The unmasked lead their gaggles of unmasked children into Target. They walk out pushing red plastic trolleys loaded with plastic bags full of food to sustain their bodies, clothing to cover their bodies, soaps to clean their bodies and homes, toys and gadgets to entertain the children. The goods go into the hatchbacks of their white Escalades, their white GMCs, all the vehicles swollen, white, gas-guzzling. The plastics are destined for the trash or Lake Erie.
My children stay home. I wear a mask as I push my trolley around the store. The unmasked glance at me, perhaps afraid I’m unvaccinated, or sure they know my political affiliation from the fact I’m wearing the mask. They’d be correct. I believe they’re not wearing masks because of what they’d called freedom, though you might more correctly define it as liberty or license. Freedom to do what you want. Freedom to do what you want even if it puts others’ lives at risk.
* * *
I work as a college professor, so I spend hours at a time talking in classrooms with students, and work closely with colleagues in our offices and at seminar tables. Faculty at many institutions feel concerned about in-person teaching because of the risk of infection. As the fall semester begins in September 2021, our institution mandates vaccination for all students, faculty, and staff, though there are no stated consequences for noncompliance. Students and faculty mask in the classroom; faculty and staff are to mask except when alone in our offices. To me these measures feel relatively safe, although one of my children isn’t yet old enough to be vaccinated, so remains at higher risk. In my office cluster there are also three other parents of children too young for vaccination, one mother herself immune-compromised, and a woman who cares for her frail elderly parents. Several academic programs share the office suite, and people from several more come through to use our copy machine and wash mugs in our sink.
A coworker who refuses to get vaccinated sits at a centrally located desk. She eats vegan, she says, and gets sunshine and exercise every day, so her immune system is strong; and God will choose who lives and who dies. She sits at her desk, does a good job, and is in all other respects a kind and thoughtful coworker, though she endangers the elderly parents, the four unvaccinated children, and the colleague down the hall who recently finished cancer treatment.
Meanwhile, the ongoing brute work of converting the campus’s massive antiquated heating system to geothermal continues. Shade trees down, trenches dug, temporary pedestrian bridges, detours, looming piles of infrastructural equipment, all of it looking like 1960s sci-fi. The campus expects to be carbon neutral by 2025. Such a huge, optimistic investment in a future I hope we all live to see.
* * *
My whole childhood I believed I had less than other people. I did have less than the girls at my school, with their semi-circular driveways and baby grands and horses, the high-mounded mulch around their trees. Yet in college, I learned that my family had more wealth than 96% of the families on earth. I was rich not with riding lessons but with reliable shelter, sufficient food, clean water, access to toilets. This stark, basic fact about the world had escaped me because I was a teenager, and no doubt also because of relative privilege. The parts of the world in which you had to walk a mile to use a toilet were too far for me to see. I felt chastened.
* * *
A short list of national events that have filled me with rage:
The assertion that Al Gore, the more qualified presidential candidate, would have fared better had he been more likable.
Hanging chads.
Our current inaction on the climate crisis, which follows in a direct line from those hanging chads.
Mitch McConnell blocking Merrick Garland’s appointment to the Supreme Court, then subsequently turning tail when his argument would apply to Amy Coney Barrett.
Walking around singing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Never Gonna Be President Now” when the pee-pee tape news broke, then watching that horrible predictometer on the New York Times website while people elected him President.
Who we had as President when Covid hit.
His selecting three Supreme Court Justices.
Dobbs vs. Jackson.
West Virginia vs. EPA.
Big oil, and how deeply it’s enmeshed with money and power.
On a smaller scale:
Being the last person admitted to my grad-school class, the only one not awarded a fellowship; being told this, it seemed, to keep me in my place.
Men looking at my breasts while conversing with me.
The implied threat when men on the street order me to smile.
An older colleague putting his hand on my leg under the dinner table. Having to ask an older woman colleague if she could make him stop, because I believed I’d be the one to suffer at that institution if, as a visitor, I filed a complaint against tenured faculty. Whatever she told him worked.
At a different institution, my department chair: “Well, don’t you look cute.”
