These days, my heart feels a little like a shredded blanket that I am trying my best to hold into one piece, and my guess is that yours might be a little tender right now, too.
When my children fight, and I have to speak sternly, or tell them for the fifteenth time to clean up after themselves, I suddenly get teary: So many mothers have been wrenched from their children. How dare I speak anything but total tenderness to these kids?
Or they show me the projects and ideas they’re working on, or they read out loud something funny in their books, and I suddenly get teary: What must it be like to be torn out of your children’s lives? To wonder if anyone is appreciating their humor and tenderness and genius in the way that only you can? To not know if they will be cared for and comforted?
My arms hurt with ache of the loss, like they did after my own miscarriages. I feel that wrenching in my womb, that sense of not being able to go back to the before, when everything was okay.
In the day since the president signed his grandiose Executive Order to stop the separation of families, I only come up with more sadness, more questions. I am having trouble sorting out the information, and I wonder if this was the intent: To offer an obvious outrage, then set out a “solution,” but a solution with fangs.
These are things that I don’t like, and things that I want to continue to call my representatives about:
1. The 2300 who were torn from their families must be reunited with their parents. Now!
2. Indefinite detention–that doesn’t sound so good. Refugees, asylum seekers–they’re going to be placed in detention indefinitely. How far is this from a concentration camp?
3. I think I understand this new plan correctly: Entering the country without paperwork will now be a criminal offense instead of a misdemeanor. Is that right? That’s getting pretty intense. And that would then lead to children being taken from their parents anyway, right?
4. The language that these folks are using to talk about deterrents and following the law is still pretty brutal and cruel-sounding.
5. The president’s EO feels like a smokescreen, to further obfuscate the cruelty and inhumanity that is occurring. It all feels so carefully orchestrated to me–Like they played with these children’s lives not because they really thought it would even provide the deterrent they claimed, but because they wanted to exhaust our outrage so that we’d be ready to give up and accept this EO as an answer.
6. Blogger John Pavlovitz used the analogy of someone running recklessly and intentionally over people with their car, then blaming it on someone else. When they finally stop running over people, you don’t praise them for stopping. You stand up and speak out.
Gratitude List:
1. The girls and women of Sense of Wonder Camp. I love telling stories to that group. This year, their theme is leadership, and they’re including the collaborative leadership and listening process of The Council of All Beings.
2. On the way home from Sense of Wonder, I saw a foal nursing from a mare. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. Tender.
3. All the Tree Beings: Sycamore, poplar, oak, pine, walnut, willow. . .
4. These goofy, goofy cat people.
5. Snakes and snakes messages. Snake sightings are becoming at least an every other day occurrence in the holler right now. Time to shed old bad habits and pick up new good ones.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 