I have not written or posted anything in over a year. Life got in the way. We sold one house, bought another half the size, and moved. One son graduated from college and moved out of the house. The other went to study abroad in Germany. We cared for and then lost a beloved parent. My husband accepted early retirement from his government job after 24 years, and we had to navigate that transition. All of this has been going on while we’ve monitored the news, observed immigration agents sending undocumented workers to detainment camps in the Everglades or deporting them to unspecified locations, watched our military troops unleash tear gas on our own citizens, and witnessed our government exploding ships in the Caribbean and posturing about seizing property and resources belonging to other nations. It’s been a lot, and I’ve felt overwhelmed and underprepared while trying to remain hopeful. I know I am not alone.

I won’t lie. We live in a bubble I cannot ignore. I have not experienced firsthand any anti-immigration activity in our city, although it has occurred. While others have had their families, communities, and lives upended, I have had the luxury of being able to continue on, suffering more from cognitive dissonance than from honest-to-god fear for my life or the lives of my family. I feel guilty about it, as I believe I should, because I recognize the privilege inherent in my freedom to dissociate right now. I know my birthright as a fourth generation, white person of Christian descent, augmented by our favorable financial situation, keeps me relatively safe, at least for the present moment. I’m also aware that if they come for others, I might be next.

I’m a liberal-arts educated woman with a healthy amount of empathy who follows the news, reported both within and outside our borders, so I haven’t escaped unscathed. Yesterday’s video of Renee Good being gunned down, presumably for not stopping her car when the masked agents shouted at her, yanked me from my place of security. I’ve known for months that eventually someone not a target of a specific immigration raid would lose their life either defending a neighbor or protesting because they felt they still had a protected first amendment right to do so, but knowing that didn’t make the murder easier to witness. I sat on the floor and wept hard enough that our dogs approached to comfort me. I’ve been paying attention. I’ve had my mental state chipped away at since the new administration took office last January. I’ve watched the videos of parents being ripped from their sobbing children. I’ve read about families who have had members disappear completely. I’m well aware federal agents have arrested and detained US citizens for days. Sometimes it takes everything I have to not stay in bed all day crying in futility. While some Canadians, Europeans, and Australians take to social media to berate those of us who understand what is going on and yet feel powerless to do anything about it (be it from fear, exhaustion, emotional overwhelm, finances, jobs, children, illness, caring for aging relatives, whatever), we’re all doing our best here trying to figure out what, if anything, we can do. You want us to march? We have, just to have videos we’ve taken of large protests scrubbed from social media and ignored by our now state-friendly press. You want us to show up and spur our elected officials to action? We’ve tried. They’re too afraid to show up to speak to us, much less to speak out against the current administration. We’re watching our country become 1930s Germany and we’re heartbroken and terrified. You may be too young to remember it, but I bet your grandparents or great grandparents felt paralyzed when Hitler showed up to abduct their neighbors and coworkers. I suspect you might not be here today if your ancestors had stood in the street and attempted to stop the S.S. from branding their neighbors like livestock and shoving them into railcars headed towards incinerators.

I don’t know why I am writing any of this. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to be harangued by those who think I need to be doing more when it’s a struggle merely to keep from becoming a functioning alcoholic in this reality. How do you watch a woman get murdered on her street in front of her spouse and then act like it’s any normal day and figure out what to fix for dinner? I have no idea how to navigate the situation we are in because I’ve never been in this situation before. We all like to think we would have stood up and fought for our marginalized neighbors in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but history demonstrates that self preservation usually wins out. We are wired to survive.

So, with the memory of little me standing in class reciting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance etched on my heart, I acknowledge I didn’t want to and couldn’t see our downfall coming. You can’t protect yourself from a thing you never imagined could happen. It’s a battle to feel free and brave here right now. I’m just one in 340 million, but I’m sorry I didn’t try harder and do better.

“Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.” ~Lady Bird Johnson

Mother’s Day is upon us. It’s a mixed bag for me because of how I was parented, but one thing makes my Mother’s Day perfect every year. It’s my sons. I don’t care what happens in my life going forward, my sons made my life better. Actually, they made my life. Period. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t give thanks for what their presence on this earth did for me as a person. I’m who I am because of them.

I have known for a couple months now that the due date for the senior dedication page in my son’s high school yearbook was November 19th, but I guess I wasn’t ready to write it yet. I mean, how can this kid be 18, nearing the halfway point of his senior year, and awaiting college acceptance notices? I swear just yesterday it was his second birthday and, rather than blowing out his birthday candle, the wise child chose instead to put his mouth on the cake and take a bite before anyone else could get to it. He’s always been a forward thinker, a planner, and a negotiator. Soon, he will be putting those skills to good use in navigating his own life without the parental training wheels. I’ve known it was coming. I was just busy swimming up a river in Egypt.

