Mama, Why Are You So Sad? Explaining the Roe Decision to a Toddler...and Myself

I’ve been trying to sit down and write whimsical science fictional things for all of you. To wax enthusiastic about…anything. I really have. But the whimsy, the enthusiasm, they are not coming easily at the moment. I know so many of you (I hope all of you) feel the same way.

I sit and I stare a lot. It doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to be so sunny and bright out there. Not anymore. I don’t know how to get any work done; this is all I’ve thought about for four days. I don’t know how to compartmentalize it away like I usually to to make space for any kind of work or living.

So I figured if this was all I had in me to talk about, I’d better get talking.

Problem is, I don’t actually to know what to say. And I kind of always know what to say. It’s like my entire gig. And yet. I have no idea. I do not feel my skills are up to this one. But it’s impossible not to say something. But also impossible to know the right thing. Impossible to speak when it feels like it won’t help. Impossible to stay silent, as that definitely won’t help.

It never has. Not for a second. Not for anyone.

The last time I felt like this; the last time there was a setback like this that felt like a hollow breathless hole in reality, it was 2016 and I wrote a Fairyland story to explain it to kids. It felt like something, then. Not something politically useful, but I am only a small bear of very little brain, after all. It was, at least, something I could do for others to put a little hope into the world, even though I felt no hope at all. To encourage, and say it is not the end, that the fight goes on.

I wish I could tell you this is the preamble to a new Fairyland story explaining all this.

It isn’t.

I’m sorry it isn’t. I really would like it to be. Because that would mean I had some wisdom to share, some optimism for the future. It would mean I had something left to give. That I knew how to explain this, at all, in any way, how this happened, how it will turn out. 

But I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen. To me, to all of us. I don’t know what to do with the mad that’s inside me. The thing about stories is they fundamentally rely on concepts like justice, progress, consequences, at least one little guy having power enough to change a big guy world. Even in their absence, the tacit agreement among readers is always that they should exist, they should matter.

And all those nice things, with their nice clothes and nice manners, left the building on Friday.

It’s hard for me even to type the words Roe vs Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022. On Twitter, you can talk about it without actually saying that; everyone knows what happened, at least for the moment, hashtag or not. But here, where this essay (or at least vomit of alleged text) will stay, open and free, for always, I have to tell you what I’m talking about.

Because very probably, looking back on 2022 from some future time, it won’t be immediately obvious which devastation I mean.

This one. This quiet, terrible devastation.

On Thursday I was a citizen with more or less full and equal rights under the law. On Friday I was not.

On Thursday I had control over my own body. On Friday I did not.

On Thursday my life and my body belonged to me. On Friday it belonged to any man who could take it.

On Thursday, at least on paper, I was considered as fully human as someone born with a Y chromosome. On Friday…

Jesus pole-vaulting Christ, America. The hell did I ever do to you but pay taxes and set off fireworks? What the actual dead-eyed stone-hearted fuck is your problem? A bunch of thoroughly documented assholes think my whole unique human flawed shining unrepeatable soul has the approximate value of two goats and maybe some olive oil because people to whom running water was a fucking radical new industry disruptor said they wanted to get laid without all the fuss of actually having to talk to women, so now two thousand years later I’m not a full person? COOL. FINE. FUCK.

And the worst of it all, that despite years of hearing how the streets would come to a standstill if Roe was every touched, how men would march with us, how the last dam would be broken and we’d unite, the protests seem to have lasted all of a day and never gathered much more than medium crowds, mostly AFAB, mostly the same activists its always been, mostly ignored.

And I can’t truly blame anyone. I’ve marched so many times and not once has it changed the future our government had already chosen for us. I hope, I truly do hope, that November shows the resolve we were promised for so long. But November is a long way away.

Half the nation lost our rights to choose what happens to our bodies. Lost the right to not die for the grave sin of conceiving an ectopic or otherwise non-viable pregnancy. To choose our own medical care and the course of our own lives. There’s already rumblings of controlling where we travel, monitoring our movements and app usage to determine if we might be pregnant and thus no longer in possession of, apparently, any rights at all.

And half the nation kept their humanity.

It won’t end with us, of course. The decision itself told us that loud and clear. Roe was decided on the right to privacy. So were a shit-ton of other things. And SCOTUS no longer believes we have that right. I cannot fully express to those of you not physically affected by this yet how much of modern life is predicated on that presumed right, and how much is very likely to suddenly turn to vapor and drift away.

And with this Court, it will never matter what legal arguments are made, precedent is set or violated, hypocrisy exposed, or what the Constitution says at all. They will vote on ideology and nothing else. This is where we see the limitations of the money rules politics axiom. Because you could make each of those six conservative mind flayer judges billionaires and it would not change one single vote. They believe in what they’re doing, whole-heartedly, down to their fucking marrow. You can’t buy anything from them but loyalty to that which already holds them in thrall.