When he had scheduled an all-faculty meeting during Kol Nidre, I told him I found this religiously insensitive. He replied, “I think I’ve been very sensitive. I scheduled it early enough that you should be able to get to your little dinner thing.”
* * *
The base state of motherhood is rage. Rage at the baby itself. Babies sucking and grabbing at and licking and biting my nipples all day and night, a sensation that makes me recoil and that now I could never escape, even in sleep. Then lack of sleep. Not for days, weeks, or months, but years—years still ongoing, even with my younger son in third grade. Years since I’ve slept through a night.
The breast pump. More sucking. Cleaning and storing, scrounging out time and space to use it from already-full days. Sharing my office with another person, who fortunately is kind and has raised three babies of her own. We still have to negotiate it. Rage at the way our culture devalues motherhood. How expensive daycare is. How easy it would be to quit my job and not pay for daycare, if only I didn’t want to work, if only I wanted to spend my time with babies. How much pressure there is to do Mommy-and-Me classes, and how, when I go, I have little in common with the other women beyond that all of us have babies. How you can’t send a child to daycare if he’s under the weather. Someone has to lose a day of work. How, if you’re nursing, it really has to be you. How once you are done nursing, your husband, being a man, has no workplace protections on the basis of parental status, so his boss threatens to fire him if he misses days caring for a sick child. Thenceforward, until years later when he gets a better job, my work and my time are more often compromised. My job and also my writing.
The school calls the mother first if it’s closing or the child has fallen ill and needs to be picked up or has a bloody nose or has wet his pants and needs someone to bring dry pants. The school assumes you’re at home, perhaps watching TV, or that if you have a job, it’s a secondary job, an extra job, because your husband has the real job. There’s no consideration for women who want to work, or have to work, who have the main jobs themselves, or for lesbian or non-binary parents or single moms, or families with no moms at all.
Rage, all the time. Ongoing incoherent rage at the child because you did not know when people said parenting was a tough job that this was what they meant, and more significantly rage because the whole system is stacked against you if you choose to work, which I do, and also choose to have children, which I did, and would do again. I would do it again. I love their questions, talents, and sense of humor. I’m grateful to be able to help them grow into thoughtful, resilient adults. They’re good people, interesting and fun. But I will be punished for wanting and having both. I will continue to feel my blood pressure in my throat each time I encounter the punishment.
* * *
The slow-building boredom-rage of spending a whole day following a toddler’s whims, walking down the street at the rate of one block an hour as he stops to examine each pebble, each leaf; making the lunch he requests and having him fling it across the room because it isn’t the lunch he thought he wanted. The slow-building boredom-rage of listening to a child talk about Pokémon, or of reading a Pokémon manual to him aloud, or of reading the first chapter of a third-rate book to him for the umpteenth time when he keeps falling asleep before you get farther. The book is terrible, but cannot be as terrible as rehearsing its first chapter again and again.
* * *
Other people’s judgment, if you love your work, if you would rather do it than spend all your time with your children; your rage against them. Your rage about other people’s concerns about your child’s gender presentation. Why his hair is long, why he prefers bright colors, why he wants to carry a small tote with his rocks and plastic animals in it, why his clothes don’t proclaim allegiance to corporate sports empires. Why you cloth-diaper when disposables are readily available. Why you still carry him in a baby carrier: “He’ll never learn to walk,” though the person with the opinion might very well be pushing, or have pushed, their own baby in a stroller. Stroller babies learn to walk fine, but carried babies are spoiled.
Each time this comes up—it happens day after day, week after week, year after year—I answer, I don’t think our ancestors had strollers when they crossed the land bridge from Asia, or when the Sea of Reeds parted and they escaped from Mitzrayim. They did carry babies in slings, though. This argument elicits puzzled stares, either about the invention of strollers, paleoanthropology, or Judaism, or about why I’d scoff at prevailing wisdom, shared only to help me. Stroller plastic will persist unchanged for a thousand years in landfills along with disposable diapers. Cloth diapers and baby wraps biodegrade. But people shrug. It’s a free country, the shrugs might say, though that has only ever been true for certain people. Rage against how so many in your society view your choices and the way you parent. One day, as I walk with Baby #2 in a wrap on my back, a black woman pulls her car over. “That’s the way to do it, mama,” she shouts. “That’s how we do it back home in Kenya! Good for you!” My eyes instantly sting with tears. I thank her, wave, want to prolong the encounter, but she pulls back into traffic on the busy street.
