Thanksgiving

I woke up the morning of November 9, 2016, to a world in which I did not want to raise my children.  I planned to rear them in a world where the first black man was elected president, followed by the first woman.  I anticipated more progressive thinking and reform in the United States.  I assumed that the adoption papers my wife and I carry for our own biological children would become antiquated.

I was wrong.

What happened to our country?  We elected a racist, narcissistic misogynist to run our country.  I say we because even though he clearly did not have my vote, 53% of white women voted for him.  What kind of respect do we as women have for ourselves if we elect as a leader who wants to take away our reproductive rights?  A man who disrespects us so much that he normalizes rape culture?

My black friends and colleagues like to tell me that I am black like them.  This is a false honor.  Unlike them, I was completely shocked by the election's outcome.  My friends and colleagues knew what was coming.  But in my naive white privilege, in which I do not experience daily social and institutional injustice, I believed that our society was getting better.  I was wrong.

Our President-elect is selecting his cabinet, and his "alt-right" choices are bringing back high school memories from the early 1990s.  I had completed a research project on neo-Nazi hate groups in the United States.  In my presentation to the class, I explained how Morris Dees, a lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center, was bankrupting hate groups by suing them successfully in the court of law.  After white supremacist members of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) beat an Ethiopian man to death, Dees won a civil court case against their leader for $12.5 million.  The leader declared bankruptcy and WAR went out of business.

As part of my research I called neo-Nazi hotlines and recorded their hate-filled messages.  They were blatantly racist and anti-Semitic.  They threatened violence, torture, and genocide.  They were on a quest to reclaim their country from anyone "different."  They ended their tirades with, "This... is... WAR."  For weeks I had recurring nightmares about these skinheads coming to my school and sticking a loaded gun in my face, pulling the trigger when I was unable to recite the entire Lord's Prayer.  This is how, in my dreams, they discovered that I was Jewish.  During this time, in reality, we evacuated the school for a pulled fire alarm and returned to black swastikas spray-painted all over the stairwells.

Last year a friend tried to convince me that after so many white supremacist groups went bankrupt, they were quietly and slowly infiltrating government organizations, waiting for their time to come.  I laughed this off as another conspiracy theory.  She told me that they were rising in the ranks as police officers, FBI agents, and representatives in local and state governments.  I said something noncommittal, like "that's scary," and we left it at that.  Was I wrong again?

When David Duke celebrates Steve Bannon's appointment by Trump; when a KKK parade is planned in North Carolina; when a group of neo-Nazis raise their arm in the Nazi salute; when there are 700 hate crimes around the United States in one week post-election, the world becomes a much more frightening place.  On the other hand, these events are bringing together more than three million Americans who vow to not be complacent.  We have a community of three million who will stand up against bigotry, against racism, against misogyny, against anti-Semitism, against homophobia.  We are a community of people who in the past complacently believed it would all work out, but now we are ready for action.  We are a community of people who believe in goodness, diversity, and freedom.  We are ready to fight.

I still mourn the loss of the world in which I wanted to raise my children.  I didn't know how I could ever explain to them this turn of events in our nation's history.  But now, I also see that my children will have role models to teach them that one voice among many counts.  They will learn how to be an ally, how to speak up on behalf of others, and how to be part of a community.  They will learn how to be kind, loving, and accepting of all people.  On this Thanksgiving, while I am still anxious about the future, and depressed about the present state of affairs, I am also thankful for my friends, my colleagues, and my family.  May we do what is right by each other, and in doing so, be role models for all of our children.

Germs

I am somewhat of a germaphobe.  Not the excessive kind that wears gloves and walks around Lysol-ing doorknobs, but the kind that carries around hand sanitizer and goes to great lengths to avoid touching public door handles.  Riding a crowded bus has always been a balancing act, because I refuse to hold on to the poles.  I can't help but fixate on the germs I imagine crawling all over from everyone else's sweaty hands.

A sneeze or cough from someone makes me hold my breath and cringe.  Colds and runny noses are the worst - when I have a cold, I wash my hands so often and exhale so far away from others that I am the person from whom you will NOT catch a cold.  I often wish everyone would be so considerate.

And then I had kids.

Kids are germ-fests.  They can be sweet, loving, cute, funny, and sometimes annoying, but they are also disgusting.  While I expected diaper blowouts and food-filled faces, I never anticipated the depths to which my children are able to gross me out just by being themselves.

