I couldn't sleep on Saturday night.
I was doing that thing where I couldn't get off the internet and go to bed. But like many people all over the world, on Saturday I was glued to the web because ISIS is systematically murdering people, and like many people in America, I'm paying more attention all of a sudden.
I have felt numb as this has unfolded because of that feeling of not knowing what to DO, when reposting an article and changing my profile picture feels ridiculous and infuriating in its inadequacy.
I will not accept that this is the way the world must be, and will forever be. I am firmly in the camp of people who have posted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous quote: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that."
But the path forward, through the pain of those grieving in Paris and the hate of the myriad voices on social media equating Muslims and refugees with terrorists and the thicket of statements of what the true problem is--let alone the true solution...
All of it leaves me gutted, hunched over my kitchen counter while NPR details for me that my planet is in chaos.
I was numb. And then I broke down and wept when I read this article about mothers of ISIS recruits.
These women have lost a child to ISIS's twisted ideology, but not in the tragic way families in Paris and Beirut and Baghdad lost someone on Thursday and Friday. These mothers lost their children slowly, watching them transform from awkward teenagers to newly converted Muslims to radical extremists. And now their children are dead.
"Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions... [T]heir parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. It is sorrow at the loss of a child, it is guilt at what he or she may have done, it is shame in the face of hostility from friends and neighbors, and it is doubt about all the things they realize they did not know about the person whom they brought into the world. Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss."
This article broke me not because I am a mother, though it would have on that front alone. It broke me because it brought me face to face with the humanity of the group being almost universally demonized: ISIS fighters.
I suggest that, like the mothers of ISIS recruits, we "weave a strange alliance from our loss."
While France's president orders a "pitiless" retaliation, while airstrikes funded by our tax dollars kill civilians in Syria, while our political leaders respond to the fearful outcry of their constituents and close their borders to refugees fleeing from these terrorists, I suggest that we employ humanity's overdue solution:
Empathy.
Radicalized, militarized empathy. Empathy proportional to the single-minded fervor that ISIS demonstrates. Empathy that contemplates training camps (and then writes the curriculum and books the venues). Empathy that includes daily rituals. Empathy that organizes on social media, that meets in cafes, that donates money, infects voting, calls senators, and meets the hatred in our Facebook feeds with reason and compassion.
I am seriously suggesting that, like ISIS, we plan and organize to take over the world. That we adopt the policy, in our personal lives and in our politics, of "no human left behind."
I am not deflecting the rage we feel toward ISIS. Their actions are despicable. They have murdered thousands of innocent people and caused almost 2 million to flee for their lives. They torture people. They have drafted a pamphlet on their rules for keeping women and girls as sex slaves. And I am not saying that there should be no military action whatsoever. But I am saying we should seek justice, not revenge, and we should fight against any confusion between the two that leads to militarism.
Militarism is the grown up, globalized version of two boys on the playground pointing at the other and screaming "But he hit me first!" It is time we matured as a species, or we will extinguish ourselves. We can hate this ideology, and we should. But we won't defeat ISIS until we understand why they exist and what they want.
I have also felt numb in the wake of the Paris attacks in part because I am ashamed.
I'm ashamed because I participate in global racism. I knew about Paris. But I did not know about the ISIS bombings that killed over 40 and injured over 200 in Beirut on Thursday, or the bombing at a funeral that killed 18 people in Baghdad within hours of the Paris attacks. Not until I went beyond the New York Times and started scrolling through my Twitter feed.
As a western media consumer, I do not demand perspective from every part of the world, and I am slow to seek it out. I am among the countless people blogging and posting now, when articles detailing why we should care about ISIS have been available and enticingly numbered like Buzzfeed lists for months. And so I dehumanize with my distance, privilege, and apathy. I make people feel as though it "does not make a difference if they die."
Justice requires empathy, because it allows us to understand what is needed to achieve it. In Bangladesh in 2003, Mukul--one of my English students--raised his hand and asked why my president was attacking Islam. This is the perception our militarism has created all over the world: that our wars and airstrikes and drones are intended to destroy their entire culture, and that our violence flows from an ideology that they hate and fear as much as we hate and fear theirs. In the 12 years since I heard that striking question (it has never left me), we have not done enough to dissolve that perception, and we have done so very much to solidify it.