* * *
Where I grew up—Westfield, New Jersey—felt safe from the world’s disasters: earthquakes, tornados, tsunamis. I visited California for the first time as a teen, and felt an earthquake while sleeping one night. It wasn’t huge, magnitude five. Still, it scared me, made me wonder how anyone could choose to settle atop that kind of instability. Now most of the world is unstable. Towns like mine flood. People paddle down streets in canoes. They drown in their bloated cars. It happens to New Orleans, it happens to Mumbai, but when it happens to New Jersey, or to quaint hamlets in Germany—
* * *
Even if you start out healthy, middle class, white, with access to medical care in the developed world, pregnancy is fraught with peril. Pregnancy books describe all possible disasters, as if this is what they want you to do, worry about what can go wrong. If you start having babies in your late thirties, as I did, there is a whole lot of doom talk about “geriatric pregnancy” and “advanced maternal age.” You could have had children while in your reproductive prime if you hadn’t been so focused on your career. As with all things related to motherhood, it’s your fault.
My first pregnancy devolved into preeclampsia and six weeks of bed rest. Then an emergency C-section after a failed external version, an attempt to turn a breech baby. The ultrasound showed oligohydramnios—a precipitous loss of amniotic fluid—and the baby went into cardiac distress. For the duration of my second pregnancy, I had hyperemesis gravidarum, uncontrolled vomiting. Not morning sickness: This is vomiting day and night for the whole pregnancy, not being able to keep down a teaspoon of water; needing to go to the hospital to be rehydrated and pumped full of drugs, then vomiting again within an hour of getting home. I still went to work. On the day I gave birth to my second child, I was so malnourished I weighed 118 pounds, counting him still in there. That birth was traumatic too. I was permitted to V-BAC (have a vaginal birth after delivery), as many people are not because hospitals fear uterine rupture and lawsuits, but he got stuck and had to be suctioned out, via a botched episiotomy that took months and then years to heal.
These were good births with fortunate outcomes. After all that—a baby. At once so fragile and so fierce in its determination to live.
After birth, your energy diverts to mere survival, yours and the baby’s. You nurse the baby day and night. You nurse the baby through gas and hiccups and fevers and hand, foot, and mouth disease (not hoof, I still have to tell myself, not hoof-and-mouth) and impetigo and projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea, through learning to sit, crawl, walk, run, ride a scooter, ride a bike, climb, pet friendly dogs and avoid vicious ones, put 100,000 variously toxic and choke-on-able objects in his mouth. You take him to the doctor when he’s ill, to urgent care when he’s injured, to the ER when he’s injured and the urgent care is closed. Hours arguing with health insurance because this is America, where we pay the world’s highest rates for substandard care and then have to pay more thanks to for-profit insurers’ and hospitals’ inept billing.
And there is no value to this work, not to anyone else. There’s no break at work or in the schedule at which writers are supposed to produce books, very little sympathy from anyone around you unless they too are living through this period. A friend’s mother says, “No one cares about you after the baby comes out.” No one cares about you after the baby comes out. You work to keep a roof over your heads and because you love to work, love your work. You bathe and feed and dress, you mend clothes, you buy clothes, you sort through hand-me-downs, you play stacking games and recite the alphabet and sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “Good Night, Irene” until you wish you could jump in the river and drown, you read to at night, while doing all the work of your work. You make sure your children focus on their schoolwork. You help them when they’re struggling, you practice math with them in the car, you make sure they get enough sleep and drink water and eat a variety of foods, you give them a Jewish education at home (Shabbat, holidays, practicing Jewish values) and in synagogue and Hebrew school, you prepare them for college and for adult life (take these steps to address an empty toilet paper roll; this is how you fold and sort laundry; here’s why a pawn shop is less awesome than it sounds; be polite to older people), you hope they can get scholarships because your two full-time jobs can’t keep you all housed and fed and support two college tuitions. You do all of this. You keep them safe in all these ways. You’ve always known you can’t protect them from accidents, fatal illnesses. You know the polar ice caps are melting and coral reefs are dying and there’s a monstrous floating island of plastic trash in the Pacific. But the past eighteen months, you never imagined. All of these horrors have something in common, though, which is that countless people are at fault, while countless others have to pay the price.
