Daddy Mom

This morning at the spray ground, I encountered a little girl, no more than 4, who referred to her mother as “daddy.”

“Daddy” was actually a really doting, attentive mom who seemed genuinely committed to the little one’s care. “How are your feet, sweetie? Do you need your sandals?” “No, no, honey. We need to put the garbage in the trash can. We can’t leave it on the ground.”

When I engage transactivists (TRAs) on the internet, I trend a bit more severe and pointed in my communications. For one thing, the Twitter TRAs in my feed are usually abusive, narcissistic men fostering a fetish for which I have very little sympathy, especially given the heavy cost for women and girls. And from a policy perspective, it’s fair to say that I experience a significant amount of righteous indignation at gender ID’s aggressive assault on womankind.

But when I encounter the women trapped in this all-consuming monster of a cult in the real world, it’s not anger that I feel; it’s sadness. When I observe their scars, their baggy clothes, their flailing attempts at performative masculinity, all I can really see is unprocessed trauma that’s demanding an audience. These are largely deeply wounded women who are desperate to escape the parts of themselves that have been weaponized against them. In some very specific ways, I can empathize with them. I know what it’s like to be disembodied, to feel betrayed by your own anatomy, to resolve to never let anyone ever hurt you that way again. In 2023, it’s still viciously hard to be a woman, and I fully understand the inclination to run as far away as possible from it.

But as I watched the interaction of this mother and daughter, I found that the bulk of my pity shifted from the mother and rested with the child. As someone who’s wrestled to keep control of my own mental health, the cold hard truth remains that children bear the brunt of our unprocessed demons. What will this little girl grow up to believe is true about women if she’s being raised by someone who’s actively waging war against her own womanhood? How will she grow into her own self-acceptance when all that’s being modeled for her is aggressive self-hatred and rejection?

As I wrestled with these questions, I began to take careful inventory of the myriad ways my own issues might be affecting my children. Am I embracing cognitive distortions that will negatively affect their perceptions of reality and the world? Are my views about myself informing the foundations upon which they build their own identities? These are harrowing questions, and though a bit overwhelming, I think they’re worth the wrestle. Our kids deserve our healthiest versions of ourselves.

As in this case, some of our distortions can affect our kids’ concepts of themselves, but other times, the twisted ideas we embrace can also affect their concepts of others.

I know a lot of people whose kneejerk response to exposure to situations like this “daddy” daughter combo is to batten down the hatches, home school the children, start a homestead, sequester themselves, and prepare for the end times. (Insert disclaimer about how amazing homeschool moms are and how much I support them.) But as I sat with a group of homeschool moms earlier this week, I was really struck by how completely insular their lives seemed to be. In all their discussions about meal planning and curriculum swapping and lesson planning and avoiding wokeness, I had to bite my tongue a few times to keep from asking about the end goal. One of these friends actually shared her guilt and anxiety over having failed to sufficiently tend her garden in preparation for the apocalypse. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and gently ask her, “What then? Let’s say you get your family through the apocalypse. Great work. But then what? What’s it all for? So they can keep living? Do they have any obligation to the world around them? Any purpose on earth beyond their own survival?”

She shared with me that the world around her was increasingly convincing her that there may be even fewer people in heaven than she originally anticipated. “Everyone’s so deluded!” she remarked.

So I pressed. “I feel this, friend,” I said. But then I asked if she had any concerns about the delusion on our side of the political divide, and she got really quiet. “No, not really,” she said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

So I shared my own concern. I told her I was worried about people who embrace anti-Semitism, who believe America is the new Jerusalem, who can’t seem to discern the difference between Jesus Christ and Donald Trump. I told her I was concerned about people who claim to love Jesus while showing up at parades with signs reading “God hates fags.” I told her I was worried about my friends who think God is calling them to literal war in His name. I shared my concerns about “Christian” nationalism. I asked if she had any opinions about how God would feel to hear His people referring to (even illegal) immigrants as vermin. And I asked her if this kind of delusion was markedly worse than the delusion she could readily see.

I still don’t know what she thinks about that conversation, but I do hope she’ll wrestle with it. I’m constantly asking God to gently reveal my blind spots because I know they exist in spades and that they are not without consequence. And I added the “gently” part to the request because sometimes it’s pretty friggin brutal to realize how tragically wrong we’ve been about some pretty monumental things to the degree that we end up inadvertently hurting the people we are trying our hardest to love and protect.

As I left the spray ground today, I noticed a dad wearing an InfoWars shirt, and all I could do was pray, “Lord, bless us all. Bless us with truth. Bless us with healing. Bless us with grace to plug the gaps in the interim.”