I asked Luke for his advice as to how I should approach this task, and his advice was to be lighthearted and funny. So here, then, are some lighthearted and funny things I could address in his yearbook:

Luke has always been a climber. He climbed out of his crib, he climbed onto counters to get cupcakes, he climbed onto the kitchen table so he could sit there for a better view of the television while he ate.

Luke has always liked to run the show. When other kids were racing their bicycles, Luke decided that rather than race too he would be the judge at the finish line.

Luke has always been an unapologetic fashion maverick. I once found him wearing the neighbor’s turkey decoy as a hat.

Luke has always been fiscally aware. When asked who his favorite Star Wars character is, he answered, “Han Solo because he’s just in it for the money.”

Luke has always had epic confidence. He once asked me, “Am I really good at art or am I awesome at it?”

Luke has always been on the right side of things. I once saw him with a toy bat and a blindfold and heard him say to his brother, “Hold still, Joe. You’re a pinata.”

Luke has always been mature for his age. When he was 7, he told me, “I’m ready to grow up. I want to get a wife, have some kids, just get on with my life.”

Luke has always understood women. He once told his brother, “That’s how you get the girl, Joe. You do what she wants.”

Luke has always set lofty goals. “I think I’ll learn the Australian accent.”

Luke has always been protective of his older brother. Once when Joe was showering in our bathroom before school, a two year old Luke ran in and started hitting me and said, “He’s my favorite brother. Get him OUT!”

Luke has always sought creative solutions. He once took his brother’s stuffed mouse, tied it to a stick, stuck the stick in upright clothespins, and then drew a fire pit and placed it beneath the mouse, and “roasted” the mouse on a spit.

Luke has always been a negotiator. I once offered him a dollar to try a new food. He countered with six dollars. I told him a dollar was my offer. His response was, “Okay. Okay. One dollar, plus five.”

Luke has always had a prodigious vocabulary. Once in the car when he was 11, he called me out for changing subjects telling me that was a “total non sequitur.”

Luke has always been great help around the house. He started changing toilet paper rolls at age 7.

Okay. Okay. I’ll get out of DeNile now, dry off, and write the damn yearbook dedication.

One of the most frustrating aspects of my life at home is grocery shopping. The three members of my family, lucky souls, have zero food restrictions, whereas there are currently 39 food items/ingredients I need to avoid to feel well. I am chief in charge of buying food for our home so no one has to try to keep up on what I can and cannot consume. I try to anticipate what grocery items my family needs but, because there are so many items they can eat that I can’t and because they don’t always remember to tell me what they have run out of, I make no less than four trips to a grocery store each week.

This morning, Thing 2 awoke, wandered into the kitchen, and starting rifling through the fridge in search of food. There were plenty of breakfast items, from cereal to eggs to pancake fixings to hash browns and even pumpkin bread I made from scratch a couple days ago, but he came up empty for ideas.

Thing 2: I don’t know what to eat.

Me: Well, there’s….

Hubby: (immediately seeing an opportunity, cuts me off) We could go get breakfast burritos.

Thing 2: I’d be down for that.

Me: (finally continuing) There’s all sorts of food here to eat.

Thing 2: Breakfast burritos sound good.

Hubby: Let me finish making this coffee and we can go.

Thing 2 runs off to put on clothes for the outing to Tamale Kitchen for breakfast. I sit there wondering if I have become invisible or was somehow muted accidentally.

Me: We have plenty of food here. We don’t always have to go out to eat when someone is hungry.

Hubby: But….breakfast burritos.

Me: You have a problem.

Hubby: I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s a solution, actually.

I shook my head as Thing 2 returned to the kitchen fully clothed. He and hubby disappeared out the door to the garage.

Hubby picked up take out last night. The night before that we grabbed burgers after our son’s cross-country meet. Meanwhile, the food in our fridge is slowly staging a revolt and becoming revolting because we are ignoring it. I try to save us money by purchasing food we can prepare, but after twenty-eight years with my husband I should know better. The siren’s song of food trucks and take out menus and In ‘n Out and Chipotle is deafening. I am no match for it.

In light of this, I’ve decided the solution to my problem is to buy groceries for myself and let everyone else fend for themselves and go out to eat. Fewer dishes for me to wash, less food thrown out, no complaining about what I prepare, no danger of me feeling sick because I ingested foods from a food truck or restaurant with ingredients I should have avoided, and every meal time will be peaceful because I will be alone while my family is out. Ultimately, we might even save on food costs because I won’t be tossing food in the trash because it went bad while we were eating out, and I won’t be frustrated because all my efforts around meal planning and food purchasing are for naught.

Damn. I really wish I had thought of this sooner.