The Reflecting Pool is Perfect
Sometimes you write a thing in your head for a week before you start writing it with your fingertips, especially if the subject is one that hurts. Or maybe I should say sometimes I do. Kind of like my mind has been hiding the topic from me, the main one, so I could play with the outer edges before I realized what the center was.
That’s about all the warning I can give you, but it’s more warning than we get in life. It’s something, right? An opportunity to strap in or walk away.
My mother’s birthday is coming up, June 26th, and I always feel a gravitational pull this time of year. I miss my mother like I breathe. The ache is familiar now, I notice it the same way I notice my freckles; I don’t notice it much at all except when I do. What surprises me is the tears, and how they’re right underneath the surface all the time. How I can think of her, and already, the screen is blurry. How I’d give just about anything for one more conversation — one where she still has her voice and her laugh.
If you didn’t know me, you might read this and imagine my relationship with my mother must have been the kind you encounter sometimes. Those mothers and daughters who have their own language, an understanding, a knowingness. I have it with my own daughter now, which also makes tears spring to my eyes. I guess it must be the knowledge that unconditional love exists in the space between you and another person. I’d observed that kind of mother-daughter bond a few times when I was very young, watching my friends with their moms. It hurt to be around, though I tried never to show it. I was happy for my friends who had that. I knew it must be my fault that I didn’t.
My mother chose Chardonnay, and sometimes other drinks, even after I made it clear she was causing me pain in every way imaginable. Deep down I thought I must not be that great if I couldn’t win out over alcohol, but I had some understanding that she was in the mix, too. She had her own choices to make.
At fourteen, after dealing with the volatility for years, you start to ask yourself questions. What could I have done at seven years old to deserve that kind of wrath, though? You start to have thoughts like, No kid deserves to be terrorized and hurt by the person they love more than anything.
By sixteen, you’re as tall as your mother, and one night when she’s in a drunken rage, coming at you for the millionth time, you say, “If you hit me again, I’m going to hit you back.” You are all fury, and shaking voice — and also, pure, broken heart. You surprise yourself, and by the looks of it, you surprise your mother, too. That’s the last time she raises her hand to you.
We did not have the kind of relationship that other girls and women envy, and now maybe you think it was awful, but that wouldn’t be accurate, either. It was painful. I loved her wholeheartedly, and she was the kind of person it hurts to love. She loved me in that way where I was supposed to tolerate everything and anything from her, but if you crossed me, she’d get in the line of fire like you crossed her. Only she could go for my jugular. If I could have trusted her, that might have come in handy, but I learned early not to make myself vulnerable. It was only a matter of time before she’d betray my confidence in some slurred and devastating way.
She had a lot of shocking loss in her life, and her response was to try to control everything to avoid being hurt. You might have noticed you can’t control anything except your response to whatever happens, and I’m sure she noticed that, too. Every time someone let her down, or things didn’t go according to her plans, she got furious, and every night at about 5pm, she opened a bottle of Chardonnay, and then another. Sometimes one more after that. She’d start earlier, if circumstances allowed. “It’s 5 o’clock, somewhere!” she’d say on those days, and I’d feel everything in my body contract.
My mother was never wrong about anything. She’d never apologize the next day, I would. I’d write her letters saying I was sorry for not being a better child, I’d try harder, she deserved a good daughter. I would try not to be so thoughtless or stupid or lazy. I wrote these letters when I was so little. I’d blocked it out, but she saved the letters, and I found them when I was packing up her apartment in March. It all came flooding back.
If I went to her friends asking them to get her some help, they’d tell me she wasn’t an alcoholic, she was a “social drinker” and I was “overly sensitive” and “dramatic”, words my mother called me. She also called me Little Sarah Bernhardt, then she’d roll her eyes and her friends would laugh. They weren’t there in the apartment late at night, though, they didn’t know what was happening, and I surely didn’t tell them the awful parts. My mother taught me, “We don’t air our dirty laundry.” I would never have betrayed her.
Everyone knew my mother was an alcoholic. Anyone with eyes could see, but no one who wanted to stay in her good graces would say it out loud. My mother could be incredible. She could be kind. There was always a room in our house for a friend in need. She was charismatic and very smart. She could also be terrifying. No one wanted to be banished from the Queendom. I was what you call collateral damage.
There are so many people who can never admit they’re wrong. They’d sooner not have you in their life. I don’t understand it, I think you’d have to live inside that frame of mind to fathom it, but I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of those ultimatums. “Accept my version of reality, or we’re done.” Pretend I’m not an alcoholic, or this isn’t going to work. Deal with what I did or said, don’t make me own it, or we can’t move forward. Those are my boundaries, we aren’t going to deal with yours.