* * *
May 2022: I dream about giving birth to a third child. The Labor & Delivery ward triages women in kennels. Each cage holds a laboring woman, sometimes along with a partner or a medical practitioner, sometimes with machines. I refuse to go into my kennel, and instead walk free in the corridors between them, screaming, leaking blood and fluids. At one point I vomit on the ward’s scale, and in the dream have the idea that I am making performance art.
* * *
In March 2020, the day the college announces its closure also happens to be Purim. I am wearing a Gryffindor uniform, including sweater and repp tie, when the Dean calls an emergency all-faculty meeting. That morning, it felt fun to Hermione myself, tie the tie. At the meeting, I feel embarrassed to be the only one in a costume, the person who didn’t understand the somberness of the day.
Public schools close outright, and you and your partner keep working full-time—teaching online, from home—while the children bounce off the walls of your small house. Your employer recognizes that during this time parents and other caretakers (like my colleague who cares for her parents) shoulder a huge burden, but takes no meaningful steps to lighten that load. It would be impossible, the institution states, for parents to receive a course reduction or temporarily to reduce office hours or committee responsibilities—parents can’t receive money to offset the cost of babysitting should babysitting ever again become possible—despite that these ordinary job responsibilities have become actually impossible if you have school-age-or-littler kids at home, who are now your responsibility every hour of every day and night, while the lives of the childless and those with grown children have in many cases increased in terms of stress and dread, but that’s all.
Until May 2020, the kids are loose in your house, tuning in for an hour a day of Zoom school, and otherwise bored and wild from so much unstructured time, while you and your husband have your computers at home and continue to teach your freaked out, dislocated students virtually. The children, like much of society, no longer want to get dressed, and now continuously wear pajamas. No one knows whether it’s safe for kids from different families to play together, so they don’t; they call wistfully over the fence to the kids next door. Your next-door neighbor, one parent of those children, is a brilliant artist with whom you typically converse about art-making, academia, and the news as well as about your children, but now you both feel your brains have atrophied. You leave perfume samples in each other’s mailboxes and then text about them—a small, sensory connection in an otherwise now completely disembodied world.
In June, the Center for Disease Control determines that outdoor playdates of kids whose families are in a pod together are low risk, so you pod up with the family next door. Now the kids can play, and you sometimes have an adult conversation outside. Then ensues a long summer of no camp and no babysitting. You can’t write, or plan your fall courses, because you entertain children all day. You can’t think a thought through to completion, because exactly like when they were babies and toddlers, they are interrupting you, asking for things, yanking on you, in your physical space all the time. Dust accrues, dishes, garbage, toilet smells. You can’t see your seventy-nine-year-old father because he’s too far away to pod with, too far away to drive to in a single day, and you don’t want to risk giving him the illness by stopping at a hotel or a restaurant, stopping for gas.
When the kids go back to school in September 2020, it’s online. The best part: seventh-grader, in band each morning at 8:10, blowing his trombone in his office, which was formerly your office. He’s good at the trombone, the sound is crisp and clear, if extremely loud. If you walk the dog early in the morning, you can hear it a block away, with the windows closed. Neighbors claim it doesn’t bother them. Worst parts: seventh- and second-graders, bored out of their minds all day, finagling ways to play bootleg versions of Minecraft on their school computers and asking for snack after snack after snack. Ten snacks a day, fifteen. Increasing pickiness about snacks; diminishing willingness to accept fruits or nuts as snacks. Teaching full-time while managing this, while each kid has Zoom school at top volume in a different room, so sonically, you bounce all day from a seventh-grade Zoom hellscape to a second-grade one. Sometimes you’re in both at once. All that noise, their loud voices warping the sound from the laptop speakers. When you look over your younger son’s shoulder, you see all the seven-year-olds wiggling in their boxes like some kind of deranged aquarium. It makes you seasick. The children like school but hate online school, complain about it and bicker all day. You try patiently to refute their arguments while also working full time, feeding them every meal and a hundred snacks, keeping abreast of the filthy disaster your house has become with four people living in it ceaselessly and without respite for months on end. You do this for an entire school year in which they fail tests and, in the older child’s case, whole classes, yet somehow manage to progress to their next grades. You adults, and later the older child, manage to get vaccinated.