But now I’m just talking myself into a despair spiral. That’ll happen when a hijacked branch of government withdraws your right to self-determination because you were born without a penis. But it’s not why I started writing this. It’s not what I wanted to present to all of you who are deep in your own spirals. Anger is motivating; despair is stultifying and paralyzing. I am trying to hold on to the one and not give in to the other.

It’s a pretty brutal ask. Especially since one of the things I know about myself and my history but do not often discuss is that I got pregnant when I was 19. I miscarried. If I hadn’t, I would absolutely have aborted it. I was a child, barely clawing my way through college, broke as hell, in an awful relationship, without a family to help. Having a child was not an option.

But if I hadn’t miscarried, and abortion was not available, not one single book of mine would ever have been written. The last two decades of my life would’ve shrunk to a poor kid dropping out of college, raising a baby with someone who low-key hated her, and all those stories, all those experiences, all those moments when people connected with words I wrote, worlds I made, would…suddenly turn to vapor and drift away.

And that story isn’t unique or even particularly interesting. A handful of books are the very least we will lose to this ruling. So much will be lost. And that isn’t speculation. There are already women suffering and dying waiting in ERs for doctors to consult lawyers about treating ectopic pregnancies—which it is not possible to bring to term, and if left untreated will kill the parent carrying it. The lives, the potential, the progress and innovation, the contributions of 52% of us, the ability to make contributions, to pursue what we excel at and not simply always be confined to how useful others find our genitalia and our servitude.

Many of us have tried to do both, to raise children and pursue our own excellence. But they are desperate to close the door to both and leave us with nothing but only.

Without the right to choose, there is no right to life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Not for women or trans men or non-binary folk, no matter our color or creed or who we are as people. None of that matters next to our potential to be forced back into silence and invisibility as servants and captive breeders to the other half of our species.

And that’s what they want. They are not shy about it. And that’s what I fear. I fought so hard to use my voice. They want to take it, along with just about the entire past 65 years. They want, profoundly, to make the entire idea of it gets better a lie. And way too much of this country is just fine with that as long as they also get to be evil to all the other marginalized groups too. You know, as a treat.

And that despair spiral, that feeling of helplessness and hopelessness we feel, is their ticket to their nasty little treats.

But here’s the thing.

I can’t say any of that to my son.

Oh yes, the evil feminist queer SJW wokescold blue-haired pro-choice radical lefty bitch from the internet, and I cannot stress the next word enough, chose to have a child. That she would prefer not to completely traumatize before kindergarten.

And there is not one word of any of that up there that I can use to answer him when he asks: “Why is Mama so sad?”

My son is three years old. He’s just barely gotten his head around the concept that sometimes C makes a Kuh sound but sometimes it makes a Suh sound. All of this is way above his pay grade, and frankly, if Dora the Explorer or Daniel Tiger isn’t the one explaining it, he’s not super interested anyway.

Can YOU say bodily autonomy in Spanish? It’s autonomía corporal! But HOW do we get there?

But I had to tell him something.

Every Friday we go out to dinner just the two of us. We call it Friday Night Bites. My son looks forward to it all week, he gets amped for it like it’s the World Cup. And for all three year olds do not exactly crush it at empathy, they are absolute champions at knowing when there’s something wrong with one of their parents.

Normally, if I had a bad Friday, I can suck it up for the happy childhood cause.

But some Fridays. Some Fridays are not like the others.

Over the years, the very same people celebrating this Friday have asked with their fake serious expressions and po-faced pantomimed concern how am I supposed to explain this simple thing that does not affect me at all, isn’t any kind of problem, and causes no one any harm to my poor innocent baby chiiiiiildren?

And I want to be clear, fuck those people. They never really cared, they just wanted to short-circuit an actual discussion by pretending their kids were some kind of victims of an evil campaign to…not be dicks to other people. God, why not start by explaining that part, Susan.

But I do care. I care A LOT. I’ll even help those sniveling cruelty-gobblers out! It’s super easy, Suze. Any kind of people can love each other just like Mommy and Daddy. And love is never bad.

Now you tell me.

How in the burning pits of fuck am I supposed to explain to my son that I have fewer rights than he and his father do? That when his mother dropped him off at pre-school she had a fundamental, inalienable right she’d lost by the time she picked him up?

I think I need a drink.

Okay, I’m back.

And I want to tell you what I said to him. How I explained it. Not because it’s particularly profound. Not because it’s some kind of model of what to say to kids. Not because it made me feel better, because it definitely didn’t.

Just because it’s literally the only thing I’ve done since Friday that felt like it mattered at all, because a child accepted it. And because fuck those eel-brained judges for making me explain injustice to a toddler instead of normal shit like why vegetables aren’t yucky. Fuck you for making me do that. It’s not gonna go to damned waste.