If we employ empathy, we will be willing to slow down and consider how drones create extremists, why ISIS was gestated in a US military prison, and how our demand for oil laid the groundwork.
If we employ empathy, we can understand how to fight ISIS's effectiveness at recruiting through social media. Empathy will keep people from vandalizing mosques and demonizing Muslims. It will keep us from dismissing the fears of others when they are expressed as prejudice, from writing off our co-workers or family members, from unthinkingly vilifying anyone at all.
Empathy will keep us from perpetuating the racism that allows us to ignore violence against people who are "not like us." [they are just like us]; ongoing attacks by Boko Haram in Nigeria; the April al-Shabab attack that left 147 dead at Garissa University in Kenya, which bizarrely resurfaced after the Paris attacks on social media in a flurry of white guilt; the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of American police officers.
Empathy calls us to be relentlessly kind. It will help us to love our neighbors and our enemies. It will allow us to honor the inscription on the Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--that welcomes "the huddled masses yearning to breathe free," and avoid repeating the mistake of excluding refugees that we made during the Holocaust. It will move us to befriend our Muslim brothers and sisters in a country that is increasingly Islamophobic. Kindness will train our hearts and our reflexes, so that we can be more like young Parisians calling for unity, the husband of a woman killed in the Paris attacks who refuses to hate, and the father in Beirut who tackled a suicide bomber and saved hundreds of lives at the cost of his and his daughter's.
Empathy as a strategy is at a disadvantage. Many of us who see its worth are comfortable. Our urgency is suffocating under the busyness of lives filled with jobs, families, and leisure. Extremism is sparked and grows to inferno where there is tragedy, injustice, and deprivation. This means that we must fight harder, and be more devoted than ISIS. Humanity is on the line.
Empathy allows us to understand. And when we understand, then we can be kind. And when we can be kind, then there can be peace. In Paris, and everywhere.
Ten years ago today, Nathan and I placed our firstborn son for adoption.
I was barely 23 when I got pregnant with Benjamin. I had just graduated from Northwest University, and was preparing to spend two years in Jakarta, Indonesia as an associate missionary. I got my acceptance letter to the program the same week I took a pregnancy test. Suddenly there stretched a chasm between where all my efforts and plans had directed me and where I found myself, faced with one of the biggest decisions of my life. A decision with a ticking, eight-month clock.
Nathan walked through the entire adoption process with me. Our adoption counselor said it was the first time they had had a birth father in their office. Together we went to doctor's appointments and chose a family for our child. And then, on August 30, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina raged in the Gulf and on our hospital TV, Ben came into the world.
I have always wanted to be a mother. I have a fabulous example. My mom stayed at home with the three of us, pouring countless hours into me and my brothers, feeding and cleaning and teaching and protecting. I don't remember ever deciding I would have kids. I just knew that I would. The desire, the inclination, was embedded so deep in who I am that it was assumed. My unplanned pregnancy at 23 did away with my picture around that assumption.
Writing now--a decade later--is an exercise in healing for me. It is the outpouring of the surreal realization, with pain and vivid nostalgia, that I am the mother of a 10-year-old. I have grieved the reality of not parenting Benjamin very deeply. I am sure I will continue to grieve that loss, at various points in my life and his, in innumerable ways. But in June I took a road trip, and somewhere in Wyoming I was awash in memories of him and his birth that felt so fresh as to leave me unable to breathe.
Sometimes grief is a sniper. You are struck with a memory, a smell, a comparison, or an image when you are simply going about your day, and you are pierced to your core. I am amazed at how the pain can be so very near the surface, after all these years.
I am also writing now because I want to live the fullest life I can, and for me that means sharing grief as well as joy. I want to be open about my own grief, and to be intentional about processing it alone and with others. And sometimes in public. I want to be a person who can meet others in their grief--with empathy, at the right times, and without fear. It's my hope that this blog is practice toward being more fully human, and that it is an encouragement to others who are seeking ways to process and share their grief, too.
I hope also to lend complexity to the conversation around sex, pregnancy, and parenthood. Often it is talked about only in black and white terms: pro-life and pro-choice, abstinence-only, right and wrong. My assumptions around parenting were of a marriage in my early 20's, a supportive partner, and at least some financial stability. Questions of race and socio-economic status are well beyond the scope of this post, as are questions around sexuality. But now, as a white middle-class single mother who spent several years on food stamps, and has wrestled with faith and shame around my pregnancies, I want to urge this: whenever we encounter people whose lives don't match our picture, questions are far more important than assumptions.
