in a complicated world, you can be the problem and the solution

I love the news. Always have. I watch it like people watch sports, and, while I understand that a break from the news - especially in a cycle like the current one - is a wise decision, it doesn’t usually feel like a necessity for me. Because the news doesn’t stress me out as much as it enrages me. It doesn’t floor me as much as it inspires a sense of righteous agency. And that’s different. The news doesn’t stress me out in the way that finalizing the summer schedule does, as I stand there immobile, hands hovering over the computer keyboard, as though whatever decision we make about Aidy doing one or two weeks of sleepaway camp might wreak irreversible havoc on our lives.

It’s silly, I know, to compare the state of America to planning our family’s summer schedule. But the point I’m hoping to make is that I work hard to not be a person who is hamstrung by either, because I believe that this sort of hand-wringing, while completely understandable, is not only pointless, but, if you let it go too far, harmful. You can overthink yourself into inaction. And that kind of anxiety can be contagious.

J and I own a Tesla. I know. And the truth is we bought it well before we knew Elon Musk was going to play such a large, destructive part in dismantling so many of our country’s institutions, and jobs, and values - so haphazardly! so abruptly! - but we did not buy it before we knew he was crazy. We knew. And we had discussions about it, intense, but civil, where J was for, and I was against, until I accepted his reasoning, because some of it was sound: Tesla had a much more extended charging network than the other EVs available, important for fairly lengthy daily commute; Tesla prices had dipped significantly and the incentives were very good; the model we were considering had a flip up third row, helpful in a family of five; and it was a cool car.

This last one didn’t compel me, but the others I eventually accepted. Art vs. the artist, and all. Now, of course, that multi-faceted excuse doesn’t seem like nearly enough justification and I’ll take our (all gas) VW Atlas over the Tesla when I need to run an errand because I feel so conflicted about this. I’ve always loved ethical dilemnas but I don’t love it when I’m the subject of my own quandary, it turns out.

Another example. I bought airline tickets to visit with my high school friends in New Orleans at the end of the month. Immediate, joyful, anticipation! For the trip out, I booked a nonstop flight on Avelo, a somewhat new, low-cost airline that flies out of smaller hubs. It’s been a real boon for New Haven, and very popular among friends. Until this week, that is, when stories broke that Avelo would be working with the Trump administration by facilitating deportation flights out of Arizona. Now my flight was ideal but immoral, and fighting back futile. I already paid for the ticket.

This is where the news - once proof that I, with my informed liberal hot takes and my yelling at the television, was doing things right - has gotten more complicated for me as of late. My choices aren’t right, my impulses unclear. Am I being performative? Am I thinking through the repercussions of our collective acts? What is the fallout from shopping on Amazon? Do I speak out on social media, or boycott it? It’s so easy to let the questions rule the day, and whatever activities you had planned - the real concrete stuff of everyday life - fall by the wayside.

In addition to the rage I feel as a Democrat in 2025, I am overcome with petty annoyance: STOP MUCKING UP ALL OUR CHOICES, YOU GUYS. It is too expensive to trade in this vehicle!

I don’t know how many of you have seen the show, “The Good Place,” but it’s a favorite among our family, and the question of being a good person in a complicated, modern world is at its heart. It is a messy, fascinating issue, and these days, I find myself in its grasp more than I’d like, chasing down possibilities instead of moving on with my messy, fascinating life. Contemplating scenarios instead of enacting real change whether it’s personal or bigger picture. Or just walking the dog to clear my head, a beneficial act for me, and for her, that yields additional ones, like a chat with a neighbor.

It’s predictable for a person like me, who owns a Tesla for christ’s sake, to recommend that we go easy on ourselves in these high-octane times. But I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. Because I think we should go hard. Live our beliefs. Hit ‘em where it hurts, so to speak.

But keep moving on, too. Keep moving through. Don’t let making the right choices become your paralysis, or let the news become your entire life. You can be the problem and the solution. In other words: make the right choices from behind the wheel of your controversial car (that’s metaphor for you, and reality for me).

One thing I have always told my children is that you can do good even when you’re not feeling your best. You can be having a bad day, and still make the right choices. It’s a form of integrity. It’s how you take a deep breath and decide not to unleash hell on your brother for doing a Taekwondo flying side kick near your face when you are trying to finish your very challenging environmental science homework. It is how you focus and listen, or at the very least try to listen, to your husband when he’s getting in the weeds on genetic sequencing or splicing or something, and you are super exhausted from obsessing over the eighteen headlines you got about that day’s stock market swings. When you, by the way, got a degree in English and Philosophy and don’t understand the words he is saying.

