Through the Looking Glass

Everything feels a little strange lately, and maybe it’s the same for you. I’m not taking life one day at a time right now, or even one hour at a time - I’m taking things in chunks of time, however those chunks present themselves. And that’s not exactly right, because I am not “taking” anything, I am just rolling with the flow - a number of minutes or hours when I feel productive, and blocks of time when I need to retreat and allow myself to be still. A few hours when things feel okay, and hours when nothing feels okay. I have given up any idea that I can control this, I suspect it’s a sane reaction to an insane world. I’m trying to meet myself where I am with friendliness and compassion. Doesn’t that sound good and yoga teacher-ish? I’ve been practicing for over thirty years, so maybe it’s finally sinking in, or maybe I’m in my gopher era. Sticking my head up, looking around, deciding it’s still the same upside-down world, and burrowing back in to rest so I can try to face it again in a little while.

Yup, still nuts out here. Photo by Y S on Unsplash

My writing life is like this, too. Usually when I think about the weekly essay, there’s a complete thought or idea, something that rolls around in my head for a few days, gathering steam. Right now what I get are fragments. Some line from a book or a poem that pops into my head and plays on repeat, or a sentence I write down in my Notes app so I don’t forget it, even though it’s just some random thought. This week the line that got stuck in the net was: Don’t just do something, stand there. That quote is most often attributed to The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and I’ve always loved it, from the very first time I heard it. That was the kind of thing that would make me laugh as a kid.

As I got older, I realized it’s a quote I need to keep tucked in my back pocket, because I tend to go into problem-solving mode in an emergency. I think many kids who grow up in chaos have this tendency. You get used to being on high alert, looking for signs of danger and trying to figure out how to diffuse them or circumvent them, or flee if all else fails. It comes from trying to keep yourself safe. But if the “emergency” is that someone you love is grappling with anxiety, fear, grief, or sadness, sometimes trying to solve it is annoying, and also not helpful. And if you are the person having those feelings, sometimes the White Rabbit quote is the one you need. Just stand there and feel it. Or sit there and be with someone, listening.

When I was little, I loved the story of Alice in Wonderland (truth be told, I thought it was Allyson Wonderland until I could read. That was back when my preschool teachers called me Allyson and I didn’t know I could tell them I preferred Ally. I was Ally to my family. Ally-Oop to my cousins. Allyson only if I was in trouble. I still feel like I’m in trouble if anyone addresses me that way. Let’s move on, shall we?) I loved the White Rabbit and knew I would have followed him down the rabbit hole just like Alice, gladly.

Through the looking glass is a term that’s come to mean looking at something unfamiliar. Trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense. If life in the U.S. right now was an allegory, surely the moral would be: whatever you feed will grow and strengthen. Which reminds me of another story, the one about the grandfather telling his grandson there are two wolves inside him. You know the story. One wolf is good and kind, and the other is a white nationalist. Whichever one you feed is the one that will win. As usual, I’m taking some liberties there, but the story - while often attributed to Cherokee or other indigenous American peoples - is, in fact, of unknown origin. And it feels like a story a white person would tag as Native American because it sounds good. God knows we have plenty of horrifying white people these days. There’s like a run on them. Maybe there was a Black Friday sale on horrifying white people. Or a Cyber Monday deal. I swear to lemons if you need me to say not all white people, you are in the wrong place. Please go ahead and exit right.

I don’t know why it isn’t obvious to everyone that cruelty will never lead to peace. That (misogynistic, racist, bigoted) white nationalists are never the guys you want in charge unless you’re a white nationalist. I’d call that a spoiler alert, but this tale is so strange, there’s no way to predict how it will end. The death of democracy? Some version of The Handmaid’s Tale? It would be great to approach it all with detachment and curiosity. I was thinking about that, too. Alice is seven when she goes down the rabbit hole, and one of the best assets she has as she tries to navigate the uncertainty is her curiosity. I think it’s a largely underrated attribute in a person.

When I’m on my yoga mat or meditation cushion, that’s the quality I try to cultivate. If I weren’t worried about the fall of democracy, The Heritage Foundation, or what the consequences might be for my teenage daughter - and for all of us, frankly - I could get really philosophical about it. I could maybe even laugh and shake my head at the insanity of a vast number of people choosing (choosing, can you fucking believe it?!) terrifying, soulless, awful men to take the reins. To reign.

