I was heavily pregnant on the day of the 2024 election. When I say heavily, I mean heavily—I can’t tell you how close it seemed I was to giving birth. I voted by mail, and while I stayed at home with prodromal labor—counting contractions, is this it? No, damn it—my brother was out manning the polls, after spending months doing voter registration drives and campaigning for Kamala.
We were prepared for days of uncertainty, and then, maybe, a drawn-out legal battle. We hoped for a Democratic victory. Neither of those things happened. The results were quick and decisive. After it was called, my brother texted us:
The name you see redacted is my daughter’s.
My brother has never been a baby person, but my daughter—or the promise of her, from the earliest weeks of my pregnancy—changed that. For years, he struggled to find his footing in the adult world. His December college graduation was followed immediately by COVID, and he had a hard time getting his career off the ground as the world slowly came back together. He struggled to imagine the future. I tried to get him to start saving money, but it seemed absurd. Why plan for the future? Who knows if there will even be a tomorrow?
But my baby, completely unexpectedly for both of us, gave him something to look forward to—even to live for.
He drove me all around the state to get secondhand things for her nursery. He started buying her dinosaur toys when I was barely 8 weeks pregnant. He saved the visitor’s pass from his first visit to the hospital when she was born, and hung it up in his cubicle at his new job. As the first months of her life passed by, he made a collage of photos and hung it above his desktop monitor, which we jokingly called his “do it for her” display. He now works full-time in conservation, and this little person—and the future she symbolizes—is who he reminds himself he’s doing his work for.
That baby is now well over a year old, and snoring against my chest as I write this. As a parent to a toddler in this political moment, I live in between extremes. I read Brown Bear, Brown Bear five times in a row. I watch a man be shot on the street by ICE officers from three different angles. I comb little blonde hairs; play peek-a-boo; rock and sing to sleep. I fear war over Greenland; the end of NATO. I bake banana bread with my child, and as I do I think of the mothers in Palestine, for whom war is not a far-off fear but a lived reality. I pray out loud for the milk supplies of those mothers; for peace for the children trying to sleep with drones overhead. I paint protest signs; I wonder if it’s safe to protest anymore. Sometimes I doomscroll, feeling the world get small and dark and narrow. And then my daughter takes her first steps and I suddenly feel how beautiful and wide and expansive it all is, always has been, like the first gulp of spring air after a long winter.
I hold my daughter in the dark and know there has never been a better feeling. I see her joy and think of who our next child might be, because I know I do want more children, yes even in this world.
The mothers of Instagram will remind you that the revolution needs nurturers. They will tell you that those in power want you to be afraid; that the future needs the smart, empathetic, curious children you are currently raising. All those things are true. This moment also needs your voice, your activism, your engagement—so when I say this, please know that I’m not telling you to look away or stop protesting or get comfortable. But I want to ask you, on top of all of those things, not to let the world steal the joy you spent years waiting for. Many of the parents I know spent years imagining this very time. We didn’t foresee raising children during a pandemic or the rise of authoritarianism or the threat of war. But we did hope, and pray, and imagine, raising these children. We longed to be parents. For me, by the end of my fertility journey, that longing was almost all-consuming. And while these crises need my urgency and action and attention, I also know that if I scroll away these precious, mundane, domestic little moments with fear after fear after fear, trauma after trauma after trauma, I will have given the dark forces of this world the very thing I spent years asking God to give me.
Saint John Chrysostom said that “a house is a little church.” I love this quote because it reminds me that the home I’m building is a sacred place—a place where we can come to weary and walk away refreshed; a place where we can grow in kindness, in love of God and neighbor; a place where we can find communion, and resolve, and strength for hard times. There is something sacred about reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear five times in a row; about wiping butts and making memories and wrangling your toddler into a carseat because We are going to visit a farm today! What does the cow say? MOOOOOOO!!! MOOOOOOO!!!! There is something sacred about all this joy, just as there is something sacred about lament and bearing witness. It is sacred work to protect the kingdom of childhood as long as we can, and grow alongside the tiny people we’ve been entrusted to nurture. It is sacred to guide the little hand wrapped around your finger; to tend and nurse and hold; to teach our children the world is good and safe, even if in our hardest moments, we aren’t so sure.
My great-grandparents raised their children in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. On my mother’s side, they each had eight children. Eight to guide and protect and keep safe. Not all those children survived the war; my grandfather’s oldest sister died during the Hunger Winter, and every one of my grandparents faced some kind of great hardship or another. One great-grandmother had to go into prostitution to feed her family. Another died of cancer on the morning of D-Day. She never heard the war ended.
Still, if you look at some of the photos of those years, they speak of moments of great joy amidst what I’m sure was also great fear and uncertainty. I see tea parties and dress-up days and trips to the beach. And thank God, because that was the only childhood my grandparents would ever have, and the only parenthood their parents would ever experience. Thank goodness there was great joy and beauty amidst it all. That joy and beauty lives on in my mother’s body, and in mine. It lives on in my daughter, too, alongside the strength and stubborn courage.
I will not squander my child’s laugh, or the look of the sunlight in her hair, or her first scribbed drawing of a cow. I will not waste these precious, sacred moments, even and especially as they exist alongside fear of an uncertain future. These times are uneasy, but they are far from unprecedented—even in the last century. Take courage, have hope; savor what you can; fight for what you love. Keep walking, and keep faith.