The following, only slightly cleaned up for time, flawed memory, and frequent digressions into how crayons are made and why we don’t have a green kitty, was our Friday night existential discussion.

“Mama, why are you so sad?” My son asked.

“I’m not, baby,” I attempted to deflect.

“Yes you are you so sad.”

Fuck. I scrambled in my head for a simple way to contextualize it in a way he could understand. Not abortion itself, necessarily. He literally thinks babies might come from water bottles or the mailbox or possibly there’s an outside chance you get them at the plant shop since it’s called a nursery which is, admittedly, very confusing. But just…the why part. Why Mama is so sad.

I went for the mental Rolodex of Stuff My Kid Has a Solid Grasp Of quickly, discarding abstract concepts left and right. SCOTUS? No. Religion? Will not go well. Self-determination and equality under the law? Nope, he’ll be putting fries in his ears before I get through six words. What actually happened today? If you pull all the details and context and implications and pain away?

The law changed.

Okay. I could work with that.

I said:

“You know how there’s rules at school and rules at home and Mama is always trying to get you to do what the rules say?”

“Yeah!”

“Well, there’s rules for countries, too.”

“What’s a country?”

Fuck.

“Okay, remember last month when we went to Chicago? And then we went to Michigan? And last summer we went to visit Mimi and Baba in Seattle and your Auntie and Uncle and cousins in Oregon? And how where we live is Peaks Island in Maine?”

“Sure!”

“So Chicago and Seattle are cities, and Michigan and Oregon and Maine are states, which are really big, with lots and lots of places and cities in them. And lots and lots of states all smooshed together (sometimes they’re called provinces or even regions) are a country. The country that has Chicago and Seattle and Michigan and Oregon and Maine and our little bitty island in it is called America, and that’s where we live.”

“America. Ok. If you say so.” (If you say so is his new favorite phrase, intoned in an exhausted, world-weary voice.)

“OK, let’s try this. You know how Daddy talks different than you and Mama do?”

“Yeah! It’s funny.”

“Well, your Daddy and your Nana and Grandad and Uncle Michael and Auntie Erin are from a different country called Australia, where most people talk like that and not the way you and me and your teachers at school talk! There’s lots and lots of different countries, and people talk differently in all of them. Sometimes in other languages, like Spanish.”

“I can count to ten in Spanish!”

“You sure can, and I’m very proud. The point is, Daddy was born in Australia, and Auntie Miranda was born in another country called Canada, and Grandad was born in another country called England. But you and me were born here in America. That’s the country we live in right now. Got it?”

He looked very seriously at a fry for awhile and may have been considering the organization of geo-political units but may also have been considering whether to put it in his ear.

But, miracle of miracles: “Got it.”

“Ok, so a country has rules, too. But when the rules are for a whole country full of cities and lots and lots of different people, they’re called laws. Well, Mama is so sad because today, a big rule got changed, and a lot of people are going to…get owies and boo-boos, and some of those will be really big boo-boos. Like a lot bigger than when you fall down and hurt your knee. A lot of people are going to get hurt.”

“Who changed the rules?”

“Uh…” Simplify, Cat, he doesn’t know what a judge is. Or a court. Or literally anything. “…the government.”

“What’s a government?”

Fail.

Deep breath. “I’m gonna try to explain but this is a REALLY big idea, so you gotta look in Mama’s eyes and listen extra good, ok?”

“The chickie nuggie is listening. Extra good.”

My mind raced through his shows for one that had an authority figure I could use and not just the goddamned lawless parent-free troll anarchy of most kids’ edutainment.

“Right, so a government is like a prince. You know what a prince is. Like Prince Wednesday!” Oh thank god. “Prince Wednesday and King Friday are in charge of Daniel Tiger’s neighborhood, right? And they get to wear crowns and have a lot of gold and tell people what to do. They’re the government of Daniel Tiger’s world.” Don’t say they shouldn’t be. Don’t say primogeniture; don’t say proletariat. Don’t say hereditary monarchy is a rot that corrupts the human soul. “Well, so this morning, six bad princes cheated and lied and cast a spell that changed a good rule into a bad one. And the rule is about people like Mama, so Mama is afraid.”

“But I don’t want you to be afraid!”

“I know, lovebug. I don’t want to be afraid either. And Mama isn’t really too afraid of getting hurt that way. Mama is older and we live in New England, which is a good place to be right now. Mama is a lot more afraid for the other people who will get hurt.” While we’re in this swamp of abstraction, let’s try for the concept of empathy why not. “It’s really important that we take care of other people, you know? Like how we take care of you. And just like how we care about how you feel and when you’re upset or mad or sad, we want to make you feel better, it’s our super big job to think hard about what other people feel and think and what they want and how they might get hurt and try to make things better for them too.”

“If you say so.”

“Let’s take that one again. You know how your dinner came before Mama’s?”