I have watched people I love dearly struggle with parenting, with the loss of a child, with miscarriage, infertility, adoption, abortion, and singleness. There can be so much pain around the topic of children. Or the lack of children. All too often there is a gulf between our longings at the level of assumption and our unfeeling circumstances.
We want children, and cannot have them. We long for the child we no longer have. We struggle with the distance between who we are as parents and who we want to be. We want people to stop asking us why we don't have kids. We want people to stop asking us why we don't want them.
The weight is so often carried alone because it can be so hard to talk about, or to ask about. It can stretch out unmarked by an actual date. It is the kind of pain that is too easily misunderstood, ignored, or dismissed. But it is so much lighter when shared, and I am so grateful to the people who have helped me carry the weight of being a birth parent.
I will never forget the pain I sensed from Benjamin's mother and father the first time we met with them. They told us their story with a practiced and partial vulnerability, in the coffee shop at Third Place Books in Shoreline. It was a neutral place calculated to neutralize the gravity of the meeting, where we nibbled on scones for show and talked about giving them our baby.
On September 1, 2005, we placed a child for adoption. I placed my baby...my son...the warm, wriggling embodiment of a desire so deep I assumed it, into the arms of another woman. And she and Benjamin's father received from me and Nathan a son who embodied the difficult road of adoption along with the joy of a newborn. A road that led them through literal barrenness and emotional barrenness. A searing, vast, and all too public desert, littered with discarded versions of a desire they spent years and thousands pursuing in an alternative form after it could no longer be assumed.
There are the moments so etched in my memory that I can see and feel them if I just close my eyes and put out the barest of efforts.
I will never forget the walk down the hallway in the hospital after his family had come to pick him up. They stayed behind, in the postpartum suite with our adoption counselor. And Nathan and I, faces swollen and streaked with two days of tears, shuffled toward the elevator. We carried flowers and hospital bags, but no car seat. No diaper bag. The walls were pale green and lit with that fluorescent light that is the stuff of the worst scenes in movies. The tile on the floor was bland white and cream checkered. Each step was a leaden fight, a refusal to do what all my instincts told me to do: throw myself on the floor and allow the primal wail to escape from the pit of my stomach. Run back and burst through the door and say I was sorry, but I couldn't do it.
When we made it to the elevator, I stood clinging to Nathan's hand like a life ring as our tiny steel compartment full of strangers sank toward the parking garage. They all stared and shifted uncomfortably and looked away. I'm sure they thought we had lost someone. And we had.
I will never forget being two days out, lying in recovery and shock in bed, with bags of frozen corn laid across my chest to help the milk that had filled my breasts subside. I breastfed for the two days we were in the hospital, giving my son the parting gift of colostrum I knew was so full of antibodies and nutrients, instead of starting him right away on formula. The skin on my chest was so taut and burning hot it felt like it would explode. I was struck in the moment with the thought that even if the knowledge and the emotion of what had just happened disappeared, even for a second of reprieve, the physical pain would remain. My body ached and throbbed with one constant, desperate, accusatory question: "Where is he?"
I think it was the year Benjamin turned five, as Nathan and I were walking away from our annual meeting with him and his family, that we realized the weight had shifted. It had taken five years, but finally the joy of what we had done for him and for his family outweighed the pain that we felt in losing him.
All this said, I would change none of it. It is the decision in my life that I am proud of, if I need to point to just one. I believed the best way I could be a mother to Benjamin was to decide, with all of the herculean meaning behind that decision, to place him with a family who could give him what I could not. The certainty of a home, of parents who were prepared, of parents whose longing fit his timing.
I believe I was brave in that choice. I was true to my definition of love: to do what is best for the object of your love, even if that action comes at tremendous cost. And I believe I was wise. I knew I could not give my son the life I wanted--assumed--I would give to my children. And I knew he could have that life, if I was willing to choose it for him.
The costs of all of it are yet to be borne fully. For Benjamin. For his parents and sister. For Miles. For me and for Nathan, and for our families. I have no doubt there will be questions asked, tears shed, resentments worked through, and stories told and retold and processed over all our lifetimes.
And those moments will be part of the practice at those junctures. As this one is now.
