bravest people you knew.

You cry at the evening news, and you rejoice, and cry, at St. Jude’s success stories. As our children get older, parenting becomes a little more routine. We get a bit lost in the endless loads of laundry, and we aren’t thrilled anymore when our child eats two bites of green beans. There’s still joy and wonder, but once they can throw a granola bar wrapper on the floor and walk away, the moments of awe are balanced by moments of discipline and monotony and sometimes near hysteria, as we find our child covered from head to toe in orange and black marker or red nail polish. Always an adventure, we say, eyes a little crazy and smile a little too bright.

Babies encourage us to look forward, but they also prompt us to look back. To our own childhoods, to our parents’. Beyond. There have been many times, if I’m being honest, that I have compared my life to life on a wagon train heading West, just to remember that I’m probably going to make it through.

My brother carries his grandfather’s name as his middle name, and now so does his son. I was blessed to have amazing grandparents. We don’t necessarily appreciate our grandparents as much as we should when we’re young, and yet they have incredible impact on us, as I know my own children, and my new nephew, will come to know, as well. Grandparents shape our worldview because they’ve lived so much more than we have, they’ve learned what to fight for, and what to let go. Through them, and the children they raised, we learn what’s worth fighting for.

On my father’s side, my grandparents were longstanding volunteers with the Salvation Army. I can picture the vintage push button phone on the side table by the stairs, the notepad beside it. Someone would need help, that phone would ring, and just like that (or so it seemed to a child), help was en route. They were everyday heroes in plain sight. I realized that in retrospect. At the time, I mostly thought we watched a lot of Lawrence Welk and This Old House, and I liked my grandmother’s backyard goldfish pond, and going fishing with my grandfather to restock it.

I grew up in the same house as my maternal grandmother. She was a church youth group leader, taking teens to areas of need within the US for service projects, she joined adult service trips annually and encouraged me to participate for multiple years in ASP, Appalachian Service Project. In the days of my mother’s childhood, she garnered a reputation of a “friendly house” to railroad hitchhikers. She wrote letters to prisoners and believed passionately in Heifer International, an organization her family still supports today, three generations deep. That my daughter, her great-granddaughter, spends as much time inspecting the Heifer International livestock gift catalog as the Toys R Us wish book is a testament to her enduring service, goodness and grace. She lived, “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”

I’m not at their level. I have better intentions than actions. I get busy with my own life, and I forget my roots. I’m proud of who I come from, but I’m not sure that I’m always living up to their example. But my world view is still foundationally theirs. It’s why I’ve been wound so tightly the last year or so, and even more tightly still the last few months. My world view is at odds with my world, it sometimes seems. My husband and I went to see Billy Joel in concert last fall. He played the classic, We Didn’t Start the Fire, and his stage show showed classic imagery from the original song, spliced with today’s news. We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning, since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire. No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it. …We didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re doing much to fight it lately.

In the three months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, validating the Brexit campaign which was built largely on anti-immigration rhetoric and dissatisfaction with the status-quo, homophobic attacks in the UK rose 147%. Hate crimes in general spiked and have now begun to stabilize, in a depressing way, to levels above the pre-Brexit vote. The country voted in intolerance by just 4%. And yet it was a referendum on ugliness. I’m terrified by the parallels in the US.

The day after the Brexit vote, pro-Brexit politicians admitted their grand plan was mostly lip service that they would not be able to deliver. Many voters said that they voted for Brexit never thinking it would actually win, but wanting to lodge a protest vote, to feel heard. Afterward, some voters wondered aloud if there could be a re-do. Except, elections don’t work that way. Voters have to make adult decisions in the first round. How often have I wished that I could see two parallel paths play out. But way leads on to way.

