It was a Friday.

There are rosy, hazy memories that have the soft edges of a matte Slumber filter. KOA picnic tables with a Coleman stove as my parents, younger than I am now, fixed breakfast we would eat off blue enamelware plates. The celebration of Put-in-Bay with high school friends when we were just old enough to undertake such an adventure on our own. My grandmother kneading bread on the orange, flour-covered Formica countertops of my childhood kitchen.

And then there are crystalline memories, good and bad, as vivid today as when they happened. Watching a butterfly flit past the third story hospital room window when I was in pre-term labor with my oldest and knowing knowing in the deepest recess of my soul, that everything would be okay. But also coming home from work the day Lucky, the dog who selflessly loved me more than anything, died in his sleep in the summer sunshine of our backyard. It still stings. Memory is tricky. Some things we’d like to last forever slip away at the edges – much loved-voices, vacation details – while things we’d like to just forget, stubbornly hold on.

My parents can easily remember the day that Kennedy was shot, just as 9/11 seared our memories decades later. I remember the day the Challenger exploded, all of us huddled around the bulky television that had been wheeled in just so that we could all watch history happen – though no one thought it would be history like that.

I remember when I heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. It was a Friday. As is not unusual on a Friday, we were on Highway 24 in Colorado Springs, heading to our cabin in Woodland Park. Stopped – also typical – somewhere between 8^th and 31^st, scrolling news to pass time as we waited in traffic, it was a ubiquitous red headline. When 9/11 happened, it was terrible and tragic and felt unbelievable, but it was terrible in part because we didn’t know what would happen next. When RBG died, the reason that my stomach knotted and dropped, the reason I ugly cried until I was headachy and spent, was that I knew exactly what would happen next. I knew exactly what it meant. For me. For my daughters, for a country already bitterly at odds. While Kennedy’s assignation and the Challenger explosion and 9/11 largely brought people together in common grief and purpose, RBG’s death was a further shattering of shared purpose, of common democratic ideals and I was under no misconception that anything but glee and steely-eyed purpose was being felt by many at her death. Despite being quite firm that Obama did not have the right to nominate Merrick Garland in March 2016, before the November election, it turned out that nominating a Justice in mid-September before the 2020 election was just fine. Amy Coney Barrett was nominated and confirmed within 34 days, sworn in about a week before the presidential election.

I sometimes think about the things I’m glad that my grandmother never had to see when she died in her sleep, buoyed by Obama’s election the week before she passed away, thinking things were changing for the better. She was so glad she was able to vote for him, and I’m glad that she had the chance. Of course, I never met Ruth Bader Ginburg, but sometimes I’m glad that she didn’t see what happened in the weeks and months after her death.

This has been a long week. And actually, last week was a long week. The attrition rate at my workplace is through the roof. The Great Resignation has definitely been felt. From myriad articles I’ve read and anecdotes I’ve heard, recruiter messages on LinkedIn, it’s not just us. But just because it’s common, doesn’t absolve the stress of it. I’ve been at my company for 10 years, but since 2020, my department has seen about 80% turnover. Like a celebrity breakup, there’s the public statement, a goodbye email with contact information or maybe just an acknowledgement of the end of the road. “With absolute love and respect for one another, we have chosen to lovingly separate to begin new chapters, remaining friends as we begin new journeys though we walk separate paths…” Or something. The gradual wear and tear, the slow grind, is exhausting.

We are tired. To-the-bone tired. It’s ironic because I assumed that this stage of my life would be difficult because of having teenagers (no offense, love you girls!). But that’s what they tell you at each prior stage. “Just wait! Just wait!” But my teenagers are good and interesting people. My blended family is pick-ups and drop-offs, and dinner conversation, and inside jokes with just enough eye roll to keep it real. I went back to therapy recently – I go sporadically when it starts to feel like an impartial third-party might help me navigate my 3am what-ifs – and I told her, “I feel heavy. Like I’m carrying around a concrete block I can’t put down. I’m eating too much. I’m drinking too much. I’m just unimaginably tired.” I think the real issue is not so much that I’m exhausted, as that I can’t see when it ends. Apparently there’s no quick fix for this, which is always disappointing, but I’m going again in 4 weeks, just to see if something new materializes.

