A Love Story
This is a story I wrote for the anthology “New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings, and Climate Crisis” edited by Alastair Lee Bitsóí and Brooke Larsen, published by Torrey House Press in November 2021. It is an honor to be included in these pages among friends and fellow community organizers in the Southwest. Order a copy of the book here.
“How do we give our children what they need to know to survive, and what they need to want to survive?”
—adrienne maree brown, Octavia’s Parables podcast
Author’s Note: I use he/him and they/them pronouns interchangeably for Luca in this story as they are too young to define their own pronouns, and Lauren uses they/them pronouns exclusively. I like the website mypronouns.org if you want to learn more about life-affirming personal pronouns.
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“We need to do something about the bottle.”
“I know, I had the same thought last night.”
“But we need a plan, it’s not just going to happen.”
I pull out my phone and search “how to wean toddler off bottle” with the desperate conviction of a frazzled, sleep-deprived parent at their wit’s end—which I am, we are. Lauren and I have spent three consecutive nights waking up to answer Luca’s cries for another bottle, the restless nights fueling sleepy-eyed tantrums during the day for both parents and our two-year-old. I’m desperate to figure out how to get our kid to sleep through the night.
Our pediatrician had recommended weaning early. Babies (and their parents) sleep better when they can learn to self-soothe, she said, and becoming dependent on a bottle could get in the way of that. But our initial problem was getting him to go to sleep on his own in the first place. A nighttime bottle had conveniently solved that issue and mitigated my refusal to let him “cry it out.” I was way more willing to spend hours of my evening lying in bed with Luca sticking his finger up my nose, waiting to welcome sleep, than to let my heart break listening to him scream for me until he gave in to exhaustion. Fortunately, Luca was more than happy to be left alone in bed chugging milk until they passed out, and once the pandemic hit, the extra time in the evenings to process and chill out became critical.
So here we are now, dealing with the consequences of a short-sighted strategy that continued for far too long because #2020.
With Lauren looking over my shoulder as we sit in bed, I scroll through an article in Fatherly that advocates for the “cold turkey” method, with an emphasis on talking through it before tossing the bottles out forever.
“Yeah we should definitely start talking about it, that feels good. But cold turkey?”
We move on to another article in Today’s Parent written in first person by a mom who swaps the bottle for a sippy cup of water while on a trip, with the excuse that “they don’t have bottles here.” She gushes about how pleasantly surprised she was when her kid never asked for one again.
“I don’t think Luca’s going to get over it that easily.”
Our toddler is still initiating earthquake drills after the 5.7 magnitude quake that shook us awake one morning last March; he’s obsessed with the possibility of running into “scary spiders” around the house after seeing Lauren go into red-alert when they found a black widow in our living room; and while it’s December as I write this, he just stopped asking if there’s fire in his closet from shrapnel that fell on the roof above his room during Pioneer Day fireworks in July... A small sampling of the “monsters” that walked the earth this year—or at least the ones Luca was consciously aware of and verbally coherent enough to recognize and express as unusual disruptions (the pandemic’s been too much of a slow burn to register as an “event”).
“We need a good story.”
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Stories have been a critical part of helping me survive and adapt to change throughout my life. I was born in Spain, moving back and forth between there and the US a few times from ages three to twelve as my parents struggled through economic instability, mental health crises, and marital strife. Despite the xenophobia they experienced in Utah and the barriers our undocumented status created, the pull of the American Dream—a core component of the worldview they’d converted to as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—was strong enough to bring us back. After 9/11, the borders were more tightly secured, forcing a commitment one way or another. This is, of course, an oversimplified story to help move mine along. Both of my parents are complex human beings with their own reasons for making the choices they made, and I don’t speak for them.