Case in point: my daughter has a penchant for pooping in water.  My wife protests this statement as false, but I disagree.  Once is an accident, twice is a pattern, three times is a habit.  The first time was when both of my children were splashing and giggling in our large, oval, jacuzzi-style tub.  I had just finished washing both children when I saw it.  Floating in between their smiling faces was an enormous, brown, banana-shaped turd.  OH MY GOD.  I threw a dry towel on the floor and hauled my children out of the bathtub.  In the eternity of the next second my brain realized five things:

1.  Due to the now poop-y water, my children needed another bath.
2.  This meant I had to drain the tub.
3.  Draining the tub meant STICKING MY HAND into the poop-y water to open the drain.
4.  I was going to have to lift that monstrous excrement out of the water to dispose of it,
5.  AND I had to act quickly because small bits of the load were disintegrating into the water.

Do I need to mention the gagging that took place as I completed these tasks?  Do I need to explain how I disinfected the tub and threw all of the bath toys in the dishwasher before running another bath?  Or how I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed my hands with disinfectant soap?  Or how I detested being the responsible parent in this very moment?

The next time it happened, my wife was home with me.  This time it was floating rabbit turds.  My wife nearly dry-heaved and ran out of the bathroom, leaving clean-up duty to me.  Then she tried to explain that my daughter doesn't have a habit of pooping in the tub because she wears diapers and poops whenever she has to go, so it was normal.

Then it happened a third time.  In our condo swimming pool.   The swim diapers I had purchased were a size too large and completely ineffective.  We flew out of the pool so quickly both kids burst into tears!  To my horror, my wife sent ME back into the pool to clean up the feces.  My scalding shower upon arriving home was not hot enough to keep my skin from crawling.

But kids are grosser than just poop.  For instance, my daughter eats cat food daily out of the cat bowls.  I've given up trying to keep her away from the bowls in the kitchen, because it's a losing battle.  "Nom nom!" she exclaims, thinking it's fun to see Mama freak out and try to pull the kibble out of her mouth.  My son ate part of the canned cat food the other day while I was pulling kitty litter out of my daughter's mouth.  I didn't realize he ate the cats' leftovers until I picked him up and he breathed the incredible stench of fish in my face.  I almost dropped him.  He screamed while I washed his fishy hands with soap and water in the sink.

Going out to restaurants elicits my internal squirm, because my daughter likes to eat the table.  Open mouth on the edge of the table, sucking and drooling.  Granted, she is endlessly teething, but I don't trust the cleanliness of public tables and moist rags that wipe them down.  My stomach writhes in protest and I just can't look.  Whether it's tables, grocery cart handles, swing chains, or the arms on highchairs, stopping her is futile.  I swear the twins take turns needing my full attention so the other one can eat microorganisms.

It's no wonder that kids are sick for eight months out of the first two years of life  My wife read me this foreboding statistic and I still pray it isn't true.  Sick toddlers are the germ-iest, grossest little people on the planet.  From the yellow, white, and green stinky snot that hangs out of their noses no matter how much I wipe them, from the smelly liquid that splatters with each sneeze and cough, to the wet, slimy hands that insist on touching my face... these are the days my children snuggle and need the most love and nurturing.  These are also the days I am completely revolted by my children.  They cry because I incessantly wipe away their boogers.  They cry because I wash their hands and faces, then scour my own.  And my wife - she won't come near the bulb nose sucker or even worse, the Nose Frida - she calls me from across the house to tell me that our child's nose needs to be wiped.  She calls me from across the house to tell me that our child's diaper needs to be changed.  She reminds me that when we got pregnant she informed me that she couldn't handle body fluids because they make her vomit.  I didn't realize she was one hundred percent serious.  She often makes retching sounds on her way out of the room.  I also didn't realize how much my children would activate my own nausea daily.

To think that I was aghast the day my infant son peed into his own mouth while I was changing his diaper.  To think that I almost puked on my daughter the day she removed her poop-y diaper during nap time and played in it all over her crib.  To think I looked on in horror when all of the toddlers ate  the same drooled-on toys during playgroup.  To think all of that was just the beginning.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE being a parent.  But I would truly enjoy it so much more without the disgustingness factor.