I was absolutely heartbroken in November 2016, but I was hopeful, too. Hopeful that it would be a wake-up moment for everyone who had shrugged and figured things would work themselves out. Hopeful that a neophyte politician would be mindful and humble enough to surround himself with experienced professionals and be … less than terrible. My family marched in the Women’s March in January 2021 in downtown Denver, and the spirit of positivism and activism felt indefatigable. Surely, we would rise.

Stephen Colbert saw it coming. In 2005, far before the first clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon to the average storm watcher, he coined Truthiness on his cable satire news show. Truthiness is knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head. It’s taking what you see and putting your full faith in what you’d rather see. Truthiness feels true. And in that moment, Colbert recognized that it was the beginning of facts being the tool of the elitist left.

It’s hard getting up some days. It was a long week, and I was just holding on for the weekend, really. And then on Friday morning news broke that – as expected – Roe v Wade had been overturned by the Supreme Court in a strictly partisan 6-3 decision. (Actually, the 6-3 was a little surprising. I thought Roberts might vote for precedent and a creditable court, but at this point, neither here nor there.) Abortion is now up to the states, and immediately in those states with “trigger” laws, abortion may already be a felony. My family lives in Colorado which has laws already protecting abortion access, but if you live in North Dakota and are a high school senior who, let’s say, is also an honor student with a steady boyfriend who has early admission to a university out of state when you find out you’re pregnant even though you thought you were being careful, well… your options for a self-determined future just got a lot smaller.

I know a lot of pro-choice people. Men and women. Among them, I don’t know a single person who is pro-abortion. No one who thinks it is a decision that would or should be taken lightly. But I do know a lot of people who pragmatically realize that life is a lot harder for some people than others. That teenage birth rates and welfare rates are already higher in states that have draconian abortion laws, and that carrying a baby to adoption is not always healthy for the mother, physically and/or mentally. The foster system is already full. If everyone who professes belief that every baby should be born no matter the circumstances adopts a child from foster care, perhaps this conversation could begin to evolve differently. Currently, our country’s societal framework – no maternal care standards, universal health care, parental leave, nutrition access, etc. – cares far less about unwanted or unplanned children after they leave the womb.

Anyway, memory can be funny. I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on Monday, but I can remember the white plastic rocking horse with its coil springs that my babysitter had when I was 3. But for the life of me, I can’t remember how we got here. I can remember #thisisnotnormal. The inflated inauguration numbers. The noise of windmills causing cancer. I can remember the Sharpie hurricane path. The staring into the eclipse. They all seem so ridiculously trivial, though also a little embarrassing on the world stage. But I also remember that phone call with some guy we hadn’t even heard of at the time, Zelenskyy. Who knew how that would come back around. And how half the country shrugged and called it political theater. I remember Helsinki. I remember “very fine people on both sides” and “shithole countries.” Each time sunk the bar of normal a little lower. Each one made it a little harder to feel the positivity, the push for change, of that January 22, 2017 march. A little harder to reconcile our country as the one in the international headlines.

I’m tired because I can’t see how it ends. I’m tired because I thought the bottom was 2016. And then I thought the bottom was 2018. And 2020. And because I know parents are feeding their children Tucker Carlson for bedtime stories. I used to think that we were fighting against each other like a bunch of Dr Seuss Sneetches. But the point of the Sneetches story was that they were ultimately all the same on the inside, and I’m not so sure we all are anymore.

At what point did we go from a country that achieved polio and smallpox eradication, to one where an entire segment of the population, and championed by their elected officials and vice versa, openly and derisively mocked masks (which have been in common use for disease control for more than 200 years) and use horse dewormer instead of mRNA vaccines during a global pandemic. Who celebrate the overturning of Roe while fighting to keep AR15s in the hands of 18-year-olds, even before its latest victims are buried. It defies belief, and yet. And yet. Here we are. I cannot figure out how we have allowed ourselves to be here, and I don’t know how we get out.

This is the part where I usually try to tie back to the opening paragraphs and end with something at least low-level insightful if not outright hopeful.

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