As I became more and more aware of the dysfunctional world around me, and without the tools to process my experiences, I turned to stories. My parents are gifted storytellers and have infused our lives with both real and imagined narratives. While my dad prefers to share stories from his own life as a way of expressing himself, and more recently, as a way to give us a more concrete connection to our genealogy, my mom was the Queen of Imagination. In my early childhood, she would tell my siblings and I colloquial Spanish bedtime stories, host puppet shows for me and my friends, and make up stories on the spot, always coming up with a variety of voices for each character. When we moved to Utah, she took us to the library every week with a laundry basket we’d fill to the brim with books, often reaching our check-out limit.
Books, movies, TV, and music became my coping mechanisms—my escape, fuel for my daydreams, a stable and safe portal into other people’s minds, new worlds, and infinite possibilities, and a way for me to piece together who I was and wanted to be. I was willing to try any genre, but favored sci-fi, fantasy, and first-person coming-of-age stories. I especially appreciated series that allowed me to build a relationship with the characters and their world over time, and would often choose books based on how thick they were, practicing self-discipline as I got to the final chapters, trying to savor them slowly if it was an especially good book.
At the age of eight, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a writer, eager to express myself and be seen by other readers in the way I searched for and found parts of myself in the stories I read.
It wasn’t until much later in life that I developed more conscious awareness of the power stories had to create meaning, weave entire belief systems, and inspire action—for better or worse.
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Like most parents, 2020 had us attempting to make sense out of a continuous series of emotionally intense situations—a handful of emergencies, some of them life and death, and many of them dealing with our environment and health. Luca latches on to each explanation of “What happened?” with focused curiosity and an incredible long-term memory for bits and pieces of stories, sustained by repetitive call-and-response phrases that describe the most dramatic moments.
“Nana fell. Nana fell. Nana fell.”
“Yes, Nana fell. And the firetruck came to help her.”
“The firetruck came? The firetruck came?”
“Yes, the firetruck came, and she’s okay now!”
“Nana’s okay. Nana’s okay. Nana’s okay.”
It’s kind of poetic. The conversation doesn’t move on until you’ve affirmed you hear, understand, and agree with him by repeating exactly what he says—which is often a variation of what you said. Basically, we spend a lot of time recalling and acting out scenes from life over and over again, and the bottles disappearing could very well be another paradigm-shifting event that plays out for months.
One such shift that required a reframe happened in early March, a week before pandemic lockdowns began in the United States. Luca had been struggling with a mild cold for weeks when he went into respiratory distress while visiting my mom in Midway, Utah, and was rushed down Parley’s Canyon to Primary Children’s Hospital by ambulance. We spent two nights in the PICU, Luca pumped full of sedatives, their chubby, twenty-month-old cheeks covered by a full-face mask attached to a ventilator. The doctors sent us home immediately after his oxygen levels went up and he could disconnect from all the tubes and wires, because the hospital was running at capacity. Since then, Luca’s continued to have asthma-like symptoms that escalate into coughing fits and wheezing when the air is full of pollen or pollution. The air pollution in particular is proving to be a compounding public health crisis for residents across the Wasatch Front and beyond as human-driven climate change increases wildfires, and development projects like the Utah Inland Port threaten to further poison our sources of life.
After struggling to breathe for two days while strapped to a mask covering his entire face, Luca did not want another piece of plastic over his mouth and nose—even if it was just for thirty seconds. But a puff or two of preventative meds every day is how we manage the symptoms so we can play somewhat fancy free. And if there’s anything that tears my soul more than letting my kid “cry it out,” it’s watching them struggle and scream as I physically constrain them. For the sake of both of us, we started calling the inhaler a “robot” and making silly mechanical noises and stiff dance moves when we pulled it out.
It took a couple of days, but our reframe was a hit! He started reminding us that it was time for robot. All the devices we’ve accumulated since then—humidifier, air purifier, nebulizer—have become part of the O2 robot team. Of course, he doesn’t like the inhaler robot anymore because it signals time for “night night” in the evening, and he’s busy moving through Gene Sharp Junior’s list of “198 Methods of No-Sleep Action” right now...
