By Melissa Reeser Poulin
A week before Trump’s inauguration, I began bleeding, miscarrying a baby just shy of ten weeks—my daughter’s little brother or sister. While women marched on Washington and in my city’s streets, I huddled in bed, losing this new life and the last of my false impressions of my country. I wanted to protest, but felt consumed by necessary grief. The baby had died weeks earlier without my knowing; Trump’s election was a mirror held up to centuries of racism, violence, and greed. That January was a time of reckoning for me as a white American, and as a mother.
I planned to join the second annual Women’s March the following January. But I became pregnant in the interceding months, and spent the day of the protest in bed again, healing my body as I nourished our newborn son.
It’s summer now and my son is eating. Sweet potato, banana. Some rice cereal, an avocado. Watching us from his booster seat, he smacks his lips. With great purpose, he moves his hands over the pieces of soft carrot on his tray, raking them, pressing them clumsily between fat palms.
I put him on his belly in the middle of our bed. He folds in half, moves like an inchworm to the edge, laughs as he pitches headfirst into me. Time is ticking by. But it doesn’t tick—it glides, drips, rushes, sweats, streams, pounds. Swells in the plums outside the window. Collects in the folds beneath my son’s chin. Ripples at the edges of my eyes. Sifts into the lines on my husband’s palms. Hides between strands of my daughter’s hair.
This time, when women gather in the streets, I gather my children and join them. I wrap the baby on my back, and my husband hefts our preschooler onto his, and we ride the bus downtown carrying simple burdens: children, diapers, wipes. Goldfish crackers to delay the inevitable tantrum. A hastily-scribbled sign: Families Belong Together.
Of course they do. It’s a phrase inadequate to the rage I feel at the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy—an extreme reduction in the admission of immigrants and refugees, including asylum-seekers, that uses children as tools to generate fear of separation in people fleeing violence in their home countries. Families belong together, but more than that, families do not belong in prison. They belong in a place of welcome and compassion, as I thought the United States once aspired to be. They belong in a country that offers rest, that responds generously to the tremendous courage required to leave one’s home and resources in order to protect one’s children.
We stand at the edge of the crowd, holding our children. It is a small act, but the size of the crowd makes it larger. It makes the shrunken lump of hope in my heart grow larger, too. Leaning against a building, I nurse my son with one arm, and with the other I snap a photo for the mother next to me, her stroller festooned with balloons and crayoned posters: Please don’t hurt kids.
My daughter tugs on my sleeve. What are we doing, Mama? Why are we here? I say we are here because we are sad about the way families are being treated. Someone is hurting others, and when you see that, it is your job to try to stop it. Fear leaps in my belly. Will I be able to follow this myself, to set an example for my children? What if it means putting my own children in danger? To myself and to a handful of close friends, I had confessed anxiety over showing up today, at a peaceful rally made up primarily of mothers, fathers, and children. Now that I am here, I don’t feel fear. I feel love. Here, it seems so clear that we are dependent on one another. Interdependent, interconnected. The border is artificial.
A clock is artificial. My son studies it along with his paper mobile, shadows on the wall. The generic light fixture at the center of the ceiling in each room in our house. My face. His hands move in circles from my mouth to my eyes and hair. He grabs fistfuls, shoves them into his mouth.
Breath and heartbeat, simple rhythms. I listen for his breath in the nursery, put my hand to my chest at the stoplight, take a full inhale. What passes for silence, for stillness. Here’s a sundial where things collect: fragments of speech, frames of sunlight, the thing my daughter said that I want to remember to tell my husband. A stem twisted off the top of a thought, in a hurry to pass a granola bar over the seat. Hmm? Almost there honey.
My little guy in the bathtub, laughing and chirping around his washcloth. Through the speed and noise of our lives together, he has somehow arrived here, on the brink of crawling, at the edge of new freedoms. But where is here? There are no real edges in childhood, no clear lines between phases of development. Every second, he is working, his body taking in food and sound and light and turning it all into a self.