In the summer of 2021 there’s camp, though it has to be 100% outdoors because the plague still prevails. No camp when it rains, which is often in Northeast Ohio. In most summers you could absorb the days off by giving up your own writing, but now you’re both teaching full-time because the pandemic has reshaped the college’s academic year.
Then straight from the teaching summer into the teaching fall, when you’ve had no time to prepare and no break from teaching or parenting or really from anything—and still not even a single full-night’s uninterrupted sleep—in eighteen straight months.
All of this happens fundamentally because global climate change displaces animals from their habitats and brings them into contact with new environments and species. Novel viruses like H1N1 and SARS-COV-2 introduce themselves into human populations. And human populations have different ideas about science, about the spread of disease, about societal responsibility. More aggressive public health measures in March 2020 could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, put children back in school, lessened all manner of suffering. So yes, you are boiling over with rage.
* * *
Hundreds of thousands of people are dead, and still many refuse to mask. It curtails their freedom. They don’t claim it curtails their freedom to need a driver’s license, or to pay taxes to resurface local roads. They won’t get vaccinated because they live in a world in which scientists lie, have ulterior motives, want to make people infertile, magnetic; want to commit genocide. (Sometimes, as the Shoah teaches us, scientists do work in the service of genocide; but thus far vaccines seem to improve public health rather than murder people.)
Ohio driver’s licenses expire on your birthday, so in September 2021 I go to the BMV to get mine renewed. BMV is what people call the DMV here in Ohio, where people are either humorless or mature enough not to laugh about the first two letters being BM. Aside from one employee, I am the only person wearing a mask. White people in their 20s, white people in their 80s. Polite, waiting calmly in line, filling out forms and answering required questions, not talking loudly on their phones or complaining or sniping at the workers’ speed as folks tend to do back in New Jersey; all seemingly certain that this public health disaster that we’re in the midst of is behind us. Maybe none of them have unvaccinated children at home, or vaccinated elderly parents they want to spare from breakthrough infections, or neighbors with weak immune systems. I focus on other people when the mask is uncomfortable; I remind myself why it’s important to wear it. Not that I want to catch this disease, either. A mild case still sounds terrible, and my mother died of a freak respiratory illness at exactly my age. This can happen to anyone, and in my heart I irrationally believe it will happen to me. If anything happens to my unvaccinated son, I’ll blame myself forever. Do these mild-mannered white people have anyone about whom they feel the same way? Do they also consider it an expression of their freedom to buy a car as big as they want, to generate as much trash as they please, to water their lawn to verdant greenness, to play golf on a golf course that uses up a whole neighborhood’s worth of water?
Controlling the virus and reversing climate change both mean recalibrating what’s necessary. We don’t need to have complete freedom of choice about what cars we drive, but we do need to stop extracting fossil fuels. All of us need to mask to ensure freedom of movement for people with more fragile immune systems. But that’s an assault on freedom, say the gentle, maskless faces of the people in the BMV, even though what they mean is that it curbs their license to do as they please—that license itself a fiction, a societal dream, a historical anomaly no one but an oligarch would ever have considered their due before now.
* * *
Americans discount global climate change because until recently, the consequences happened far away. Perhaps it’s as difficult to imagine the scale of the loss when much of Southeast Asia is leveled by a tsunami as for some non-Jews to believe 6,000,000 of us were murdered in the Shoah. Where is the evidence? Who knew them? (We did. We were them, they were our families.)
