When everything seems hard…

I like getting to work early. I eat my breakfast and catch up on the events of the day.

For awhile now, Taylor Swift and pictures of my grandbabies is the only thing keeping me sane. I’m in a group called “Gen X Swifties” and I began to notice a pattern with our cognitive dissonance. Everything right now feels hard.

I listened to the stories of people who, like me, had just lost a parent. The stories of children navigating college or new jobs or moves. Helping your kids with their kids. Having health issues ourselves. Figuring out what retirement will be like. It all feels like so…much. That’s just the day to day. This group has felt like a little corner of the world I go where we also share funny memes and go down rabbit holes trying to figure out Tay’s next move. For a few minutes of the day we get to almost become kids again. With the status of this part of our life, I think that’s why the state of the world right now feels so much more.

We’ve gotten to a place in our lives where we fundamentally know exactly who we are. We’ve lived enough to have seen a lot, historically and we’ve grown as women. There is a deep ache in our bones that wants us to protect ourselves but the fire we feel in protecting our kids and grandkids-it’s appropriate to conjure up the “momma bear” scenario for what we all feel.

I’m not sure what this world thinks they’re going to get imposing laws and rules on women, telling them they will have no protections if they’re pregnant and the unspeakable happens, or they’re not ready to be pregnant and there’s no medical interventions to keep that from happening. How a woman can be raped and our government wants to force trauma on her that she couldn’t prevent by having to carry that baby to term. I hear men consistently using the disgusting troupe of “if she’d just keep her legs closed”. 64,000 rapes resulted in pregnancies in the last few years in states with abortion bans.

I don’t know why they think women would ever want to keep having more babies when this country tells them if something happens their death or trauma won’t matter. Why should our lives-our bodies-keep getting used as a political pawn?

We are sick of a society that tells us to keep doing this with our bodies, our minds, our labor, only to be met by a country that doesn’t give women paid maternity leave. Or a society that won’t help with childcare costs-many situations being the same price as someone’s take home pay each month.

We live in a country that wants us to have babies and be the everything to everyone. The organizer of birthday parties and holidays and teacher gifts. We pack for every vacation, schedule doctor’s appointments, find summer camps and do 70% or more of the cleaning in the house. They want us to stay home to do it all, but most can’t afford that so we work and still do it all.

We’re taught since we were old enough to understand that this is our God-given right and privilege and that we should be grateful we get to do this but honestly-is this REALLY what we signed up for? To live in a world where more is expected of women every year without the support we need? And we wonder why there’s a mental health crisis with women.

I am so sick to death of seeing people my daughter’s age live in this kind of world and it makes me even more enraged my granddaughter is in it. Where her body and life will be a soundbite for mostly men to analyze and debate over and decide what kind of a life she gets to lead. I’m so completely sick of it.

This isn’t what we signed up for. So no-not everyone will decide to have kids in the future. Because what their kids will be born into-especially if you’re a girl-is scary. I have conversations every week with my daughter who’s a labor and delivery nurse and we talk about how fast things are going south. It’s not hyperbole. It’s here and I don’t know if most of us truly live in a state of cognitive dissonance and think it will all just work, but I just can’t be there anymore.

When they say vote like your life depends on it-it does. They have closed down maternity wards here already and are transferring high risk patients to places further away and shit goes south. We all see it happening.

The funny thing is-as powerless as women feel right now, and as much as they’re fighting to keep us that way, I like to take advice from Glenda the good witch when she said, “you had the power all along, my dear”. We do. We just have to wake up and use it.

Until this country decides that the conversations about us are worthy of being decided by mostly women in the room and medical professionals who understand the complexities of our bodies, we’ll just be over here choosing the bear.