“I got fries!”

“Yep. And you had your fries but Mama didn’t have anything. And the whole way walking here Mama and Bastian BOTH talked about how we were so so hungry and couldn’t wait to get our dinner, right? And what did you do?”

“I gave you some fries!”

“Yes, you gave me some fries even though I know you wanted to gobble them all up right away…because you shoved a handful in your mouth and burned yourself. But the point is, you felt hungry. And you remembered Mama was hungry, too. And you didn’t want Mama to feel hungry while you felt full because you know being hungry makes your tummy hurt and your head feel cranky and you don’t like that, so you didn’t want Mama to feel any of those bad things either. And you knew you could fix it, so you did.”

“I DID!”

“That’s called empathy. When you don’t feel something yourself, but you can tell another person is feeling it, and that makes you kind of feel it too, and want to help the other person. It’s secretly a superpower. Not everyone can do it, even grown-ups. But I know you can. The trick is, it’s super easy to do it with your Mama, and not so easy to do it with strangers. But you always gotta try. And the six bad princes didn’t try at all, they just banged a big stick and said only certain kinds of people…get fries…and other kinds of people can only have fries if they get there the very minute the restaurant opens. But mostly the princes say none at all for anybody. Even if they’re extra hungry. Even if not…getting fries…would make them have to go to the hospital really bad. Even if they’re only getting fries because someone forced them to…carry round a raw potato they never wanted.”

“But dey need fries.”

Good lord I felt out to sea at this point. Fries, self, really? “I know, but the six princes don’t have that superpower we talked about. The one I know you have. They said no. They swiped the good rule like Swiper. And now a lot of people are sad and hurt and don’t know what to do to help anybody. Mama feels sad and hurt and doesn’t know what to do to help anybody.”

“You should say Swiper No Swiping, Swiper No Swiping, Swiper Nooooo Swiping! Den dey go aw maaaaaan and dey not swipe you anymore.”

“Maybe we’ll give that a try. You never know.”

He squeezed my arm. Pretty sure he thought he had the solution for a minute there. “…Can I give you a hug and a kiss and den it be all better?”

“You can always always give me a hug and a kiss. But some things take a lot longer to make all better. I wish it weren’t like that. There’s actually a lot of things that are not so great and not so fixed and not so much better out there. And I’m sorry, my darling, I’m really so sorry that there’s so many. It shouldn’t be that way. I didn’t exactly want you to not get to leave the house for most of your life, either. Part of our job as human beings is to make as many things all better while we’re here as we can. Sometimes a hug will do it—you’d be surprised how often a hug helps! (But always ask first.) But sometimes it takes…having a big angry sort of parade in all the cities. And sometimes it takes a lot of people working really hard for a long time to get rid of a bad rule and make it go away and not come back. And sometimes it takes going to the library to vote like we did that day when it was cold and there was a line but you got a sticker, remember? And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how to make this one all better. It’s a biggie. But we will. Somehow. We gotta try. We’ll make it all better as soon as we can. We’ll make it all better together. And Mama won’t be sad anymore.”

My son didn’t say anything for a bit. He looked out to the big city over the water, the city he thinks is big but is really so small. The world he thinks is small but is really so big. I accepted the fact that I had fully faceplanted my first serious current events discussion with my kid.

Then he slurped his milk and asked, in the world's most perfect impersonation of Dora the Explorer's voice: “How do you say we make it all better togevver IN SPANISH?”

“I don’t know, honey. Mama took French.”

“…do you want summore of my dinner and you be happy den?”

And I smiled at him even though I didn’t feel it in the least.

“Sure, sweetheart.” He pushed his whole plate over to me.

“Is you happy now??”

I hugged my son and lied.

And while I was holding him, he whispered through my hair: “Do you wanna tryyyyyy sayin Swiper No Swiping?”

So we did. Together. Very loud. And you know the old rule.

What I say three times is true.

That’s all I have, really.

I told you it wasn’t really profound. It mostly involved an extremely bad metaphor that I am not overly proud of. But if all I can actually really do right now, from my lofty position as a now-slightly-less-than-human person on the ground, is vote, say nice and occasionally convincing words, and teach a kid to care about others as much as he cares about himself, then I did one on Friday, one today, and I’ll do the third in November.

And god, I don’t know, but maybe in ten years or twenty or five or fifty, we really will make it all better somehow. Not because someone saved us. We’re all way too deep in this century to believe that. But it will only ever happen because we saved ourselves.

If it was a story, that’s how it would go. Eventually. Even The Handmaid’s Tale ends like that.

Let’s hope we’re in a better story than we think. After all, and this is the only thing that keeps my chin up—we’ve done it before.

Together.

Oh. And I looked it up.

La haremos todo mejor juntos.

Come on, vámonos. Everybody let's go. Come on, let's get to it.

I know that we can do it.