Do I have to do it again tomorrow?
The election, Kindergarten, and lessons in endurance
When my sweet, yoda-esque nephew Dylan was five, he proudly trooped off to his first day of Kindergarten. He was friendly, cooperative, and disarmingly intelligent, emotionally and otherwise. He was the kind of kid who would give himself a time-out to go “tink about my feelings.” He was also unbelievably physical. If there was a tree, all you had to do was blink and Dylan would would be waving to you from the top branches. Once, when we passed a parked tour bus outside our neighborhood Korean restaurant (I was always scandalized by the idea of traveling to California from Korea and going straight to the nearest Korean joint, but you do you, Korean tourists), Dylan climbed into the open luggage compartment without anyone noticing, and then jumped out, scaring the daylights out of me.
After Dylan came home that first day of school, tossed off his oversized backpack and scarfed some string cheese, my sister asked how his day had been. It was okay, he said. It was done, wasn’t it? It felt like a triumph, though we all knew he was an excellent code-switcher and expected nothing less. But, after further explanation, Dylan realized, to his horror, that Kindergarten was more than a one-day affair. “You mean I have to go back tomorrow???!” he famously protested. “And then the next day, and the next day? Until I’m a grown-up???!”
I don’t think my sister, an educator herself, or most people, had ever thought about school like that, but he nailed it, as per usual. And he went back the next day, willingly, and became quite good at the slog, though to this day he would always rather be making benign mischief; mountain biking, playing good-natured pranks on his sister, or jumping off a cliff into the sea (true story, this is like, a weekly occurrence for teenagers in Santa Cruz).
Today is election day. But in some ways we have been living this day, dragging ourselves out of bed and pushing the same stupid stone up the same stupid mountain, for four years. Many have been trudging along every day of their lives, showing up for the joys of course, but also for the daily battering of poverty and institutionalized racism and corporate greed that has plagued this country since, well, day one. And of course, the last eight months has been its own kind of daily trial. Our very own Groundhog Day, but with bonus fuckeries added-on willy nilly, and no end in sight.
Whatever happens today, the slog is nowhere near over. That thing, where you win or lose, pop open some bubbly or cry into your pillow and wake up to a new day, punch Ned Ryerson in the face and break the spell, that thing is over. It was probably only ever a myth, anyway.
So what do we teach our children about endurance, either intentionally or through the frightful osmosis of our actions and behaviors to which they are so attuned? These days I often overhear my mother talking hope to my four-year-old. “But what if Biden doesn’t win?” he asks her.
Like Dylan, my son would rather be home, every day, doing whatever his thing is (at the moment it is pretending to be a “bright red baby Chewbacca” that I, Princess Leia, inadvertently took home when I purchased a bright red couch on which he was hiding, and decided to make my pet…kids are weird). But he is not my nephew, he is my son, and when he says he doesn’t want to go to school, something tugs at my heart, no matter how hollow it seems to have become.
I’m too afraid to be hopeful, and the pandemic has exhausted me of my parental performance of optimism. But there is something about fighting, about showing up, to be communicated here. Albert Camus, whose dismal plague has been cited often this past year, wrote that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." Happy feels like a strong word, and I am also tired of adding “or woman, or any kind of person” on to so many sentences.
But struggling towards the heights is something I can get down with. I don’t want my kids to accept a life of mortal punishment, but I do want them to return to the world, again and again, with their shoes tied and their pencils sharpened, and a little twinkle of mischief in their eyes. I want them to make plans, ambitious or teeny-tiny or just for laughs, to, as my wise virtual friend Garrett Bucks wrote this week “please oh please, go build something.” And the real drag about parenting is, we have to build something first. We’ll get out of bed tomorrow and keep going, every day, till our country grows up. And thank the goddess Katie Porter we have sweet little faces to wake us at 5am and remind us to do it, though please oh please, can I have one week off to sleep in a bath tub? And then, the building, I promise. :)
More??!
Garrett’s baller essay “A story of five election nights”
Parent reviews of Baby Shark, including one that says “Catchy! 2 stars”