At the border, they are taking children this size from their parents, children who can’t yet crawl. Our government is detaining toddlers taking their first steps, imprisoning three- and four-year-olds. My three-year-old wakes in the morning singing, and doesn’t stop asking questions until she falls asleep at night. She is a bundle of insatiable curiosity. On the radio it said the detained toddlers are quiet and still in the cages—in the cages—behavior so opposite my daughter’s it makes every hair on my body stand up.
The park is all filtered light and she’s swinging on her tummy, pretending to fly, her yellow hat floating off like a butterfly. When I was not looking, her legs turned muscular. Her attention shifted toward big kids, playing big kid games. Why are they playing a sword game, Mama? Is that a bad game?
The questions I don’t answer nestle beside the ones I answer seventeen times a day, and beneath those, my own questions, like boulders: How can I send her to school? What do I tell her about guns? How do I protect her? My animal heart can find no shelter, my chest a forest floor exposed.
Motherhood has made me permeable, my body etched with the children I’ve carried, so that their survival is my own. It has changed the way I see others’ children, knowing the weight and cost of having arrived, together, in the present moment. Knowing the feat of having kept them alive.
2,500 Families Separated at U.S. Border. Some Parents May Not See Kids Again. They seem so close, these terror-stricken faces just beneath my fingertips on the screen. My hands put the screen down to soothe the tantrum, mash a banana, spread peanut butter on bread. My stomach rumbles and I ignore it. It’s bedtime and dishes, lunches packed for the next day, then night fractured with my son’s cries for milk. A bread trail leading toward sleep or something like it, somewhere to put down the weight.
I do everything. I do nothing. With my mother hands, I care for my children. If I had to, I would take them and run, too.
Like any mother, my body’s deepest hunger is for their protection. This hunger is there when I wake in the morning, when I buckle them into their car seats, my mind flashing on an image of where the clasp should rest, high on their chests. It’s there as I watch my daughter climb the tall slide, lanky limbs wobbling. My heart swerves in tempo with my thoughts, a constant calculus that tries to balance my fear of the unknown with her need to learn, explore, and experience risk. It’s there on a drowsy day at the pool, where danger is a ripped Band-Aid, a honeybee kicking next to her water-wings. Together we raft it to cement where it crawls, drips away.
Tonight, my children sleep safely down the hall, while a 19-month-old has died after detention in an ICE facility without proper medical care. Families like hers are finding pain and suffering here, and the deepest loss imaginable, instead of relief from the instability and danger in their countries of origin. These families flee with the intention to apply for asylum as part of the legal process, to protect their children. As I would, fiercely, protect my own children.
But I am a United States citizen. The many ways in which I am privileged insulate me from this treatment. I am an educated, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, married white woman in a single-income family. My children are never hungry. I don’t fear racial profiling against them, my husband, or myself. We are in no danger of being deported or imprisoned indefinitely at the edge of the country, far from the eyes of those willing to look away.
I won’t look away.
Protecting the children of asylum-seekers isn’t just about this moment, and this issue, but all of the actions and structures in place that have led to this point. Just as Trump’s election wasn’t an aberration, but a continuation of our country’s racist history, so this policy is upheld and quietly expanded because of entrenched, unexamined racism in individuals and systems, and because those who hold privilege and power—white people—refuse to see the connection.
Protecting my children means not sheltering them from the truth. It means seeing with my own eyes and helping my children to see the realities of injustice that might otherwise be invisible to them, helping them to understand the ways in which they are unfairly advantaged, and teaching them to see what their country’s current leaders cannot: that we are all human, deserving of respect and dignity. It means teaching them to speak up and stand up when their government is committing inexcusable crimes. It means teaching myself to do all of these things.
For now my son cannot yet stand, cannot yet speak, but soon he will learn to run like my daughter, and they will fill the house with their voices, with the bright whirring of their youth. It would be easy for me to take the ease of their childhoods for granted, to pretend that that ease is disconnected from the childhoods shattering at the border, to look the other way. That’s what this administration is counting on.
Melissa Reeser Poulin is a poet and writer. She is co-editor of Winged: New Writing on Bees (Poulin Publishing 2014) and author of the chapbook Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming January 2019). Her most recent work appears in Hip Mama, Coffee + Crumbs, and Relief Journal. Visit her website at melissareeserpoulin.com.
Photo credit: A Stoller via a Creative Commons license.
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