Self-Awareness: Fetal, Forming

Dear Baby Boy,

You are growing within me in the year 2020, a year that is inspiring yet terrifying, pivotal yet cyclical, human yet unprecedented. You are my first pregnancy, my first baby. You are as new to me as this COVID-19 world.

In March, my days were still mostly spent surrounded by friends and coworkers. Rumors of the virus were just taking root in the public consciousness, and people joked and speculated, “If everyone can’t leave the house, how many babies do you think are going to be born this fall? Is there going to be a whole generation of Quarantine Babies?” I bit my tongue and kept our secret. You were still just a whisper then.

But over the past few months, you have grown bigger and stronger. You already have a personality.

Your favorite time of day is nighttime. You like when Mommy goes to bed because you have more room to stretch and play. Your clamor feels like bubblegut, minus the gas. Sprightly effervescence! You talk back to Daddy, transmitting energetic thumps to his sweet murmurs.

Every day you listen to the sounds of our home. Computer keys tapping, virtual meetings, the occasional leaf blower outside. In the evening, Mommy and Daddy eat dinner and watch TV. We laugh and try to forget how uncertain the world outside our apartment, our bubble, is.

Your every bounce and squirm announces, “Here I am!” You bring us joy, hope, and resilience.

Voices of friends and family, beloved to us, are unfamiliar to you. When we do gather with others in small groups, you are still, hesitant, processing this new and strange stimuli.

While we joke that you aren’t a true “Quarantine Baby”—at least in your conception—in October, you will enter the world in quarantine. What will your infancy be, surrounded by these gray walls and hand-me-down furniture? What will you see through our apartment windows, longing or fear? Can your dad and I help you develop curiosity and compassion when so many lines must be drawn between us and others: masks, face shields, gloves, plexiglass, windows, doors...

And what of lines that are drawn despite the virus but are no less viral? Beliefs. Politics. Gender. Race. Sexuality. Identity. Class.

Our world is at war with a pandemic. Our country reckons with its addiction to racism, pointing fingers at straw men and institutions, past and present, and struggling to hold ourselves accountable for Today. As your mother, I struggle with the sinking realization that your early years will be sheltered. By protecting you from a pandemic, we keep your world narrow and small after a year that has proven how dangerous narrow, small worlds can be.

Here’s what I know: I am thirty-three years old, about to be a first-time mom at a formative moment in history. Self-awareness is a series of lifelong cracks in a glacier of inherited systems, and 2020 is teaching me how narrow and small—how white—my life has been.

Over one hundred twenty guests attended our wedding last summer. One was Black. On June 1, 2020, Mommy and Daddy sat in Beckley Creek Park, eating Mediterranean takeout in celebration of our first anniversary. There were thirty minutes and more than a world of difference between us and the weekend of protests, riots, and police brutality in Downtown Louisville. Teenage boys ran the soccer field, scrimmaging around a shiny football. Teen girls stood at the sidelines, ignoring the game and waiting to be noticed in their bikini tops. It was summer, and everyone was showing skin. On that park bench, I wondered:

Why are the people in my life mostly white?

Growing up, I thought that having a brother with cerebral palsy—your Uncle Conner—was the same hardship as racism and poverty. Many of my Black classmates didn’t walk at highschool graduation. For every Black classmate who crossed the stage, air horns trumpeted through the sports arena.

After high school, I attended a small, prestigious college in the center of Kentucky. I studied the literary canon—Shakespeare and Milton and Melville and Chaucer and Wordsworth and Whitman and Faulkner and other writers who were white men. My classrooms were also very white.

When I lived in Japan, I was one of ten white people in a rural city of 115,000. I thought, “Now I am a minority.” More than teaching middle school English, my job was to represent the global dominant language and Western culture. I was paid well to do it, despite lacking any pedagogical training. I met the criteria of being foreign and white.

Back home, I was surprised that my years abroad did not translate to meaningful career experience. While “figuring things out,” I worked part-time jobs. Half of my team members were Black. When I secured full-time roles, my coworkers suddenly looked more like me.

Asking ourselves “why” is instructive. But 2020 is teaching us that “why” is not enough. We must adapt our mindset and pivot our approach. So I shift from “why” to “how.”

How do I raise you, my white baby boy, to see your privilege and own it, so that when you turn thirty-three, your guest lists prove that today’s systems don’t limit your connection to our shared humanity.

And how do I teach you when I am still learning? When my self-awareness is just as fetal and forming as you are right now and all of my intentions are still just words on a page?

My child, I want to make your world bigger. I want to broaden our social circles and sense of community. I want to help you see others and appreciate their lived experiences, your commonalities and your differences. I want to share with you my struggles as a woman in a patriarchal society. I want your father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins to be among your greatest role models, AND I want you to own the privilege that buoyed them across waters where other less male, less white, less heterosexual, less wealthy people have sunk or could only, furiously, tread water. I want to cut through the warm, protective blanket swaddling white babies, boys, and men, and coax you to see that assigned privilege as something other than yourself.

Baby, the year is 2020. You are as new to me as this world is to the both of us. Someday, you will reflect on your upbringing as we all must do. After all, looking back is an important step in moving forward. Be honest with yourself and critical of where Mommy and Daddy got it right and where we got it wrong in cultivating your world. More than anyone else, you will be the greatest judge of our actions.

With conviction,

Your Momma