Civilization rises and falls—sometimes in meer moments. Pompeii, Nagasaki, the Sack of Rome, Atlantis… Sometimes I think about how short life could have been and whether that’s better or worse than dying when you’re older. I think about people that have survived horrors—Holocaust survivors who lived through death camps but died in a car accident. My own grandmother who immigrated to the United States from Iran completely by herself, lived with my grandfather who was an abusive drunk (although loved her), lived through a global pandemic, and then, DURING the pandemic, got cancer, and passed away just before she could see me get married. Throughout this whole time, friends of mine were having children. Babies were born, people died, and life carried on. But times were scary. We didn’t know what was coming next. So the question remains: does life actually find a way? Is it responsible to have children and carry on a legacy when you know the dangers around every corner?
10 years ago, I sat across from a survivor of the Holocaust during an internship at the Holocaust Centre of the United Kingdom. Ruth had never been to a concentration camp, didn’t even remember the horrors of the Holocaust herself, but she had been a survivor because of her parents. Ruth’s parents had opted to send her away from continental Europe on the Kindertransport, a refugee operation that moved thousands of children to the UK and to safety, during the beginning years of World War II. Born to Jewish parents, Ruth was just a baby when they sent her to live with a Catholic family in the UK for her safety. At the time, I never could have imagined making that decision. I never could have imagined having to choose whether to keep my child or send them across the sea for their own protection, thousands of miles away, without knowing if I would ever see them again. At the time I had asked her if the rhetoric she was hearing scared her. She replied “Of course it does. This rhetoric is what made my parents have to choose. This is what led to all those horrible things.”
10 years later, I am a mother. My son is almost two years old. He is full of joy and chaos and growing up in a world that is not kind, or gentle, or communal, or fair, or understanding. He is growing up in a world that mirrors times I only thought I studied in history books. He is growing up during what is overt fascism and I, and my partner, have taken a stand fully on one side of history that puts a target on my back and on my family’s back. On top of it all, I am a History and Social Studies teacher, working through a new red scare. So how do we raise our children during these turbulent times? How do we raise children at the end of the world?
I’ve always wanted to be a mom. My parents even referred to me as the third parent with my little sister. I work as a teacher and do it more for the parentified role than for the content. My high school students are “my kids” not my students. They’ve openly adopted my son as their own, frequently referring to him as “our son” or “my nephew.” They are my family as much as I am theirs. I think about their families all the time. I work in a Title I urban school. This means that we have low funding, high absenteeism, a large student population, and an even higher concentration of students from Black and Brown backgrounds that are multilingual. We have over 60 languages represented just within our building with over a dozen dialects of hispanic languages sprinkled throughout. We also have a high number of students who are undocumented or are Dreamers, children of undocumented parents. I think about them all the time. We talk about the state of the world. I am teaching classes on Contemporary Issues and Law and Society and these conversations always come up.
My students and I see immigration raids happening in our city. One of the first in Connecticut was in the town where I live. A raid just happened in the town I grew up in. We no longer have to wait to ask when will it be here; it is here. Children are losing their families. Parents are being forced away from their children or worse being taken with their children and used as bait. And it reminds me of my conversation with Ruth. How her mother left her behind in England. She went back to Germany. Knowing what could happen to her. How she didn’t recognize her mother over ten years later when they reunited. And I wonder when it could be my turn to decide if I will leave my child. If he will be alone.
Throughout all of these ponderings and fears and anxieties, I do want to have another child, for the sheer desire for my child not to be alone. My sister and I are incredibly close and while I know this is not the same across the board, it is important for me to have a built in friend. But the guilt of knowing stops me. The fear of the man-made chaos we are living through paralyzes me. The loneliness of parenthood, motherhood, and pregnancy stops me.
My pregnancy was hard. I worked up until a week before my due date, was nauseous and vomiting for nearly 30 weeks, suffered from perinatal mood disorder, had contractions for nearly a month before going into labor, and then my last paycheck before my unpaid maternity leave was $7.85. My partner, who was working as a contract worker, got less than half his allotted pay while being on state family leave in the early weeks of my son’s birth. My family helped to a fault; they supported us financially and bought us groceries and helped where they could but I was exhausted. It really does take a village to raise a child and not just in the sense of taking care of the baby. The mother is in need. The exhaustion, the loneliness, the pain, the fear, the hormones, the post-partum depression, the mother needs the village.