Now climate disaster creeps closer. California wildfires, New York and New Jersey and Western Europe leveled by floods. Lots of people discount the Midwest—one colleague disparages those “who consider it a mortal wound to live in a fly-over state”—but right now, Northeast Ohio is a pretty safe bet, when you think about sea-level rise. It seems—as did my childhood home—like a place where that could never happen.
* * *
I wish I thought our geographical location meant our children were safe. In the short term, they likely won’t become climate refugees, though we’ve been joking for years that as adults, they’ll be foraging in the jungles of Canada. Also, it’s not a joke. Also, we’re Jews, so we keep our passports and cash handy in case we need to cross the border. If we and our children don’t have to flee pogroms or climate disaster, does that mean we’ll be taking in refugees, or, God forbid, turning them away? Is it possible more will come than we can take? Do we need to start harvesting acorns? Planting hazelnuts and pawpaw? Growing potatoes where now our children run with the dog in the grass?
* * *
Am I paranoid? So many times, non-Jewish, non-female friends have asked if I was blowing things out of proportion when I experienced anti-Semitism and misogyny. The doctor I’ve stopped seeing prescribes my husband sleeping pills to help him cope with our younger son’s constant assault on our sleep. She refuses to offer any to me. “Obviously your son needs you; it would be dangerous to take anything.” And when I express concern about sudden weight gain: “Have you heard of exercise? Exercise is widely believed to help people lose weight.” A woman doctor practices this way in the twenty-first century? Your department chair really said that about Yom Kippur? Are you sure you’re not exaggerating? Yes.
* * *
“School mask mandates violate my parental freedoms,” but your unmasked child violates the social contract.
* * *
As the children grow, my rage toward them wanes. They still overtouch but don’t use me, as a friend recently said of her toddler, as their “personal jungle gym.” They eat a wider variety of foods, throw fewer tantrums, begin employing reason more often than a loud, crazed simulacrum of reason. (“Don’t be a Trumpy,” the little one says to the big one about his bombast, and I think, oh God, is that where they learned how to bluster and storm?) The rage doesn’t disappear. It remains the base state. But it diverts. There are more worthy targets.
* * *
A paranoid delusion typically harms only the paranoid. Unless he’s a young, white, American man. He can stockpile military-grade weapons and go shoot up a school, a synagogue, a mosque, a Hindu temple, a black church, a supermarket, a massage parlor, a movie theater, an Independence Day parade. He can murder children, women, grandparents, immigrants, black people, anyone whose religious beliefs differ from his own—any kind of person he feels has wronged him. In which case there’s nothing we can do as a society due to the Second Amendment, say the originalists. Assault weapons are nothing the Founding Fathers could have imagined. In 1791, when they ratified the Amendment, rifles weren’t even in common use; a musket ball often missed its target, and the weapon took a minute to load. And the Amendment clearly describes a “well regulated Militia,” emphasis on the “well regulated,” and does not describe proto-military loner wingnuts.
Shortly after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, I got pregnant with my second child, and could envision another horrible possible end for both my children. Ten years later, when a similar massacre takes place in Uvalde, TX, our government is still wringing its hands. There is nothing well-regulated about murdering children. Our society condones paranoias that kill people, such as guns and resistance to vaccines. Everything else is paranoia paranoia. This despite the fact that so many of us believe climate scientists and epidemiologists and common sense, that we get ourselves and our eligible children vaccinated, that we want to keep weapons designed only to kill and maim people out of the hands of everyday civilians, that we want our world to make it.
* * *
If you can afford it, you can buy a plug-in electric or hybrid car, bike or walk to work. You can shut off every light in your house when not using it, install low-energy bulbs, turn down the thermostat at night, teach your children not to flush the toilet every time they pee, though if you do this, you may regret it. You can shop at your local store instead of online. You can buy local, organic produce—again, if you can afford it—or grow it if you have a plot of land and time and expertise or a willingness to learn. You can forage. You can leave chemicals off your lawn and harvest the dandelion greens. You can feed your kids a diet of actual, recognizable foods, if you don’t live in a food desert and have time to prepare meals. This is a lot of ifs, mostly class-based. And these measures make little difference without systemic change, which again and again, in way after way, those white people in line at the BMV show us holds no interest.
