Week 9: Living a More Humanizing Life #BetterTogether
On this Mother’s Day, I find myself up early trying to make sense of the world with my keyboard. I feel the weight of being a parent right now. While this pandemic has impacted me, it is my kids who are taking the real impact. They are missing a stage of life they cannot ever get back. They are the ones whose futures will be impacted the most by the effects of this pandemic – economic, social, environmental, and political. They are the ones who will have to inherit a mess they had no part in creating.
On this Mother’s Day, I want to feel hopeful. I want my kids to go back to their lives. I want to miss them, yell at them for missing curfew, and worry they are not sleeping enough. While I was initially drawn to returning to the familiarity of our lives before the pandemic, these past weeks have made me realize I want something more for them. I want my kids to live in a world that cares for another person’s needs above one’s own. I want the world to make changes, for all of us to learn, and to become a better version of ourselves. I want what they are missing, the months of their lives, to be worth it.
On this Mother’s Day, I don’t want the new normal to simply be wearing a mask and new hand washing rituals. I don’t want us to go back to living the lives we were living – filled with inequity and fueled by immediate gratification. I don’t want us to focus on our to-do lists more than the people around us. I don’t want us to feel comforted by the ease of the modern world at the expense of our natural world. I don’t want this to be a distant memory, soon forgotten.
On this Mother’s Day, I wonder what good can emerge. As I watch news clips of people protesting – comparing a stay at home order with slavery or Nazism, I worry we will not learn from our experience. As I try to make sense of the dichotomy of some people refusing to wear masks because it impinges on their civil rights while others are being racially profiled for trying to do the right thing by wearing a mask, I realize you can’t make sense of the senseless. I worry we will not move forward with a new appreciation of what it means to live with consideration for the benefit of all. I worry we will move on, not beyond.
On this Mother’s Day, I find myself thinking about a question posed to me this week in a talk by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, “How can I be more human? How can my practices be more humanizing?” She encouraged us to interrogate the world as we would a text. This interrogation includes oneself – our actions, our language, and the stories we tell. The stories we choose to tell. The stories we share with our children. The ways we help our children understand when practices are not humanizing and how our actions can work towards change.
On this Mother’s Day, I am left thinking about my children, my children’s children, and my children’s children’s children. What stories from this time will be passed down to them? What will the lessons of these stories be? Will their world be more human because of the actions we chose to take? I think it will depend on the stories we choose to tell now, the actions we choose to take, and the decisions we make today. The children are watching, listening, and learning. How we live today will fuel the stories and the practices of tomorrow.
On this Mother’s Day, I want a future for my children. I want a world that is worthy of their humanity. I know I have work to do and I know I need to begin with myself. Future generations deserve to hear stories from today that have satisfying endings. Stories that end with lessons learned, with inspirational people, and examples of practices that are more humanizing.
On this Mother’s Day, it feels like a good day to start living a new story.