Anyway, I started thinking about Alice, and how the story is a metaphor for the loss of childhood innocence. It’s a “voyage-and-return” story, a heroine’s journey where transformation occurs, a nod to the pain of adolescence and the awkwardness of puberty on the way to adulthood. Feeling like your body is always the wrong size, too big for some spaces, too small for others, not sure how much space you’re allowed to take up. Times when you feel completely stuck, or like you can’t breathe, or almost everything around you is nonsensical and scary.

And then I started thinking it works as a metaphor for these times, too. And also for perimenopausal and menopausal women, and anyone in our country who is marginalized in any way, trying to face the moment we find ourselves in, even though we didn’t choose it. The loss of innocence because we believed more people were better than this. Kinder than this. We’re down the rabbit hole now, though, and there are Mad Hatters being nominated left and right, and caterpillars telling us it’s our body, their choice, and tea parties where we aren’t sure who to sit next to, because how do we know who’s safe and who thinks we deserve fewer rights than they do? Or that we should only be able to love, pray - exist - in a way that works for them?

Cheers or whatever. Photo by Evelyn Cosplay on Unsplash

I saw an advanced screening of Nightbitch this week, and I am not going to mess it up for you. What I will say as someone who birthed two babies into this world and spent the first years of their lives totally immersed in making sure they stayed alive, healthy, happy and secure, with exceedingly little time or energy to do anything else (even though I was concurrently teaching a full schedule of classes around their preschool hours and bedtimes, opened a yoga studio when my first was two years old and my second was six weeks old, became a single mom when my son was four and my daughter was eighteen months old, and wrote most mornings until 2 or 3am - after they were asleep because it was the only time I could), nothing has ever made me feel so seen.

Motherhood as we do it in America - without paid leave or affordable childcare, without a village or a safety net, and often, without a partner who has any understanding whatsoever of what it all entails - is enough to bring out every primal feeling we possess. And that is true no matter how much you love your children, how much every cell in your body thrums with the words thank you because they are here.

I was thinking about all of that, about the ways women are expected to be the societal safety net. The ones who most often sacrifice their careers because, let’s face it, if you’re a two-income family and then you have a baby, who is probably going to stay home? The person who makes less money, right? And who is that likely to be? If we’re talking about a heterosexual couple, it’s likely to be the mom, because women are paid eighty-four cents on the dollar compared to men. That’s women working full-time, doing the same job a man does just as well, being paid less to do it … because why, again?

But let’s break it down a little further, because that’s just white women. Black women make sixty-nine cents on the dollar, Latina women fifty-seven cents, Native American women fifty-nine cents, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women, sixty-five cents, and Asian women…wait for it …they make 99 cents on the dollar. Riddle me that. This is according to the 2024 Census Bureau.

It goes beyond money, though, because there’s also a deeply ingrained narrative that women are better at taking care of children than men. They’re naturally suited to it, it’s why they grow the babies and make breastmilk. It’s biological. Of course they’re better at getting up nine times a night, going for years without uninterrupted sleep, changing diapers, soothing babies when they cry. They’re patient and kind. They’re the nurturers, after all. It’s expected.

I could write for days about the ways women judge each other for the choices they make, too, the endless posts about why breastfeeding is best, the rise of the trad wives, the moms who would never leave their kids to go back to work, why sleep-training is the only way, why co-sleeping is the only way, why attachment parenting is the only way, why you have to stick to nap times, why it’s better for your baby to adapt to your rhythm and become part of your flow, why homemade organic baby food is the way, how you need to remove all toxins from your home, with a course you can buy from an influencer who is so shot up with botox her face doesn’t move at all. And listen, get botox if you want, I am not here to judge, criticize or anything else, but don’t sell a course about the horror of toxins at the same time, that’s all.

And I mean that, I have zero tolerance for anyone judging any woman about anything she does to her own body or face in this culture. Just be grateful she isn’t killing you in your sleep and fuck right off. And women? Hey, yeah, it would be great if we could stop all the shittiness and get on the same team, because it’s hard enough, isn’t it? If we did, we wouldn’t have to worry about the Pete Hegseths and JD Vances and Matt Gaetzs and DJTs of this world, because none of us would put despicable men like that in power.

But 53% of white women voted for them, and that’s what makes me feel like I’m down the rabbit hole with the Red Queens of this world. I understand internalized misogyny, and I understand some women are raised in conservative families, or evangelical ones. I know we’re all products of our environment and little sponges for the first ten to twelve years of life, but at a certain point, it’s really good to question what you’ve been taught. How is it Christian to elect a man who abuses and disrespects women, for example? And how sad is it there’s no way to tell which man I’m talking about because the entire party is full of them?