We thought we’d figured out how to manage the asthma-like symptoms when wildfire smoke blew across the region in late summer. Salt Lake City shot up the global Air Quality Index charts to place third among cities with the most toxic air. A small sniffle turned into another rush to the emergency room one night. This time, Luca spent a few hours excited to be hooked up to an even bigger robot while playing with his tablet when he should have been asleep in bed. As for Lauren and I, we were just as excited to leave without checking in to a room at the PICU. With a doctor’s affirmation that we didn’t overreact and a prescription for an at-home “super robot” (nebulizer) in our hands, we headed home as the hospital’s morning shift began.
Outside, pieces of trash and dust were swirling violently against the workers making their way up the hill from the TRAX station. We drove past Liberty Park dodging branches, and as we got out of the car in our own driveway, the full-grown tree in my neighbor’s front yard seemed to bend in half. Lauren and Luca stayed up to watch whole limbs from fifty-foot box elder trees crash down into our backyard. My bone-deep exhaustion turned the chaos into a foggy dream as I got back in bed listening to our patio furniture and who knows what else bump against the house. I swear I heard the Wicked Witch of the West shrieking as she rode the one hundred mph hurricane-force gusts of wind some later referred to as an “inland hurricane.” Though, it’s more likely it was Lauren trying to make the freak storm that killed a human and damaged homes across the city less scary for Luca.
When I woke up feeling heartbroken and defeated, the story I’d been carefully weaving for the past decade about the world and my role in it had completely unraveled.
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I grew up being told to prepare for the world to end in my lifetime.
It sounds like a morbid existence when written out like that, but the particular story that accompanied my worldview was written in the early nineteenth century by a movement of Christian New Yorkers who imagined a loving and forgiving God—a cool dad who would send big brother Jesus to clean up our mess and bring a thousand years of peace before the final judgment day. The apocalypse was #goals: “If you’re prepared materially and spiritually, you’ll be celebrating when it comes,” was the general vibe of my church leaders and fellow members.
My faith in this story began to fray when I was twelve and my parents finally divorced after our last back-and-forth move from Spain. We moved to Cedar City with my mom this time—a small, conservative town in Southern Utah where many people were kind and welcoming, but too many more were cliquish and fearful of “outsiders.” I became anxiously aware of the way my family was treated, particularly my mom, who couldn’t hide her thick Spanish accent and was forced to work two or three jobs at a time to make ends meet.
How could people who believed everyone was divine treat others like they were unworthy of dignity and respect? Well, it was right there in the scriptures. You fail to live by the book, you’re going to be cursed with a hard life. It wasn’t difficult to extrapolate from there that if people see you struggling, they’re going to know you’re a moral failure and treat you as such. And of course, no one had given me a comprehensive American history lesson or explained that racism, classism, misogyny, and xenophobia were still alive today. As I grew into adolescence, the shame grew with me, swelling every time I witnessed my family members get mistreated, or what felt even worse: every time our family became the neighborhood charity project.
But I knew something wasn’t quite right. My parents had taught me that every human on the planet was a child of God, a sibling to Jesus, and had been “saved for these latter days” to be a beacon of truth, guiding others to accept the love of our big brother into their lives and step into their own divine role in fulfilling his plan to return to earth and bring peace. This paired nicely with the post-communist, “you’re special and you can do anything you dream” message I heard from Sesame Street in the ’90s.
Despite my dissolving faith in the Mormon Church, this was one part of the story I held on to.
After a series of experiences, which included waging war against the Cedar High PTA budget priorities as editor of the school paper; reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in my Diversity in Literature class at the University of Utah; witnessing the Dreamer and Occupy Movements spark and grow during my college years; and then moving to New York City just as the #BlackLivesMatter movement went viral to support the Sanctuary Movement and other faith-based racial and economic justice organizers with their communications work, I began piecing together a new version of the story for myself and my role in it.