* * *
When I was dating, it seemed like someone was always breaking up with me, giving up instead of trying to fix something. Maybe this was inevitable, because the few times I broke up with men, they hounded and cajoled. One came so unhinged that my landlady and I had the locks on the house changed. If there was a problem, men would say, “This isn’t working, it’s over,” rather than working through it. With every breakup, I felt hurt that the person who says no always seems to win. Optimists and the willing get left behind.
* * *
Some of us are not only willing to make change but recognize it as the only route to survival. For most it’s too much trouble, too freedom-curtailing. Liberty, license. But I don’t see how they can break up with the rest of humanity. They’re stuck with us as surely as we’re stuck with them.
* * *
My neighbor—the brilliant artist with whom I trade perfumes—is working with NASA to design a spaceship expected to launch to Proxima B in 2069. I’ll be a hundred years old; more likely dead. I wish I could see the spaceship; wish I could be here if our species ever meets one from another planet. My sons have, God willing, a good chance of living to see that spaceship blast off toward that unimaginable distance, if civilization holds. They’ll be two of the billions of people carrying civilization forward. They like science, they’re adept at math, they read voraciously, they believe in the Jewish values of tzedakah v’chesed, charity and lovingkindness. I hope this means they’re equipped to learn what they’ll need to adapt and invent. Maybe the future needs someone who can blow a trombone.
* * *
In the news: Vaccinated people, who trust science, line up for booster shots when eligible. Vaccine skeptics say the booster represents clear evidence the vaccines don’t work. Our unvaccinated coworker’s opinion doesn’t change no matter what information we share with her. Her pastor told her mRNA vaccines kill laboratory animals. He cites a source for this news; by my standards it’s not a credible source, but she holds her own opinion. She feels that in the same way she respects our choices even when she disagrees with them (for example on the subject of childrearing), we should respect hers.
The difference, I try to explain, is that what goes on in a colleague’s apparently peaceful home in no way affects her, while her ignoring a public health directive can kill her or any of us. She tells me that we are not always as open-minded as we claim to be; and I know there are senses in which she’s right. Our institution’s head of pandemic protocols says we must respect her views. Why, I ask, when they’re unfounded? We don’t have to respect the views, she amends, we have to respect her right to hold them. We have to respect her. And we do. Our respect for her is one of the many reasons we want to keep her safe. The institution has, however, taken no action against those who violate its vaccine mandate. If it isn’t enforced, it’s not a mandate. People who don’t want to protect themselves, their coworkers, and their coworkers’ families from a scourge of an illness are allowed to say no, to break up with the social contract. This does not all fit under the heading of respect.
* * *
Another academic year ends, and thus far all of us in this office, and those we care for, have made it through. Shehechiyanu, says the Jewish prayer for when something memorable and new occurs, or when the year cycles around to a holiday or observance: “Thank you for keeping us alive, sustaining us, and allowing us to reach this season.”
One colleague caught the virus, still feels unwell months later. A friend who recently recovered suffered a pulmonary embolism—a common outcome for Covid survivors on birth control. We all wear masks in the office and the classroom, as well as in Target and at the library and the post office. The children in this office pod who were too young to be vaccinated at the start of the school year are vaccinated now. Our colleague’s elderly parents remain alive, if frailer.
Shehechiyanu. Thank you for letting us continue our work for as long as we can do that, as long as we can live given this pandemic, given the increasing velocity of climate change, given our overall lack of respect for each other and this planet.
* * *
The rage I have felt about every instance of misogyny, anti-Semitism, unfairness—my own, out in the world—dims in comparison to this rage, which burns white hot day and night. People can’t be allowed to say no to their fellow humans, or to the future itself, without immediate consequences. The long-term consequences are coming for us all. Maybe mother-rage will drive change, or maybe it will do what I suspect it has always done, immolate women, burn us up from the inside. I can’t square this with my own desire to work, live, make art, rest, be a person in this world, and raise my children as part of that. If I cast my mind forward into the future I won’t live to see, I can at least imagine the spaceship, my kids and my neighbor’s kids watching it launch, remembering their mothers as they do their small part of tikkun olam, repairing the world.