Funny thing, and by funny I mean mind boggling, if you are a woman and you have kids - and not every woman wants kids, or can have kids - right when your kids become somewhat autonomous, it’s very likely your parents will start to falter, and guess what will happen then? Yup, you’re the societal safety net. Women bring the babies into the world, and daughters disproportionally care for their aging parents when the time comes. And your kids are more autonomous as teenagers, but they still need you. And if you work, you’re not going to get paid time off to care for your parents. And your parents will likely struggle with their loss of independence, because it’s humbling.

So if you’re like me, you might have your dad shouting and cursing at you while you try to make sure he has everything he needs, makes it to all his doctors’ appointments, has a full supply of Mott’s Apple Juice, and enough visits to Dunkin’ Donuts to make him happy. Oh, and that his Veterans’ benefits are going to stretch far enough as his health declines and he needs more care. That was the last year of my dad’s life for me. Trying to make sure he was okay, and having him yell at me at least once a week for my efforts. He thanked me sometimes, too. The point is it’s not easy, especially as the rest of your life is not put on pause.

A day it was not easy. Dad behind me with Mott’s.

Imagine if Kamala Harris had campaigned for mandatory vasectomies for all sexually active boys and men whether they liked it or not. And said a man’s job is in the field, in the workforce, out chopping wood, and any artsy dudes were ruining the country. Those men who like to paint or write or make music were the problem, and she was going to fix that. Time for those men to get out there and act like men! And then Tim Walz backed her up and said yeah, actually the government should decide if and when these men could reverse those vasectomies and have some kids. And if there were life-threatening medical emergencies as a result of those reversals, the states could decide how much help to give these men, and how close to death they’d need to be to get that intervention. And if men were single and over twenty-five, their vote should count less than their married peers. It’s nuts, right? Right.

Back to women. We're supposed to birth the babies and see our parents out, and in between, work our asses off and also look hot. And then deal with it when we do all of those things, we somehow survive in a culture that keeps trying to tell us who we’re allowed to be from the time we’re tiny until the time when we finally get old enough and wise enough to open our mouths and roar, and the thanks we get is half the voting public - including that 53% of white women - decide we deserve no respect.

Forget equal pay, that’s not gonna happen. Forget affordable childcare and paid time off, their plan for you is to ask Grandma to come help. She’s menopausal, she’s been put out to pasture, anyway. Forget support in the form of 504s or IEPs if your kid has special needs. Forget SNAP, forget free lunches for your kids if you’re barely making it. Forget equal rights to healthcare if you get pregnant - which is the point of you to these bastards - and you have a miscarriage. Don’t let it happen in twenty-two of our fifty states because you’ll see exactly how much they value you. And expect that number to go up.

A woman who voted for these guys sent me a message last week. She said I seemed “so angry.” Yes, I am. I think you will be, too. I think when this all plays out you’re going to wish you had voted a different way, but time will tell as it always does. I’m angry and also deeply, deeply sad because I wanted a much better world for my children, and yours, too. I wanted at least a chance for that. I wanted my queer friends to be safe. My Black friends, my Brown friends, my friends from India, my friends with nonbinary kids…all my friends who aren’t straight white men. Have you not noticed they are already less safe and your guy isn’t even in office yet? He won, though, and everyone knows it, and now there are a lot of people who feel emboldened to feed the absolute worst in themselves, just like they did last time. This is no surprise.

Did you see that beautiful family who got accosted by an utterly awful white woman on a United Airlines shuttle bus? She’s a realtor from California, apparently. She told them they smelled like curry. Their kids are young, but old enough to understand. Only one person on that bus stood up for them. This is the world you ushered in for all of us with your vote, and yes, I am furious. And heartbroken and devastated and also astounded.

We’re down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, but we’re going to find the light, somehow. There are a lot of people who want the world to be better than this, want people to be better than this, and if you look, you’ll see they’re sending up flares. This essay is my flare for you this week. Hang in there, rest when you need to, and don’t just do something, stand there. Sometimes feeling it all is what we need to do. Then we figure out the next right step.

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Emily Dickinson

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about “standing there” in the good context (feeling your feelings) versus “standing there” in the not good context - being quiet when people need your help - I’ll be here 12/6/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version which will go out Saturday as usual. If you’d like to meet me in Croatia in June, I’d love that so much. And I’ll meet you in the comments, regardless. It’s one of my favorite places to be these days. Love y’all so much.