That is not a fulfilling way to be in a relationship. Everyone is wrong sometimes, everyone makes a mess of things once in a while. Acknowledging that is nothing more than acknowledging you’re human. Refusing to admit and assert it is a huge red flag. For anyone who grew up with parents or caregivers who made demands like these — for anyone who has ever been married to someone like this, has a sibling like this, or a close friend — living in our current reality in the states is taxing on the nervous system.
We’re surrounded by people who operate this way every day, and one beastly child-man who does real and actual harm to so many truly good human beings, and refuses to be accountable for anything. He does this because he is broken inside. Malfunctioning.
I’ve already done so much work on clear communication and learning to identify what I can control (my response to what is happening), versus what I cannot control (everything else), I do not wish to give a petulant, stunted, petty little man the ability to exhaust me, enrage me, or ruin my day. It becomes challenging when that man is the president, and I happen to care about human rights and women’s rights and girls’ rights and children everywhere and BIPOC and the LGBTQ community and the planet and the Constitution and I dunno. Decency and ethics and not living with the constant fear that we’re going to end up hurtling through space because he’s just going to become more and more unhinged and no one who could, will stop him.
So, I try to find the balance each day. I want to be informed, but I do not want to be flooded by his zone of ever-constant cruelty. I do want to be able to help my neighbors, extend a hand, support people doing good work on the ground, and not give up. Giving up is not an option.
In normal times, such a man would never be president, but alas, but alas.
One of the things that helps me float are facts. They’re like little life rafts that keep me tethered, and calm my weary heart in the midst of a sea of gaslighting. I grew up this way, and maybe you relate. Experiencing a painful reality, and then having people tell you what you saw, heard and felt is not what happened. Accept my version of reality, or love will be withdrawn. You’ll find yourself banished, in the storm, alone. I can no longer accept a false version of reality from or for anyone. If that’s the price of admission, I’d rather grab my oars.
So here are a few things I think we all need to understand, since we won’t get the truth from a man who can’t admit he made an unfathomable mess of things. We won’t get the truth from the people around him, either. And then I want to share some collateral damage — not because I want to break your heart for the sake of it — but because I want to leave you with a heart broken open. It’s a good way to be.
The Memo of Understanding the president signed at the G7 yesterday is really, really good. For Iran. There are 14 points in the memo, but here are the 5 main takeaways for me.
In a nutshell the MOU agrees:
The U.S., Iran and their allies will stop military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, and agree not to fight with one another anymore, or even threaten the use of force. Israel has already said it will not be bound by any agreement between the U.S. and Iran, however. So…right off that bat, this deal does not seem to be dealing.
The U.S. will lift all sanctions against Iran, and lift the blockade of Iranian ports. This will give Iran shiny new access to world trade, a thing all previous administrations since Carter have prevented. That way they could exert pressure over the Iranian regime if and when necessary. Guess that’s over. Also, Iran can immediately begin selling oil on the world market.
Iran will give it “the old college try” for the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz — with no charge for 60 days! After that? Who’s to say, really? Not the United States, that’s for sure! “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and Maritime Services Administrator Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz” — which… sounds like fees. In the Strait that used to be free and open. Awesome.
The U.S. will thaw frozen Iranian assets immediately and “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran to fix all the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. The U.S. will grant all “required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions” — so it seems like Iran is back! Fully participating in world financial markets. We are really getting owned here. Y’all, one thing I can say. The midterms? LOL. This deal sucks so badly. I don’t think I have ever seen a deal suck as badly as this deal sucks. Yet somehow his supporters think he’s a good businessman. Will this change their minds? Nah.
Iran reaffirms it won’t develop or procure a nuclear weapon. Just like they affirmed to President Barack Obama in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action he negotiated. Except in President Barack Obama’s very good deal that did not cost the lives of 150 Iranian schoolgirls, civilians, 13 of our service members, $300 billion dollars to pay for the destruction we caused and $113 billion at home and counting, plus wreaking havoc on the world’s economies — the new MOU doesn’t contain any language about a method by which we check to make sure they aren’t developing or procuring a nuclear weapon. So…honor system, I guess? Well, actually, the president said if Iran “doesn’t behave” we’ll, “just go back to bombing them right in the middle of their head” — which sounds very presidential and will probably do it. Oh, and he called President Barack Obama a “stupid sonofabitch” a bunch of times, bwahahahahaha.
There is going to be an insane Iranian LEGO video with a banger soundtrack any minute. I’d be laughing harder, but I live here and in all reality this is heartbreaking and all so unnecessary. This is our country, and at some point soon, we are going to have to clean up the huge mess this man is leaving in his wake.
I grew up believing in the three branches of government, believing in the checks and balances, and believing in the Constitution. I never thought we were who we said we were, and I can’t tell you exactly why, though I have thoughts. Maybe it was because my dad and stepmom let me watch Roots when it aired in 1977, all eight nights of it, and didn’t decide it was “too upsetting” for a six-year-old when I sobbed my heart out. Maybe it’s because my stepmom was handing me books from the time I was little, and she didn’t worry about age-appropriateness. I read Watership Down in third grade, and I only remember that because my third grade teacher told me it wasn’t a book for eight-year-olds. I read it at home after that. I read The Color Purple when I was ten.