The arc of the universe bends towards justice, as Dr. King said; and what if this isn’t the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb, as Valarie Kaur says; and if we organize the poor and work to repair the breach, as Rev. William Barber II says…well, we just might circumvent apocalypse and create heaven on earth, I concluded. And me? I’m going to be a beacon of truth, amplifying the words of the social justice prophets, guiding others to pray with their feet until we reach the promised land together.
I just hadn’t taken into account that the land may not even be inhabitable by that point.
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Our brainstorm starts in silence as Lauren and I consider the pathways and long-term consequences of the fantasies we’ll weave to explain the disappearance of Luca’s bottles. I think about the values and principles we could affirm in this process: letting go, change, adaptation, interdependence, reciprocity.
“Swap the bottle for a new friend?”
“To add to the pile? I don’t know...he hasn’t shown any interest in his stuffed animals.”
We share ideas and eventually decide that we’ll use Luca’s upcoming change from a floor bed to a bunk bed as the catalyst—a change we’re making as a potential safeguard against the inevitably bigger earthquake that’s overdue on our fault line (this bunk bed can withstand two tons of weight). Before it arrives, we’ll start talking about this new bed and how fun it will be to sleep closer to the moon and have a secret reading nook underneath to keep him cozy and safe. We’ll tell him about the bed builders who are working so hard to make it just right and are asking us for one thing in return: now that Luca’s got a big-kid bed, they need all his bottles so they can share them with babies who still need them.
Luca’s his own human, so we can only guess at his response. While he’s always concerned about the well-being of others and is often willing to share things that are meaningful to him (like the very last fruit snack), our main worry is that we may be creating unnecessary complications around the bed transition that will just compound the problem. We’ll have to make the change irreversible and irresistible and, of course, create space for a grieving process around the bottles, if needed. To accompany and comfort Luca through the transition (and so we don’t end up back in bed with him for hours every evening), we decide to get a stuffed animal of a character from a YouTube series he loves, which Lauren originally found to help him get over his fear of spiders.
We’re truly never alone if you look close enough.
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June Jordan writes in Revolutionary Mothering: “Children are the ways that the world begins again and again,” and adrienne maree brown boldly states in Octavia’s Parables podcast, “Life or death depends on being able to slow down and have a different conversation—a conversation that brings you together.”
While the spiritual alchemists and movement doulas among us are constant sources of wisdom and inspiration for me, it’s through emotional, agenda-less conversations, wearing masks outside a campfire in my yard with friends, that I continue to make sense out of my experiences this past year. It’s in organizing meetings over Zoom where we spend half our time just checking in that I develop strategy. It’s in making the effort to be fully present with Luca while we play together, letting go of my sense of time and whatever “deliverables” I’ve been tasked with, that I’ve reconstructed my worldview and rebuilt the path to my divine purpose. Or at least, a purpose that is self-directed and accountable to my community.
I understand now that many of the changes our planet is going through because of the ways we have neglected and abused her are unstoppable. That apocalypse means “to reveal,” and we’ve been going through it for some time. But I also continue to believe in heaven, because I’ve been there just as much as I’ve been through hell this year, in my friends’ songs, my lover’s touch, my family’s unconditional support, an icy mountain lake, Luca’s laugh.
My role is to make sure Luca knows how to keep his eyes wide, his heart open, and his feet moving. I’m going to tell them stories about the monsters they might face, along with the infinite possibilities that building beloved community creates for getting a good night’s sleep; stories that celebrate the miracle of all life and the magic of self and community transformation; stories that spark curiosity, wonder, humility; stories to remind them that love is their birthright; stories to give them the desire to move towards life, one step at a time, whatever lies ahead.
I know that Luca will need a village of people, not just prophets, telling those stories from their own experiences and ancestral histories to become full-bodied narrative experiences. Hands to hold, lights to follow on his journey to realizing his own divine purpose—especially through the moments when he feels lost and alone. Which is why my commitment to this place, this people, and my child is to be a part of building movements that can turn everything over for our babies to plant new worlds with their stories and dreams.
And that’s a whole other piece of the narrative I have faith we’ll weave together.