Historically, the village did exist. Before we had children in hospitals, teams of midwives would care for women in their postpartum hours. Cultures still practice times of confinement where women are waited on while they care for their children. Yet today and from the post-industrial 20th century on, things changed. Women went from having two weeks of hospitalization after birth to having three to five days. When we went home, we were on our own. No clue how to care for my kiddo, had the wrong size diapers which sent me into full post-partum meltdown mode, and didn’t have anything to take care of my own post-partum body. If I had my village, would I have had these things? Would other more experienced moms have been able to help me? And why, of all things, did we not have that kind of care and village as part of our society today?
The thread that connects all of these ideas, from the ICE raids, to the realities of parenthood and mothering in a post-industrial era, is capitalism. The cogs must be put back in the machine as soon as possible. It must be more difficult for the cog to stop than to remove themself from the machine.
Since the beginning of industrialization and factory work where workers were exploited and taken advantage of (in more ways than one), women have suffered. We lost our villages. We lost our cottage industry where women would come together to sew, and knit, and clean, and spin wool, to machines that were faster, larger, and worked more efficiently. During the second industrial revolution women were still expected to work and find ways to care for their children. If we thought childcare was bad now, it was worse then, with women oftentimes drugging their infants while they wrapped them to their chests while they worked in factories or left several children under the watch of an overseer. Women and children were the most easily exploited group because of their lack of capital and lack of control within the capitalist patriarchy.
Women, throughout history in the industrial and post industrial era, had to choose. In turning away from communal agrarian life, they had to choose between working and raising their children and it has been that way ever since. We have to choose. We have to choose what we will put our bodies through. We have to choose what we will put our finances through. We will have to choose what we put our families through. And we will have to choose whether we work for financial capital or whether we work in unrecognized labor of the home.
Along with these struggles, childcare has become exploitative in its cost. Daycare has become a multimillion dollar business where families are expected to vet and choose high quality daycares to send their children to and spend upwards of $3000 a month to have a stranger watch their child. In a way, we are choosing to send our children away already.
As we saw with the pandemic, childcare and schooling are an incredibly necessary part of the cogs in the machine. Without childcare and school, there was no one to watch the children. In our post-industrial age, mothers and fathers had to choose who would watch their children and who would work. The financial and domestic crises that arose during the work-from-home chaos during the pandemic highlighted the absolute necessity of having access to an affordable and reliable childcare system. For many, it was too difficult to both work from home and pay attention to their children in a domestic realm.
The issues highlighted by the exploitation of parenthood and child rearing lead us to our inevitable understanding and answers to the questions we originally set out with. Flood the system. The more we have children, the more we require compassion from the world around us; the more we shirk the post industrial-exploitation of capitalism, the more we can demand a safe, secure, and supportive environment for our children and families.
Ruth’s words will stay with me for the rest of my life. Being able to meet her and have tea with her are some of the most visceral memories that will remain with me. Her story is not a story that brings me fear anymore. It is a story of strength, of choice, and of resistance. It reminds me that the situations we are in now with ICE are because of the exploitative capitalist rat race we find ourselves in and a lack of compassion that occurs when the story that the proletariat is being told is that they are being taken advantage of not by capitalists but by their fellow man. The debacles with daycares in Minnesota and California lead us to several conclusions: childcare is a right and a requirement and not a site for exploitation; having children in the face of adversity and continuing to want a better life for your children is an act of ultimate resistance. Carrying on our legacy by raising children to be compassionate and understand the exploitation occurring in the world around them is what we should be doing.
I am a mother. I am a teacher. I am a DSA member. And I resist by raising my children.
Footnotes:
- https://www.holocaust.org.uk/
- For more information about Ruth’s story, read about it in Journeys: Children of the Holocaust Tell Their Stories Chapter 1.
- I think of the 5 year old who was held by ICE agents in a little blue bunny hat while they waited to arrest his father. And when I shared about it on social media, a former student of mine tried to defend it. The mental gymnastics are insane.
- I only got the 7 bucks because my coworkers graciously donated some of their sick days to me. The whole system is incredibly archaic. I wanted to return the paycheck out of sheer pettiness but I used it to buy a desperately needed new parent coffee instead.
- Understatement of the century.
- https://www.ahmaandco.com/post/lets-talk-about-the-history-of-postpartum-care-in-the-us – take a look at this article if the history interests you. It references an amazing tv show about the transition from midwives to hospitals called Call the Midwife on BBC. Also, 3-5 days is generous. I got 2.
- There’s a tradition called wool waulking from Scotland, where women sing, fluff, and wash wool to prep it for spinning. It’s a wonderful community building tradition centered around song and female empowerment.
- https://eh.net/encyclopedia/women-workers-in-the-british-industrial-revolution/
- https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2026/01/heres-whats-really-happening-with-child-care-fraud-in-minnesota-explained/