I’d read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Jazz, Playing in the Dark, and just about everything Toni Morrison had written by the time I graduated college, not because they were assigned, but because I loved her writing. I still do.
Whatever the reasons, and I’m sure the reasons are books and authors like Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Bell Hooks to name a few (exceptionally great time to buy Communion, linked here, if you haven’t), I’ve never been confused that we had a lot of work to do as a country if we ever wanted to be the country we said we were. I simply thought we were on a trajectory that was moving in the right direction, but at a snail’s pace. I believed in our checks and balances. I believed in the Supreme Court.
I thought most people were basically good, and given the chance, they’d help a person in need if they were bleeding in front of them. I’m less sure of everything than I used to be, which might be a sign of getting older, but also might be a sign of the times.
If there’s one thing this grifting president and his administration of grifters have done really well — and there is — it’s that they’ve exposed the cracks in our foundation. The cracks are where a now-trillionaire slipped into the Treasury with 6 kids and their flash drives. The cracks are where those kids sat when they ran code that canceled countless programs, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people died, and continue to die. The cracks are where senators forget the oaths they took and look at their stock portfolios instead. It’s where they say, “Thoughts and prayers” when children die, and die, and die, and keep on dying.
Too many people have been left on the fringes, and those are the areas we need to mend most desperately. That’s where people are bleeding. If you don’t care, there are cracks in your foundation, too. It’s probably not your fault. Maybe it’s something you were taught, maybe it’s fear and it feels safer to be furious, like you’re less vulnerable that way, but you aren’t. We’re all vulnerable, it’s built into the experience of being human. You can be angry and hardened and you’ll still be vulnerable, or you can be kind. That’s the choice you get.
I’m going to tell you something unspeakably sad now.
In Senatobia, Mississippi on Sunday, police responded to a call at a Walmart about possible shoplifting. The item in question was a box of diapers. The alleged shoplifter was a Black woman. She was with another young Black woman who was holding her baby. There is cellphone footage from a witness in the parking lot that shows police officers running toward the car as the driver is pulling out of the lot. Officers in the video are behind the car and to the side of it. It is not possible to see officers in front of the vehicle if there are any. Shots are fired. The car drives away.
The baby’s name was Kohen Kartier Wiley. His mom says they went with the family friend to Walmart, and the friend paid for the diapers at the self-checkout. She has the receipt. Her attorneys have asked Walmart to release the video from inside the store. Kohen Kartier Wiley’s mom has not been charged with anything. When shots were fired, Kohen was hit in the ribcage. The driver, her friend, was hit and is critically injured, but somehow drove them all to the hospital.
By the time they got there, little Kohen had died.
In comments under posts about this tragedy, far too many people are saying it’s the mother’s fault — she shouldn’t have brought her baby “to do a crime.” She should have put him in a carseat. I’ll tell you what. She has the receipt, so she didn’t commit a crime, but even if she did, what kind of human being calls the police if they see a young woman and a baby, and their friend is shoplifting diapers?
What kind of police officers draw their weapons on two women and a baby for shoplifting diapers? I guarantee if those were two white women and a white baby, that’s not what would have happened. They would have followed the car and gotten the license plate. That’s if they’d gotten a call in the first place. Why would anyone call the police over diapers for a baby? You pay for them. Isn’t that what you’d do? I would. You pay for them. And if you’re the cop? You’re really gonna chase someone’s car over diapers for a baby? Let alone pull the trigger? You’ve lost the plot.
Then, when members of the community showed up at the Walmart hours later to protest, they were tear-gassed by police. Police in formation, arms locked, many dressed in riot gear. A white police officer shot and killed a Black baby, and shot at two Black women over diapers. The community shows up because they are — understandably — outraged, and they get tear-gassed for exercising their 1st Amendment rights to protest? What’s even happening anymore.
The man-child in the Oval Office says the Reflecting Pool is “American Flag Blue” but it isn’t. It is American Algae Green, and it’s reflecting the scum that’s growing across this country. It’s time for us to remove it.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
― Malcolm X
Rest in peace sweet Kohen Kartier Wiley. You deserved a much better world.
For those of you who’d like to meet in person, how about a writing retreat in NorCal October 16-20, 2026? All deets below!
I'm pretty sure the whole point is to keep loving even when my heart is bleeding and battered, but oof. This hurts.
Everything you write has six or seven separate points that just absolutely make my soul sing, I relate to them so hard. And those specific points are sometimes topically SO far apart, and yet somehow you weave it all together so perfectly. Thank you for continuing to spark hope in me.