I think we live in this complicated world by getting comfortable with making the best, perhaps imperfect, choices we are able to make, again, and again. It will never be enough, it won’t always be the right call. We are so beautifully, so consistently problematic.

I was walking Aidy home from school this week when I stopped by some forsythia bushes in my neighborhood that grow in a house-free strip of woods near our house, and don’t seem to belong to anybody. They’re blooming now, bright yellow. We don’t have them in our yard, but every year I collect them from somewhere to put in a vase on my dining room table. On that afternoon, Aidy, at first, deemed this fine, exciting even, until she started worrying about the cars driving past and what those people might think about my wrenching branches from an unclaimed bush like that on the side of the road; carrying them proudly home like a prize and maybe like a thief.

I got all caught up in her concern, at first, which was easy to do because my mind’s been trending that way so often lately. Were these really nobody’s bushes? And what right did I have to take the branches like that? What do people think of me, and is this yet another in a growing list of transgressions? But I stopped myself, paused the spiral mid spin. “This is what I do each spring,” I told Aidy. ‘It makes me happy.” And we kept walking, yellow flowers, imperfect decisions, spring traditions that keep us anchored in his unmoored world, and all.

Upon becoming exactly that kind of mother

Some of you may know, because I talked to you about it excessively, that I had certain feelings about driving Nora to high school last year. The school is only a mile away, I’d say to anyone who would listen, and driving her there is an inconvenient interruption on already busy mornings. An out and back that negated the possibility of any “flow.” But I’d often do it anyway, grudgingly, with my ceramic mug of coffee along for the ride. I’d plop it down, all wobbly, right there in the console meant for non-breakable travel mugs. It was like I could not possibly emphasize enough, through words or actions, how inconvenient this was for me.

I wanted her (unless the weather was truly terrible) to walk. Or, I wanted us to make a plan concerning this repeated offense. Maybe J could drive her on his way to work, making this errant ride a purposeful one. But she never got in the habit of getting up early enough to walk and we never made a sensible plan, greeting each morning as though something - magic, or a sudden burst of willpower - might have intervened in the night, solving the issue for us without the practical matter of having to do the solving part.

This year, though, a good friend who lives a bit farther out in town transferred to Nora’s high school and, starting on the first day of school, was dropped off at our house early enough that the two of them, they could walk. Walk and enjoy each other’s company and some conversation before the day began, something I’d suggested many times, referencing other friends who live - I mean! - right on the way to school if one was - for instance! - walking there. And this habit of walking has continued, with the exception of her friend’s mom driving them both on the recent mornings too dark and cold in the very depths of winter (for which I am eternally grateful).

So, on a recent morning when Nora showed up outside our bedroom door to explain that her friend was sick and what, exactly, was she going to do because, at that point, it was “really too late to walk,” it was just like old times. But without my immediate and aggressive resentment. It had been too long! I’d grown unaccustomed. My mug three-quarters full of hot coffee, my pajamas still on, I knew my part from muscle memory. “I could take you,” I said.

I drove her like before, but now charmed at the opportunity. I used to use these drives to deliver a lecture on the reasons I should not be partaking in them, but this time I inquired about her schedule that day, chattered about politics; the attempts at eager discourse a teenager really hates first thing in the morning. Nora and I often discuss the mismatch of our energy: I’m ready to take on the world and talk out its issues upon waking, while Nora comes to life around 8:30 p.m., just as I am descending into the depths of exhaustion and the inability to talk at all. We laugh at the incongruity.

The thing about an oldest child is that you live through every stage of growing up, and of parenting, for the first time with them. Over, and over, again. It’s difficult, impossible really, to imagine what you’ll miss some day.

I think sometimes about those older, more knowledgeable moms, grandmothers, too, who tell the younger ones - who once told me - that it “goes so fast.” Such a trite phrase, such an overused maxim. And yet, I’m her now, eyeing the woman with a fussy child at the grocery store, desperate to say something, wise enough to stay quiet, because it’s the kind of point you have to come to yourself. So I attempt to impart my learned experience through osmosis, throwing brain waves across the produce section. Hold on, I think in her direction. Hold on tight.