I’ve often seen, and appreciated, and identified with the sentiment, “Who let me adult? I can’t adult.” It feels true in so many ways. I might be the one with the paycheck and the mortgage and the paid-off, hail damaged car, with the carpool duty and the children who are constantly out of clean socks, but surely someone else around here is the adult. I can’t always be counted on to take my make-up off at night, or have plans for dinner, or get my oil changed on time. I can’t adult.

Except – crap, crap, crap – we are the adults. We are the ones in charge of making decisions. We are the ones who have to instill in our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, the worldviews, priorities and basic human decency that will shape their generation. It’s the most adulty part of being an adult.  We get to set our own bedtime and drink on a school night if we choose, we can buy seven shades of pink lip stick in shades from coral to sweet magnolia and watch uncensored HBO shows. But in exchange, it’s up to us to make sure we don’t muck up the world, miscarry justice and botch the compassion and decency meters of our progeny.

Why am I wound so tightly lately? So that my children and husband tip toe around me, soothing and evading in turn. Because I’m not so sure we’re doing a good job. I think about the old metaphor of a frog in a frying pan… the heat increases little by little, but the frog keeps adjusting, little by little, and it never jumps out. I think of the phone ringing in my grandparents’ house, letting them know that a stranger needed help, and their unquestioning devotion to those strangers. I think about my grandmother believing steadfastly in the light of the world overcoming the darkness. In people’s mistakes not defining them, not making them unworthy of prayer and love. I loved my grandparents. I love their memory, and my memories of them. And honestly, I’m glad they aren’t living through this period of US history. I think it would break their hearts.

These are the principles I want my children to live by:

1. Help each other.

Actually, I guess that’s it. That’s what it boils down to. I want them to know that helping someone else is the fastest way to feeling better ourselves. I want them to know that 99.999% of people in this world just want to ensure their own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews are safe, healthy and happy. Our differences are small. Our similarities huge. As my youngest once said, “When people fall down, help them up.” Our 8-year-olds get it.

Our country is currently split, according to the latest polling, at about 45% for each of our major party presidential candidates. In this post-Halloween candy fog, I feel the same way about that as if someone told me that 45% of the country actually likes Good ‘n Plentys. How could that be possible? How would one even begin to comprehend that?

45% split. For arguably the most powerful office on Earth. I realize that my own views make it hard for me to be entirely objective. But one candidate, despite being caricatured as cold and shrill and power-hungry, has spent a career ensuring children’s health care, and seeing that 75% of the world’s AIDS patients are able to seek treatment. The other has spent a career literally gilding his house in gold while both not paying taxes and suing and stiffing those who worked for him (who, by the way, almost assuredly did pay income taxes, in the event they were ever fairly paid.)

No, neither candidate is perfect. No one is. I’m not, either. Even my esteemed grandparents were not. But in this race, one candidate has advocated for fair pay and women’s rights worldwide, and one has mused publically about what a pretty picture a woman can make dropping to her knees. One has visited 112 countries and brokered a peace accord in one of the world’s perpetual hot spots. One wants to have play dates with Putin.

We’re the adults here.  We are the ones who not only get to choose, but who are quite literally responsible for the future. We are the ones who decide whether our politics and policies are helping each other, or helping ourselves. We are the ones who will live with these decisions, because we’re the adults. But we’re not the only ones. Our children get to live with them, too. And while it may make me crazy to pick up those wrappers and argue about homework, I’m still in awe of their amazing compassion and potential. I don’t want to tarnish either of those things for them.

Do we tell them we voted in hate crimes and petty retribution? I’m not speculating. Ask anyone from England, they of the 147% increase in the same. When we talk about building taller walls instead of longer tables, we are telling our children that when the phone rings, we don’t answer. When someone falls, we walk by. That when we disagree, we threaten our opposition with their life and freedom, because we’re out of real ideas. We are telling them that we’re tired of adulting.

We are defining a generation by our actions. I want to affirm for my children the world that my grandparents prepared for me. That world cannot be based on fear and division, stoking hate under a paralyzed frog in a frying pan. We’re the adults. We have to jump.