The fact alone that this piece is more than six months old makes me want to fall on my face in the dirt and weep with my whole body and heart.
As Mother’s Day approaches I’ve wanted to share about my new life with my new baby, the beauty and joy of it—but that is exactly why we need all eyes on Rafah now. Because every mother and child should know more about their neighborhood playground than about the enemy’s bombs. Because the only thing worse than the hell raining down on Gaza would be trying to mother through it.
Mother’s Day is also a hell of a time for the media (and the president) to be so quick to condemn the students protesting on college campuses. As an activist, is there plenty to roll my eyes about? Maybe even to grieve or condemn? Sure. And that’s college. You do things wrong and you figure it out—and you hope to hell there are a few adults around who care enough to walk alongside you while you do dumb, inspiring, gorgeous things. I wish I could sit and hold their hands. I hope they know that there is a country, a world beholding their anger, and that some of us call it holy.
When I read some of the headlines about the conflict in Gaza, so many days I think, “they really think we’re stupid.” Netanyahu, in particular, really thinks we all have rocks for brains. Or, more likely, he knows how many of us are searching for an excuse for our apathy, and we’ll accept even the barest pretense at seeking peace. But mothers are not stupid. We know about equivocations and excuses, and we’re not required to accept the foot-dragging and prevarications of powerful men any more than those of children. Nor, for the sake of our souls and our children’s souls, will we give in to apathy.
I have to admit that despair has been dogging me lately, and that I needed my own damn reminder from six months ago that time is our secret weapon. Freedom grows slowly before it grows fast. Empires swell and swagger before they crumble. New life is born out of dirt and darkness and pain. Maybe you need the reminder, too; so here.
My baby is ten weeks old today, and all cheeks. He is delicious and milky and can’t stop showing off how he learned to smile this month—he’ll stop in the middle of nursing, or crying, to smirk lopsidedly at us. To put him down in his bassinet, you have to place one hand on his chest while easing the other out from under his head. You have to hold it there, feeling his tiny heart beat fast, and wait until he settles back into his sleep, and slowly ease your hand away.
Then you have to wonder how many bombs rained down on sleeping ten-week-olds in Gaza last night.
For my whole third trimester I stayed in. Normally not a homebody, I would think of things I might like to do while I still had freedom and flexibility—and then I would not do them. I felt vulnerable and very, hormonally, animally, attached to my own cozy den. When I thought about motherhood, I also daydreamed of staying in. I no longer wanted to change the world. I wanted to keep my family safe, to bake cookies and cower inside.
Then Micah was born. He was so tiny and helpless, noisy and messy—perfect, and so beloved.
I’d been sliced open and rearranged and sent home to heal on 90-minute increments of sleep. I was more vulnerable than ever. I knew even deeper, in the bones of my forearms, so reluctant to put him down—no matter how gently—that this world is not safe for my baby. That there are systems that would swallow him, calculations that would count him a liability. There are people who wouldn’t even blink, if it were expedient to their purposes, to come in my house and hurt him there in his little bed and find some way to call it good.
But I was no longer afraid. I was—I am—I will forever be—enraged.
I’ve been deeply angry about injustice before. But sometimes, to be honest, my anger was really just impatience with the world and resentment at myself for being less than perfect. And rage, even righteous rage, can flare hot and bright and addict us to the false illusion of power.
This is not that. This is something deeper and truer, demanding and necessary. This is the anger of God.
I don’t know much about the anger of God. In my plush life wrapped in my oh-so-careful theology, the anger of God often seems an inconvenient—and abstract—idea. But I have also never doubted that God burns with fury at the pain of Her children.
Watching a war from beneath a sleeping newborn, I’ve never been more well and truly unable to participate in the kinds of heroics I used to regularly imagine I’d get up to in dire times. I have literally no time, literally no cognitive ability to spare in my sleep-deprived brain, and the way I calculate risk to myself is forever changed. I give money. I light candles and whisper prayers in the seconds before I fall asleep.
And in the same steady rhythm that I nurse the baby, change the baby, lay the baby down, I touch my rage like a talisman, like a torch burning beside the vast lake of tenderness that has also welled inside me.
It’s not a choice I make. It’s just something I do. Can this even be a good thing at all? Should I not find some bucket and try to douse the torch?
But some instinctive part of me knows that this, too, this making a little place for my mama anger to dwell, is somehow also doing something. Every time I wonder about the wisdom of this I hear the words again:
“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs. Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.”1
In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg’s brother Charles Wallace is everyone’s favorite. He’s kind and clever and wise. But those qualities can’t protect him from being trapped by It, the powerful brain whose totalitarian logic rules the dimension where he accidentally lands. Only Meg’s anger, unruly and unpopular, can protect them. Her anger tells her when something, no matter how seductive, is not right. Her anger drives her on when the way forward seems impossible. It says her anger does not belong, and It is right. Meg’s anger was never meant to belong. It was meant to rescue her brother, and to remake the world.
Sometimes when I nurse Micah, especially in the middle of the night when I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep, I read on my phone. But I don’t look at news of Gaza. There are some cognitive dissonances too harsh to be borne. There are times when holding two things at once could rend a ribcage. And I have to stay intact for my boy.
Women are capable of horrors and atrocities. I don’t want to know what I might allow in my name if anyone did indeed arrive here to hurt my baby, if they succeeded. I have to hope that the women around me, who tend to my humanity and my soul, would both allow me my grief and restrain my most world-destroying fantasies of revenge. I would beg them to hold me, and to hold me back.
Because I know that in the end, in the deepest-down place, this place where this torch burns and my soul tore open alongside my scar, the anger residing there would not call for revenge. It declares an even more stringent, another soul-tearing demand: No. More.
Cease. Fire.
Anger can destroy. But anger can also fuel our despairing hearts until the dawn, when we can remember how to hope. It can create, spurring us to the very action that makes hope where there was none.
I believe this is the kind of anger that burns within the God we so imperfectly reflect.
And in turn, I believe mothering rage is holy.
“Mother” is a verb, and that means there is a torch waiting to be lit within all of us. When we are exhausted by horror, it is right to tend to this torch, lighting the weary way back to our deepest reserves of compassion. When we don’t know what to do, it is good to heed its call: do something. When we’re afraid things are too complicated, motherly rage says we will take our time.
We will learn about the histories and systems that tie our fates to these children’s.
We will give and keep giving.
We will hold our representatives in government to account.
We will not forget come election time.
We will not be swayed by the what-abouts of powerful men.
We will not lose sight of each other, of the millions of us. It is time for true strength—the strength of mother-ers—to rule. We must fight for peacemaking to win out over warmongering. We will gather our courage and make a world aligned with the truth that empire can never give us the safety we long for: the safety of a mother’s embrace.
It will take a long time. But we are the 2-A.M-floor-walkers; we are the measurers of growth in millimeters on doorframes; we are the finders of lost retainers and the answerers of a thousand big and small questions a day. Patience and dedication are our weapons—the more powerful for their invisibility.
I can do so little from my small house on this broken sleep. But I do what I can, and I tend my torch—because someday, I’ll be able to do more. Because together we can do so much more, if we will only beat back the lie that we are too small, too tired, too alone.
It is, after all, war and the costs of war and the profits from war that in large part keep us this way. That claim we “can’t afford” to offer one another childcare, family leave, healthcare, the end of child poverty…but we can always afford another night of bombing.
Stay angry, my friend.
We are in the company of the divine.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
These words.
When there are no other words, these words.
Thank you.